Europe After 8:15 Part 4

Again, pursuing these haunts of the baroque and arabesque, there is the restaurant of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, a masterpiece of the Munich gla.s.s cutters and upholsterers. It is in the very heart of things, with the royal riding school directly opposite, the palace a block away and the green of the Englischer Garten glimmering down the street. Here, of a fine afternoon, the society is the best between Vienna and Paris. One may share the vinegar cruet with a countess, and see a general of cavalry eat peas with a knife (hollow ground, like a razor; a Bavarian trick!) and stand aghast while a great tone artist dusts his shoes with a napkin, and observe a Russian grand duke at the herculean labour of drinking himself to death.

The Vier Jahreszeiten is no place for the common people; such trade is not encouraged. The dominant note of the establishment is that of proud retirement, of elegant sanctuary. One enters, not from the garish Maximilianstra.s.se, with its motor cars and its sinners, but from the Marstallstra.s.se, a sedate and aristocratic side street. The Vier Jahreszeiten, in its time, has given food, alcohol and lodgings for the night to twenty crowned heads and a whole s.h.i.+pload of lesser magnificoes, and despite the rise of other hotels it retains its ancient supremacy. It is the peer of Shepheard's at Cairo, of the Cecil in London, of the old Inglaterra at Havana, of the St. Charles at New Orleans. It is one of the distinguished hotels of the world.

I could give you a long list of other Munich restaurants of a kingly order--the great breakfast room of the Bayrischer Hof, with its polyglot waiters and its amazing repertoire of English jams; the tea and liquor atelier of the same hostelry, with its high dome and its sheltering palms; the pretty little open air restaurant of the Kunstlerhaus in the Lenbachplatz; the huge catacomb of the Rathaus, with its mediaeval arches and its vintage wines; the lovely _al fresco_ cafe on Isar Island, with the green cascades of the Isar winging on lazy afternoons; the cafe in the Hofgarten, gay with birds and lovers; that in the Tiergarten, from the terrace of which one watches lions and tigers gamboling in the woods; and so on, and so on. There is even, I hear, a temperance restaurant in Munich, the Jungbrunnen in the Arcostra.s.se, where water is served with meals, but that is only rumour. I myself have never visited it, nor do I know any one who has.

All this, however, is far from the point. I am here hired to discourse of Munich beer, and not of vintage wines, bogus c.o.c.ktails, afternoon chocolate and well water. We are on a beeriad. Avaunt, ye grapes, ye maraschino cherries, ye puerile H_{2}O!

And so, resuming that beeriad, it appears that we are once again in the Hoftheatre Cafe in the Residenzstra.s.se, and that Fraulein Sophie, that pleasing creature, has just arrived with two ewers of Spatenbrau--two ewers fresh from the wood--woody, nutty, incomparable! Ah, those elegantly manicured hands! Ah, that Mona Lisa smile! Ah, that so graceful waist! Ah, malt! Ah, hops! _Ach, Munchen, wie bist du so schon!_

But even Paradise has its nuisances, its scandals, its lacks. The Hoftheatre Cafe, alas, is not the place to eat sauerkraut--not the place, at any rate, to eat sauerkraut _de luxe_, the supreme and singular masterpiece of the Bavarian uplands, the perfect gra.s.s embalmed to perfection. The place for that is the Pschorrbrau in the Neuhauserstra.s.se, a devious and confusing journey, down past the Pompeian post office, into the narrow Schrammerstra.s.se, around the old cathedral, and then due south to the Neuhauserstra.s.se. _Sapperment!_ The Neuhauserstra.s.se is here called the Kaufingerstra.s.se! Well, well, don't let it fool you. A bit further to the east it is called the Marienplatz, and further still the Thal, and then the Isarthorplatz, and then the Zweibruckenstra.s.se, and then the Isarbrucke, and then the Ludwigbrucke, and finally, beyond the river, the Gasteig or the Rosenheimerstra.s.se, according as one takes its left branch or its right.

But don't be dismayed by all that versatility. Munich streets, like London streets, change their names every two or three blocks. Once you arrive between the two mediaeval arches of the Karlsthor and the Sparka.s.se, you are in the Neuhauserstra.s.se, whatever the name on the street sign, and if you move westward toward the Karlsthor you will come inevitably to the Pschorrbrau, and within you will find Fraulein Tilde (to whom my regards), who will laugh at your German with a fine show of pearly teeth and the extreme vibration of her 195 pounds. Tilde, in these G.o.dless states, would be called fat. But observe her in the Pschorrbrau, mellowed by that superb malt, glorified by that consummate kraut, and you will blush to think her more than plump.

I give you the Pschorrbrau as the one best eating bet in Munich--and not forgetting, by any means, the Luitpold, the Rathaus, the Odeon and all the other gilded h.e.l.ls of victualry to northward. Imagine it: every skein of sauerkraut is cooked three times before it reaches your plate!

Once in plain water, once in Rhine wine and once in melted snow! A dish, in this benighted republic, for stevedores and yodlers, a coa.r.s.e fee for violoncellists, barbers and reporters for the _Staats-Zeitung_--but the delight, at the Pschorrbrau, of diplomats, the literati and doctors of philosophy. I myself, eating it three times a day, to the accompaniment of _schweinersrippen_ and _bonensalat_, have composed triolets in the Norwegian language, a feat not matched by Bjornstjerne Bjornson himself.

And I once met an American medical man, in Munich to sit under the learned Prof. Dr. Muller, who ate no less than five portions of it nightly, after his twelve long hours of clinical prodding and hacking.

He found it more nouris.h.i.+ng, he told me, than pure alb.u.men, and more stimulating to the jaded nerves than laparotomy.

But to many Americans, of course, sauerkraut does not appeal.

Prejudiced against the dish by ridicule and innuendo, they are unable to differentiate between good and bad, and so it's useless to send them to this or that _ausschank_. Well, let them then go to the Pschorrbrau and order bifstek from the grill, at M. 1.20 the ration. There may be tenderer and more savoury bifsteks in the world, bifsteks which sizzle more seductively upon red hot plates, bifsteks with more proteids and manganese in them, bifsteks more humane to ancient and hyperesthetic teeth, bifsteks from n.o.bler cattle, more deftly cut, more pa.s.sionately grilled, more romantically served--but not, believe me, for M. 1.20!

Think of it: a cut of tenderloin for M. 1.20--say, 28.85364273x cents!

For a side order of sauerkraut, forty pfennigs extra. For potatoes, twenty-five pfennigs. For a _ma.s.s_ of _dunkle_, thirty-two pfennigs. In all, M. 2.17--an odd mill or so more or less than fifty-two cents. A square meal, perfectly cooked, washed down with perfect beer and served perfectly by Fraulein Tilde--and all for the price of a shampoo!

From the Pschorrbrau, if the winds be fair, the beeriad takes us westward along the Neuhauserstra.s.se a distance of eighty feet and six inches, and behold, we are at the Augustinerbrau. Good beer--a trifle pale, perhaps, and without much grip to it, but still good beer. After all, however, there is something lacking here. Or, to be more accurate, something jars. The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with his cropped head and his outstanding ears, his _backfisch_ waist and his mudscow feet--that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offends the roving eye. No doubt a handsome man, by German standards--even, perhaps a celebrated seducer, a soldier with a future--but the mere sight of him suffices to paralyse an American esophagus. Besides, there is the smell of chocolate, sweet, sickly, effeminate, and at two in the afternoon! Again, there is the music of Grieg, clammy, clinging, creepy.

Away to the Mathaserbrau, two long blocks by taxi! From the Munich of Berlinish decadence and Prussian epaulettes to the Munich of honest Bavarians! From chocolate and macaroons to pretzels and white radishes!

From Grieg to "Lachende Liebe!" From a boudoir to an inn yard! From pale beer in fragile gla.s.ses to red beer in earthen pots!

The Mathaserbrau is up a narrow alley, and that alley is always full of Muncheners going in. Follow the crowd, and one comes presently to a row of booths set up by radish sellers--ancient dames of incredible diameter, gnarled old peasants in tapestry waistcoats and country boots; veterans, one half ventures, of the Napoleonic wars, even of the wars of Frederick the Great. A ten-pfennig piece buys a n.o.ble white radish, and the seller slices it free of charge, slices it with a silver revolving blade into two score thin schnitzels, and puts salt between each adjacent pair. A radish so sliced and salted is the perfect complement of this dark Mathaser beer. One nibbles and drinks, drinks and nibbles, and so slides the lazy afternoon. The scene is an incredible, playhouse courtyard, with shrubs in tubs and tables painted scarlet; a fit setting for the first act of "Manon." But instead of choristers in short skirts, tripping, the whoop-la and boosting the landlord's wine, one feasts the eye upon Munchenese of a rhinocerous fatness, dropsical and gargantuan creatures, bisons in skirts, who pa.s.s laboriously among the bibuli, offering bunches of little pretzels strung upon red strings. Six pretzels for ten pfennigs. A five-pfennig tip for Frau d.i.c.kleibig, and she brings you the _Fliegende Blatter_, _Le Rire_, the Munich or Berlin papers, whatever you want. A drowsy, hedonistic, easy-going place. Not much talk, not much rattling of crockery, not much card playing. The mountain, one guesses, of Munich meditation. The incubator of Munich _gemutlichkeit_.

Upstairs there is the big Mathaser hall, with room for three thousand visitors of an evening, a great resort for Bavarian high privates and their best girls, the scene of honest and public courting. Between the Bavarian high private and the Bavarian lieutenant all the differences are in favour of the former. He wears no corsets, he is innocent of the monocle, he sticks to native beer. A man of amour like his officer, he disdains the elaborate winks, the complex _diableries_ of that superior being, and confines himself to open hugging. One sees him, in these great beer halls, with his arm around his Lizzie. Anon he arouses himself from his coma of love to offer her a sip from his _ma.s.s_ or to whisper some bovine nothing into her ear. Before they depart for the evening he escorts her to the huge sign, "_Fur Damen_," and waits patiently while she goes in and fixes her mussed hair.

The Bavarians have no false pruderies, no nasty little nicenesses.

There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more clean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale in every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain for the studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swiss towns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday school superintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stinging deviltry, a swift ma.s.sacre of all the commandments, but a liquid and tolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps, but at any rate it mellows. No Munchener ever threw a stone.

And so, pa.s.sing swiftly over the Burgerbrau in the Kaufingerstra.s.se, the Hackerbrau, the Kreuzbrau, and the Kochelbrau, all hospitable _lokale_, selling pure beer in honest measures; and over the various Pilsener fountains and the agency for Vienna beer--dish-watery stuff!--in the Maximilianstra.s.se; and over the various summer _keller_ on the heights of Au and Haidhausen across the river, with their s.p.a.cious terraces and their ancient traditions--pa.s.sing over all these tempting sanctuaries of _ma.s.s_ and _kellnerin_, we arrive finally at the Lowenbraukeller and the Hofbrauhaus, which is quite a feat of arriving, it must be granted, for the one is in the Nymphenburgerstra.s.se, in Northwest Munich, and the other is in the Platzl, not two blocks from the royal palace, and the distance from the one to the other is a good mile and a half.

The Lowenbrau first--a rococo castle sprawling over a whole city block, and with accommodations in its "halls, galleries, loges, verandas, terraces, outlying garden promenades and beer rooms" (I quote the official guide) for eight thousand drinkers. A lordly and impressive establishment is this Lowenbrau, an edifice of countless towers, b.u.t.tresses, minarets and dungeons. It was designed by the learned Prof.

Albert Schmidt, one of the creators of modern Munich, and when it was opened, on June 14, 1883, all the military bands in Munich played at once in the great hall, and the royal family of Bavaria turned out in state coaches, and 100,000 eager Muncheners tried to fight their way in.

How large that great hall may be I don't know, but I venture to guess that it seats four thousand people--not huddled together, as a theatre seats them, but comfortably, loosely, s.p.a.ciously, with plenty of room between the tables for the 250 _kellnerinen_ to navigate safely with their cargoes of Lowenbrau. Four nights a week a military band plays in this hall or a _mannerchor_ rowels the air with song, and there is an admission fee of thirty pfennigs (7-1/5 cents). One night I heard the band of the second Bavarian (Crown Prince's) Regiment, playing as an orchestra, go through a programme that would have done credit to the New York philharmonic. A young violinist in corporal's stripes lifted the crowd to its feet with the slow movement of the Tschaikowsky concerto; the band itself began with Wagner's "Siegfried Idyl" and ended with Strauss's "Rosen aus dem Suden," a superb waltz, magnificently performed. Three hours of first-rate music for 7-1/5 cents! And a _ma.s.s_ of Lowenbrau, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of Lethe. There, when my days of moneyl.u.s.t are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen to my arteries hardening.

By taxicab down the wide Briennerstra.s.se, past the Luitpold and the Odeon, to the Ludwigstra.s.se, gay with its after-the-opera crowds, and then to the left into the Residenzstra.s.se, past the Hoftheatre and its cafe (ah, Sophie, thou angel!), and so to the Maximilianstra.s.se, to the Neuthurmstra.s.se, and at last, with a sharp turn, into the Platzl.

The Hofbrauhaus! One hears it from afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of _ma.s.s_ lids, the sputter of the released _dunkle_, the sharp cries of pretzel and radish sellers, the scratching of matches, the shuffling of feet, the eternal gurgling of the plain people. No palace this, for all its towering battlements and the frescos by Ferdinand Wagner in the great hall upstairs, but drinking b.u.t.ts for them that labour and are heavy laden: station porter, teamsters, servant girls, soldiers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, tinners, sweeps.

There sits the fair lady who gathers cigar stumps from the platz in front of the Bayerischer Hof, still in her green hat of labour, but now with an earthen cylinder of Hofbrau in her hands. The gentleman beside her, obviously wooing her, is third fireman at the same hotel. At the next table, a squad of yokels just in from the oberland, in their short jackets and their hobnailed boots. Beyond, a noisy meeting of Socialists, a rehearsal of some _liedertafel_, a family reunion of four generations, a beer party of gay young bloods from the gas works, a conference of the executive committee of the horse butchers' union.

Every second drinker has brought his lunch wrapped in newspaper; half a _blutwurst_, two radishes, an onion, a heel of rye bread. The debris of such lunches covers the floor. One wades through escaped beer, among floating islands of radish top and newspaper. Children go overboard and are succoured with shouts. Leviathans of this underground lake, _Lusitanias_ of beer, Pantagruels of the Hofbrauhaus, collide, draw off, collide again and are wrecked in the narrow channels.... A great puffing and blowing. Stranded craft on every bench.... Noses like cigar bands.

No waitresses here. Each drinker for himself! You go to the long shelf, select your _ma.s.s_, wash it at the spouting faucet and fall into line.

Behind the rail the _zahlmeister_ takes your twenty-eight pfennigs and pushes your _ma.s.s_ along the counter. Then the perspiring _bierbischof_ fills it from the naked keg, and you carry it to the table of your choice, or drink it standing up and at one suffocating gulp, or take it out into the yard, to wrestle with it beneath the open sky. Roughnecks enter eternally with fresh kegs; the thud of the mallet never ceases; the rude clamour of the bung-starter is as the rattle of departing time itself. Huge damsels in dirty ap.r.o.ns--retired _kellnerinen_, too bulky, even, for that trade of human battles.h.i.+ps--go among the tables rescuing empty _ma.s.se_. Each _ma.s.s_ returns to the shelf and begins another circuit of faucet, counter and table. A dame so fat that she must remain permanently at anchor--the venerable _Const.i.tution_ of this fleet!--bawls postcards and matches. A man in _pince-nez_, a decadent doctor of philosophy, sells pale German cigars at three for ten pfennigs. Here we are among the plain people. They believe in Karl Marx, _blutwurst_ and the Hofbrauhaus. They speak a German that is half speech and half grunt. One pa.s.ses them to windward and enters the yard.

A brighter scene. A cleaner, greener land. In the centre a circular fountain; on four sides the mediaeval gables of the old beerhouse; here and there a barrel on end, to serve as table. The yard is most gay on a Sunday morning, when thousands stop on their way to church--not only Socialists and servant girls, remember, but also solemn gentlemen in plug hats and frock coats, students in their polychrome caps and in all the glory of their astounding duelling scars, citizens' wives in holiday finery. The fountain is a great place for gossip. One rests one's _ma.s.s_ on the stone coping and engages one's nearest neighbour. He has a cousin who is brewmaster of the largest brewery in Zanesville, Ohio. Is it true that all the policemen in America are convicts? That some of the skysc.r.a.pers have more than twenty stories? What a country! And those millionaire Socialists! Imagine a rich man denouncing riches! And then, "_Gruss' Gott!_"--and the pots clink. A kindly, hospitable, tolerant folk, these Bavarians! "_Gruss' Gott!_"--"the compliments of G.o.d." What other land has such a greeting for strangers?

On May day all Munich goes to the Hofbrauhaus to "prove" the new bock.

I was there last May in company with a Virginian weighing 190 pounds. He wept with joy when he smelled that heavenly brew. It had the coppery glint of old Falernian, the pungent bouquet of good port, the acrid grip of English ale, and the bubble and bounce of good champagne. A beer to drink reverently and silently, as if in the presence of something transcendental, ineffable--but not too slowly, for the supply is limited! One year it ran out in thirty hours and there were riots from the Max-Joseph-Platz to the Isar. But last May day there was enough and to spare--enough, at all events, to last until the Virginian and I gave up, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian went to bed at the Bayerischer Hof at 12:30, leaving a call for 4 P.M. of May 5.

Ah, the Hofbrauhaus! A ma.s.sive and majestic shrine, the Parthenon of beer drinking, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to the connoisseur, but a bit too strenuous, a trifle too cruel, perhaps, for the dilettante. The Muncheners love it as hillmen love the hills. There every one of them returns, soon or late. There he takes his children, to teach them his hereditary art. There he takes his old grandfather, to say farewell to the world. There, when he has pa.s.sed out himself, his pallbearers in their gauds of grief will stop to refresh themselves, and to praise him in speech and song, and to weep unashamed for the loss of so _gemuthlich_ a fellow.

But, as I have said, the Hofbrauhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the Hoftheatre Cafe, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of Spatenbrau--first one, and then another, and so on until you master the science.

And all that I ask in payment for that tip--the most valuable, perhaps, you have ever got from a book--is that you make polite inquiry of the Herr Wirt regarding Fraulein Sophie, and that you present to her, when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments of one who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisa smile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!

BERLIN

[Ill.u.s.tration: BERLIN]

BERLIN

I am back again, back again in New York. My rooms are littered with battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-damp steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlin bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on by a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and gone blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the "L" trains a block away, trains rankling up to Harlem with a sweating, struggling people, the people of the Republic, their day's grind over, jamming their one way to a thousand flat houses, there to await, in an all unconscious poverty, the sunrise of still such another day. The last crack of a triphammer, p.e.c.k.e.ring at a giant pile of iron down the block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out a sporting extra. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear a grind-organ. What is the tune it is playing? I've heard it, I know--somewhere; but--no, I can't remember. I try--I try to follow the air--but no use. And then, presently, one of the notes whispers into my puckering lips a single word--"_Mariechen_." Then other notes whisper others--"_du susses Viehchen_"; and then others still others--"_du bist mein alles, bist mein Traum_." And the battered bags and the down-at-the-heel walking sticks and the still-damp steamer rugs and the trunks creaking down the hallway and the rattle of the "L" trains fade out of my eyes and ears and again dear little Hulda is with me under the Linden trees--poor dear little Hulda who ever in the years to come shall bring back to me the starlit romance of youth--and again I feel her so soft hand in mine and again I hear her whisper the _auf wiederseh'n_ that was to be our last good-bye--and I am three thousand miles over the seas. For it's night for me again in Berlin--_kronprinzessin_ of the cities of the world.

I am again on the hitherward sh.o.r.e of the Hundekehlensee, flas.h.i.+ng back its diamond smiles at the setting sun. I am sitting again near the water's edge in the moist shade of the Grunewald, and the trees sing for me the poetry that they once sang to the palette of Leistikow. My nose cools itself in the recesses of a translucent _schoppen_ of Johannisberger, proud beverage in whose every topaz drop lies imprisoned the kiss of a peasant girl of Prussia. From the southward side of the Grunewaldsee the horn of a distant hunting lodge seems to call a welcome to the timid stars; and then I seem to hear another--or is it just an echo?--from somewhere out the spur of the Havelberge beyond. Or is just the Johannesberger, soul of the most imaginative grape in Christendom?

Or--woe is me--am I really back again across the seas in New York, and is what I hear only the horn of the taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below?

But I open my too-dreaming eyes--and yes; I am in the Grunewald. And the summer sun is saffron in the waters of the lake. And about me, at a thousand tables under the Grunewald trees, are a thousand people and more, the people of the Kaiserland, their day's work over, clinking a thousand _wohlseins_ in a great twilight peace and awaiting, in all unconscious opulence, the sunrise of yet such another day. And a great band, swung into the measures by a firm-bellied _kapellmeister_ as gorgeous in his pounds of gold braid as a peafowl, sets sail into "Parsifal" against a spray of salivary bra.s.s. And the air about me is full of "_Kellner!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Wiener Roastbraten und Stangenspargel mit geschlagener b.u.t.ter!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Junge Kohlrabi mit gebratenen Sardellenklopsen!_"

and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_Sahnenfilets mit Schwenkkartoffeln!_"

and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and a thousand _schmeckt's guts_ and a thousand _prosits_ and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" And no outrage upon the ear is in all this guttural B minor, no rape of exotic tympani, but a sense rather of superb languor and wholesome tranquillity, of harmonious stomachic socialism, an orchestration of honest ovens and a diapason of honest _braus_ and _brunners_, with their balmy wealth of nostril arpeggios and roulades.

And thus the evening breeze, come hither through the reeds and cypress from over the purpling Havel hills beyond, takes on an added perfume, an added bouquet, as it transports itself to the sniffer over to the hurrying _krebs-suppen_ and thick brown-gravied platters and dewy seidels. My nose, in its day, has engaged with many a seductive aroma.

It has met, at Ca.s.sis on the Mediterranean, the fumes breathed by _beca.s.se sur canapes_ and Chateau Lafitte '69--and it has ffd and ffd again and again in an ecstasy of inhalation. It has encountered in Moscow, the regal vapours of _nevop astowka Dernidoff_ sweeping across a slender goblet of golden sherry--and it has been abashed at the delirium of scent. On the Grand Boulevards, it has skirmished with punch _a la Toscane_ flavoured with Maraschino and with bitter almonds--and has inhaled as if in a dream. The juicy, dripping cuts of Simpson's in London, the paradisian pudding _sueldoiro_ on the little screened veranda in the shadow of the six-minareted Mosque of El-Azhar in Cairo, the salmon dipped in Chambertin and the artichokes, sauce Barigoule, at Schonbrunn on the road to Vienna, the _escaloppes de foie gras a la russe_ (favourite dish of the late Beau McAllister) at Delmonico's at home--all these and more have wooed my nostril with their rare fragrances. But, though I have attended many a table and given audience to many an attendant perfume, nowhere, nor never, has there been borne in upon me the like of that exquisite nasal blend of _bratens_ and _braus_ with which the twilight breezes have christened me among the trees of the Grunewald. Forgotten, there, are the roses on the moonlit garden wall in Barbizon, chaperoned by the fairy forest of Fontainebleau; forgotten the damp wild clover fields of the Indiana of my boyhood. All vanished, gone, before the olfactory transports of this concert of hops and schnitzels, of Rhineland vineyards and upland _kase_. And here it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on the border of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble _kellner_ at my elbow, with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, with the stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band lifting me, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, and with the innocent eyes of the fair fraulein under yonder tree intermittently englis.h.i.+ng their coquettish glances from the _eisschokolade_ that should alone engage them--here it is that I like best to bide the climbing of the moon into the skies over Berlin--here it is that I like best to wait upon the city's night.

Ah, Berlin, how little the world knows you--you and your children! It sees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your every vowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicose mistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It sees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out a cyclopean vat of beer. It hears your music in the ta-tata-tata-ta-ta of your "_Ach, du lieber Augustin_" alone; the sum of your sentiment in your "_Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten_." Wise American journalists, commissioned to explore your soul, have returned characteristically to announce that you "In your German way" (_American synonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish_) seek desperately to appropriate, in ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the "spirit of Paris" (_American synonyms: silk stockings, "wine," Maxim's, jevousaime, Rat Mort_). Announce they also your "mechanical" pleasures, your weighty light-heartedness, your stolid, stoic essay to take unto yourself, still in tigerish itch to be cosmopolitan, the frou-frouishness of the flirting capital over the frontier. Wise old philosophers! Translating you in terms of your palaces of prost.i.tution, your Palais de Danse, your Admirals-Casinos; translating you in terms of your purposely spurious Victorias, your Riche Cafes, your Fledermauses.

As well render the spirit of Vienna in the key of the Karntnerstra.s.se at eleven of the Austrian night; as well play the spirit of Paris in the discords of its Montmartre, in the leaden pitch of its Pre Catelan at sunrise. Sing of London from the Astor Club; sing of New York from its Bryant Park at moontide, its Rector's, its ridiculous Cafe San Souci and its Madam Hunter's. 'Twere the same.

Pleasure in the ma.s.s, incidentally, is perforce ever mechanical; a levee at Buckingham Palace, a fete on the velvet terraces sloping into the Newport sea, a Coney Island gangfest, a city's electric den of gilt and tinsel.

But the essence of a city is never here. Berlin, in the wanderl.u.s.t of its darkened heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begarneted, crimson-lipped Minna angling in its gaudy dance decoy in the Behrenstra.s.se; nor the satin-clad, pencilled-eyed Amelie ogling from her "reserved" table in the silly sham called Moulin Rouge; nor yet the more baby-glanced, s.h.i.+rtwaisted Ertrude laughing in the duntoned Cafe Lang.

Berlin is not she who beckons by night in the Friedrichstra.s.se; nor the frowsy she who sings in the _bier-cabarets_ that hover about the Lichtprunksaal. Berlin, under the stars, is the sound of soldiers singing near the arch of the Brandenburger Tor, the peaceful _bauer_ and his frau Hannah and his young daughters Lilla and Mia lodged before their _abend bier_ at a bare table on the darker side of the far Jagerstra.s.se. Berlin, when skies are navy blue, is Heinrich, gallant rear private of Regiment 31, publicly and with audible ado encircling the waist of his most recent _engel_ on a bench in the Linden promenade--Berlin, in the Inverness of night, is Hulda, little Alsatian rebel--a rebel to France--a rebel to the Vosges and the vineyards--Hulda, the provinces behind her, and in her heart, there to rule forever, the spirit of the capital of Wilhelm der Grosste. For the spirit of Berlin is the laughter of a pretty, clean and healthy girl--not the neurotic simper of a devastated ware of the Madeleine highway, not the raucous giggle of a bark that sails Piccadilly, not the meaningfull and toothy beam of a fair American badger--none of these. It is a laugh that has in it not the motive power of Krug and Company or Ruinart _pere et fils_; it smells not of suspicioned guineas to be enticed; it is not an answer to the baton of necessity. There's heart behind it--and it means only that youth is in the air, that youth and steaming blood and a living life, be the world soever stern on the morrow, are a trinity invincible, unconquerable--that the music is good, the seidel full. Ah, Berlin--ah, Hulda--ah, youth ... ah, youth, what things you see that are not, that never will be, never were; foolish, innocent, splendid youth!

An end to such so tender philosophies, such so blissful ruminations.

For even now the _kutsche_ has drawn us up before the door of Herr Kempinski's victual studio, running from the Leipzigerstra.s.se through to the Krausenstra.s.se and const.i.tuting what is probably the largest stomach Senate and House of Representatives in the seven kingdoms. Here, in the mult.i.tudinous _sale_--the Mosel-saal, the Berliner-saal, the huge Grauer-saal, the Burgen-saal, the Alter-saal, the Erker-saal, the Gelber-saal, the Cadiner-saal, the Eingangs-saal, the Durchgangs-saal, the Brauner-saal and the various other chromatic and geographical saals--one may listen in dyspeptic Anglo-Saxon abashment to such a concerto of down-going _suppen_ and _coteletten_ and _gemuse_ and down-gurgling Laubenheimer and Marcobrunner and Zeltinger and Brauneberger as one may not hear elsewhere in the palatinates. And here, in the preface to the night, one may prehend while again eating (for in Germany, you must know, one's eating is limited in so far as time and occasion are concerned only by the locks of the alimentary ca.n.a.l and the contumacy of the intestines) the grand democracy of this kaiser city.

For in this giant eating hall that would hold a round half-dozen New York restaurants and still offer ample elbow room for the dissection of a knuckle and the wielding of a stein, one observes a vast and heterogeneous commingling of the human breed such as may not be observed outside an American charity ball. At one table, a lieutenant of Uhlans with his _madel_ of the moment, at another a jolly old _spitzbub'_ sending with a loose jest a girl from the chorus of the Theater des Westens into blushes--and being sent himself in return with a looser. At another (one removed from that of a duo of palpable daughters of joy engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with a colossal _roastbif englisch mit Leipziger allerlei_) a family man _with_ his family. At still another, another family man with his. At another, the Salome from the Konigliches Opernhaus--at another a noted _advokat_--at another, two little girls (they can't he more than sixteen years old) enjoying their meal and their bottle of Rhenish wine undisturbed, unogled, unafraid.