The Grand Tour

Opposite Manhattan's topless towers, on Hoboken's Fifth Street Pier, the tightly phalanxed crowd was as agitated as an Agnes de Mille ballet, and every bit as chic. Before backdrops of exquisite luggage moved exquisite figures--Katharine Hepburn the actress, the Marquis and Marquise de Cuevas of the international set, and "Mile. Cine-Revue," the Belgian beauty queen (not to mention a sprinkling of ambassadors and two Marshall Plan emissaries). Also present were Mr. Hamish MacGregor, Mr. S. Wodowski, Mrs. A. Haggerty. Many passengers received, instead of steamer baskets, food parcels for their friends in the Old Country.

In the melee, superbly hatted and slightly perspiring heads bobbed and nodded with visions of what lay ahead--the Continent of bad plumbing, charm, great ruins, inflation, cancan and the cutest little French restaurant just around the corner. There were some references to crisis and even war. "My dear," said a woman in dark sunglasses, "I do think you are brave to go."

The Grand Tour was under way again--that great annual pilgrimage which almost since the Revolution has led Americans back to Europe at the command of fashion, war or undefined nostalgia. Well over 200,000 Americans were expected to go to Europe this summer, nearly on a par with the best prewar years, and as many as the reduced Atlantic fleet could carry. Ships of all sizes and registries were booked to capacity, and on the vastly expanded airlines space was going fast. Europe feverishly offered up its beauties in exchange for dollars, announced special rations to keep well-fed Americans well fed, and promised with a slightly wrinkled leer that all would be as gay as ever.

Most of the pilgrims indeed looked for gaiety--or for that vague value, romance (of which Americans never seem to get enough at home). Some were going, as Emerson put it, "to learn what man can" --to be humbled or inspired by a culture of which their own was part and product. Some went in search of clarity in a confusing world, and some simply went for a look at their father's house.

What would the pilgrims find?

What they will find on the ravaged Continent is beauty, and, startlingly, peace. Not peace in the pitched battle for Europe's faith and allegiance, nor peace in the daily battle for bread and hope, but the kind of peace that happens simply because life must continue. From the Clyde to the Tiber, the face of Europe is still scarred, yet these new scars--like the older ones at Athens, Rome and Nimes--are becoming part of Europe's peace. Europeans have learned long ago that the danger which always threatens even their stoutest cities and their most cherished lands is not the result of any particular calamity, but man's permanent calamity on earth.

The Passing Shadow. Meanwhile, Europe and Europeans are showing full intention of surviving as usual. In London there is St. Paul's Cathedral, miraculously saved from fire and from the grey, mean maze of neighboring buildings which used to obscure its glory before the blitz cleared the view. There is Rye, on the coast of Sussex, blitzed and partly evacuated in the war. Careful hands have refitted each uprooted cobblestone, and have restored the Look-Out at the end of High Street where townsmen once more sit in the sun, watching slow brown sails slide along the River Rother below. High on the hill stands the church with its freshly painted sundial and freshly gilded lettering: "For our Time is but a Shadow that Passes away."

Across the Channel, on Belgium's dunes, lovers sit these evenings, looking out toward Britain, their backs turned on some of history's great battlefields. Far behind them lies Bastogne, where during the Battle of the Bulge U.S. General McAuliffe answered a German demand for surrender with a defiant "Nuts!" (Bastognards have incorporated the word into their language.) In Malmedy, little girls in blue smocks run about vacant lots where houses once stood, pelting each other with the fluffy shrapnel of dandelion heads.

In Malines, silence settles on the town at 9 every evening when the first bat meets the last swallow above the ancient gables; then from the tower of the Cathedral of St. Rombaut sounds the music of the carillon. It played when the Walloons fled before the Inquisition to settle in New Amsterdam; and when German occupation troops began their march home in 1918 (the mocking tune then was Bon Voyage, Monsieur Dumollet). Listening townsmen select certain narrow streets perpendicular to the tower where, long experience has shown, the golden notes fall with particular clarity.

What a Cathedral Sees. Just four years ago, on the Normandy beaches, Americans began a grim tour of Europe. Last week, in commemoration of Dday, handfuls of bright yellow buttercups lay on American graves; in the cemeteries, stacks of coffins were waiting to be shipped home. At Rouen, where Joan the Maid burned at the stake, one Edouard Leplis, a grey-haired textile worker, looked up at the cathedral (whose Gothic symmetry was wrecked when an Allied bomb abruptly shortened one of its spires). Said he: "A lot of wars have passed this cathedral. It is old but it still stands. Things will not be too bad if it has seen its last war." An old lady turned on Leplis and said bitterly: "You are a sentimentalist. Your grandfather probably said the same thing on exactly the same spot. What silly, hopeful people the facade of this cathedral has seen!"

On the other side of Western Europe's old cockpit, the dark green Rhine flows peacefully between jealously tended vineyards; old vintners predict that '48 will be a good year. Southward, Switzerland rises and the Alps loom in the sky like petrified thunder. Herdsmen this month drive their cattle from the cramped valleys into the mountain pastures. Farther south, in Italy, are the green hills of Tuscany and villages like Santa Croce sull' Arno. Santa Croce is oblivious of tourism. For 40 days during the recent war, its people crouched in nearby caves while American and German artillery fought a deadly duel overhead. Now life in Santa Croce has resumed its normal pace; red wine is drunk in taverns, and schoolboys still recite from the Comedy called the Divine. Are there any people in Santa Croce who cannot read? Old Father Morelli, who sits in his favorite cafe chair in the Piazza Garibaldi, replies with a frosty twinkle: "Non da Dante a oggi" (not since Dante).

Where Clarity Lies. In the port of Villefranche-sur-Mer between Monte Carlo and Nice, an old woman squats beside a heap of torn fishing nets, her face expressionless, only her mending hands alive; at her bare feet, the tiny port's gentle waters lap at the greenish old soapstone landing. Suddenly the woman drops her work--the flat, rugged fishing boats are coming home. Dripping baskets of fish are turned upside down on long brown tables. A fisherman calls out (in Provencal): "O Pei! O pei!" (Fish). Laughing and chattering, village women crowd around the fisherman in charge of the sale. As one opulent girl bends over the table to pick the best, a young fisherman peers gluttonously down her loosely bloused corsage. Some pounds of sardines slip absentmindedly into her basket without being weighed.

Over in Nice, the Marche de Fleurs is in full swing. The flowers, tightly packed in compact cubes, form solid walls--blood red, pale rose, ivory and candy-bar-striped carnations, calla lilies and scarlet roses, royal blue cornflowers and amber-hued dahlias. Their perfume mingles with the smell of frying fish.

For those who seek it, there is clarity in Europe's face. It is not only in the magnificent marks left by old orders which served and, as all orders must, in the end failed; nor even in the marks of Communism's new order--which are still faint beside the broken Colosseum or the ramparts where Vienna fought the Turks. Clarity lies in Europe's dogged continuity. By that arithmetic, history is the plow in Flanders fields, the cowbell in the Swiss mountains, the Santa Croce schoolboy reading Dante.

At the Hoboken pier, the great liner prepared to sail. Miss Hepburn, in slacks and loafers, smiled brilliantly for the cameras. Amid a faint cloud of alcohol, emanating from farewell parties, the last visitors streamed down the gangplank. There were envious smiles from stay-at-homes, and shouts of goodbye. "Be sure," exclaimed the woman in the dark glasses with plumpish wistfulness, "be sure to give my regards to Paris!"

Then the liner's intricate white majesty shuddered slightly, whistles tooted, and the S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam was off to Southampton, Le Havre and Rotterdam with 1,228 passengers.

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