I would not care to live the whole of my youth over again; but I would like to take that trip once more, with the clock just where it was then.
The following year we bestowed our patronage upon Boulogne; and ferreting about for ourselves unearthed a small hotel in the Haute-Ville, where they did us well for seven francs a day en pension. Étaples had just been discovered by the English artists. Dudley Hardy was one of the first to see the beauty of its low-lying dunes and pools of evening light. I became an habitué of the Continent. I discovered that with a smattering of the language, enabling one to venture off the beaten tracks, one could spend a holiday abroad much cheaper than in England. Ten shillings a day could be made to cover everything. Zangwill once told me that he travelled through Turkey in comfort on twenty sentences, carefully prepared beforehand, and a pocket dictionary. A professor of languages I met at Freiburg estimated the entire vocabulary of the Black Forest peasant at three hundred words. Of course, if you want to argue, more study is needful; but for all the essentials of a quiet life, a working knowledge of twenty verbs and a hundred nouns, together with just a handful of adjectives and pronouns, can be made to serve. I knew a man who went to Sweden on a sketching tour, knowing nothing but the numbers up to ten; and before he had been there a month, got engaged to a Swedish girl who could not speak a word of English. Much may be accomplished with economy. At Ostend, in the season, one can enjoy oneself for eleven francs a day; but to do so one should avoid the larger hotels upon the front. It was the smell of them, and of the people dining in them, that first inclined my youthful mind to Socialism.
Paris is a much over-rated city, and half the Louvre ought to be cleared out and sent to a rummage sale. On a rainy day with an east wind blowing, it isn't even gay; and its streets are much too wide and straight: well adapted, no doubt, to the shooting down of citizens, with which idea in mind they were planned, but otherwise uninteresting. All the roads in France are much too straight. I remember a walking tour in Brittany. All day long, the hot, treeless road stretched a straight white line before us. We never moved; or so it seemed. Always we were seven miles from the horizon, with nothing else to look at. There must have been villages and farmsteads scattered somewhere around, but like the events of a Greek drama one had to imagine them. The natives were proud of this road. They boasted that an army corps could march along it thirty abreast without ever shifting a foot to right or left. But they did not use it much themselves. From morn to eve, we met less than a score of people; and half of them were mending it. A motoring friend of mine told me that touring in France was ruination. A tyre burst every day. It was the pace that did it. “But must you go so fast?” I suggested. “My dear boy,” he answered, “have you seen the roads? You don't want to linger on them.”
The best things about Paris are its suburbs. I am sorry they are rebuilding Montmartre. I never grew tired of the view, and one lodged there cheaply. The huge lumbering omnibus drawn by three mighty stallions served one for getting about Paris when I first knew it. And for playing the grand Seigneur there was the petit fiacre at one franc fifty the course; or two francs by the hour, with a pour-boire of twenty cents. But the drivers were cruel to their half-starved horses.
Provence is the most interesting part of France. The best way is through Blois and the region of the great châteaux. With a Dumas in one's pocket, one can dream oneself back in the days of the Grande Monarque; and when one reaches Orange, and has forgotten the railway, one hears the marching of the legions. I never succeeded in finding Tartarin's house at Tarascon, but King René still holds his court there, in the twilight. They were repairing the Palace of the Popes at Avignon when I first visited the town, some thirty-five years ago, and they were still repairing it when I was there last, the year before the war. They did not seem to me to have got much further. Maybe the British workman does not take so disproportionate a share of the cake for leisureliness as he is supposed to do. But everything goes slow, or else stands still, in sunny, sleepy Provence. I used to like it in the summer time before the tourists came. We English get accustomed to extremes. I remember, after déjeuner in a cool cellar, strolling through Les Beaux. The houses are hewn out of the rock on which the town stands: so much of it as still remains. From one of the massive doors a little child ran out, evidently with the idea of joining me upon my walk. And next moment came its mother, screaming. She snatched up the child and turned on me a look of terror.
“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed. “To promenade here in the heat for pleasure! You must surely be Monsieur the Devil himself. Or else an Englishman.”
Another time, at St. Petersburg on a mild winter's morning (as it seemed to me), I went out without a greatcoat; and made a sensation in the Nevski Prospect.
A curious thing once occurred to me in Russia, persuading me of the possibility of thought transference. I was staying with my friends the Jarintzoffs. General Jarintzoff had been the first governor of Port Arthur, and Madame, most fortunately for me, had constituted herself my translator; and had made my name fairly well known in Russia. A friend had dropped in, and the talk had turned on politics. Madame Jarintzoff was repeating, in Russian, a conversation I had had with her the day before on India. Suddenly she stopped and stared at me.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I must have misunderstood you. But how on earth did you know what I was saying?”
Unconsciously, I had interrupted her, and corrected a statement she had made. I knew hardly a word of Russian, except a few sentences she had taught me, enabling me to go out by myself. Her voice could have conveyed nothing to me, but the thought behind it I had grasped. I may, of course, have gathered it from her expression.
The Russians are a demonstrative people. On stepping out of the train at St. Petersburg, I found a deputation waiting to receive me. The moment they spotted me, the whole gang swooped down upon me with a roar. A bearded giant snatched me up in his arms and kissed me on both cheeks; and then light-heartedly threw me to the man behind him, who caught me only just in time. They all kissed me. There seemed to be about a hundred of them: it may have been less. They would have started all over again, if Madame Jarintzoff had not rushed in among them and scattered them. Since then, my sympathies have always been with the baby. I knew it was affection; but in another moment I should have burst out crying. I never got used to it.
There used to be a special breed of fox-terrier popular in Russia, employed on bear-hunting expeditions. Being very small and very courageous, they would contrive to get behind the bear, when sheltering in his cave, and by biting at his heels drive him out. Some friends at Zarskoe Selo made me a present of one of these dogs. He was eleven weeks old at the time, but grew up to be quite the smallest and quite the fiercest animal that I have ever lived with. His name—I forget the Russian for it—signified “Seven Devils,” but for short I called him Peter. He was useful on the way back from St. Petersburg to Berlin. He saw to it that we had the compartment to ourselves; and were both able to lie down and get some sleep. There were complaints, of course. But in Russia, in those days, there was a fixed tariff for officials. Railway guards and ticket-inspectors cost a rouble; station-masters two; and Divisional Superintendents, with sword, sometimes as much as five.