Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

I had them off and he altered them to conform, and I went back on the morrow; in fact I went back so often that after a while I became really quite attached to the place. I felt almost like a member of the firm. Between calls from me the cutter worked on those breeches. He cut them up and he cut them down; he sheared the back away and shingled the front, and shifted the buttons to and fro.

Still, even after all this, they were not what I should term an unqualified success. When I sat down in them they seemed to climb up on me so high, fore and aft, that I felt as short-waisted as a crush hat in a state of repose. And the only way I could get my hands into the hip pockets of those breeches was to take the breeches off first. As ear muffs they were fair but as hip pockets they were failures. Finally I told him to send my breeches, just as they were, to my hotel address—and I paid the bill.

I brought them home with me. On the day after my arrival I took them to my regular tailor and laid the case before him. I tried them on for him and asked him to tell me, as man to man, whether anything could be done to make those garments habitable. He called his cutter into consultation and they went over me carefully, meantime uttering those commiserating clucking sounds one tailor always utters when examining another tailor's handiwork. After this my tailor took a lump of chalk and charted out a kind of Queen Rosamond's maze of crossmarks on my breeches and said I might leave them, and that if surgery could save them he would operate. At any rate he guaranteed to cut them away sufficiently to admit of my breast bone coming out into the open once more.

In a week—about—he called me on the telephone and broke the sad news to me. My English riding pants would never ride me again. In using the shears he had made a fatal slip and had irreparably damaged them in an essential location. However, he said I need not worry, because it might have been worse; from what he had already cut out of them he had garnered enough material to make me a neat outing coat, and by scrimping he thought he might get a waistcoat to match.

I have my English raincoat; it is still in a virgin state so far as wearing it is concerned. I may yet wear it and I may not. If I wear it and you meet me on the street—and we are strangers—you should experience no great difficulty in recognizing me. Just start in at almost any spot on the outer orbit and walk round and round as though you were circling a sideshow tent looking for a chance to crawl under the canvas and see the curiosities for nothing; and after a while, if you keep on walking as directed, you will come to a person with a plain but substantial face, and that will be me in my new English raincoat. Then again I may wear it to a fancy-dress ball sometime. In that case I shall stencil Pike's Peak or Bust! on the sidebreadth and go as a prairie schooner. If I can succeed in training a Missouri hound-dog to trail along immediately behind me the illusion will be perfect.

After these two experiences with the English tailor I gave up. Instead of trying to wear the apparel of the foreigner I set myself to the study of it. I would avoid falling into the habit of making comparisons between European institutions and American institutions that are forever favorable to the American side of the argument. To my way of thinking there is only one class of tourist-Americans to be encountered abroad worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they see merely because it is European, and that is the class who condemn offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely because it is not American. But I must say that in the matter of outer habiliments the American man wins the decision on points nearly every whack.

In his evening garb, which generally fits him, but which generally is not pressed as to trouserlegs and coatsleeves, the Englishman makes an exceedingly good appearance. The swallow-tailed coat was created for the Englishman and he for it; but on all other occasions the well-dressed American leads him—leads the world, for that matter. When a Frenchman attires himself in his fanciest regalia he merely succeeds in looking effeminate; whereas a German, under similar circumstances, bears a wadded-in, bulged-out, stuffed-up appearance. I never saw a German in Germany whose hat was not too small for him—just as I never saw a Japanese in Occidental garb whose hat was not too large for him—if it was a derby hat. If a German has on a pair of trousers that flare out at the bottom and a coat with angel sleeves—I think that is the correct technical term—and if the front of his coat is spangled over with the largest-sized horn buttons obtainable he regards himself as being dressed to the minute.

As for the women, I believe even the super-critical mantuamakers of Paris have begun to concede that, as a nation, the American women are the best-dressed women on earth. The French women have a way of arranging their hair and of wearing their hats and of draping their furs about their throats that is artistic beyond comparison. There may be a word in some folks' dictionaries fitly to describe it—there is no such word in mine; but when you have said that much you have said all there is to say. A French woman's feet are not shod well. French shoes, like all European shoes, are clumsy and awkward looking.

English children are well dressed because they are simply dressed; and the children themselves, in contrast to the overdressed, overly aggressive youngsters so frequently encountered in America, are mannerly and self-effacing, and have sane, simple, childish tastes. Young English girls are fresh and natural, but frequently frumpy; and the English married woman is generally dressed in poor taste and appears to have a most limited wardrobe. Apparently the husband buys all he wants, and then, if there is any money left over, the wife gets it to spend on herself.

Venturing one morning into a London chapel I saw a dowdy little woman of this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to the service. Her blouse gaped open all the way down her back and she was saying with much fervor, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done." She had too, but she didn't know it, as she knelt there unconsciously supplying a personal illustration for the spoken line.