Various

“ As I appear at the window a woman covers her face with her hands and screams, and I recognise her as the wife of one of our comrades, a workman. This cry, this gesture, the word “torture” that I hear run along the crest of the wall—all this at first surprises me. As, however, I follow the direction of the eyes of those gazing at me, I discover the cause. My hands, by which I am holding myself to the window bars, are covered with blood, the result of my recent work of destruction of glass and woodwork. There is blood, too, on my light-coloured dress. Poor woman! ”

“ Often I had to go miles out of my road to avoid a ravine, and twice I reached a high point only to have to descend again. But at length I crossed the ridge, and crept down to a spot from where, concealed, I could spy upon my own house. She—my wife—stood by the flimsy bridge. A short hatchet, such as butchers use, was in her hand. She leant against a pine trunk, with her arm behind her, as one stands whose back aches with long stooping in some cramped position; and even at that distance I could see the cruel smile about her lips. ”

“ There old friends, such as M. Edmond de Goncourt, are ever made welcome, and life is one long holiday for those who bring no work with them. Daudet himself has described his country home as being “situated thirty miles from Paris, at a lovely bend of the Seine, a provincial Seine invaded by bulrushes, purple irises, and water-lilies, bearing on its bosom tufts of grass, and clumps of tangled roots, on which the tired dragon-flies alight, and allow themselves to be lazily floated down the stream.” ”

“ All these sensations are lost in my extreme nervous excitement and anxiety for the others, who are now quiet, and for Nadine, from whom I instinctively turn my eyes.
It is very warm, and through the broken window I see a large patch of sky, so transparent and luminous that my eyes, long accustomed to the twilight of my cell, can hardly stand the brightness. There is light everywhere. ”

“ Almost everything has been reduced to an art. You can learn journalism outside a newspaper, playwriting by theory, French without a master. How to succeed in literature and how not; both ways have been laid down for the student. There is scarcely an art or a habit you cannot learn in books. Etiquette, how to make up, stock-jobbing, acting, gardening, and a host of intellectual pursuits, have their rules and regulations; but the mysterious and delicate art of tipping as yet remains unexploited in the social ethics of this much-taught generation. ”

“ We are perched upon a tiny plateau halfway up the mountain. On one side the rock rises almost perpendicularly, piercing the sky; while on the other, two thousand feet below us, the torrent hurls itself into black waters of the fiord. The house consists of two rooms—or, rather, it is two cabins connected by a passage. The larger one we use as a living room, and the other is our sleeping apartment. We have no servant, but do everything for ourselves. I fear sometimes Muriel must find it lonely. The nearest human habitation is eight miles away, across the mountain, and not a soul comes near us. ”

“ Out of their earnings they have to pay all breakages and washing, and, for the thirty to thirty-five shillings they earn a week, they have to put up, from a class of customers, with patience and a perpetual smile, more abuse than one in any other ten men would stand. It not unfrequently happens that a waiter would do without it rather than accept a tip which assumes the form of an insult. We look upon it as a remuneration due to us, and, after trying to satisfy the client, we do not see why he should think it an unbearable nuisance, and treat the recipient with contempt. ”

“ Many, at different times, have tried to occupy the house, but strange tales are told of them. ‘Men do not live at Hund’s saeter,’ said my old grey-haired friend, concluding his tale, ‘they die there.’ I have persuaded some of the braver of the villagers to bring what provisions and other necessaries we require up to a plateau about a mile from the house and leave them there. That is the most I have been able to do. It comes somewhat as a shock to one to find men and women—fairly educated and intelligent as many of them are—slaves to fears that one would expect a child to laugh at. ”

“ Then I close-to the latch, and she—the living woman—asks me in her purring voice what sound I heard, hiding a smile as she stoops low over her work, and I answer lightly, and, moving towards her, put my arm about her, feeling her softness and her suppleness, and wondering, supposing I held her close to me with one arm while pressing her from me with the other, how long before I should hear the cracking of her bones. ”

“ It is always present in Europe in a mild form, but periodically tipping swoops down upon the United States, and its effects are dreadful to contemplate. If tipping ever becomes epidemic in America, the unfortunate citizens will have to leave, and seek a cheaper country, for the haughty waiter in an American hotel scorns the humbler coins of the realm, and accepts nothing less than half a dollar. ”

“ Give up the idea that tipping will succumb to any agitation. So long as commodities have to be paid for in cash, and not in fine words and sweet smiles, tipping will exist. The moralist may rave against it, but ask him in what way his gratitude manifests itself when a railway porter politely relieves him of half-a-dozen bags, and deposits them in a snug corner, whilst he has barely time to take his ticket at the booking-office. ”

“ Rising and groping about me, I found an opening, and passed through, and crept forward with palms outstretched until I touched the logs of a hut; then, feeling my way round, discovered the door, and knocked. There came no response, so I knocked louder; then pushed, and the heavy woodwork yielded, groaning. But the darkness within was even darker than the darkness without. The others had contrived to crawl down and join me. Michael struck a wax vesta and held it up, and slowly the room came out of the darkness and stood round us. ”

“ A gentleman accompanied by a lady, if she is only an acquaintance, is sure to tip generously, pour la galerie, although he may look as if he wanted to accompany every penny by a kick. But when the same person dines with his wife or sister, the remuneration is as small as decency can permit. When a waiter spots such a relation between a party of diners, he generally tries to escape the obligation of offering them a table. At the large restaurants we gauge the diners’ liberality very frequently at one glance, and in any case form an accurate opinion of him by the way he orders his menu. ”

“ The outer court-yard is gradually and silently filling with moving shadows. Rifles, of which the barrels glitter in the starlight, are pointed towards our windows. This mute menace of a massacre in the darkness finds us indifferent, and not one of us leaves his or her place at the window. But some are ill, and all wounded and tired out by the emotions and struggles of the day, and having been without food for over twenty-six hours; and can we revolt again? As regards the court-martial, none fear, and all would be willing to be tried by it. ”

“ The talk drifted to church and parish matters, and, as soon as he decently could, the curate took his leave, looking very much more depressed and anxious than ever. As he raised the latch of the Vicarage gate, a voice, whose sound he knew only too well, called to him by name; and, turning, he beheld Miss Caroline Cope, the Vicar’s daughter, pursuing him skittishly down the garden path. Miss Caroline was not young, neither was she amiable, and her appearance was quite remarkably unattractive. ”

“ Unless in the next half-hour we could chance upon a saeter, this meant passing the night upon the mountain. Michael and I looked at the guide, but though, with characteristic Norwegian sturdiness, he put a bold face upon it, we could see that in that deepening darkness he knew no more than we did. Wasting no time on words, we made straight for the nearest point of descent, knowing that any human habitation must be far below us. ”

“ Strong curiosity overcoming faint scruples, we read them by the dull glow of the burning juniper twigs, and, as we lay aside the last of them, there rose from the depths below us a wailing cry, and all night long it rose and died away, and rose again, and died away again; whether born of our brain or of some human thing, God knows. ”

“ Thomas Todd was later on conveyed, still shouting fragments of circus dialogue, to the County Lunatic Asylum. The curate’s mind had temporarily given way beneath the strain of the position in which he had found himself placed, and of the horrible future that lay before him, and his insanity had taken the form of an imaginary return to the scenes of his early life. When, some two years later, he was discharged cured, he attached himself to a mission about to start for the South African Coast, and left England without re-visiting Great Wabbleton. ”

“ Now and again, as in single file you walk cautiously along some jagged ridge, you catch glimpses of the green world, three thousand feet below you; though you gaze not long upon the view, for your attention is chiefly directed to watching the footprints of the guide, lest by deviating to the right or left you find yourself at one stride back in the valley—or, to be more correct, are found there. ”

“ In conclusion, pourboire, buona mancia, backshish, tipping or bribery, was born with man, and will only die out with him.
Giuseppe of the Cafe Doney, at Florence: his experience.
Ah! Milor, what do I think of “teeping?” What would become of me without it? In some forty or fifty years I shall be a rich man, and perhaps keep a café myself, thanks to the benevolence and generosity of the American and English milors. At first I was a cabman, but in Italy no one gives the cabman a pourboire; so my friends said, “Ah! Giuseppe, you must make money somehow. Become a waiter, and you will grow rich.” ”

“ Of course, if the would-be writer has already an income, I see no reason why he should not give himself up to literature altogether. It was in order to provide a certain number of coming geniuses with the wherewithal to find at least spare time in which to write possible masterpieces, that my friend Edmond de Goncourt and his brother Jules conceived the noble and unselfish idea to found an institute, the members of which would require but two qualifications, poverty and exceptional literary power. ”

“ When in a theatre I see a couple occupying a bad seat, when better ones are vacant, I make the suggestion, and would certainly be astonished if the gentleman did not acknowledge the hint. When the working classes do not syndicate they have to accept wages so ridiculously low that they are obliged to find some means of increasing their earnings. But will it ever be possible to suppress the “evil”? Allow me to doubt it. The thing is, therefore, to prevent tipping taking the form of an imposition. ”

“ I have told myself it must have been a kerchief of her own, and that all the rest has been my imagination—that if not, then my strange visitant was no spirit, but a woman, and that, if human thing knows human thing, it was no creature of flesh and blood that sat beside me last night. Besides, what woman would she be? The nearest saeter is a three hours’ climb to a strong man, the paths are dangerous even in daylight: what woman would have found them in the night? ”

“ That if you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp of the log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less widespread than a prize-fighter’s, and a pecuniary position which you might with far less trouble have been born to. ”

“ He added that he had a great horror of alcohol as a stimulant for work, and has ofttimes been heard to say that those who believe in working on spirits had better make up their minds to become total abstainers if they hope to achieve anything in the way of literature.
Unlike most literary ménages, M. and Madame Daudet are one of those happy couples who are said by cynics to be the exceptions which prove the rule. Literary men are proverbially unlucky in their helpmates; and geniuses have been proved again and again to reserve their fitful humours and uncertain tempers for home use. ”

“ Backwards through the open door, backwards along the garden path between the juniper bushes, backwards till her heels are overhanging the ravine, and she grips [Pg 593] life with nothing but her little toes, I shall force her, step by step, before me. Then I shall lean forward, closer, closer, till I kiss her purpling lips, and down, down, down, past the startled sea-birds, past the white spray of the foss, past the downward peeping pines, down, down, down, we will go together, till we find my love where she lies sleeping beneath the waters of the fiord. ”

“ As the night grows deeper, and the sounds of evening are lost in the mists, covering the country as [Pg 659] with a veil, our sick nerves become calmer, and our hatred gives place to an immense and tender sadness. Then we talk of our mothers, of the mother of Helena Q——, and of Ivanoff’s mother, both of whom are probably still in ignorance of the death of their children, and are still waiting and hoping. ”

“ Speaking now as an American, I will give a tip right here. If Conan Doyle, or George Meredith, or some author in whom Americans have confidence, would get out a book entitled, say, “The Right Tip, or Tuppence on the Shilling,” giving exactly the correct sum to pay on all occasions, Americans would buy up the whole edition and bless the author. I think Americans are altogether too lavish with their tips, and thus make it difficult for us poorer people, whom nobody tips, to get along. ”

“ It is not the night I fear, but the day. I hate the sight of this woman with whom I live, whom I call ‘wife.’ I shrink from the blow of her cold lips, the curse of her stony eyes. She has seen, she has learnt ”

“ M. Daudet will seldom be beguiled into talking on politics. Like all Frenchmen, the late Panama scandals have profoundly shocked and disgusted him, as revealing a state of things discreditable to the Government of his country. But the creator of Désirée Dolobelle has a profound belief in human nature, and believes that, come what may, the novelist will never lack beautiful and touching models in the world round and about him. ”