He was pleased when Luciano radioed, on the last day out: 'Keys of Napoli yours shall be at pier.'
So the Passionate Pilgrim entered one of the most beautiful harbours of the world and, gaping at the revelation of Vesuvius and the amphitheatre of Naples, he meditated, 'Golly, I knew Europe would be quaint and old and all that, but I didn't expect such grand scenery, except maybe in the Alps. I wonder if those big white blobs are hotels? Dandy situation!'
Luciano Mora was not on the pier--he was suddenly and mysteriously on the ship, while they were docking, and yelping as youthfully as when he had been a baggage-porter at the Westward, 'Myron, this is splen-did! I present to you Italy! How are Effie and the boy and Alec? It was so too bad about old Mark! . . . Luigi! Mr. Weagle's luggage! . . . He will see it through the customs and take it to your rooms. Come!'
(Luciano was the only person in Italy who could master Myron Weagle's amusing foreign name. To every one else it was 'Mee-ron Vee-ag-ley'.)
Myron had expected quantities of quaintness, good food and complete inefficiency in the Pastorale. He was a little astonished by the English and by the swiftness of the porter, who had the baggage in Myron's suite fifteen minutes after his arrival; he was astonished by the magnificence of Luciano's Isotta-Fraschini car and its uniformed chauffeur, by their speed through the streets, and later, by their exceeding great speed when Luciano took him down to Amalfi and Sorrento. He had always understood that only the free and dashing Americanos drove fast; he was to learn that any crippled centenarian in Italy, Paris, or Germany would feel disgraced if he drove a car at an average of less than a hundred kilometres an hour or if he regarded a skid as worth noticing.
He found the lobby of the Pastorale too small and, with its chairs of yellow satin, too like a drawing-room; he found the elevators creaky and much too small. But he was again astonished, even a little embarrassed, as though he had been caught lying, by the leather-and-marble splendour of his suite, the flowers on the occasional tables, and a bath-room with a mosaic of nymphs in blue and green and pink on a golden ground, and conveniences new even to a plumbing-expert like himself. He was astonished at the speed with which a floor-waiter appeared when Luciano rang for him, astonished at his bowing and murmuring, 'Si, Commendatore.'
He decided that Commendatore must be some kind of a title. Luciano with a title! Was he a Sir? And do you suppose he had the title all the while he was in America, and him so chummy and all? And here he was, the director of an hotel in which the smallest bedroom was the size of a Waldorf ballroom. Pretty nearly. Seemed so, anyway. And yet Luciano--'Commendatore'!--he was chattering just like in the old days! 'Myron, did you remember the time we sent Carlos Jaynes a loffly bottle of Scotch that was filled with ginger ale?'
There were vain interludes during which Myron felt that he was not learning much, though he shamefully admitted that he did enjoy them. Luciano took him to Capri, but they spent only a couple of hours on the kitchens and offices of the Hotel Quisisana, for Luciano insisted on talking about views and on dragging Myron out for a monstrous two-hour walk, all up and down hill, to the entirely disorderly and useless ruins of a villa or castle or something that had belonged to a Roman emperor whom Luciano called 'Timberio'. It was kind of interesting to see a floor of tiles which, Luciano claimed, was almost two thousand years old, and yet scarcely worn. But still! Myron had only three months in Europe. And no matter what Luciano said, he didn't remember learning in school about an emperor named Timberio. There had been Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony and Marcus, or something like that, Aurelius. And Nero, of course, who had fiddled while Rome was burning. But no Timberio, never. But then, probably it was just a Wop translation of some regular name.
It was the longest walk that Myron took in Europe--or in America either, all that decade--unless you counted ten miles or so a day through hotel corridors and kitchens.
Luciano gave for him a dinner to all the hotel dignitaries in Naples and the neighbourhood--managers and owners and chief clerks from the Grand, the Excelsior, Bertolini's, the Bristol, Parker's, the Britannique, the Eden, the Victoria, the Santa Lucia, the Quisisana. Half of them seemed, to Myron's romantic delight, to be Commendatores or Cavilieres, and he wondered if a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace wouldn't be very much like this--only not so many black beards and rotund white waistcoats.
So, sitting between Commendatore Luciano Mora and the owner of a pension (which meant a high-class boarding-house) who was apparently a Conte (which seemed to be an even higher title than Commendatore, though it didn't sound half as swell), Myron actually tasted the Animelle di Vitello alla Minuta con Tartuffi of which he had read when he was meat-cook of the Eagle Hotel, Torrington, Connecticut. The gilded plaster cupid on the ceiling of the private dining-room quivered to the vehemence with which the mayor, no less, shouted that the whole city was humbly honoured to greet Meeron Veeagley, who was not only the lifelong friend of Commendatore Mora, but the noblest example this season of American efficiency and hospitality, and a witness of the historic friendship between America and the entirely new and improved Italy.
Seven of them saw him off at the station, and Myron was sorry to leave Luciano, and impressed with the porters' linguistic skill as he handled the luggage. He spoke Italian so rapidly!
He saw, in Italy, Switzerland, France, and England, everything that he had longed for as being cultured and of good repute. And he saw distinguished small-city restaurants--invariably, it seemed, personally conducted by that ubiquitous superman, the former chef of the Kaiser--of which he had never heard. Having been reliably informed that Europe was very small, he was perplexed to find it so very large that, with only three months for travel, he was able to have only a week in Germany and Austria, and unable to see Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Poland, or the Balkans at all, though with the accurate planning for which he was known in the hotel-world, he had designed to do them thoroughly, with three full days devoted to Spain alone.
'Whew!' he said, as his steamer left Southampton, 'I've got enough ideas to last a lifetime! But I won't be sorry to get back. I do believe I'm a little tired! . . . Funny how many top-notch European hotels have toothpicks right on the table!'
He spent hours in his cabin, filling up two new volumes of 'Hotel Project Notes'.
He concluded that the European system was better in room-service, in the guest's pressing a button instead of telephoning, and in having one garçon, who came to know his ways, instead of a horde of unfamiliar waiters and bellboys. He concluded that the food was as much better as had been fabled, because of more time taken in preparation, more patience with the processes of even a simple consommé, training of a lifetime among cooks and, as to the guests themselves, more knowing palates and freedom from the superstition that the world will fail if the office is not reopened promptly at 2.01 p.m.--though what anybody could do about it, in a large American city dining-room, where the guests expected to have lunch and dash away in twenty-five minutes, he did not see. He liked the Continental habit of eating outdoors, in an arbour or on the side-walk, whenever it was possible, and this custom he would have at the Black Thread Inn.
Yet he vehemently did not, like the professional expatriates, believe the worst European inn was better than the best American hotel. He had found plenty of bad hotels. He had known supercilious porters, managers who never left their stinking little offices but hid there always with their beards brushing the ledgers, waiters who believed that all Americans loved being chummily informed about the weather, cashiers who refused to charge a fifty-franc telegram on the bill, and bills on which the taxes were invariably overcharged, restaurants which had never heard of veal, and restaurants in other lands which had never heard of anything except veal, bar-keeps who believed that ice in a whisky-soda was against all the principles of the English Constitution--and also, that the only purpose of American visitors was to conform to the principles of the English Constitution, English reception-clerks who could scarcely endure speaking to a strange guest without an introduction by the vicar's aunt and who had to be wooed before they would admit that, in a completely untenanted inn, there were rooms for rent. French cashiers who went hysterical over ten centimes but remained admirably calm about a few millions of war-debt and, in no case, even when he was a guest, thought much of a son of Uncle Shylock, Italian stewards who could not respect anyone who did not care to fill up like a balloon on ravioli before beginning the real dinner, Swiss clerks who understood that all Americans understood that, after the outrageous charges in their own country, they were lucky to be able to get a room for twelve dollars a day, German and Austrian clerks who chuckled, 'In Dollars ist es nur ein Bagatelle', caravanserais with original Holbeins and no hot water except on Saturdays from 5.30 to 6.17 p.m., hotels with marble floors and total absence of heating--generously provided as ways of counteracting the tropical temperature of 38° Fahrenheit on a March morning, damp napkins, Italians who believed that cuttlefish are edible, Germans who regarded pig's knuckle as a vegetarian health-food, and Englishmen who had the same high opinions of wilted lettuce, tripe, and gooseberry tart drowned in custard, German guests who despised the French, French guests who despised the Italians, Italian guests who despised the English, English guests who despised everybody, and American guests who despised only all the other Americans, but so wholeheartedly as to make up for their narrowness. He had quaked in dancing elevators, and been smothered in the dust that lay like a model of the Sahara on brocade chairs, and been racked on beds stuffed with damp sea-weed. And once, though once only, he had found a French hotel with a filthy tablecloth, paper napkins, and chicken which could have been used for chips to kindle a fire.