The Prater on Sunday was thronged, and a dozen bands were playing in the excellent coffee gardens scattered about it. But the great sight to me was the ‘Punch and Judy, or People’s Prater.’ Here, among hundreds of merry-go-rounds, Richardson’s shows, outdoor balls, and the general ‘fun of the fair,’ you could walk upon the people’s heads. I should like to take Messrs. M’Dougall and Parkinson through the Punch and Judy Prater of Vienna one day and show them how the toiling masses of a great city can enjoy themselves when plenty of cheap amusement and good wholesome refreshment are provided for them.
There is one peculiar custom in certain parts of Austria, notably in Vienna, which it takes an Englishman some time to get accustomed to. When you are generous to anyone the recipient of your bounty makes a tremendous bow and ‘kisses your hand.’ Sometimes this phrase is a mere form of words, ‘Ich küsse die hand’ (the Viennese say, ‘Ich kiss die hand), but frequently the actual performance takes place. A lady gives, say, to the chambermaid of her hotel a gulden, and instantly the chambermaid exclaims, ‘I kiss your hand,’ and does it. I have seen the English ladies thoroughly nonplussed at the unexpected homage.
The porter at the Vienna railway-station who put my portmanteau on a cab told me that he kissed my hand, and my cabman, to my complete discomfiture, actually did it. As soon as I discovered it was a custom of the country, I became rather nervous, and when I went to a little theatre and an old lady handed me a programme, fearing the possible salute, I only gave her a copper coin. She didn’t ‘kiss my hand,’ but went off muttering in the Viennese dialect something which, fortunately for my self-esteem, I was unable to grasp.
I spent a pleasant week in Vienna, but felt rather the worse for wear when I left. The custom of the country is that you should consume a mid-day meal with several glasses of beer, have wine in the middle of it, and finish up with cognac or kummel. Then in the afternoon everybody goes to the Prater, and sits at the first, second, or third coffee-house and drinks more beer—sometimes six glasses, one after the other. The middle-day meal is a terrific one, consisting of six or seven courses; but towards four the Viennese get hungry again, and so at the Prater coffee-gardens a man walks about with a basket of enormous sausages in one hand and a pair of scales in the other, and about half a hundredweight of Gruyère cheese under his arm. You have rolls of bread on every little table where you drink your beer, so all you have to do is to cry ‘salami,’ which is sausage, and instantly the gentleman with the basket comes to your table, cuts you as many slices as you require, weighs them, and puts them in front of you on a piece of clean white paper. You then drink your beer and eat your sausage with your fingers, gnawing a piece of bread in between. And thus the happy hours glide away towards evening, and the best military bands of Vienna soothe you with the soft strains of music. It is only in Vienna that you can have Strauss and salami together.
At ten, after the theatres are over, eating begins again, and is of a most formidable character. The best restaurants are crowded. At Sacher’s you cannot get a table, for all the elegant world from the opera is there. At Leidinger’s there is scarcely room for you to pass between the crowd of feasters and find a place for your hat and umbrella, and at the Old Tobacco-pipe, where the Viennese kitchen proper (or improper if you prefer it) reigns supreme, you sometimes have to wait your turn and stand at the door eagerly watching for a supster to come out that you may go in.
Before I left Vienna, having exhausted the theatres, I did a round of the waxwork exhibitions. These delighted me hugely, many of the subjects being realistic enough to make M. Zola’s hair stand on end. Our Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s is buttermilk compared with the chambers of horrors I saw in Vienna. The whole series of tortures inflicted by the Inquisition are realized in one establishment in the Kohl Market, and the wax figures roll their eyes and quiver with agony, and open their mouths and gasp in so lifelike a manner, that sometimes the country-folks grow indignant and want to get at the Grand Inquisitor and the executioner and lynch them.
The Schneiders, who systematically robbed and murdered servant-girls, are prominent features in all the waxworks of Austria; but they didn’t interest me nearly so much as an elegantly-dressed young gentleman of aristocratic appearance, who won renown some time ago by committing a murder under rather novel circumstances. He was a young man of good family, and at one time had money; but he gambled and lost it, and, being hard up, conceived a highly original plan for replenishing his purse. It is the custom in Austrian as in many European towns for the postman to bring a registered letter up to the room of the person who is to receive it, and to take the signature for it there. As this causes considerable delay on a round, the registered letters are kept back from the ordinary delivery, and sent out by a special postman. Our hero addressed an envelope to himself, put some money in it, registered it, and then made his little arrangements. When the postman came up to his bachelor apartment on the fourth-floor of a big house, he stunned him with a sudden blow, then finished him off, and, taking his bag of registered letters, opened the lot, extracted the banknotes, jewellery, etc., and made tracks with them. He got a very large sum of money, but the postman’s body was quickly discovered, and the aristocratic youth went through the dead-letter office.
But the most ghastly bit of realism of all is, I think, a representation of ‘The Last Moments of Alexander II.’ The Czar lies on a real bed, with his uniform and his linen saturated with blood. His shirt is open to the breast, and a horrible gaping wound is exposed to the eye of the spectator. As the figure breathes convulsively, the eyes roll up in the head, and real blood gushes up to the surface of the terrible wound. I have never been so horribly fascinated in my life as I was by that figure of the dying Cæsar, with his life-blood welling up before my eyes. It was shocking, it was brutal, it was hideous; but it held me spellbound by its intense reality. You forgot you were looking at a wax figure in a glass-case. You seemed to be watching a real man dying a horrible death. It was with the greatest difficulty that I prevented myself running for the nearest doctor.
CHAPTER XXIII.
BUDAPEST.
After my nocturnal adventure in Prague, I made up my mind that if I wanted to do Austria thoroughly in a fortnight it was absolutely necessary I should have someone familiar with the tongues of Bohemia and Hungary, to say nothing of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro. I met Herr Julius, cosmopolitan courier, promiscuously at a café in Vienna. We fell into conversation, and I secured him then and there to accompany me upon my Hungarian explorations. Herr Julius not only speaks German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish fluently, but is as a native when it comes to Czechish and Magyar and Croatian.