Europe After 8:15 Part 5

But why need to pursue the catalogue? This, too, is Berlin. Not the Berlin of Herr Adlon's inn, gilded with the leaf of Broadway and the Strand to flabbergast and ensnare the American snooper--not the Berlin of the Bristol, with its imitation c.o.c.ktails--not the Berlin of the Esplanade, gaudy dump of the Bellevuestra.s.se, with its sugar tongs, finger bowls and kindred criteria of degeneracy--not this Berlin; but the real Berlin of the German people, warm-hearted, mindful only of its own affairs, all-understanding, all-sympathetic, all-human--its larynx eternally beseeching liquid succour, its stomach eternally demanding chow. And, too--and note this well--not the Berlin of the rouged menu and silk-stockinged _kellner_, not the trumped-up Berlin of the vaselined va.s.sal, of the bowing _oberkellner_, not the Berlin of the affected canteloupe (3,50 m.) and the affected biscuit tortoni (2,40 m.)--but the Berlin of _beinfleisch im kessel mit Meerrettich_ (90 pf.), the Berlin of _kraftbruhe mit nudeln_ (40 pf.)--the Berlin of Mamsch and Traube.

And now I am again in the streets of the city, rattling with the racing flotilla of things awheel. (Or is the rattle that I hear only the rattle of the "L" trains a block away, and am I really back in New York?) But no; for still I see in the brilliant Berlin moonlight the bronze Quadriga of Victory atop the distant Gate of Brandenburg and still I hear a group of students singing in the Cafe Mozart, and still--but what is moonlight beside the fairy light in your eyes, fair Hulda? What is song beside the soft melody of your smile? Normandy is in the night air ... "_man lacht, man lebt, man liebt und man kusst wo's Kusse giebt_"

... and we and all the world are young. Ah, Hulda, mine own, mine all, and who is that pretty girl tripping adown the street, that one there with the corals at her throat and the devil at the curtain of her glance ... and _that_ girl who has just pa.s.sed, that little minx with eyes like sleeping sapphires and a smile as melodious as mandolins by the summer sea? As melodious as your own, fair Hulda.

The play is over and I have alternated a contemplation of the loves and fears, the tremors and triumphs of some obese stage princess with a l.u.s.ty entr'-acte excursion into Culmbacher and the cheese sandwich, served, as is the appealing custom, in the theatre promenade. And thus fortified against the night, I pa.s.s again into the thoroughfares still a-rattle with the musketry of wheels. I perceive that many amateur American Al-Raschids are abroad in the land, pockets echoing the tintinnabulation of manifold marks and eyes abulge at the prospect of midnight diableries. See that fellow yonder! At home, probably a family man, a wearer of mesh underwear, an a.s.siduous devourer of the wisdom of George Harvey, a patron of the dramas of Charles Rann Kennedy, a spanker of children, an entertainer at his board of the visiting clergyman, a pantophagous subscriber, a silk hat wearer--in brief, a leading citizen.

See him oleaginate his grin at the sight of a pa.s.sing painted paver. (To his mind, probably a barmaid out for an innocent lark.) See him make for the Palais de Danse where (so he has read in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_) one may purchase the Berliner spirit at so much per pound. We track him, and presently we behold him seated at a table in this splendiferous hall of Terpsich.o.r.e and Thas "opening wine" and purchasing _blumen_ for a battle-scarred veteran who is telling him confidentially that she just got in that afternoon from her poor home in a little Bavarian village and that she feels so alone in this big, great city, with its lures and temptations, its snares and its pitfalls. Soon the bubbles of the grape are percolating through his arteries and soon the "Grosse Rosinen" waltzes have mellowed his conscience and soon....

"Berlin spirit, huh!" he is telling his wife a month later--"Berlin spirit? All artificial. Just to make money out of the visitors. And _very_ sordid!"

At the Moulin Rouge and at the Admirals-Casino, at the Alhambra and the Tabarin, at the Amor-sale and the Rosen-sale, we track down others such, "seeing the night life of Berlin." We see them, too, champagne before them, coquetting with Fraulein Ilona, who numbers Militar-Regiment 42 as her gentleman friend, and with innocent-looking little Hedwig, who in her day has tramped the streets of Brussels and Paris, of London and Vienna; we see them intriguing elaborately with these sisters of sorrow, who, intriguing in turn against the night's wage, a.s.sist the skirmish on with incendiary quip and tender touch of foot and similar cantharides of financial amour. And we track them later to such inst.i.tutions as the Fledermaus--"_der grosse luxuriose, vornehmstes vergnugungsplatz, paradiesgarten, grosste sehenswurdigkeit Berlins_" (in the advertis.e.m.e.nts)--as the Victoria and the Cafe Riche, the Westminster and the Cafe Opera and--

"Berlin spirit, huh!" _they_ are telling _their_ wives a month later--"Berlin spirit? All artificial. Just to make money out of the visitors. And _very_ sordid!"

Ah, Cairo dreaming in the Nile's moon-haze--are you to be judged thus by the narrow street that snakes into the dark of Bulak? And Budapest by the Danube--are you to be judged by the wreckage of the Stefansplatz that has drifted on your sh.o.r.es? And you, Vienna, and you, Paris--are you, too, to be measured thus, as measured you are, by the crimson light of your half-worlds that for some obscures your stars?

The Berlin of the Palais de Danse is the Paris of L'Abbaye; the Berlin of the Fledermaus is the New York of Jack's.

But the Berlin that I know and love is not this Berlin, the Berlin of Americans, not the spangled Berlin, the hollow-laughing Berlin, the Berlin decked with rhinestones, set alight with prismatic electroliers and offered up as mistress to foreign gold. When the River Spree is amethystine under springtime skies and the city's lights are yellow in the linden trees, I like best the Berlin that sips its beer in the peace of the little by-streets, the Berlin that laughs in the Tiergarten near the Lake of the Goldfish and on the Isle of Louisa, where watch throughout eternity the graven images of Friedrich Wilhelm the Third and of Wilhelm the First in the years of his boyhood. I like best the Berlin that sings with the students in the undiscovered, untainted _wein_ and _bier stuben_ of the thitherward thoroughfares, the Berlin that dances in the Joachimstra.s.se, where the _madels_, each to herself a Cecilie, s.h.i.+rtwaisted, poor, happy, kick up their German heels, drink up their German beer, a.s.sault the Schweizerkase and bring back memories of that paradise of all paradises--the Englischer Garten of Munich the Incomparable, the Divine.

In such phases of this kaiser city, one is removed from the so-called Tingel-Tangel, or _varietes_ and cabarets, where the visiting _narrverein_ is regaled with such integral and valid elements of Berlin "night life" as "_der cake walk_," "_der can-can_" and "_die matschiche--getanzt von original importierten Mexikanerinnen_." So, too, is one removed from the garish demi-women of the so-called "Quartier Latin" near the Oranienburger Tor and from the spurious deviltries of the Rothenburger Krug and the Staffelstein, with their "property"

students, cheeks scarred with red ink, singing "Heidelberg" (from "The Prince of Pilsen") for the edification and impression of foreign visitors, and fiercely and frequently challenging other prop. students to immediate duel. The girls, alas, in these places are not unlovely.

Well do I remember the dainty Elsa of the Hopfenbluthe, she of face kissed by the Prussian dawn, and employed at sixteen marks the week to wink dramatically at the old roues and give the resort "an air." Well does memory repeat to me the loveliness of delicate little Anna, she with hair like the waving golden gra.s.s in the fields that skirt the roadways from Targon to Villandraut, and paid so much the month to laugh uproariously every time the hands of the clock point the quarter-hour.

And Rika and Dessa and Julia and Paulina--all sweet of look, all professional actresses; Bernhardts of Fun (inc.), Duses of Pleasure (ltd.). Not the girls in whose hearts Berlin is beating, not the girls in whose _elan_ Berlin lives and laughs. Leave behind all places such as these, seeker after the soul of Berlin. Leave behind the Tingel-Tangel with its uniformed bouncer at the gate, with its threadbare piano, with its "_na kleener d.i.c.ker_" smirked by soiled _decolletes_, its doleful near-naughty ditties--"_Ich la.s.s mich nicht verfuhren, dazu bin ich zu schlau, ich kenne die Manieren der Manner ganz genau_"--"I won't be led astray, I am too slick for that, I know the ways of mankind, I've got them all down pat." Leave behind the Berlin of the Al-Raschids and keep to the Berlin of the Germans.

Just as the worst of Paris came from America, so has the worst of Berlin come from America by way of Paris. The maquereau spirit of Montmartre, with its dollar l.u.s.t and its poisoned blood, has not yet the throat of this German night city full in its fists; but the fists are tightening slowly--and the voice behind them speaks not French, but the jargon of Broadway. And yet, when finally the fingers work closer, closer still, around that throat, when finally the death gurgle of spontaneous pleasure and of clean, honest, fearless night skies comes--and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from the dunghill. I must believe it. For they--_we_--may kill the laughter of Berlin's streets--as we have killed it in Paris--but we can never kill the heart, the spirit and the living, quivering corpuscles of German blood. The French may drink stronger stuffs, eat richer foods and love oftener than the Germans, and may be better fighters--but they cannot laugh, they cannot sing as the Germans laugh and sing. And Berlin is the new Germany, the Germany of to-day and to-morrow ... the Germany whose laughter will grow louder as the decades pa.s.s and whose song will echo clearer from the distant hills. While Paris (to go to Conrad)--is not Paris and her land already at Bankok, and far, far beyond? Her children spent before their day, listening to the too-soon lecture of Time? And all hopelessly nodding at him: "the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone--has pa.s.sed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash--together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions...."

But again a truce to philosophisings. It grows late apace. (Ah, Hulda, how like opals in the lyric April rain are your eyes in this first faint purple-pink of the tremulous dawn.... Were I a Heine!) In my far-away America, Hulda, in far-away New York, it is now onto midnight. I see Broadway, strumpet of the highways, sweltering collarless under the loud electricity of Times Square. I see a fetid blonde, dangling a patent leather handbag, hurrying to an a.s.signation in Forty-fifth Street. I see two actors, pointing their boasts with yellow bamboo canes. A chop suey restaurant flashes its sign. And I can hear the racking ragtime out of Shanley's. A big sightseeing bus is howling the fict.i.tious lure of the Bowery, Chinatown and the Ghetto to gaping groups from the hinterlands.

A streetwalker. Another. Another. In the subway entrance across the street, a blind man is selling papers. A "dip" calls a friendly "h.e.l.lo, Dan" to the policeman in front of the drugstore and works his steps over the car tracks toward the drunk teetering against the window of the Jew's clothing store. The air is dust-filled. An intermittent baking gust from the river sends a cast-aside _Journal_ fluttering aloft. A dirt-encrusted b.u.m begs the price of a coffee. Another streetwalker, appearing from the backwaters of Seventh Avenue, grins in the drugstore's green light....

But to your eyes, Hulda, must be given no such picture. Yet such is the New York I come from; such the New York, stunning by day in its New World strength and splendour, loathsome by night in its hot, illumined bawdry. Ah, city by the Hudson, forgetting Riverside Drive twinkling amid the long tiara of trees, forgetting the still of the lake and cool of the boulders that plead in Central Park, forgetting the superb majesty of Cathedral Heights and the mighty peace of the byways--forgetting these all for a Broadway!

But the symphony of the Berlin dawn is ours now, fraulein, and have done with intrusive memories, corroding reflections. What are my people doing in Berlin at this hour? What are these prowling Al-Raschids about?

Do they know the sorcery of the virgin morning light of Berlin as it falls upon the Siegesallee and gives life again to the marble heroes of Germany? Have they ever stood with such as you, fraulein, in the coral-tipped hours of the dawning day before the image of Friedrich der Grosse in that wonderful lane and felt, through this dead, cold thing, the thrill of an empire's glory? Do they know the witchery of the withering Berlin night as it plays out its wild fantasia in the leaves of the Linden trees? Have they ever been with such as you, fraulein, at the base of the Pillar of Triumph in Konigsplatz or sat with such as you, fraulein, near the Grotto Lake in the Tiergarten, or stood with such as you, fraulein, on one of the bridges arching the Spree in the first trembling innuendo of morning?

Where are these, my people?

You will find them seeking the romance of Berlin's greying night amid the Turkish cigarette smoke and stale wine smells of the half-breed cabarets marshalled along the Jagerstra.s.se, the Behrenstra.s.se and their tributaries. You will find them up a flight of stairs in one of the all-night Linden cafes, throwing celluloid b.a.l.l.s at the weary, patient, left-over women. You will find them sitting in the balcony of the Pavilion Mascotte, blowing up toy balloons and hurling small cones of coloured paper down at the benign harlotry. You will see them, hatless, shooting up the Friedrichstra.s.se in an open taxicab, singing "Give My Regards to Broadway" in all the prime ecstasy of a beer souse. You will find them in the rancid Tingel-Tangel, blaspheming the _kellner_ because they can't get a highball. You will find them in the Nollendorfplatz gaping at the fairies. You will see them, green-skinned in the tyrannic light of early morning, battering at the iron grating of their hotel for the porter to open up and let them in.

For them, are no souvenirs of happy evening hours that sing always in the heart of a Berlin they can never know. For them, shall be no memory of that vast and insuperable _gemutlichkeit_, that superb and pacific democracy, that dwells and shall dwell forever by night in the spirit of the German people. They will never know the Berlin that lifts its seidel to the setting sun, the Berlin that greets the moonrise, the Berlin that meets the dawn. The Berlin that they know is a Berlin of French champagnes, Italian confetti, Spanish dancers, English-trained waiters, Austrian courtesans and American hilarities. They interpret a city by its leading all-night restaurant; a nation by the _demi-mondaine_ who happens to be nearest their table. For them, there is no--

But hark, what is that?

What is that strange sound that comes to me?

"Extra! _Evening Telegram_, extra! All 'bout the Giants win double-header!"

A newsboy in neuralgic yowl, bawling in the street below.

Alas, it is true: after all, I am really 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 rankling "L" trains. 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. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear again the grind-organ.

It is playing "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

LONDON

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONDON]

LONDON

Macauley's New Zealander, so I hear, will view the ruins of St. Paul's from London Bridge; but as for me, I prefer that more westerly arch which celebrates Waterloo, there to sniff and immerse myself in the town. The hour is 8:15 _post meridien_ and the time is early summer. I have just rolled down Wellington Street from the Strand, smoking a ninepence Vuelta Abajo, humming an ancient air. One of Simpson's incomparable English dinners--salmon with lobster sauce, a cut from the joint, two vegetables, a cress salad, a slice of old Stilton and a mug of bitter--has lost itself, amazed and enchanted, in my interminable recesses. My board is paid at Morley's. I have some thirty-eight dollars to my credit at Brown's, a ticket home is sewn to my lingerie, there is a friendly jingle of s.h.i.+llings and sixpences in my pocket. The stone coping invites; I lay myself against it, fold my arms, blow a smoke ring toward the sunset, and give up my soul to recondite and mellow meditation.

There are thirteen great bridges between Fulham Palace and the Isle of Dogs, and I have been at pains to try every one of them; but the best of all, for such needs as overtake a well fed and ruminative man on a summer evening, is that of Waterloo. Look westward and the towers of St.

Stephen's are floating in the haze, a greenish slate colour with edges of peroxide yellow and seash.e.l.l pink. Look eastward and the fine old dome of St. Paul's is slipping softly into greasy shadows. Look downward and the river throws back its innumerable hues--all the coal tar dyes plus all the duns and drabs of Thames mud. The tide is out and along the south bank a score of squat barges are high and dry upon the flats.

Opposite, on the embankment, the lights are beginning to blink, and from the little hollow behind Charing Cross comes the faint, far-away braying of a bra.s.s band.

All bands are in tune at four hundred yards, the reason whereof you must not ask me now. This one plays a melody I do not know, a melody plaintive and ingratiating, of clarinet arpeggios all compact. Some lay of amour, I venture, breathing the hot pa.s.sion of the Viennese Jew who wrote it. But so heard, filtered through that golden haze, echoed back from that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of human frailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something wholly chastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes the joys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must be fed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger is frankly a brute; but once he has yielded he departs forthwith from his gorged carca.s.s and flaps his transcendental wings.... Do honeymooners ever come to Waterloo Bridge? I doubt it. Imagine turning from that sublime sweep of greys and sombre gilts, that perfect arrangement of blank ma.s.ses and sweeping lines, to the mottled pink of a cheek lately virgin, the puny curve of a modish eyebrow, the hideous madness of a trousseau hat!...

I am no stranger to these moods and whims. I am not merely a casual outsider who has looked about him, sniffed deprecatingly and taken the train for Dover--which leads to Calais--which leads to Paris--which leads to youthful romance. I have wallowed in London as the ascetic wallows in his punitive rites, with a strange, keen joy. I have been a voluntary St. Simeon on its cold grey street corners. I have eaten so often--and so much--at Simpson's that I know two of the waiters by their first names. And I could order correctly their famous cuts by looking at my watch, knowing at what hour the mutton was ready, at what hour the roast beef was rarest. So long have I worn English s.h.i.+rts that even now I find myself crawling into the American brand after the manner of the woodchuck burrowing into his hole. Frequently I find myself proffering dimes to the fair uniformed vestals of our theatres who present me with programmes. I have read each separate slab in Westminster Abbey. I have made suave and courtly love to a thousand nursemaids in Hyde Park. I have exuded great globules of perspiration rowing on the Thames, while the fair beneficiary of my labours lolled placidly in the boat's stern upon a hummock of Persian pillows. I know every overhanging lovers' tree from Richmond to Hampton Court. I have consumed hogsheads of ale at "The Sign of the c.o.c.k." I have followed the horses at Epsom and Newmarket, at Goodwood and Ascot. I have browsed for hours in French's book store. I have lounged in luxurious taxicabs upholstered in pale grey, and ridden interminably back and forth through the Mall, Const.i.tution Hill and Piccadilly....

All of these things have I done. And more. In brief, I have lived the das.h.i.+ng and reckless life of a dozen Londoners. But--and here is the point!--I have lived it _in the daytime_. When the shadows began to drift into the fogs and the twilight settled over the grey masonry of the city, I would generally fly to the theatre and afterward to my garish rooms in Adams Street; or, as was often the case, I would merely fly to my flat, giving up my evenings to the low humour of Rabelais, or to deep, deep sleep.

Although for years one could not lose me in London, or flabbergast me with those leaning-tower-of-Pisa addresses (the items piled one upon the other in innumerable strata), I knew nothing of the goings-on when the windows of London became patches of orange light. In fact, I a.s.sumed that when I slept London also snored. To think of London and of night romance was like conjuring up the wildest of anachronisms. Romance there was in London, but to me it had always been shot through with suns.h.i.+ne.

It had been the hard commercial romance of the Stock Exchange. Or the courteous and impeccable romance of polished hats and social ba.n.a.lities.

Or the gustatory romance of Cheddar cheese, musty ale, roast lamb and greens. Or it had been the romance of the Cook's tourist--the romance of cathedrals, towers, palaces, dungeons and parliamentary buildings. Or the romance of pomp, of horseguards and helmets and epaulettes and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and guns at "present arms." Or it had been the anaemic romance of Ceylon tea, toasted m.u.f.fins and _pet.i.ts fours_. As for amours and intrigues and subdued lights and dances and cabarets and sparkling _demi-mondaines_ and all-night orchestras and liquid jousting bouts and perfume and champagne and rouge and kohl--who would have thought that London, the severe, the formal; London, the saintly, the high-collared, the stiff; London, the serious, the practical, the kid-gloved; London, the arctic, the methodical, the fixed, the ceremonious, the starched, the precise, the punctilious, the conservative, the static; London, the G.o.d-fearing, the episcopal, the nice, the careful, the scrupulous, the aloof, the decorous, the proper, the dignified--who would have thought that London would loosen up and relax and partake of the potions of Eros and Bacchus?

And yet--and yet--back of London's grim and formidable exterior there lurks a smile. Her stiff and proper legs know how to shake themselves.

Her cold and sluggish blood grows warm to the strains of dance music.

Her desensitized and asphalt palate thrills and throbs beneath the tricklings of _Cordon Rouge_. Her steel heart flutters at the touch of a wheedling phryne. She, too, can wear the strumpet garb of youth. She, too, in the vitals of her nature, longs for the gay romance of the Boulevard Montparna.s.se ere the American possessed it. She, too, admires the rhythmic parabolic curve of bare shoulders. Silken ankles and amorous whisperings stir her--if not to deeds of valour, then at least to deeds of indiscretion. London, it seems, cannot look upon the moon without suffering some of the love qualms of Endymion. In fine, London, the mentalized, is human.