Part 9 (1/2)

”_Ja wohl_, certainly; at once, if you please!”

They were handed over to me, and I saw the bridge and gave the two francs, and all was well. But it gave me no renown in Venice, for the Consul and all my friends regarded it as a fabulous joke of mine, inspired by poetic genius. But I sometimes think that the official who yielded up the keys, and the man whom he sent with me, and perhaps the commissionaire, all had a put-up job of it among them on those keys, and several gla.s.ses all round out of those two francs. _Quien sabe_? _Vive la bagatelle_!

We went on an excursion to Padua. What I remember is, that what impressed me most was a placard here and there announcing that a work on Oken had just appeared! This rather startled me. Whether it was for or against the great German offshoot from Sch.e.l.ling, it proved that somebody in Italy had actually studied him! _Eppure si muove_, I thought. It cannot be true that--

”Padua! the lamp of learning In thy halls no more is burning.”

I have been there several times since. All that I now recall is that the hotel was not very good the last time.

I met in Venice a young New Yorker named Clark, who had crossed with me on the s.h.i.+p. He was a merry companion. Sailing with him one morning in a gondola along the Grand Ca.n.a.l, we saw sitting before a hotel its porter, who was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great was Clark's delight, and he called out, ”I say, Buck! what the devil are you doing here?”

With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in deep Southern accent--

”Dey sets me hyar fo' a bait to 'tice de Americans with.”

I heard subsequently that he had come from America with his mistress, and served her faithfully till there came into the service a pretty French girl. Great was the anger of the owner of the man to find that he had unmistakably ”enticed” the maid. To which he replied that it was a free country; that he had married the damsel--she was his wife; and so the pair at once packed up and departed.

We used to hear a great deal before the war from Southerns about the devotion of their slaves, but there were a great many instances in which the fidelity did not exactly hold water. There was an old Virginia gentleman who owned one of these faithful creatures. He took him several times to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf ear to the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to depart, and refused every free-ticket offered for a journey on ”the underground railway,” and went back to Richmond, he was of course trusted to an unlimited extent.

When the war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how he could have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He replied--

”Kase it paid. Dere's nuffin pays like being a dewoted darkey. De las'

time I went Norf wid ma.s.sa I made 'nuff out of him to buy myself free twice't over.”

Doubtless there were many instances of ”pampered and petted” household servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These were the only devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or relatives sold from them--_as happened on an average once at least in a life_--were all to a man quite ready to forsake ”ole ma.s.sa” and ”dear ole missus,” and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who would sacrifice his _freedom_ to any other living being, be it for love or feudal fidelity--and what a villain must the man be who would accept such a gift!

I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not _like_ slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, ”the sum of all crimes.” In which summation he showed himself indeed a ”sumner,” as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was _an Abolitionist_. I kept it to myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything Southern was exalted and wors.h.i.+pped with a baseness below that of the blacks themselves.

For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who owned ”sla-aves,” detest the name of ”South,” and to learn that their fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free.

I lived to see the roof of the ”gentlemanly planter,” who could not of yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke--

”And death-shots flying thick and fast,”

while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to G.o.d. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the conversation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, become all at once blatant ”n.i.g.g.e.r-wors.h.i.+ppers,” abundant in proof that they had always had ”an indescribable horror of slavery”--it was, in fact, so indescribable that (until it was evident that the North would conquer) none of them ever succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of it, or any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and cautiously--”paw by paw into the water”--these dough faces became hard- baked Abolitionists, far surpa.s.sing us of the Old Guard in zeal. I lived to see men who had voted against Grant and _reviled_ him become his most intimate friends. But enough of such memories. It is characteristic of the American people that, while personally very vindictive, they forgive and forget political offences far more amicably--very far--than do even the English. However, in the case of the Rebellion, this was a very easy thing for those to do who had not, like us old Abolitionists, borne the burden and heat of the day, and who, coming in at the eleventh hour, got all the contracts and offices! It never came into the head of any man to write a _Dictionnaire des Girouettes_ in America. These late converts had never known what it was to be Abolitionists while it was ”unfas.h.i.+onable,” and have, as it were, live coals laid on the quivering heart--as I had a thousand times during many years--all for believing the tremendous and plain truth that _slavery_ was a thousand times wickeder than the breach of all the commandments put together. It was so peculiar for any man, not a Unitarian or Quaker, to be an _Abolitionist_ in Philadelphia from 1848 until 1861, that such exceptions were pointed out as if they had been Chinese--”and d---d bad Chinese at that,” as a friend added to whom I made the remark. So much for man's relations with poor humanity.

My old friend, B. P. Hunt, was one of these few exceptions. His was a very strange experience. After ceasing to edit a ”selected” magazine, he went to and fro for many voyages to Haiti, where, singular as it may seem, his experiences of the blacks made of him a stern Abolitionist. He married a connection of mine, and lived comfortably in Philadelphia, I think, until the eighties.

I travelled with Mr. Clark from Venice to Milan, where we made a short visit. I remember an old soldier who spoke six languages, who was cicerone of the roof of the Cathedral, and whom I found still on the roof twenty years later, and still speaking the same six tongues. I admired the building as a beautiful fancy, exquisitely decorated, but did not think much of it as a specimen of Gothic architecture. It is the best test of aesthetic culture and knowledge in the world. When you hear anybody praise it as the most exquisite or perfect Gothic cathedral in existence, you may expect to hear the critic admire the designs of Chippendale furniture or the decoration of St. Peter's.

So we pa.s.sed through beautiful Lombardy and came to Domo d'Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rus.h.i.+ng mountain- torrents bursting over the road; far away, ever and anon, we heard the roar of a _lauwine_ or avalanche; sometimes I looked out, and could see straight down below me a thousand feet into an abyss or on a headlong stream. We entered the great tunnel directly from another, for the snow lay twenty feet deep on the road, and a pa.s.sage had been dug under it for several hundred feet, and so two tunnels were connected. Just in the worst of the road beyond, and in the bitterest cold, we met a sleigh, in which were an English gentleman and a very beautiful young lady, apparently his daughter, going to Italy. ”I saw her but an instant, yet methinks I see her now”--a sweet picture in a strange scene. Poets used to ”me-think” and ”me-seem” more in those days, but we endured it. Then in the morning we saw Brieg, far down below us in the valley in green leaves and suns.h.i.+ne, and when we got there then I realised that we were in a new land.

We had a great giant of a German conductor, who seemed to regard Clark and me as under his special care. Once when we had wandered afar to look at something, and it was time for the stage or _Eilwagen_ to depart, he hunted us up, scolded us ”like a Dutch uncle” in German, and drove us along before him like two bad boys to the diligence, ”pawing up” first one and then the other, after which, shoving us in, he banged and locked the door with a grunt of satisfaction, even as the Giant Blunderbore locked the children in the coffer after slamming down the lid. Across the scenes and shades of forty years, that picture of the old conductor driving us like two unruly urchins back to school rises, never to be forgotten.

We went by mountains and lakes and Gothic towns, rocks, forests, old chateaux, and rivers--the road was wild in those days--till we came to Geneva. Thence Clark went his way to Paris, and I remained alone for a week. I had, it is true, a letter of introduction to a very eminent Presbyterian Swiss clergyman, so I sent it in with my card. His wife came out on the balcony, looked coolly down at me, and concluding, I suppose from my appearance, that I was one of the unG.o.dly, went in and sent out word that her husband was out, and would be gone for an indefinite period, and that she was engaged. The commissionaire who was with me--poor devil!--was dreadfully mortified; but I was not very much astonished, and, indeed, I was treated in much the same manner, or worse, by a colleague of this pious man in Paris, or rather by his wife.

I believe that what kept me a week in Geneva was the white wine and trout. At the end of the time I set out to the north, and on the way met with some literary or professional German, who commended to me the ”Pfisterer-Zunft” or Bakers' Guild as a cheap and excellent hostelry. And it was curious enough, in all conscience. During the Middle Ages, and down to a very recent period, the _Zunfte_ or trade-guilds in the Swiss cities carried it with a high hand. Even the gentlemen could only obtain rights as citizens by enrolling themselves as the trade of aristocrats. I had heard of the boy who thought he would like to be bound apprentice to the king; in Berne he might have been entered for a lower branch of the business. These guilds had their own local taverns, inns, or _Herbergs_, where travelling colleagues of the calling might lodge at moderate rates, but n.o.body else. However, as time rolled by, these _Zunfte_ or guild- lodgings were opened to strangers. One of the last which did so was that of the _Pfister_ or bakers (Latin, _pistor_), and this had only been done a few weeks ere I went there. As a literary man whom I met on the ramparts said to me, ”That place is still strong in the Middle Age.” It was a quaint old building, and to get to my room I had to cross the great guild-hall of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Bakers. There were the portraits of all the Grand Masters of the Order from the fourteenth or fifteenth century on the walls, and the concentrated antique tobacco- smoke of as many ages in the air, which, to a Princeton graduate, was no more than the scent of a rose to a bee.

I could speak a little German--not much--but the degree to which I felt, sympathised with, and understood everything Deutsch, pa.s.seth all words and all mortal belief. _Sit verbo venia_! But I do not believe that any human being ever crossed the frontier who had thought himself down, or rather raised himself up, into Teutonism as I had on so slight a knowledge of the language, even as a spider throweth up an invisible thread on high, and then travels on it. Which thing was perceived marvellously soon, and not without some amazement, by the Germans, who have all at least this one point in common with Savages, New Jerseymen, Red Indians, Negroes, Gypsies, and witches, that they by mystic sympathy _know those who like them_, and take to them accordingly, guided by some altogether inexplicable clue or _Hexengarn_, even as deep calleth unto deep and star answereth star without a voice. Whence it was soon observed at Heidelberg by an American student that ”Leland would abuse the Dutch all day long if he saw fit, but never allowed anybody else to do so.” The which thing, as I think, argues the very _ne plus ultra_ of sympathy.

I found my way to Strasburg, where I went to the tip-top outside of the cathedral, and took the railway train for Heidelberg. And here I had an adventure, which, though trifling to the last degree, was to me such a great and new experience that I will describe it, let the reader think what he will. I went naturally enough first-cla.s.s, so uncommon a thing then in Germany that people were wont to say that only princes, Englishmen, and a.s.ses did so. There entered the same carriage a very lady-like and pretty woman. The guard, seeing this, concluded that--whatever he concluded, he carefully drew down all the curtains, looking at me with a cheerful, genial air of intense mystery, as if to say, ”I twig; it's all right; I'll keep your secret.”