CHAPTER VII
[Too much Postcard.]
The postcard craze is dying out in Germany--the land of its birth--I am told. In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all. The German when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in life. The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the postcards he had sent. Then it was he began to enjoy his trip.
"What a charming old town!" the German tourist would exclaim. "I wish I could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel and have had a look round. Still, it is pleasant to think one has been there."
"I suppose you did not have much time?" his friend would suggest.
"We did not get there till the evening," the tourist would explain. "We were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had had our breakfast, it was time to leave again."
He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top.
"Sublime! colossal!" he would cry enraptured. "If I had known it was anything like that, I'd have stopped another day and had a look at it."
It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in a Schwartzwald village. Leaping from the coach they would surge round the solitary gendarme.
"Where is the postcard shop?" "Tell us--we have only two hours-- where do we get postcards?"
The gendarme, scenting Trinkgeld, would head them at the double- quick: stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter Frauen gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all propriety, slim Fraulein clinging to their beloved would run after him. Nervous pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways, careless loiterers would be swept into the gutter.
In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin. The cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong men, would rend the air. The German is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast. A woman would pounce on a tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray would be snatched from her. She would burst into tears, and hit the person nearest to her with her umbrella. The cunning and the strong would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and--sucking stumpy pencils--write feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might happen to be.
[The Postcard as a Family Curse.]
One presumes that even to the patient German the thing grew tiresome. In the Fliegende Blatter two young clerks were represented discussing the question of summer holidays.
"Where are you going?" asks A of B. "Nowhere," answers B.
"Can't you afford it?" asks the sympathetic A.
"Only been able to save up enough for the postcards," answers B, gloomily; "no money left for the trip."
Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and addresses of the people to whom they had promised to send cards. Everywhere, through winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain pathway, one met with prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as they walked:
"Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?"
Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment. Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a photographic studio, to be made beautiful.
"I want," says the lady, "a photograph my friends will really like. Some of these second- rate photographers make one look quite plain. I don't want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want something nice."
The obliging photographer does his best. The nose is carefully toned down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn't know her. The postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might have been.
"If it were not for the houses," says the postcard artist to himself, "this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediaeval aspect."
So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been. The lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and when he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets mad. I bought a postcard myself once representing the market place of a certain French town. It seemed to me, looking at the postcard, that I hadn't really seen France--not yet. I travelled nearly a hundred miles to see that market place. I was careful to arrive on market day and to get there at the right time. I reached the market square and looked at it. Then I asked a gendarme where it was.
He said it was there--that I was in it.
I said, "I don't mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque one."
He said it was the only market square they had. I took the postcard from my pocket. "Where are all the girls?" I asked him.
"What girls?" he demanded. [The Artist's Dream.]
"Why, these girls;" I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been about a hundred of them. There was not a plain one among the lot. Many of them I should have called beautiful. They were selling flowers and fruit, all kinds of fruit--cherries, strawberries, rosy- cheeked apples, luscious grapes--all freshly picked and sparkling with dew. The gendarme said he had never seen any girls--not in this particular square. Referring casually to the blood of saints and martyrs, he said he would like to see a few girls in that town worth looking at. In the square itself sat six motherly old souls round a lamp-post. One of them had a moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but in other respects, I have no doubt, was all a woma