The idea occurred to him, a magnificent idea, of going into a shop. No one made the slightest effort to help him. The assistants were interested only in trying to sell him everything which the house contained. Finally he found himself in a street where there were only clothing merchants. Hardly had he set foot there when he was seized and dragged into a shop. An hour passed before Mortier could escape, more dead than alive, from the merchant’s clutches. The information he gave led us to suppose that this must have been the famous Baxter Street, the quarter in which Jewish second-hand dealers ply their trade. It was past five o’clock when he succeeded finally in regaining the bridge, and then it was only with difficulty that he got across, for it was already overcrowded with workers returning to their homes in Brooklyn.
Finally he found the hotel again, swearing that he was going to take the first steamer for Europe.
“Anywhere,” he would groan; “I would rather be anywhere in the world than here. I’m not going to stay another hour in such a country. A rotten country! Rotten people!”
This time, in Pierre Mortier’s eyes, we were “rotten.” It would be hard to estimate how many discourteous adjectives this young man applied to our people in a short time. He must have made a record.
However, the Brooklyn hotel at which we were staying was equipped “on the European plan” with carefully chosen menus à la carte.
In the city to which we went later there was a purely American hotel, at which we put up. A central plate surrounded by a dozen little plates stood in front of each guest. All these were filled simultaneously with soup, entrees, fish, meat, vegetables and fruit. The guests with hasty movements gobbled smoked salmon, roast beef, chicken, mashed potatoes, badly cooked “pie,” salad, cheese, fruit, pudding, ice-cream, with apparently no regard for the effect of the hazardous mixtures on their digestive organs.
Mortier left the table completely disheartened by this spectacle.
“What are those savages made of,” he said. “Upon my word they make me look back with regret to the thieves in New York. And when you consider that to urge down their hideous mixtures they incessantly guzzle ice water and keep chewing olives, just as civilised people eat bread!”
When we returned to New York Mortier went to the Holland House, a hotel at which French was spoken, and where things were done in a manner approximating nearer to what he was accustomed to.
America—this America which on the steamer he had assured himself would be perfect—had come to interest him only in places where it had lost its own character. He found it good only in the few spots where it resembled Paris. In this was not this young journalist, after all, like most of his compatriots when they undertake to travel even in other countries than in America?