Abroad with the Jimmies

by Lilian Bell

Vienna fashions are very elegant. Being the seat of the court, there is a great deal of dress. There is wealth, and the shops are magnificent. Personally, I much prefer the fashions of Vienna to those of Paris. Prices are perhaps a little more moderate, but the truly Paris creation generally has the effect of making one think it would be beautiful on somebody else. I can go to Worth, Felix, and Doucet, and half a dozen others equally as smart, and not see ten models that I would like to own. In Vienna there were Paris clothes, of course, but the Viennese have modified them, producing somewhat the same effect as American influence on Paris fashions. To my mind they are more elegant, having more of reserve and dignity in their style, and a distinct morality. Paris clothes generally look immoral when you buy them, and feel immoral when you get them on. There is a distinct spiritual atmosphere about clothes. In Vienna this was very noticeable. I speak more of clothes in Paris and Vienna, as there are only four cities in the world where one would naturally buy clothes,—Paris, Vienna, London, and New York. In other cities you buy other things, articles perhaps distinctive of the country.

When you get to St. Petersburg, in your shopping experiences, you will find a mixture of Teuton and Slav which is very perplexing. We were particularly anxious to get some good specimens of Russian enamel, which naturally one supposes to be more inexpensive in the country which creates them, but to our distress we discovered Avenue de l'Opera prices on everything we wished. Each time that we went back the price was different. The market seemed to fluctuate. One blue enamelled belt, upon which I had set my heart, varied in price from one to three dollars each time I looked at it. Finally, one day I hit upon a plan. I asked my friend, Mile, de Falk, to follow me into this shop and not speak to me, but to notice the particular belt I held in my hand. I then went out without purchasing, and the next day my friend sent her sister, who speaks nothing but Russian and French, to this shop. She purchased the belt for ten dollars less than it had been offered to me. She ordered a different lining made for it, and the shopkeeper said in guileless Russian, "How strange it is that ladies all over the world are alike. For a week two American young ladies have been in here looking at this belt, and by a strange coincidence they also wished this same lining."

For once I flatter myself that I "did" a Russian Jew, but his companions in crime have so thoroughly "done" me in other corners of the world that I need not plume myself unnecessarily. He is more than even with me.

All through Russia we contented ourselves with buying Russian engravings, which are among the finest in the world. Perhaps some of their charm is in the subject portrayed, which, being unfamiliar, arouses curiosity. Russian operas, paintings, theatricals, the national ballet, the interior of churches and mosques are different from those of every other country. There is in the churches such a strange admixture of the spiritual and the theatrical. So that the engravings of these things have for me at least more interest than anything else.

Occasionally we were betrayed into buying a peasant's costume, an ikon, or an enamel, but in Moscow and Kief, the only way that we could reproduce to our friends at home the glories and splendours of these two beautiful cities was by photographs, in which the brilliancy of their colours brings back the sensations of delight which we experienced.

Shopping in Constantinople is not shopping as we Americans understand it, unless you happen to be an Indian trader by profession. I am not. Therefore, the system of bargaining, of going away from a bazaar and pretending you never intended buying, never wanted it anyhow, of coming back to sit down and take a cup of coffee, was like acting in private theatricals. By nature I am not a diplomat, but if I had stayed longer in the Orient, I think I would have learned to be as tricky as Chinese diplomacy.

We were given, by several of our Turkish friends, two or three rules which should govern conduct when shopping in the Orient. One is to look bored; the second, never to show interest in what pleases you; the third, never to let your robber salesman have an idea of what you really intend to buy. This comes hard at first, but after you have once learned it, to go shopping is one of the most exciting experiences that I can remember. I have always thought that burglary must be an exhilarating profession, second only to that of the detective who traps him. In shopping in the Orient, the bazaars are dens of thieves, and you, the purchaser, are the detective. We found in Constantinople little opportunity to exercise our new-found knowledge, because we were accompanied by our Turkish friends, who saw to it that we made no indiscreet purchases. On several occasions they made us send things back because we had been overcharged, and they found us better articles at less price. Of course we bought a fez, embroidered capes, bolero jackets, embroidered curtains, and rugs, but we, ourselves, were waiting to get to Smyrna for the real purchase of rugs, and it was there that I personally first brought into play the guile that I had learned of the Turks.

I remember Smyrna with particular delight. The quay curves in like a giant horseshoe of white cement. The piers jut out into the sapphire blue of this artificial bay, and are surrounded by myriads of tiny rowing shells, in which you must trust yourself to get to land, as your big ship anchors a mile or more from shore.

It was the brightest, most brilliant Mediterranean sunshine which irradiated the scene the morning on which we arrived at Smyrna. A score of gaily clad boatmen, whose very patches on their trousers were as picturesque as the patches on Italian sails, held out their hands to enable us to step from one cockle-shell to another, to reach the pier. In the way the boats touch each other in the harbour at Smyrna, I was reminded of the Thames in Henley week. We climbed through perhaps a dozen of these boats before we landed on the pier, and in three minutes' walk we were in the rug bazaars of Smyrna. Such treasures as we saw!

We were received by the smiling merchants as if we were long-lost daughters suddenly restored, but we practised our newly acquired diplomacy on them to such an extent that their faces soon began to betray the most comic astonishment. These people are like children, and exhibit their emotions in a manner which seems almost infantile to the Caucasian. Alas, we were not the prey they had hoped for. We sneered at their rugs; we laughed at their embroideries; we turned up our noses at their jewelled weapons; we drank their coffee, and walked out of their shops without buying. They followed us into the street, and there implored us to come back, but we pretended to be returning to our ship. On our way back through this same street, every proprietor was out in front of his shop, holding up some special rug or embroidery which he had hastily dug out of his secret treasures in the vain hope of compelling our respect. Some of these were Persian silk rugs worth from one to three thousand dollars each. Although we would have committed any crime in order to possess these treasures, having got thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, we turned these rugs on their backs and pretended to find flaws in them, jeered at their colouring, and went on our way, followed by a jabbering, excited, perplexed, and nettled horde, who recklessly slaughtered their prices and almost tore up their mud floors in their wild anxiety to prove that they had something—anything—which we would buy. They called upon Allah to witness that they never had been treated so in their lives, but would we not stop just once more again to cast our eyes on their unworthy stock?