CHAPTER XXIII. THE TRAVELLING PARTY
I have already taken occasion to indoctrinate my reader on the subject of what I deem the most perfect species of table d’hôte. May I now beg of him, or her, if she will be kind enough, to accompany me to the table-monstre of Wiesbaden, Ems, or Baden-Baden? We are at the Cursaal, or Shuberts, or the ‘Hof von Nassau’ at Wiesbaden. Four hundred guests are assembled, their names indicative of every land of Europe, and no small portion of America; the mixture of language giving the impression of its being a grand banquet to the ‘operatives at Babel,’ but who, not satisfied with the chances of misunderstanding afforded by speaking their own tongues to foreigners, have adventured on the more certain project of endeavouring to being totally unintelligible, by speaking languages with which they are unacquainted; while in their dress, manner, and appearance, the great object seems to be an accurate imitation of some other country than their own. Hence Frenchmen affect to seem English, English to look like Prussians, Prussians to appear Poles, Poles to be Calmucks. Your ‘elegant’ of the Boulevard de Ghent sports a ‘cut away’ like a Yorkshire squire, and rides in cords; your Londoner wears his hair on his shoulders, and his moustaches, like a Pomeranian count; Turks find their way into tight trousers and ‘Wellingtons’; and even the Yankees cannot resist the general tendency to transmutation, but take three inches off their hair behind.
Nothing is more amusing than these general congresses of European vagrancy. Characters the most original meet you at every step, and display most happily traits you never have the opportunity to inspect at home. For so it is, the very fact of leaving home with most people seems like an absolution from all the necessities of sustaining a part. They feel as though they had taken off the stage finery in which they had fretted away their hours before, and stand forth themselves in propria. Thus your grave Chancery lawyer becomes a chatty pleasant man of the world, witty and conversable; your abstruse mathematician, leaving conic sections behind him, talks away with the harmless innocence of a child about men and politics; and even your cold ‘exclusive’ bids a temporary farewell to his ‘morgue,’ and answers his next neighbour at table without feeling shocked at his obtrusion.
There must be some secret sympathy—of whose operations we know nothing—between our trunks and our temperaments, our characters and our carpet-bags; and that by the same law which opens one to the inspection of an official at the frontier, the other must be laid bare when we pass across it. How well would it have been for us, if the analogy had been pushed a little further, that the fiscal regulations adopted in the former were but extended to the latter, and that we had applied the tariff to the morals, as well as to the manufactures, of the Continent.
It was in some such musing as this I sat in a window of the ‘Nassau,’ at Wiesbaden, during the height of the season of——. Strangers were constantly arriving, and hourly was the reply ‘no room’ given to the disconsolate travellers, who peered from their carriages with the road-sick look of a long journey. As for myself, I had been daily and nightly transferred from one quarter of the hotel to another—now sleeping in an apartment forty feet square, in a bed generally reserved for royalty, now bivouacking under the very slates; one night exposed to the incessant din of the street beside my windows, the next, in a remote wing of the building, where there were no bells in the chambers, nor any waiter was ever known to wander. In fact, I began to believe that they made use of me to air the beds of the establishment, and was seriously disposed to make a demand for some compensation in my bill; and if I might judge from the pains in my bones I contracted in ‘Lit de Parade,’ I must have saved her Majesty of Greece, who was my successor in it, a notable attack of rheumatism. To this shuttlecock state of existence the easiness of my nature made me submit tamely enough, and I never dreamed of rebellion.
I was sitting conning over to myself the recollections of some faces I had seen before, when the head waiter appeared before me, with a request that I would be kind enough to give up my place at the table, which was No. 14, to a gentleman lately arrived, and who desired to sit near his friends in that vicinity. ‘To be sure,’ said I at once; ‘I have no acquaintance here, and 114 will do me as well as 14—place me where you like.’ At the same time, it rather puzzled me to learn what the individual could be like who conceived such a violent desire to be in the neighbourhood of some Hamburg Jews—for such were the party around me—when the waiter began to make room for a group that entered the room, and walked up to the end of that table. A glance told they were English. There was an elderly man, tall and well-looking, with the air ‘gentleman’ very legibly written on his quiet, composed features; the carriage of his head, and a something in his walk, induced me to believe him military. A lady leaned on his arm, some thirty years his junior—he was about sixty-six or seven—whose dress and style were fashionable, and at the same time they had not that perfect type of unpretending legitimacy that belongs essentially to but one class. She was, in fact, trop bien mise for a table d’hote; for although only a morning costume, there was a display about it which was faulty in its taste; her features, without being handsome, were striking, as much for the carriage of her head as anything in themselves. There was an air of good looks, as though to say, ‘If you don’t think me handsome, the fault is yours.’ Her eyes were of a bluish grey, large and full, with lightly arched brows; but the mouth was the most characteristic feature—it was firm and resolute-looking, closely compressed, and with a slight protrusion of the lower lip, that said as plainly as words could say it, ‘I will, and that’s enough.’ In walking, she took some pains to display her foot, which, with all the advantages of a Parisian shoe, was scarcely as pretty as she conceived it, but on the whole was well formed, and rather erring on the score of size than symmetry.
They were followed by three or four young men, of whom I could only remark that they wore the uniform appearance of young Englishmen of good class, very clean-looking faces, well-brushed hair, and well-fitting frock-coats. One sported a moustache of a dirty-yellow colour, and whiskers to match, and by his manner, and a certain half-shut-eye kind of glance, proclaimed himself the knowing man of the party.
While they were taking their places, which they did at once on entering, I heard a general burst of salutations break from them in very welcome accent: ‘Oh, here he is, here he comes. Ah, I knew we should see him.’ At the same instant, a tall, well-dressed fellow leaned over the table and shook hands with them all in succession.
‘When did you arrive?’ said he, turning to the lady.