Grand Tour--Nonstop!

by BERGEN EVANS

1

COSMIC TOURS, INC., by whom I was employed as an assistant courier in the summer of 1930, threw in an extra country as an enterprising tailor throws in an extra pair of pants. Their itineraries were not designed for the rich and certainly not for the idle. They were democratic in their appeal, and Number 56, to one swarm of which I was attached, by promising “Eight Countries in Six Weeks,” at a cost which would scarcely have moved an equivalent amount of freight over the same route, precipitated an invasion of which Europe has not seen the like since the days of Alaric.

Although the tour technically began at the dockside in New York, the caravanos (as the Italians called them) were not assembled until we left London. Small detachments, coming by various boats, converged on the metropolis from Liverpool, Southampton, Plymouth, and Glasgow. But though weakened by seasickness and confused by strange customs, the members of these groups were still individuals, human beings possessing a degree of independence incompatible with their undertaking. To reduce t hem to units of Number 56, they were put through a sort of boot training. They were shoved into charabancs and dispatched to Windsor, Oxford, and Stoke Poges. Contingents of two and three hundred were squeezed in and out of the Stratford church in ten minutes, Anne Hathaway’s cottage in eight, Warwick Castle in twelve. That Shakespeare was not for an age but for all time was never more strikingly illustrated than in the remarkable relevance, which none but he could have foreseen, of the first line of the inscription under his bust:

Stay Passenger, Why Goest Thou By So Fast?

Parties got mixed up, luggage was lost, rooms changed, passports collected, returned, and collected again. There were quarrels with roommates and reassignments to worse roommates. Side trips were proposed, arranged for, and canceled.

But it was not until they realized that the eight hundred and sixty frenzied people milling about the boat train at the Liverpool Street Station were all part of one hegira that the requisite pecking-order between company and customer was definitely established. That they did not, one and all, turn and flee was plainly due not to courage but to the exhaustion of it which the preceding week had induced.

We were always a formidable group. Legions were continually being detached for special forays, but their place was quickly filled by others who were joined to us, and the total that reached Paris was even larger than that which left London. Two hundred and twenty were detached at Cologne, leaving six hundred and forty to ascend the Rhine and occupy Munich. It was the year of the Passion Play and all count was lost in the vortex of Oberammergau. How many of the thousands who endured their own private Gethsemane for seven hours on those flinty benches, numb with rhetoric and impeded circulation, were ours I cannot say, but for the blessed ensuing week we were reduced to a mere handful of two hundred and ten, seven scant busloads rumbling peacefully across Switzerland.

From the Furka Pass on, however, we gathered sufficient numbers to warrant our special trains again. From Lugano we descended (in one day, with an hour off for lunch and Leonardo in Milan) to Venice, where we crowded into our gondolas, queued up for the Bridge of Sighs, and left the next day for Florence, where we had what was known as a “stopover,” a respite of forty-eight hours. From Florence we proceeded directly to Naples. Pompeii, Sorrento, and Capri were covered all in one day. One more day was allotted to Naples itself, and then north to Rome for a two-day communion with the envied dead. En route from Rome to Paris, by way of Genoa, Nice, Marseilles, and Avignon, our numbers were continually augmented to form the mighty torrent of disheveled and haggard voyageurs that debouched from the Gare de Lyon to surge along the boulevards or stagnate in the Place Pigalle until the boat trains swept them off.

Since the cost of sleepers is so much greater than that of hotel rooms, all of our traveling was done by day. That meant that of the thirty days that elapsed between our leaving London and arriving in Paris, nineteen were spent on trains or boats or in buses. And each of the remaining eleven featured some special expedition that required still more riding. So that Europe to our pilgrims was really a confusing succession of train or bus windows, interspersed with a squawking medley of stations, taxis, and hotels. Most of the clients were not sure where they were, and some of them were not sure where they had been. I was once called upon to settle an argument: had they or had they not been in Austria? They had (one night at Innsbruck) and I identified it for the doubting as the place where the guide had worn a feather in his hat.

The special conveyances which we usually rode in prevented even a casual contact with a European. The natives, like the scenery, were something outside the window. The tourists were completely surrounded by their own background and hence found their prejudices confirmed everywhere they turned. When, for example, they were served their first Continental breakfast their indignation was echoed from every table around them — since these tables were also filled with Americans having their first Continental breakfast — and it would have been impossible for them to have formed any opinion except that a Continental breakfast is a penurious barbarism condemned by all rightthinking people.

Their numbers imposed regimentation as well as isolation. There were advantages, of course: they were relieved of all concern with luggage and reservations and everywhere they went they had the priority of an avalanche. But the schedule, the price and penalty of their bargain, was inflexible. There could be no individual variations. If they were spared the burdens of ordinary travel, they were denied its solaces. They couldn’t change their plans or their hotel or stop over even for a day. After a while, when weariness had begun to seep into their bones, they didn’t seem able even to omit minor expeditions in order to rest. It was easier to stagger out to the buses than to explain why you didn’t want to.

In addition they were the victims of an insidious process designed — how deliberately I could never decide — to reduce them to imbecile helplessness. At home, I suspect, they were people of intelligence and initiative. They must have had aspirations to have come at all. They must have had the ability to save and earn their money or the cunning to wheedle it out of someone. Yet in a group they were bewildered.

The courier held the hotel vouchers and the railway tickets. They had surrendered their passports and many of them their money into his keeping. He alone could communicate with the menacing brigands who babbled and gesticulated around them as they rushed from trains to taxis. He alone knew when the trains left and by the simple device of keeping this knowledge to himself prevented any unscheduled wanderings. The dangers of being stranded in a strange country had been too graphically impressed on them for them ever to let the courier out of their sight.

Mr. Crandall, the chief courier, was an extraordinary man. Ulysses would have been home the afternoon of the second day if he could only have put his affairs into Mr. Crandall’s hands. A cumbrous old man, who shuffled along on crippled feet, he had formerly been stage manager for Augustin Daly and attributed his talents to twenty years of pacifying prima donnas. Though he usually seemed to be asleep in the most comfortable corner of the most comfortable compartment, he was as observant as a stoat and in moments of crisis he was truly great. On the morning of the memorable day in which we traveled from Lugano to Venice he complacently informed us assistant couriers that there would be an insurrection in the late afternoon. He estimated that all dispositions would be curdled by half past three and that the announcement, to be withheld until five, that dinner would not be served on the train would produce an open revolt.

But he was completely unperturbed. At Padua a messenger sent out from Venice secretly boarded the train with the mail and Wellington did not hold the Guards more jealously in reserve at Waterloo than Crandall held those letters. The uproar occurred on schedule with all predicted fury but it was not until a committee of protest was coming down the corridor that Crandall ordered the mail to be distributed. By eight o’clock the opposition had re-formed but Crandall was secure. We were then approaching Venice and he knew the gondolas would “get ‘em.”

2

ALL the veteran couriers were remarkable men. They had to be linguists, experienced travelers, diplomats, and dictators. They had to be resourceful, patient, and perpetually unruffled. And, in addition, they had to be eager for temporary employment at a very low salary.

One would have thought such a combination to be rare, but Europe seemed to be crowded with men possessing all of these qualifications, particularly (as the company frequently reminded us) the last. Most of them had known more glamorous days and the job was an opportunity to sun themselves once more in the warming deference of managers and headwaiters. It was customary for them to receive wine and a few extra delicacies with their meals, which were served in a room apart so that they might have a snatch of peace and enjoy their perquisites without exciting the wrath of the tourists. And how they relished those meals, prolonging the soup with loving sucks, applauding the roast with heartfelt grunts, savoring the dessert, and dawdling over their coffee and liqueur! With trembling old hands they deflowered their cigars, and with what mute agony they looked at one another when some shrill questing voice profaned these precious moments.

Such a voice, when it came, was most likely to be that of a “hostess.” Attached to every group was a worthy matron whose helpful companionship and moral influence had been lyrically set forth in our advertising. She was most probably a sorority housemother or a professor’s or minister’s widow and had qualified for her high office by persuading ten other people to sign up, a feat which endeared her to the company but left the couriers cold. At the time of her usefulness she was encouraged to see herself as a guide, leading a few choice and grateful spirits through the treasury of the ages, stopping, perhaps, to point out the particular merits of a masterpiece or to call attention to some elusive grace of an older culture.

Once the wheels had started rolling, however, these ladies were just in the way. Many were beguiled into being “one of the party” and “taking it easy,” but many others refused to relinquish their importance. A few jewels, such as the hostess of Section A, a high school French teacher from South Bend, the most accomplished linguist and diplomat on the whole tour, pitched in where it really helped and by soothing the exasperated and enduring the bores, by acting as an interpreter, by being always willing to accept the worst room and the worst seat, added immensely to the general comfort. But most of the others preferred the more noble occupation of inciting to riot, stirring the cauldron of discontent with hissing charges of favoritism and rumors of special privilege, urging the tourists to “assert themselves” and “demand their rights.”

The older couriers always managed to pacify them with a little flattery but the younger men, to whom the job was something of a lark, frequently fought back. One particularly active daughter of Eris found herself seized and bound to a pillar in the station just as her train was about to leave Milan. Before she could be extricated the train pulled out. There was a storm, of course, but the couriers felt that the peace of her temporary absence was well worth it.

3

NEITHER the numbers nor the regimentation, however, constituted the chief burden. It was speed, the relentless pace to which we were committed. For a day or two it was amusing and even exhilarating. The scramble, the panting, the urgency and insistence all seemed to promise some great event, and the remarkable experiences of every day seemed to justify the haste. But tiredness accumulated. We grew irritable. Pleasure became an onerous duty and every experience was snatched from us, to make way for the next, before we could savor it.

The schedule was tyrannical. Ten minutes, for example, were always allowed between breakfast and departure, and those who failed to make full use of them were more to be pitied than censured. Our people were genteel and this was a generation ago. Most of them came from small towns where urban frankness did not yet prevail and respectability wrung from them the tribute of a great deal of silent anguish.

There were moments, of course, when the indignant flesh thrust the spirit aside. One such occurred in Switzerland when I was in charge of a busload of thirty women. Because of the weather we had made an unexpectedly early start. The driver had become lost and we had been following back roads for several hours before I sensed the mounting tension and even then I attributed it to concern about our route. But when a small inn, hardly more than a chalet, suddenly appeared out of the mist and we showed no sign of slackening speed one of the ladies screamed “Stop!” in such desperate fury that the driver almost overturned us in his haste to comply. And the wheels had barely stopped turning before they were struggling out and bearing down on the hostel like Maenads in their unvoided frenzy. I had a momentary glimpse of the host’s welcoming beam changing to consternation as he was swept aside, and could hear his roars of protest as the passengers returned to the bus without (quite understandably) buying anything to drink. It took five francs out of my own pocket to pacify the man and days of circumspection to pacify the ladies.

We were continually getting into some such ludicrous or humiliating situation. A minor fracas occurred at Bellinzona when the sign “Uomini” was mistaken to signify “Women.” Several of our gentlemen were brought to the verge of uremia by encountering female attendants in the French lavatories, and most of our ladies to hypertension by the alfresco insouciance of the Italians.

They were plainly not, as the phrase goes, traveling for their health, but they made things worse than they need have been by stuffing themselves with sandwiches and fruit and soft drinks at every station. They were not hungry. The meals provided were excellent. They ate out of boredom and for the pleasure of spending strange money. Their compartments were littered with paper cups and the wrappers from sandwiches, and as the long hot afternoons wore on and the persistent rhythm of the wheels exercised their hypnotism they sank into querulous lethargies of repletion until the next station with its new array of vendors’ trucks led them to gorge anew.

By the time we reached Paris we were all bilious. Tempers were short and outbursts of petulance hourly occurrences. And then the whole thing came to a boil in an incident which now seems amusing but was a nightmare at the time.

In the contracts between the company and the clients and those between the company and the hotels it was stipulated that there were never to be more than two persons to a room. Paris was crowded and the hotel to which we were assigned had put an extra cot in a dozen or so of the rooms, promising to remove them the next day. It was late when we arrived. The day had been hot, and when the clients discovered that some of them were expected to sleep three to a room all their exasperations and humiliations, their exhaustion and excess sandwiches, came to a head. With the hostesses hovering over them like Valkyries, there was a general and uninhibited display of temper (including that of the couriers), and the upshot was that the company — more, I suspect, to discipline the hotel than to mollify the clients — moved them all in the middle of the night, to another hotel several miles distant. The second hotel assigned only two persons to a room, but its rooms were so small and dark and its bathrooms so few and far that the first hotel (where there had been a bath to every room) seemed paradise, and this only increased the clamor — or, rather, the whimpering, for the energy needed for a good clamor had long been dissipated.

The clients’ plight, however, was as nothing compared to the assistant courier’s. Immediately upon arriving at the first hotel, each person had sent out a large bundle of laundry. These bundles had been handed to the maid on each of the seven floors over which we had been distributed and the maid had marked each bundle by its room number. Few in their weariness had bothered to itemize their lists, and most in the fury of their departure forgot the numbers of the rooms which they had so briefly occupied. The courier’s task, therefore, was to identify, a week later, more than ninety bundles of laundry, without any identification or descriptions, to seven chambermaids on seven different floors at such harassed moments as he and they could spare, the whole requiring a vocabulary with which he was singularly unfurnished.

The tourists, who were several miles away and had to be dealt with in their spare moments, would not pay for their laundry until it was delivered and examined in detail. The chambermaids would not give it up until it was paid for. The hotel was sulky and uncoöperative. The company was firm and unyielding. The courier, who was developing a nervous rash which was for several years to be of great interest to numerous dermatologists and psychiatrists, finally just ransomed the lot out of his own pocket and let anyone take what struck his fancy and pay what soothed his conscience. Some of the consciences could have stood a little laundering too.

Solace in this trying hour was afforded by the reflection that Mr. Whipple was still alive. Mr. Whipple was an elderly gentleman who had been dragged on the tour by his wife, a lady some twenty years his junior. Mrs. Whipple had recently had her gall bladder removed and had come abroad, we suspected, in search of a new audience for her narrative of suffering and triumph. At every lull her voice had been heard, vibrant with clinical detail. Beside her, his white face beaded with perspiration and his bloodless lips set in a gentle smile, her ailing spouse would be reclining with closed eyes.

Crandall had spotted him before we left the Liverpool Street Station and had at once issued a special order: “Don’t let that man die this end of the gangplank.” A dead tourist, it appeared, constituted a serious traffic hazard and involved the couriers in a tremendous amount of extra work. Therefore our first concern on reaching a hotel was to get Mr. Whipple to bed. The first problem on boarding a train was to get him a corner seat on the shady side. He was always fed at the first sitting and always seated midway between the axles on the buses, always pale, whispering his courteous thanks, eyes closed and breathing with difficulty. At every sortie he was urged to remain where he was. Had the various cathedrals and galleries been as totally devoid of interest as Crandall painted them on these occasions, the tourists would have had strong grounds for suit. But they good-naturedly recognized these denigrations as a beneficial conspiracy against Mr. Whipple — a conspiracy into which, it might be said, no one entered with more fervor than he did.

4

WHETHER many of the rest of them would not have done better to have remained with him in the bus is debatable. The cathedrals usually moved them to the awe for which they were designed, but the mood was frequently disturbed by the determination of our Protestant majority not to bow down in Rimmon’s house. The Catholics found the churches less alien, of course, but they were often uneasy at the exhibition of relics. The matter-of-factness in presenting these seemed to disturb them. They apparently expected more formality. Faith that could afford to relax may have seemed, at least in the presence of their heretical friends, too like credulity. The Protestants snickered a little, to assert their superiority, but they too were a little uneasy when told that these were the actual chains that bound St. Peter, this the actual nail thatpierced Our Lord. The matter-of-factness intimidated them; for the first time many of them began to wonder uneasily where you drew the line.

Their most exciting religious experience came, I think, in St. Peter’s when a vigilant watch was finally rewarded by seeing an old peasant woman kiss the toe of the famous statue. Their ecstasy knew no bounds and they lost all semblance of decorum in their eagerness to summon friends to share the spectacle.

Galleries were “done” with an immense sense of duty. The “Mona Lisa,” the “Madonna of the Chair,” and the “Last Supper” were recognized with pleasure. They learned to exclaim over perspective and were hardly to blame — considering the tedious iteration of the guides — for believing that the eyes “following you around the room” was the supreme excellence of portraiture.

Most of the pictures were meaningless to them, however. Crucifixions, Adorations, and Last Judgments were commonly understood, but Annunciations, scenes from the Apocrypha, and various acts of the Apostles and martyrs were insoluble mysteries. Historical and mythological persons and events were strange if not unknown and since many of them involved nudity were discreetly passed by. Now and then a particularly athletic rape of the Sabines or an unusually steatopygic Venus could not be ignored and drew whispers from the younger and frowns from the older members of the party. Rubens’s heroic presentation of Diana of the Ephesians (in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre) provoked open indignation. Sixteen breasts on one woman was apparently thought to exceed the permissible limits of the artistic imagination.

Their chief instrument of aesthetic appreciation was arithmetic,¹ and woe betide the luckless guide who made a computable error. Before such terms as “composition” and “chiaroscuro” they were helpless, but figures were figures. Their supreme artistic moment came in the Louvre when the guide identified a copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” as a faulty sketch by the master who had, unfortunately, omitted one of the disciples and hence produced a canvas salable only in the provinces. A voluntary Committee on Verification was at once self-appointed and within five minutes had overtaken the main body with the intelligence that there were thirteen figures in the picture. The guide blustered but to no avail. Back he had to go and eat crow.

Most of their pleasures, however, were found outside the galleries. They were most favorably impressed by the luxury of the hotels, including the plumbing. Despite the myth to the contrary, nine tenths of all Americans abroad stay at more luxurious hotels than any they have ever known. (The bidets, by the way, shocked them and confirmed some of their darkest suspicions.)

Their enthusiasm was honestly reserved for matters within the scope of their comprehension. They were genuinely excited by the grandeur of the Alps and the beauty of the Italian lakes. They got more out of Pompeii than I suspect their European equivalents would, sensing at once in the plan of the streets, the restaurants, and even in the facetious inscriptions above the doors (comparable to the “Wit’s End,” “Belly Acres,” and “Mortgage Manors” of our own brighter set) the affinity between America and Rome.

Among minor delights ought, perhaps, to be mentioned the mortuary sculptures in the cemetery at Genoa, together with the thrifty custom, there employed, of digging up such as are behind with their rent. At Garmisch they were enraptured with the dessert, which was of ice cream in the form of swans, life-size. Twelve of these creations were brought into the dining room all at once and the roar of delight that greeted them must have made the chef a happy man. Nor will they ever forget the Amalfi Drive. At the very zenith of its splendors an Italian who had formerly lived in Brooklyn and operated a concession at the ball park ran out shouting “Peanuts a-popcorn!” and was rewarded with wild applause. The great moment in London came when, on our way to the station, a boy on a bicycle was observed to spin his pedals backwards. The misfortune (or advantage) of this performance was that it happened just where Newgate Street runs into Cheapside, and diverted the charabanc’s attention during the very ten seconds that had been allotted to glimpsing St. Paul’s.

Whether these pleasures were worth the pain they cost is not for me to say. Who can evaluate another’s experience? George Ade, who traveled extensively and always in luxury, regarded any trip as a success which had been no more than 95 per cent misery. Making allowances for their less sumptuous circumstances, our people probably did well by this sophisticated standard.

My recollections are possibly somewhat colored. I was young and would have preferred the company of some of the younger ladies to that of their baggage. And there were possibly resentments on their side too. Certainly it was hard for the couriers to believe that the death of an assistant courier — who was pushed out of a window as his train was passing through a tunnel west of Menton — was wholly the accident that the company chose to regard it.