Troubles of a Tourist Agent.--His Views on Tourists.--The English Woman Abroad.--And at Home.--The Ugliest Cathedral in Europe.--Old Masters and New.--Victual-and-Drink-Scapes.--The German Band.--A "Beer Garden."--Not the Women to Turn a Man's Head.--Difficulty of Dining to Music.--Why one should Keep one's Mug Shut.
I think myself it is Saturday. B. says it is only Friday; but I am positive I have had three cold baths since we left Ober-Ammergau, which we did on Wednesday morning. If it is only Friday, then I have had two morning baths in one day. Anyhow, we shall know to-morrow by the shops being open or shut.
We travelled from Oberau with a tourist agent, and he told us all his troubles. It seems that a tourist agent is an ordinary human man, and has feelings just like we have. This had never occurred to me before. I told him so.
"No," he replied, "it never does occur to you tourists. You treat us as if we were mere Providence, or even the Government itself. If all goes well, you say, what is the good of us, contemptuously; and if things go wrong, you say, what is the good of us, indignantly. I work sixteen hours a day to fix things comfortably for you, and you cannot even look satisfied; while if a train is late, or a hotel proprietor overcharges, you come and bully ME about it. If I see after you, you mutter that I am officious; and if I leave you alone, you grumble that I am neglectful. You swoop down in your hundreds upon a tiny village like Ober-Ammergau without ever letting us know even that you are coming, and then threaten to write to the Times because there is not a suite of apartments and a hot dinner waiting ready for each of you.
"You want the best lodgings in the place, and then, when at a tremendous cost of trouble, they have been obtained for you, you object to pay the price asked for them. You all try and palm yourselves off for dukes and duchesses, travelling in disguise. You have none of you ever heard of a second-class railway carriage--didn't know that such things were made. You want a first-class Pullman car reserved for each two of you. Some of you have seen an omnibus in the distance, and have wondered what it was used for. To suggest that you should travel in such a plebeian conveyance, is to give you a shock that takes you two days to recover from. You expect a private carriage, with a footman in livery, to take you through the mountains. You, all of you, must have the most expensive places in the theatre. The eight-mark and six-mark places are every bit as good as the ten-mark seats, of which there are only a very limited number; but you are grossly insulted if it is hinted that you should sit in anything but the dearest chairs. If the villagers would only be sensible and charge you ten marks for the eight-mark places you would be happy; but they won't."
I must candidly confess that the English-speaking people one meets with on the Continent are, taken as a whole, a most disagreeable contingent. One hardly ever hears the English language spoken on the Continent, without hearing grumbling and sneering.
The women are the most objectionable. Foreigners undoubtedly see the very poorest specimens of the female kind we Anglo-Saxons have to show. The average female English or American tourist is rude and self-assertive, while, at the same time, ridiculously helpless and awkward. She is intensely selfish, and utterly inconsiderate of others; everlastingly complaining, and, in herself, drearily uninteresting. We travelled down in the omnibus from Ober-Ammergau with three perfect specimens of the species, accompanied by the usual miserable-looking man, who has had all the life talked out of him. They were grumbling the whole of the way at having been put to ride in an omnibus. It seemed that they had never been so insulted in their lives before, and they took care to let everybody in the vehicle know that they had paid for first-class, and that at home they kept their own carriage. They were also very indignant because the people at the house where they had lodged had offered to shake hands with them at parting. They did not come to Ober-Ammergau to be treated on terms of familiarity by German peasants, they said.
There are many women in the world who are in every way much better than angels. They are gentle and gracious, and generous and kind, and unselfish and good, in spite of temptations and trials to which mere angels are never subjected. And there are also many women in the world who, under the clothes, and not unfrequently under the title of a lady, wear the heart of an underbred snob. Having no natural dignity, they think to supply its place with arrogance.
They mistake noisy bounce for self-possession, and supercilious rudeness as the sign of superiority. They encourage themselves in sleepy stupidity under the impression that they are acquiring aristocratic "repose." They would appear to have studied "attitude" from the pages of the London Journal, coquetry from barmaids--the commoner class of barmaids, I mean--wit from three-act farces, and manners from the servants'-hall. To be gushingly fawning to those above them, and vulgarly insolent to everyone they consider below them, is their idea of the way to hold and improve their position, whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally indifferent to the rights and feelings of everybody else in the world is, in their opinion, the hall-mark of gentle birth.
