NOS PENSIONS.

They have been many and of a widely various character. We tried them in England, in France, in Italy; we tried them likewise in Germany, Sweden, and Spain, but the result of that trying was, in these last-named countries, far more trying to our digestions and tempers than rich in such recollections as would add to the interest of this paper.

Our first European pension was, naturally, a London one. It was one of the innumerable host in the pale realms of Bloomsbury. Like others of its kind in that region, it prided itself upon its "connexion,"—or, less euphemistically, its custom,—and made a specialty of an Australian "connexion," as the next number upon the right made a specialty of Germans, the one upon the left of South Americans and Spaniards, the one opposite of Russians, and uncounted ones all over London of our countrymen. Although our house was largely frequented by Australians, it did by no means confine its privileges to them. Like every other London boarding-house, it was a perfect caravansary of foreigners of almost every nation and every shade of color. At one time, with a Danish landlord and an Irish landlady, we were Norwegians, Swedes, Russians, Spaniards, Germans, Italians, and East Indians. Also we were several Americans, as was proved one notable day. That day we heard the arrival of new-comers in the hall below. We saw not their hue, but we recognized their cry as that of our countrypeople. We are not madly enamoured of our countryman in foreign climes. There his least adorable qualities—his bumptiousness, his provincialism, his strident tones and "costume de Yank"—are always more strikingly conspicuous than the chivalry toward women and the self-respecting manliness we always recognize so emphatically in him when we return to our own land after a prolonged absence. Hence we panted not for the dinner-hour, that should show us the faces whose voices we recognized as to our own manner born. That hour came, however, as all hours come to those who know how to wait. We descended to the showy table, with its floral decorations of paper, muslin, and gay paint, the ladies in the evening dress of flowers, trains, and décolletée bodices which is the absurd custom of pretentious London pensions. We glanced along the table to note the new-comers. They were there, neatly and stylishly dressed in walking-costumes. They were three quiet gentlemanly and lady-like persons, but their faces were Medusa-like to almost every American who gazed upon them. The foreigners looked intensely amused at this collapse of the American contingent,—all save our Danish landlord, who stared with amazement. Next day our new-comers disappeared.

"How in the world did you congédier them?" somebody asked.

"I told them my Americans admire enough coppery Turks, South Americans, Japanese, and East Indians, but they turn to stone at sight of niggers," answered Mr. Nodskou.

The line was certainly not drawn at color, for our Parsees were dusky enough, goodness knows, and them our maidens found very captivating. Several of them spoke no English, and it was the fascinating pastime of our English, Australian, and American girls to teach them our common language. But the result was, alas, not a little confusing to our Parsees.

"Don't fancy you are learning English from those Americans," warned Britannia. "Their accent is horrible: they say the weather is 'fair' when they mean 'fine,' they call their luggage 'baggage,' and when they speak of their travelling-boxes talk of their 'trunks,' like elephants!"

"Don't be fooled by English English," advised Columbia: "the accent is like a mouthful of pudding, and when they mean to say the weather is bad they say it is 'nawsty;' they call their rubbers 'galoshes,' their dépôts 'stations,' and when they start on a journey they get their 'boxes' together, like sweet-biscuit-peddlers."

"Don't mind what either of them say," quoth Miss Melbourne. "Both are wrong. It is only we Australians, living between the two branches of the language, as it were, who select the best and gobble it."

"What must it to say when I have such a fear, such a fear, that I speak not?" asked one of the Parsees.

"Say you're dickey on your pins," laughed Australia.

"Say you feel all of a goneness," spoke up Columbia.

"No; that is Americanese," flouted Britannia: "say you're in a beastly funk!"

That our Parsees improved under such tuition was somewhat remarkable. The lingual advance of one of them was quite startling. Our young ladies had striven to teach him "good-by." One day, therefore, as the ladies were departing from the dining-room, leaving the gentlemen to their wine, our Parsee opened the door with grave, Oriental courtesy, and, bowing to the rustling covey, said solemnly, "By god, ladies, by god!"

During a political discussion in which English and Australians took chief parts, a Melbourne girl exclaimed excitedly, "Thank goodness, I'm not English!"

"Not Engleesh!" exclaimed her neighboring Parsee. "What are you but the small little brat of the mother-country?"

Not until we laughed did our grave Oriental remember that "brat" and "child" are not strictly synonymous.

Said one of our English girls afterward to me, with tact and taste pre-eminently British, "She glad she is not English! Really, I'd almost as soon be American as Australian."

Our Parsees were not our only peculiar people. We Americans found quite as much food for sly laughter in the queerness of our English habitués as they did in ours. Our English contingent was largely feminine, therefore, as goes without saying, very High-Church, very dévote, and excessively Tory, worshipping the English aristocracy vastly more than that of celestial courts. Everybody knows the two diseases that virulently assail young Englishwomen,—"scarlet fever" and "black vomit,"—maladies provoked by association with red-coated officers and black-coated curates.

One of our fair Britons had the darker malady. She fasted regularly on Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her jours maigres by the quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de Ninon, to dine, à la Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a few lentils or a lettuce-leaf.

One Sunday somebody asked this fair devotee to give us a certain popular but profane piano-arrangement. She was shocked beyond measure. A few moments' temptation, however, brought her to a compromise.

"I think there will be no harm if I play it slowly and make it as solemn as possible."

We smiled at the æsthetic piety of our Saint Catherine. But she did more than smile at our national practicality when, one evening, from the gay drawing-room we heard the clamor of a feminine arrival below:

"I won't see any rooms till I know your price. I won't stir a peg till I know what's to pay. I've come from Chicago, where folks know what's what, and I'm going to do Yoorup on the cheap!"

Saint Catherine worshipped her country's aristocracy. One day Jonathan happened to be putting on his coat in the hall, when somebody knocked at the front door. Forgetting that the act, so natural to an American, is ungentlemanly and menial in England, he opened the door himself. A couple of young swells inquired for Saint Catherine.

"I just saw her go out," answered Jonathan.

"Tell her that the brothers of Lord Verisopht called," said the spokesman.

"I'll tell her," spoke Jonathan; "but, good heavens, young man, don't lords' brothers have any names of their own in this country?"

Another day came a gorgeous individual with a bouquet to the door.

"What skion of the British nobility is that?" asked Jonathan.

"That is Lord Blank's footman," replied Saint Catherine.

"My! Well, whose footman is that?" continued her interlocutor, pointing to a less gorgeous person holding the reins.

"That is Lord Blank," answered Saint Catherine loftily.

"Sakes alive! Does that goose of a lord think he will stand any chance with the girls when he takes such a howling swell as that around with him?" asked simple Jonathan.

To this question Saint Catherine deigned no reply, having, perhaps, remarked the wicked twinkle of Jonathan's eye.

One of our pensionnaires objected very much to the American language. "It is principally slang," she said. This lady, no longer young, had been three times upon the eve of marriage, had had three bridal dresses, had countermanded three wedding-feasts. She was heiress at that time to the fifty thousand pounds she has since inherited, and the persistent failure of her matrimonial endeavors surprised us all.

"It is because Monsieur mon Père is perfectly addled on the matter of settlements, and rowed with every one of my fiancés," she explained.

She said one day, "The gov'nor has done me out of a guinea of my allowance this week. He's a first-class Do!"

Another time, "The mater and I prefer to live in our own house, but the gov'nor won't hear to it. He prefers 'diggin's' where he can always have his whist."

Some time after our sojourn in Bloomsbury "diggin's" we found ourselves in a Continental pension, the very reverse of this in every respect. It was a Parisian pension bourgeoise, but one entirely away from every haunt of foreigners as well as from foreign influences,—a pension as French as French could be, where we were not merely the only foreigners present, but the only ones who had ever penetrated there.

It was a large white house, standing in its own grounds, not far from the Bois de Vincennes, pre-eminently a pension bourgeoise, and without pretensions higher than the widows of shopkeepers and the relicts of small government employees that formed its support. Not counting ourselves, there were twenty Relicts and one Maiden, all with handsome incomes and diamonds, but with the habit of running far and wide upon the open boulevard in caps, loose sacques, and list slippers, and of boasting of the cheap bargains they made in stockings and gowns. Their toilets were always tout ce qu'il y a de plus bourgeois, their conversation ran upon public scandals, private gossip, and fluctuations of trade (almost all of them had kept shop with their departed consorts), their reading was Paul de Kock's novels and the feuilletons of "Le Petit Journal." The youngest widow was fifty, the Maiden ninety-and-nine. The latter was daughter of a man who had been concierge of the Tuileries during the reign of Charles X. She was dusky and shrivelled as any daughter of the Pharaohs, but her faculties were marvellously preserved and her memory rich with interesting personal gossip of a former period. We Americans should have delighted to draw upon that memory, but one thing hindered us: that was the insatiable, indomitable, unparalleled coquetry of our ancient Maiden. She would never talk with any woman when any man was in the room. She descended to the stuffy little salon only in the evening, when the Relicts were gathered to their gambling for sous and the atmosphere was an imitation of the Black Hole of Calcutta. She descended en grande tenue, the grandest ever seen there, frizzled, jewelled, and muffled to the throat in fleecy clouds of white wool. She came all quirks and quivers, all flutters and smiles, for there she met our only Monsieur,—Monsieur Boulanger, our landlord. She invariably took her seat beside him, and devoted quirks and quivers exclusively to him, tapping him with her fan, calling him "Méchant! méchant!" "farceur," or "quel diable d'homme!" twittering and carolling in her old broken voice, like a senile canary dreaming of its far-off youth. M. Boulanger was of peasant origin and appearance, gray-bearded and gray-haired, and clumping always in sabots over the stone floors, except in the salon in the evening. But her eyes were only for him; and the only occasion on which any of her own uninteresting sex had her attention was when Madame Boulanger pouted and pretended to be jealous, or some Relict showed pique that our only Monsieur was monopolized by our only Maiden. Then she smiled archly, cooed sweetly, and arched her ancient neck with visible triumph.

Before we left the pension bourgeoise our front door was hung with heavy black curtains, and our Maiden passed forth into the broad day for the first time in ten years. She went out unsmiling, uncooing, without flutter or quirk, and no date upon her pine coffin, for with her last breath she had forbidden it.

"Nobody need know that I have lived more than fifty years," she murmured; "and don't let Monsieur Boulanger look at me when I am dead."

One of our widows—Madame Notte—was almost stone-deaf. She was a dwarfish creature, passionately fond of cards, waxing into terrible tempers over them, and with only one interest in life,—worshipful love of her only son, a not too beautiful citoyen of fifty. This son fell ill and died. Poor Madame Notte knew of his illness, but not of its danger and final end. It was thought best to keep from her the knowledge that she was childless, lest the shock should be too great for her frail strength. She was told he had gone to Italy for his health; and when his widow and daughters came twice each week to visit her, they left their weeds at home, came in a close carriage in their gayest attire, and laughed and talked to her blithely with heavy hearts. All about the poor old mother we talked openly and freely of her loss and our pity, and she sat as unwitting as stone of it all. But when we put our mouths to her ear and asked for her son, a beautiful change always dawned upon the leaden countenance. "He has gone away," she invariably smiled,—"gone to a better country, where it is always summer. When I see him again he will be well, quite well." She, too, passed under the heavy black curtains that winter; and from our hearts we prayed that all was well with them in that better country where it is always summer.

One of our Relicts prided herself upon her English, and criticised ours. "They speak English fairly well: I can understand them," I once heard her say of us to a group of Relicts in the garden; "but of course they speak only a patois: they are Americans."

"Why say you always to your infant, 'Hurry, my darling'?" she asked one day. "The pure Englishes says always, ''Urry, me darlink.'" Madame had acquired her English from her defunct lord, a commercial traveller from Lancashire.

One day, glancing at an envelope I had just addressed, she remarked, "Eh bien! you Americans are very like English, after all. In England the last name of almost every monsieur is 'Esq.'!"

Another day she sweetly remarked, "This knife has very bad bladders."

As knives in our country are not generally endowed with that physical possession, I could only stare my astonishment.

"Eh, I see! It is an English word, and you do not understand it. It means lame."

By which I discovered that had she spoken our transatlantic patois she would have said "blades."

Every one of our Relicts had her private sitting-room attached to her bed-room, the house having been built expressly to suit the demands of bourgeois widows with fortunes. Thus our salon was of very little account until after dinner, when our widows, instead of returning to their own rooms, the garden, or the boulevard, where they spent the day, herded together around card-tables almost as closely as sheep in a pen. The salon was not intended for daytime use; in the bitterest weather it had no fire until evening, and it had but a single window, which looked out upon the pavement of a well-like court arched over, three stories above, by a handkerchief bit of sky. Very little light or air ever entered the box-like place; during the day its atmosphere was stale and heavy, at night almost fetid. Whenever we ventured to pass an hour there our struggle was always against fate. Slyly we would leave the one door an inch ajar, or surreptitiously unclose the window a fraction as much. Scarcely, however, had we begun to congratulate ourselves upon success when half a score of antique roses flaunted and flared, and the death-knell of sly hopes sounded with echoed and re-echoed cry: "Mon Dieu! I smell air!" "Mon Dieu! Smell you not air?" "Mon Dieu! Smell we not air?" "Mon Dieu! Smells she not air?" "Mon Dieu! Smell they not air?"

Almost all our veuves had children and grandchildren in Paris, and we were continually surprised to see the mundane elegance of these younger branches of our withered old trees. It showed the usual history, however, of bourgeois parents who had worked steadily, lived humbly and economically, to gather dots for their daughters and open careers for their sons, to see them thus rise to positions in life far above their parents. Every day some of these younger branches came to our house in handsome carriages and toilets; and indeed on some days the number of elegant visitors who rang at our door gave the impression of a gay reception à la mode rather than of the ordinary visitors of a pension bourgeoise at Saint-Maudé.

One of our Relicts was decidedly less bourgeoise and more paysanne than any of the rest. She was round as a ball, seventy years of age, and dressed always in short gray petticoats, black short-gown, and close white cap. Madame Boulanger kept close watch upon her, and tried to confine her to the sunny, high-walled garden set with a number of round little iron tables, where our Relicts took their after-déjeûner café on sunny days. But Madame Boulanger was not Argus-eyed, and thus we often saw Madame Leroy escape through the front door and roll like a huge balloon along the boulevard, bent on what she called "collecting her rents." The way she did it was to enter every open door and accost every grown person she saw with the stern reproach that he was behind-hand with his rent, and if he did not pay up by to-morrow she would send the huissier to sell him out. The poor creature was so well known in the neighborhood that she never received rough treatment, and was generally so thoroughly tired out by her rent-collecting as to be quite ready to return without resistance whenever one of our servants sought her. When she did not escape, and mingled with the conglomerate widowhood of the garden (she was never permitted in the salon, and went to bed with the chickens), her time was spent, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, going from Relict to Relict, telling always the same story,—always the same, and always a true one:

"Are you in trade? I am. My husband and I came to Paris from Normandy fifty years ago, on foot, with one hundred francs. We kept a green-grocery on Rue des Saints-Pères. When my husband died he left me one hundred thousand francs. I go to collect my rents: will you go? Are you in trade? I am. My husband and I came to Paris on foot," etc., etc., etc.

One of the most elegant of all our visitors was to this poor old Madame Leroy. She always came in an elegant landau, with liveried coachman and footman. Her toilets were of incomparable luxury, but likewise of restrained and cultured taste, being usually of black velvet, duchess-like laces, and queenly furs. She always went directly to this old peasant-woman's handsomely-furnished rooms, and we never saw her except as she descended from her carriage before the windows at which we sat. She was a tall, finely-formed, aristocratic-looking brunette of thirty-five or forty, artistically gotten up as to complexion and hair, and always smiling affectionately at the tea-kettle old figure waiting at the door to greet her. This aristocratic lady was known in the house as Madame la Princesse, and was the daughter of our ancient paysanne and green-grocer, whom a Slav noble had taken from a café chantant in Constantinople to endow with his name and fortune.

Another of our veuves filled her private salon with cats. There were seven of them, and the odor of her premises was ancient and cat-like. Three of these cats were sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything, and had lived with their mistress in these very rooms years before, when booming shells sped hot over the house, and fell sometimes close beside it, during the siege of Paris.

"How did you manage to feed them?" we asked.

"I bought slices of cat in the market and stewed them in wine," answered Madame Pognon. "Wine and rice were the only things we were not stinted in. Thus I could always make a ragout for Pierre, Jean, and Jacques, and they throve on it. But I had to keep them shut up, or they would have made ragouts instead of eaten them."

A characteristic of our Relicthood en bloc was its idleness. I never saw one of them with a piece of knitting or any other work in her hands during all the weeks we were there. In fine weather they loitered and basked in the garden, gossiping or amusing themselves with novelettes cut from the penny papers and passed from one to the other in turn. The front door stood almost always open, and the suburban neighborhood about it was during pleasant days largely flecked by the grave gowns and white caps belonging to our pension. Nearly all were Bonapartists (for was not trade good during the Empire?) and found the present times sadly out of joint. Nearly all had stood behind counters or at cashiers' desks, and had thus never learned more strictly feminine employments, and now, retired upon their rentes, they found time heavy upon their hands. None were conspicuously dévote: they had never been so in their younger days, and they were not of natures to be spiritualized by long familiarity with life. Death could not be far off from most of them, but they never spoke of it, never seemed to think of it; and, although life was dull, they clung to it as by monotonous habit that is but knows not why.

Still another of our well-remembered pensions was on the bright Vesuvian Bay. The flaming mountain overlooked us, Naples floated beyond us like a dream-city, before us the Mediterranean shimmered and shone like a sultana's satin tunic. We could drop a stone from our windows into the sea; we ran dripping from our sea-baths up long stairs, across tiled balconies, into our vast rooms; all day and all night the swish and lisp of the soft tides mingled with our voices and dreams.

As somebody said of us that summer, we were a "cosmopolitan mess," a hotch-potch of nationalities, such as is always found in so general a rendezvous as Italy. We were rather less of a hotch-potch, however, than in London, but somehow it seemed to us that our peculiarities were more salient than they could ever appear in proper and conventional Bloomsbury. We were largely German, as the travelling population of Italy is. In Bloomsbury our medium of expression was the English language, and English was the language at table, no matter how foreign our company. But in this Italian pensione, where the faces were continually changing, the languages changed as often. One day only English was the rule, and those who could not unite with the majority remained mute. Another day, with a tremendous incursion of Teutons, who always seem to travel in hordes, only German gutturals held the table, and we who had no facility with them muttered meek French or sullen English to our neighbors. The next day French would be the rule, and Teuton must mumble in it and Anglo-Saxon stammer or hold its peace. Curiously enough, although we were in Italy, Italian was rarely, almost never, spoken among us, our only use of it being in orders to the servants. Our landlady was English, with an Italian husband, but they both held only upper menial places in the establishment, and never dreamed of sitting at table with us or of meeting us upon any terms of equality. This want of familiarity with Italian proves how little mere travellers and haunters of pensioni ever know of the middle-class inhabitants of the country. The Italians themselves stir from home very seldom; they almost never admit foreigners into their own houses, and when forced abroad seek cheap Italian inns rather than the innumerable boarding-houses infested by the outer barbarian. Italian peasant life is open to all foreigners, but not that of the middle classes.

Our landlord had a daughter whose cheek was pale and whose garments hung loosely upon her. When first we remarked this and her heavy eye, everybody laughed.

"The usual story,—loves and rides away," was remarked in various languages.

It was heartless to laugh, but we could not help it. For wan and drooping landlords' daughters had become so familiar to us in Italian pensioni that we needed only to glance at the set of each one's gown and the tint of her cheek to know if HE were still present and wooing or had faithlessly ridden away. The race, however, was not always to the rider.

One evening under our window, when the air swooned with languid scent of lemon- and orange-blossoms, we heard a sobbing and a sighing that reminded us of the Mock Turtle in "Alice in Wonderland." Glancing out, by the soft light of the summer moon, enhanced by the shimmering water, we saw two persons who seemed to be weeping in each other's arms under a shuddering ilex. The stouter one—he was not the taller—we recognized as a young Teuton for whose sake we had seen a gown very loose and a cheek very wan afar off among the Alban Hills only a month before.

"I love you, Tita, I love you. I have thought I loved a dozen times before, but I was mistaken. I never loved any girl before," he boohooed.

"Dio mio!" laughed the girl. "All the Tedeschi say that who come here. I wonder they are not tired of the old tune. I—I am fiancé to a bel Espagnol who rode away a month ago, and who ought to have been back before now."

We found our Teuton fellow-pensionnaires to have tastes more unnatural than for landlords' daughters. One of them we had remarked for his extreme beauty, not entirely of feature and rich olive hue, but of pathetic, dreamy expression,—as we said, like an ideal St. John. At first we never spoke of him except as "St. John." We gradually ceased to call him so, however, when we had seen him several times at table, and we grew finally so coarsely irreverent as to call him "Mange-tout."

Our meat was brought from distant Naples, making the journey without ice, under a broiling Italian sun. Often it came to table so shorn of its pristine freshness that not the hungriest of us could condone its odor. One sultry night everybody's plate went away untouched, save two or three. Flesh and fowl were "high,"—yea, "twice high," as the British gourmet prefers his game. St. John's plate was not sent away. That ideal being was served three times, after which he rose and helped himself from the side-table, remarking half apologetically as he did so, "The cook has really surpassed himself to-day!"

"Ja! ja!" echoed our Teutons.

We saw our St. John next morning sucking raw eggs before his coffee.

"Because the nourriture is poor. I do it to strengthen me," he explained.

"When I am well I eat all I can hold," he confidentially imparted to the table-d'hôte. "When I am ill I eat more than I do when I am well."

One of our pensionnaires was a swarthy Brazilian, living upon a colossal and mysteriously-begotten fortune and spending what remained to him of life upon the Mediterranean shores. He knew every pensione of the whole wide region, and in strident, barbaric tones—continually reminding us of the savage aboriginal blood betrayed by narrow eyes and high cheek-bones—flooded our table-d'hôte with the gossip of pensioni at Capri, Castellamare, Pompeii, Sorrento, and Salerno,—the giddiness of all the widows, the cunning of the young girls, the wickedness of the wives, and the barefaced or clever intriguing of husband-hunting mammas. All that year, as we quietly slipped from one Mediterranean pensione to another, we met and recognized the heroes and heroines of our Brazilian's chroniques scandaleuses, and we breathed many a thanksgiving that we were slipping east while he slipped west and thus were not known of name and evil fame in advance of our coming.

Our Brazilian was a devout Catholic, which led to his giving great offence at our table. Nobody could endure to pass him anything or to take anything from him, and the hideous bird-of-prey-like rattling of his right hand at any service turned many a delicate appetite away and made our Brazilian of almost Gorgon-like effect upon all new-comers. The finger-nails of his right hand were vowed to the Virgin: for two years they had been uncut, and now, like fiendish claws, extended two inches beyond the withered and dusky fingers.

"Why am I not liked by ces belles dames?" he asked one day. "They never ask me to their excursions; they seem to shrink from taking my hand."

"Because of your talons," somebody ventured to explain.

"Oh, no! the Blessed Virgin would never allow that," he asserted confidently.

Before the end of the summer, however, he seemed to lose confidence in the Virgin's tampering with natural law for his sake. One day we saw that the talons were sacrificed, and were told that the Mother of God had announced to our Brazilian in a dream that she would accept a vow never to cut his hair in place of the devoted nails.

A few days later our divoto came upon the loggia, where sat a bevy of ladies of many nations, in a screeching aboriginal rage.

"I sacrificed my vow to you belles dames, although I refused it to Madame la Duchesse de B——," he screamed, "and yet you avoid me. Am I not an homme fait" (certainly our sixty-year-old Brazilian had never read "Pendennis"), "and better than any of these boys you admire? Do you imagine the Blessed Virgin will not pay you off for this? Do you think she will go back on a man like me,—of whom Victor Emanuel himself was jealous when I rode on the Pincian with Madame la Princesse della Gr——?"

We thus found many peculiar people in the varied experiences of nos pensions. We found often learning and often culture, but more vulgarity than we did refinement, more splendor than delicacy of habit, more blatant ignorance than culture, more sans gêne than dignity of manners and character. It is always thus in any mere "cosmopolitan mess," any "hotch-potch of nationalities." For the eccentric and obnoxious types are always and everywhere those most largely en évidence, while the gentle and refined nestles closest to the cool, still, mossy ground, leaving sunny flaunting to wider blooms and stronger perfumes.