Part 8

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 massacre 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 Muenchener ever threw a stone.

And so, passing swiftly over the Burgerbraeu in the Kaufingerstrasse, the Hackerbraeu, the Kreuzbraeu, and the Kochelbraeu, 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 Maximilianstrasse; and over the various summer keller on the heights of Au and Haidhausen across the river, with their spacious terraces and their ancient traditions--passing over all these tempting sanctuaries of mass and kellnerin, we arrive finally at the Loewenbraeukeller and the Hofbraeuhaus, which is quite a feat of arriving, it must be granted, for the one is in the Nymphenburgerstrasse, 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 Loewenbraeu 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 Loewenbraeu, an edifice of countless towers, buttresses, 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 Muencheners 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, spaciously, with plenty of room between the tables for the 250 kellnerinen to navigate safely with their cargoes of Loewenbraeu. Four nights a week a military band plays in this hall or a maennerchor 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 Sueden," a superb waltz, magnificently performed. Three hours of first-rate music for 7-1/5 cents! And a mass of Loewenbraeu, 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 moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen to my arteries hardening.

By taxicab down the wide Briennerstrasse, past the Luitpold and the Odeon, to the Ludwigstrasse, gay with its after-the-opera crowds, and then to the left into the Residenzstrasse, past the Hoftheatre and its cafe (ah, Sophie, thou angel!), and so to the Maximilianstrasse, to the Neuthurmstrasse, and at last, with a sharp turn, into the Platzl.

The Hofbraeuhaus! One hears it from afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of mass 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 butts 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 Hofbraeu 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 Hofbraeuhaus, 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 mass, wash it at the spouting faucet and fall into line. Behind the rail the zahlmeister takes your twenty-eight pfennigs and pushes your mass 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 aprons--retired kellnerinen, too bulky, even, for that trade of human battleships--go among the tables rescuing empty maesse. Each mass 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 Constitution 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 Hofbraeuhaus. They speak a German that is half speech and half grunt. One passes 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 mass 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 skyscrapers have more than twenty stories? What a country! And those millionaire Socialists! Imagine a rich man denouncing riches! And then, "Gruess' Gott!"--and the pots clink. A kindly, hospitable, tolerant folk, these Bavarians! "Gruess' Gott!"--"the compliments of God." What other land has such a greeting for strangers?

On May day all Munich goes to the Hofbraeuhaus 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 Hofbraeuhaus! A massive 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 Muencheners 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 passed 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 gemuethlich a fellow.

But, as I have said, the Hofbraeuhaus 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 Spatenbraeu--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 Fraeulein 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

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, peckering 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 suesses 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 shore of the Hundekehlensee, flashing 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 brass. And the air about me is full of "Kellner!" and "Zwei Seidel, bitte!" and "Wiener Roastbraten und Stangenspargel mit geschlagener Butter!" 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 braeus 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 Cassis on the Mediterranean, the fumes breathed by becasse 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 Schoenbrunn 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 braeus 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 kaese. 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 fraeulein under yonder tree intermittently englishing 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 prostitution, 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 Kaerntnerstrasse 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 mass, 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 wanderlust of its darkened heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begarneted, crimson-lipped Minna angling in its gaudy dance decoy in the Behrenstrasse; 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, shirtwaisted Ertrude laughing in the duntoned Cafe Lang. Berlin is not she who beckons by night in the Friedrichstrasse; 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 Jaegerstrasse. 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 Groesste. 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 Leipzigerstrasse through to the Krausenstrasse and constituting what is probably the largest stomach Senate and House of Representatives in the seven kingdoms. Here, in the multitudinous saele--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 gemuese 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 canal 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 maedel 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 Koenigliches 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.

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 cocktails--not the Berlin of the Esplanade, gaudy dump of the Bellevuestrasse, 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 vassal, 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 kraeftbruhe 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 kuesst wo's Kuesse 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 passed, 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.

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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 lusty 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 pass 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 assiduous 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 passing 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 Saturday 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 Terpsichore and Thais "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....

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