* * * * * +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in | | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of | | this document. | | | | Subscript letters are shown thus: H_{2}O. | | | +------------------------------------------------------------+

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[Illustration: EUROPE AFTER 8:15]

[Illustration: BERLIN]

EUROPE AFTER 8:15

BY

H. L. MENCKEN

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT

WITH DECORATIONS

_By_ THOMAS H. BENTON

NEW YORK--JOHN LANE COMPANYTORONTO--BELL & COCKBURN--MCMXIV

Copyright, 1914BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

CONTENTS

 PAGE

PREFACE IN THE SOCRATIC MANNER 7

VIENNA 35

MUNICH 71

BERLIN 111

LONDON 145

PARIS 189

PREFACE IN THE SOCRATIC MANNER

 "Nothing broadens and mellows the mind so much as foreign travel. "--_Dr. Orison Swett Marden. _

The scene is the brow of the Hungerberg at Innsbruck. It is thehalf-hour before sunset, and the whole lovely valley of the Inn--_stillwie die Nacht, tief wie das Meer_--begins to glow with mauves and applegreens, apricots and silvery blues. Along the peaks of the great snowymountains which shut it in, as if from the folly and misery of theworld, there are touches of piercing primary colours--red, yellow, violet--the palette of a synchromist. Far below, hugging the windingriver, lies little Innsbruck, with its checkerboard parks and Christmasgarden villas. A battalion of Austrian soldiers, drilling in theExerzierplatz, appears as an army of grey ants, now barely visible. Somewhere to the left, beyond the broad flank of the Hungerberg, thenight train for Venice labours toward the town. 

It is a superbly beautiful scene, perhaps the most beautiful in allEurope. It has colour, dignity, repose. The Alps here come down a bitand so increase their spell. They are not the harsh precipices ofSwitzerland, nor the too charming stage mountains of Northern Italy, butrolling billows of clouds and snow, the high-flung waves of some titanicbut stricken ocean. Now and then comes a faint clank of metal from thefunicular railway, but the tracks themselves are hidden among the treesof the lower slopes. The tinkle of an angelus bell (or maybe it is onlya sheep bell) is heard from afar. A great bird, an eagle or a falcon, sweeps across the crystal spaces. 

Here where we are is a shelf on the mountainside, and the hand of manhas converted it into a terrace. To the rear, clinging to the mountain, is an Alpine _gasthaus_--a bit overdone, perhaps, with its red-framedwindows and elaborate fretwork, but still genuinely of the Alps. Alongthe front of the terrace, protecting sightseers from the sheer drop of athousand feet, is a stout wooden rail. 

A man in an American sack suit, with a bowler hat on his head, loungesagainst this rail. His elbows rest upon it, his legs are crossed in thefashion of a figure four, and his face is buried in the red book of HerrBaedeker. It is the volume on Southern Germany, and he is reading thelist of Munich hotels. Now and then he stops to mark one with a pencil, which he wets at his lips each time. While he is thus engaged, anotherman comes ambling along the terrace, apparently from the direction ofthe funicular railway station. He, too, carries a red book. It isBaedeker on Austria-Hungary. After gaping around him a bit, this secondman approaches the rail near the other and leans his elbows upon it. Presently he takes a package of chewing gum from his coat pocket, selects two pieces, puts them into his mouth and begins to chew. Then hespits idly into space, idly but homerically, a truly stupendousexpectoration, a staggering discharge from the Alps to the first shelfof the Lombard plain! The first man, startled by the report, glances up. Their eyes meet and there is a vague glimmer of recognition. 

The First Man--"American?"

The Second Man--"Yes: St. Louis. "

"Been over long?"

"A couple of months. "

"What ship'd you come over in?"

"The _Kronprinz Friedrich_. "

"Aha, the German line! I guess you found the grub all right. "

"Oh, in the main. I have eaten better, but then again, I have eatenworse. "

"Well, they charge you enough for it, whether you get it or not. A mancould live at the Plaza cheaper. "

"I should _say_ he could. What boat did _you_ come over in?"

"The _Maurentic_. "

"How is she?"

"Oh, so-so. "

"I hear the meals on those English ships are nothing to what they usedto be. "

"That's what everybody tells me. But, as for me, I can't say I foundthem so bad. I had to send back the potatoes twice and the breakfastbacon once, but they had very good lima beans. "

"Isn't that English bacon awful stuff to get down?"

"It certainly is: all meat and gristle. I wonder what an Englishmanwould say if you put him next to a plate of genuine, crisp, _American_bacon?"

"I guess he would yell for the police--or choke to death. "

"Did you like the German cooking on the _Kronprinz_?"

"Well, I did and I didn't. The chicken _à la_ Maryland was very good, but they had it only once. I could eat it every day. "

"Why didn't you order it?"

"It wasn't on the bill. "

"Oh, bill be damned! You might have ordered it anyhow. Make a fuss andyou'll get what you want. These foreigners have to be bossed around. They're used to it. "

"I guess you're right. There was a fellow near me who set up a hollerabout his room the minute he saw it--said it was dark and musty and notfit to pen a hog in--and they gave him one twice as large, and the chiefsteward bowed and scraped to him, and the room stewards danced aroundhim as if he was a duke. And yet I heard later that he was nothing but aBismarck herring importer from Hoboken. "

"Yes, that's the way to get what you want. Did you have any nobility onboard?"

"Yes, there was a Hungarian baron in the automobile business, and twoEnglish sirs. The baron was quite a decent fellow: I had a talk with himin the smoking room one night. He didn't put on any airs at all. Youwould have thought he was an ordinary man. But the sirs kept tothemselves. All they did the whole voyage was to write letters, weartheir dress suits and curse the stewards. "

"They tell me over here that the best eating is on the French lines. "

"Yes, so I hear. But some say, too, that the Scandinavian lines arebest, and then again I have heard people boosting the Italian lines. "

"I guess each one has its points. They say that you get wine free withmeals on the French boats. "

"But I hear it's fourth rate wine. "

"Well, you don't have to drink it. "

"That's so. But, as for me, I can't stand a Frenchman. I'd rather dowithout the wine and travel with the Dutch. Paris is dead compared withBerlin. "

"So it is. But those Germans are getting to be awful sharks. The waythey charge in Berlin is enough to make you sick. "

"Don't tell _me_. I have been there. No longer ago than lastTuesday--or was it last Monday?--I went into one of those bigrestaurants on the Unter den Linden and ordered a small steak, Frenchfried potatoes, a piece of pie and a cup of coffee--and what do youthink those thieves charged me for it? Three marks fifty! Think of it!That's eighty-seven and a half cents. Why, a man could have got the samemeal at home for a dollar. These Germans are running wild. Americanmoney has gone to their heads. They think every American they get holdof is a millionaire. "

"The French are worse. I went into a hotel in Paris and paid ten francsa day for a room for myself and wife, and when we left they charged meone franc forty a day extra for sweeping it out and making the bed!"

"That's nothing. Here in Innsbruck they charge you half a krone a day_taxes_. "

"What! You don't say!"

"Sure thing. And if you don't eat breakfast in the hotel they charge youa krone for it anyhow. "

"Well, well, what next? But, after all, you can't blame them. WeAmericans come over here and hand them our pocket-books, and we ought tobe glad if we get anything back at all. The way a man has to tip issomething fearful. "

"Isn't it, though! I stayed in Dresden a week, and when I left therewere six grafters lined up with their claws out. First came theport_eer_. Then came--"

"How much did you give the port_eer_?"

"Five marks. "

"You gave him too much. You ought to have given him about three marks, or, say, two marks fifty. How much was your hotel bill?"

"Including everything?"

"No, just your bill for your room. "

"I paid six marks a day. "

"Well, that made forty-two marks for the week. Now the way to figure outhow much the port_eer_ ought to get is easy: a fellow I met inBaden-Baden showed me how to do it. First, you multiply your hotel billby two, then you divide by twenty-seven, and then you knock off half amark. Twice forty-two is eighty-four! Twenty-seven into eighty-four goesabout three times, and a half from three leaves two and a half. See howeasy it is?"

"It _looks_ easy, anyhow. But you haven't got much time to do all thatfiguring. "

"Well, let the port_eer_ wait. The longer he has to wait the more heappreciates you. "

"But how about the others?"

"It's just as simple. Your chambermaid gets a quarter of a mark forevery day you have been in the hotel. But if you stay less than fourdays she gets a whole mark anyhow. If there are two in the party shegets half a mark a day, but no more than three marks in any one week. "

"But suppose there are two chambermaids? In Dresden there was one on dayduty and one on night duty. I left at six o'clock in the evening, and sothey were both on the job. "

"Don't worry. They'd have been on the job anyhow, no matter when youleft. But it's just as easy to figure out the tip for two as for one. All you have to do is to add fifty per cent. , and then divide it intotwo halves, and give one to each girl. Or, better still, give it all toone girl and tell her to give half to her pal. If there are threechambermaids, as you sometimes find in the swell hotels, you add anotherfifty per cent. And then divide by three. And so on. "

"I see. But how about the hall porter and the floor waiter?"

"Just as easy. The hall porter gets whatever the chambermaid gets, plustwenty-five per cent. --but no more than two marks in any one week. Thefloor waiter gets thirty pfennigs a day straight, but if you stay onlyone day he gets half a mark, and if you stay more than a week he getstwo marks flat a week after the first week. In some hotels the hallporter don't shine shoes. If he don't he gets just as much as if hedoes, but then the actual 'boots' has to be taken care of. He gets halfa mark every two days. Every time you put out an extra pair of shoes hegets fifty per cent. More for that day. If you shine your own shoes, orgo without shining them, the 'boots' gets half his regular tip, butnever less than a mark a week. "

"Certainly it seems simple enough. I never knew there was any suchsystem. "

"I guess you didn't. Very few do. But it's just because Americans don'tknow it that these foreign blackmailers shake 'em down. Once you let theport_eer_ see that you know the ropes, he'll pass the word on to theothers, and you'll be treated like a native. "

"I see. But how about the elevator boy? I gave the elevator boy inDresden two marks and he almost fell on my neck, so I figured that Iplayed the sucker. "

"So you did. The rule for elevator boys is still somewhat in the air, because so few of these bum hotels over here have elevators, but you cansort of reason the thing out if you put your mind on it. When you get ona street car in Germany, what tip do you give the conductor?"

"Five pfennigs. "

"Naturally. That's the tip fixed by custom. You may almost say it's theunwritten law. If you gave the conductor more, he would hand you change. Well, how I reason it out is this way: If five pfennigs is enough for acar conductor, who may carry you three miles, why shouldn't it be enoughfor the elevator boy, who may carry you only three stories?"

"It _seems_ fair, certainly. "

"And it _is_ fair. So all you have to do is to keep account of thenumber of times you go up and down in the elevator, and then give theelevator boy five pfennigs for each trip. Say you come down in themorning, go up in the evening, and average one other round trip a day. That makes twenty-eight trips a week. Five times twenty-eight is onemark forty--and there you are. "

"I see. By the way, what hotel are you stopping at?"

"The Goldene Esel. "

"How is it?"

"Oh, so-so. Ask for oatmeal at breakfast and they send to the liverystable for a peck of oats and ask you please to be so kind as to showthem how to make it. "

"My hotel is even worse. Last night I got into such a sweat under thebig German feather bed that I had to throw it off. But when I asked fora single blanket they didn't have any, so I had to wrap up in bathtowels. "

"Yes, and you used up every one in town. This morning, when I took abath, the only towel the chambermaid could find wasn't bigger than awedding invitation. But while she was hunting around I dried off, so noharm was done. "

"Well, that's what a man gets for running around in such one-horsecountries. In Leipzig they sat a nigger down beside me at the table. InAmsterdam they had cheese for breakfast. In Munich the head waiter hadnever heard of buckwheat cakes. In Mannheim they charged me ten pfennigsextra for a cake of soap. "

"What do you think of the German railroad trains?"

"Rotten. That compartment system is all wrong. If nobody comes into yourcompartment it's lonesome, and if anybody _does_ come in it's too damnsociable. And if you try to stretch out and get some sleep, some ruffianbegins singing in the next compartment, or the conductor keeps buttingin and jabbering at you. "

"But you can say _one_ thing for these German trains; they get in ontime. "

"So they do, but no wonder! They run so slow they can't _help_ it. Theway I figure it, a German engineer must have a devil of a time holdinghis engine in. The fact is, he usually can't, and so he has to waitoutside every big town until the schedule catches up to him. They saythey never have accidents, but is it any more than you expect? Did youever hear of a mud turtle having an accident?"

"Scarcely. As you say, these countries are far behind the times. I saw afire in Cologne; you would have laughed your head off! It was in a feedstore near my hotel, and I got there before the firemen. When they cameat last, in their tinpot hats, they got out half a dozen big squirts andrushed into the building with them. Then, when it was out, they put thesquirts back into their little express wagon and drove off. You neversaw such child's play. Not a line of hose run out, not an enginepuffing, not a gong heard, not a soul letting out a whoop. It was morelike a Sunday school picnic than a fire. I guess if these Dutch ever_did_ have a civilised blaze, it would scare them to death. But theynever have any. "

"Well, what can you expect? A country where all the charwomen are menand all the garbage men are women!"

For the moment the two have talked each other out, and so they loungeupon the rail in silence and gaze out over the valley. Anon thegumchewer spits. By now the sun has reached the skyline to the westwardand the tops of the ice mountains are in gorgeous conflagration. Scarlets war with golden oranges, and vermilions fade into palpitatingpinks. Below, in the valley, the colours begin to fade slowly to auniform seashell grey. It is a scene of indescribable loveliness; thewild reds of hades splashed riotously upon the cold whites and pale huesof heaven. The night train for Venice, a long line of black coaches, isentering the town. Somewhere below, apparently in the barracks, a sunsetgun is fired. After a silence of perhaps two or three minutes, theAmericans gather fresh inspiration and resume their conversation. 

"I have seen worse scenery. "

"Very pretty. "

"Yes, sir; it's well worth the money. "

"But the Rockies beat it all hollow. "

"Oh, of course. They have nothing over here that we can't beat to awhisper. Just consider the Rhine, for instance. The Hudson makes it looklike a country creek. "

"Yes, you're right. Take away the castles, and not even a German wouldgive a hoot for it. It's not so much what a thing _is_ over here as what_reputation_ it's got. The whole thing is a matter of press-agenting. "

"I agree with you. There's the 'beautiful, blue Danube. ' To me it lookslike a sewer. If _it's_ blue, then _I'm_ green. A man would hesitate todrown himself in such a mud puddle. "

"But you hear the bands playing that waltz all your life, and so youspend your good money to come over here to see the river. And when youget back home you don't want to admit that you've been a sucker, so youstart touting it from hell to breakfast. And then some other fellowcomes over and does the same, and so on and so on. "

"Yes, it's all a matter of boosting. Day in and day out you hear aboutWestminster Abbey. Every English book mentions it; it's in thenewspapers almost as much as William Jennings Bryan or Caruso. Well, oneday you pack your grip, put on your hat and come over to have alook--and what do you find? A one-horse church full of statues! Andevery statue crying for sapolio! You expect to see somethingmagnificent, something enormous, something to knock your eye out andsend you down for the count. What you _do_ see is a second-rategraveyard under roof. And when you examine into it, you find thattwo-thirds of the graves haven't even got a dead man in them. Whenever aprominent Englishman dies, they put up a statue to him in WestminsterAbbey--_no matter where he happens to be buried_. I call that cleveradvertising. That's the way to get the crowd. "

"Yes, these foreigners know the game. They have made millions out of itin Paris. Every time you go to see a musical comedy at home, the secondact is laid in Paris, and you see a whole stageful of girls doing thehesitation, and a lot of old sports having the time of their lives. Allyour life you hear that Paris is something rich and racy, something thatmakes New York look like Roanoke, Virginia. Well, you fall for theballyhoo and come over to have your fling--and then you find that Parisis largely bunk. I spent a whole week in Paris, trying to find somethingreally awful. I hired one of those Jew guides at five dollars a day andtold him to go the limit. I said to him: 'Don't mind _me_. I amtwenty-one years old. Let me have the genuine goods. ' But the worst hecould show me wasn't half as bad as what I have seen in Chicago. Everynight I would say to that Jew: 'Come on, now Mr. Cohen; let's get awayfrom these tinhorn shows. Lead me to the real stuff. ' Well, I believethe fellow did his darndest, but he always fell down. I almost feltsorry for him. In the end, when I paid him off, I said to him: 'Save upyour money, my boy, and come over to the States. Let me know when youland. I'll show you the sights for nothing. You need a littlerelaxation. This Baracca Class atmosphere is killing you. '

"And yet Paris is famous all over the world. No American ever came toEurope without dropping off there to have a look. I once saw the BalTabarin crowded with Sunday school superintendents returning fromJerusalem. And when the sucker gets home he goes around winking andhinting, and so the fake grows. I often think the government ought totake a hand. If the beer is inspected and guaranteed in Germany, whyshouldn't the shows be inspected and guaranteed in Paris?"

"I guess the trouble is that the Frenchmen themselves never go to theirown shows. They don't know what is going on. They see thousands ofAmericans starting out every night from the Place de l'Opéra and comingback in the morning all boozed up, and so they assume that everything isup to the mark. You'll find the same thing in Washington. NoWashingtonian has ever been up to the top of the Washington monument. Once the elevator in the monument was out of commission for two weeks, and yet Washington knew nothing about it. When the news got into thelocal papers at last, it came from Macon, Georgia. Some honeymooner fromdown there had written home about it, roasting the government. "

"Well, me for the good old U. S. A. These Alps are all right, I guess--butI can't say I like the coffee. "

"And it takes too long to get a letter from Jersey City. "

"Yes, that reminds me. Just before I started up here this afternoon mywife got the _Ladies' Home Journal_ of month before last. It had beenfollowing us around for six weeks, from London to Paris, to Berlin, toMunich, to Vienna, to a dozen other places. Now she's fixed for thenight. She won't let up until she's read every word--the advertisementsfirst. And she'll spend all day to-morrow sending off for things--newcollar hooks, breakfast foods, complexion soaps and all that sort ofjunk. Are you married yourself?"

"No; not yet. "

"Well, then, you don't know how it is. But I guess you play poker. "

"Oh, to be sure. "

"Well, let's go down into the town and hunt up some quiet barroom andhave a civilised evening. This scenery gives me the creeps. "

"I'm with you. But where are we going to get any chips?"

"Don't worry. I carry a set with me. I made my wife put it in thebottom of my trunk, along with a bottle of real whiskey and a couple ofporous plasters. A man can't be too careful when he's away from home. "

They start along the terrace toward the station of the funicularrailway. The sun has now disappeared behind the great barrier of ice andthe colours of the scene are fast softening. All the scarlets andvermilions are gone; a luminous pink bathes the whole scene in its fairylight. The night train for Venice, leaving the town, appears as a longstring of blinking lights. A chill breeze comes from the Alpine vastnessto westward. The deep silence of an Alpine night settles down. The twoAmericans continue their talk until they are out of hearing. The breezeinterrupts and obfuscates their words, but now and then half a sentencecomes clearly. 

"Have you seen any American papers lately?"

"Nothing but the Paris _Herald_--if you call _that_ a paper. "

"How are the Giants making out?"

". .. Badly as usual . .. Rotten . .. Slump . .. Shake up. .. . "

". .. John McGraw . .. Connie Mack . .. Glass arm. .. . "

". .. Homesick . .. Give five dollars for. .. . "

". .. Whole continent without a single baseball cl. .. . "

". .. Glad to get back . .. Damn tired. .. . "

". .. Damn. .. . "

". .. _damn_. .. . "

VIENNA

[Illustration: VIENNA]

VIENNA

The casual Sunday School superintendent, bursting with visions ofluxurious gaieties, his brain incited by references to _Wiener blut_, his corpuscles tripping to the strains of some Viennese _schlagermusik_, will suffer only disappointment as he sallies forth on his first nightin Vienna. He is gorgeously caparisoned with clean linen, talcumed, exuding Jockey Club, prepared for surgical and psychic shock, his legsdrilled hollow to admit of precious fluids, his pockets bulging withkronen. He is a lovely, mellow creature, a virtuoso of the domesticvirtues when home, but now, at large in Europe, he craves excitement. His timid soul is bent on participating in the deviltries for whichVienna is famous. His blood is thumping through his arteries inthree-four time. His mind is inflamed by such strophes as "_Es giebt nura Kaiserstadt; es giebt nur a Wien_" and "_Immer luste, fesch undmunter, und der Wiener geht nit unter_. " But he is brought gradually tothe realisation that something is amiss. Can it be that the vicecrusaders have been at work? Have the militant moralists and theprofessional women hunters, in their heated yearnings to flay thetransgressor, fallen foul of Vienna?

He expected to find a city which would be one roseate and romanticrevel, given over to joys of the flesh, to wine-drinking andconfetti-throwing, overrun with hussies, gone mad with lasciviouswaltzes, reeking with Babylonish amours. He dreamed of Vienna as onecontinual debauch, one never-ceasing saturnalia, an eternal tournamentof perfumed hilarities. His lewd dreams of the "gayest city in Europe"have produced in him a marked hallucinosis with visions of Neronicorgies, magnificently prodigal--deliriums of chromatic disorder. 

But as he walks down the Kärntnerstrasse, encircles the Ring and standswith bulging inquisitive eyes on the corner of the Wiedner Hauptstrasseand Karlsplatz, he wonders what can be the matter. Where, indeed, isthat prodigality of flowers and spangled satin he has heard so muchabout? Where are those super-orchestras sweating over the scores ofseductive waltzes? Where the silken ankles and the glittering eyes, thekisses and the flutes, the beery laughter and the delirious leg shaking?The excesses of merrymaking are nowhere discoverable. Des Moines, Iowa, or Camden, New Jersey, would present quite as festive a spectacle, hethinks, as he gazes up at the sepulchral shadows on the giganticOpernhaus before him. He cannot understand the nocturnal solitude of thestreets. There is actual desolation about him. A chlorotic girl, hercheeks unskilfully painted, brushes up to him with a careless "_GehRudl, gib ma a Spreitzn. _" But that might happen in Cleveland, Ohio--andCleveland is not framed as a modern Tyre. He is puzzled and distressed. He feels like a Heliogabalus on a desert isle. He consults his watch. Itis past midnight. He has searched for hours. No famous thoroughfare hasescaped him. He has reconnoitred diligently and thoroughly, as only apious tourist bent on forbidden pleasures knows how. He is the arch-typeof American traveller; the God-fearing deacon on the loose; thevestryman returning from Jerusalem. Hopefully, yet fearfully, he haspushed his search. He has traversed the Kärntnerring, the Kolowratring, peered into Stadt Park, hit the Stubenring, scouted Franz Josefs Kai, searched the Rotenturmstrasse, zigzagged over to the Schottenring, followed the Franz, Burg and Opern-Rings, and is back on the Karlsplatz, still virtuous, still sober!

Not a houri. Nary a carnival. No strain of the "Blaue Donau" has wooedhis ear. No one has nailed him with sachet eggs. He has not been chokedby quarts of confetti. His conscience is as pure as the brews of Munich. He is still in a beneficent state of primeval and exquisite prophylaxis, of benign chemical purity, of protean moral asepsis. He came preparedfor deluges of wine and concerted onslaughts from ineffable_freimaderln_. But he might as well have attended a drama by CharlesKlein for all the rakish romance he has unearthed. His evening has gone. His legs are weary. And nothing has happened to astound or flabbergasthim, to send him sprawling with Cheyne-Stokes breathing. In all hispromenading he has seen nothing to affect his vasomotor centres or toproduce Argyll-Robertson pupils. 

Can it be true, he wonders, that, after all, Viennese gaiety is anillusion, a base fabrication? Is the _Wiener blut_, like Iowan blood, calm and sluggish? Is Vienna's reputation bogus, a snare for tourists, adelusion for the unsophisticated? Where is that far-renowned_gemüthlichkeit_? Has an American press agent had his foul hand in theadvertising of Austria's capital? Perhaps--perhaps!. .. But what of thoseViennese operas? What of those sensuous waltzes, those lubric bits of_schramm-musik_ which have come from Vienna? And has he not seenpictures of Viennese women--angels _à la mode_, miracles of beauty, Loreleis _de luxe_? Even Baedeker, the papa of the travellingschoolmarms, has admitted Vienna to be a bit frivolous. 

A puzzle, to be sure. A problem for Copernicus--a paradox, a theoremwith many decimal points. So thinks the tourist, retiring to his hotel. And figuring thus, he falls to sleep, enveloped in a caressing miasma ofalmost unearthly respectability. 

But is it true that Vienna is the home of purity, of early retirers, ofphlegmatic and virtuous souls? Are its gaieties mere febrile imaginingsof liquorish dreamers? Is it, after all, the Los Angeles of Europe? Or, despite its appearances, is it truly the gayest city in the world, redolent of romance, bristling with intrigue, polluted with perfume? Itis. And, furthermore, it is far gayer than its reputation; for all hasnever been told. Gaiety in Vienna is an end, not a means. It is born inthe blood of the people. The carnival spirit reigns. There are almost norestrictions, no engines of repression. Alongside the real Viennesenight life, the blatant and spectacular caprices of Paris are so muchtinsel. The life on the Friedrichstrasse, the brightest and most activestreet in Europe, becomes tawdry when compared with the secret gloriesof the Kärntnerring. In the one instance we have gaiety on parade, instrumpet garb--the simulacrum of sin--gaiety dramatised. In the otherinstance, it is an ineradicable factor of the city's life. 

To appreciate these differences, one must understand the temperamentalappeals of the Viennese. With them gaiety comes under the samephysiological category as chilblains, hunger and fatigue. It is acceptedas one of the natural and necessary adjuncts of life like eating andsleeping and lovemaking. It is an item in their pharmacopoeia. They donot make a business of pleasure any more than the Englishman makes abusiness of walking, or the American of drinking Peruna or the German ofbeerbibbing. For this reason, pleasure in Vienna is not elaborate andexternal. It is a private, intimate thing in which every citizenparticipates according to his standing and his pocketbook. The Austriansdo not commercialize their pleasure in the hope of wheedling dollarsfrom American pockets. Such is not their nature. And so the slummingtraveller, lusting for obscure and fascinating debaucheries, findslittle in Vienna to attract him. 

Vienna is perhaps the one city in the world which maintains aconsistent attitude of genuine indifference toward the outsider, whichresents the intrusion of snoopers from these pallid States, whichdeliberately makes it difficult for foreign Florizels to find diversion. The liveliest places in Vienna present the gloomiest exteriors. Theofficial guides maintain a cloistered silence regarding those addressesat which Viennese society disports itself when the ledgers are closedand the courts have adjourned. The Viennese, resenting the intrusion ofoutsiders upon his midnight romances, holds out no encouragement forglobe-trotting Don Juans. He refuses to be inspected and criticised bythe inquisitive sensation hunters of other nations. Money will not tempthim to commercialize his gaiety and regulate it to meet the morbiddemands of the interloper. Hence the external aspect of sobriety. Hencethe veneer of piety. Hence the sepulchral silence of the midnightthoroughfares. Hence the silence and the desolation which meet theroaming tourist. 

In this respect Vienna is different from any other large city inEurope. The joys of Parisian night life are as artificial as cosmetics. They are organised and executed by technicians subtly schooled in thepsychology of the Puritan mind. To the American, all forms of pleasureare excesses, to be indulged in only at rare intervals; and Parissupplies him with the opportunities. Berlin, and even Munich, makes abusiness of gaiety. St. Petersburg, patterning after Paris, excites thevisitor with visions of gaudy glory; and London, outwardly chaste, maintains a series of supper clubs which in the dishonesty of theirsubterranean pleasures surpass in downright immorality any city inEurope. Budapest is a miniature Babylon burning incense by night whichassails the visitor's nostrils and sends him into delirious ecstasies. San Francisco and New York are both equipped with opportunities forall-night indulgences. In not one of these cities does the sight seekeror the joy hunter find difficulty in sampling the syrups of sin. Mysterious guides assail him on the street corners, pouring libidinoustales into his furry ears, tempting him with descriptions likeSuetonius's account of the Roman circuses. Automobiles with megaphonesand placards summon him from the street corners. Electricsigns--debauches of writhing colour--intoxicate his mind and point theway to haunts of Caracalla. 

But Vienna! He will search in vain for a key to the night life. Bybribery he may wring an admission or obtain an address from the hotelclerk; but the ménage to which he is directed is, alas, not what heseeks. He may plead with cabmen or buy the honour of taxicab drivers, but little information will he obtain. For these gentlemen, strange asit may seem, are almost as ignorant of the gaiety of Vienna as hehimself. And at last, in the early morning, after ineffectual searching, after hours of assiduous nosing, he ends up at some _kaffeehaus_ nearthe Schillerplatz, partakes of a chaste ice with _Wiener gebäck_ andgoes dolorously home--a virgin of circumstance, an unwilling anddespondent Parsifal, a lofty and exquisite creature through lack ofopportunity, the chaste victim of a killjoy conspiracy. He is that mosttragic figure--an enforced pietist, a thwarted voluptuary. _Eheu! Eheu!Dies faustus!_

In order to come into intimate touch with the night life of Vienna onemust live there and become a part of it. It is not for spectators and itis not public. It involves every family in the city. It is inextricablywoven into the home life. It is elaborate because it is genuine, becauseit is not looked upon as a mere outlet for the repressions ofpuritanism. From an Anglo-Saxon point of view Vienna is perhaps the mostdegenerate city in the world. But degeneracy is geographical; morals aretemperamental. This is why the Viennese resents intrusion and spying. His night life involves the national spirit. His gaiety is not aprerogative of the _demi-monde_, but the usufruct of all classes. Joy isnot exclusive or solitary with the Viennese. He is not ashamed of hisfrolics and hilarities. He does not take his pleasures hypocriticallyafter the manner of the Occidental moralist. He is a gay bird, asybarite, a modern Lucullus, a Baron Chevrial--and admits it. 

To be sure, there is in Vienna a miniature night life not unlike thatof the other European capitals, but it requires constant attention andassiduous coddling to keep it alive. The better class Viennese will havenone of it. It is a by-product of the underworld and is no morecharacteristic of Vienna than the gilded _cafés chantants_ which clusterround the Place Pigalle on Montmartre are characteristic of Paris. Theseplaces correspond to the Palais de Danse and the Admirals Palast inBerlin; to the Villa Villa and the Astor Club in London; toReisenweber's in New York; to L'Abbaye and the Rat Mort inParis--allowing of course for the temperamental influences (and legalrestrictions) of the different nations. 

Let us arouse a snoring cabman and make the rounds. Why not? Allmerrymaking is shot through with youth, no matter how dolorous the joyor how expensive the indulgence. So let us partake of the feast beforeus. Our first encounter is with the Tabarin, in the Annagasse, anestablishment not unlike the Bal Tabarin in Paris. We hesitate at theentrance, but being assured by the doorkeeper, garbed like Louis Seize, that it is "_ein äusserst feines und modernes nacht etablissement_" weenter, partake of a bottle of champagne (thirty kronen--New York prices)and pass out and on to Le Chapeau Rouge, where we buy more champagne. From there we go to the Rauhensteingasse and enter Maxim's, brazenlyheralded as the Montmartre of Vienna. Then on to the Wallfischgasse tomingle with the confused visitors of the Trocadero, where we are urgedto have supper. But time is fleeting. The cabmeter is going round like atortured turbine. So we hasten out and seek the Wiehburggasse, where wediscover a "Palais de Danse"--seductive phrase, suggestive of ancientorgies. But we cannot tarry--in spite of Mimi Lobner (Ah, lovely lady!)who sings to us "Liebliche Kleine Dingerchen" from "Kino-Königin, " andmakes us buy her a peach _bowle_ in payment. One more place and we areready for the resort in the Prater, the Coney Island of Vienna. Thislast place has no embroidered name. Its existence is emblazoned acrossthe blue skies by an electric sign reading "Etablissement Parisien. " Itis in the Schellinggasse and justifies itself by the possession of avery fine orchestra whose _militär-kapellmeister_ knows naught butinebriate _tanzmusik_. 

Again in the open air, headed for the Kaisergarten, we reflect on ourevening's search for _nachtvergnügungen_. With the lone exception of ourhalf-hour with Mimi, it has been a sad chase. All the places (with thepossible exception of the Trocadero) have been cheaply imitative ofParis, with the usual appurtenances of arduous waiters, gorgeouslydressed women dancing on red velvet carpets, fortissimo orchestras, expensive wines, _blumenmädl_, hothouse strawberries and otheraccessories of manufactured pleasure. But compared with Paris theseplaces have been second rate. The _damen_ (I except thee, lovely Mimi!)have not inflamed us either with their beauty or with manifestations oftheir _esprit gaulois_. For the most part they have been stodgy womenwith voluminous bosoms, Eiffel towers of bought hair--bison withastonishing hyperboles and parabolas, dressed in all of the voluptuoussplendour but possessing none of the grace of the Rue de la Paix. Furthermore, these establishments have lacked the deportmental abandonwhich saves their prototypes in Paris from downright banality. All oftheir deviltries have been muted, as if the guests suffered from apathological fear of pleasure. Strangers we were when we entered. Asstrangers we take our departure. 

Why do I linger thus, you ask, over these hothouse caperings? For thesame reason that we are now going to inspect the Kaisergarten. Becausethis phase of life represents an unnatural development in the Viennesemode of pleasure, something grafted, yet something characteristic of theimpressionability of the Viennese mind. The Viennese are a hybrid andimitative people. They have annexed characteristics distinctly French. In the Kaisergarten these characteristics are more evident thanelsewhere. Here is a people's playground in which all manner ofamusements are thrown together, from the _balhaus_, where nothing butexpensive champagne is sold, to the scenic railway, on which one mayride for fifty heller. This park presents a bizarre and chaotic minglingof outdoor concerts, variety theatres, _bierkabaretts_, moving picturehalls, promenades and sideshow attractions of the Atlantic City type. The Kaisergarten is the rendezvous of the bourgeoisie, the heaven of hoipolloi--rotund merchants with walrus moustachios, dapper young clerkswith flowing ties, high-chokered soldiers, their boots polished intoebony mirrors, fat-jowled maidens in rainbow garb. .. . There islovemaking under the Linden trees, beer drinking on the midway, _schnitzel_ eating in the restaurants. Homely pleasantries are thrownfrom heavy German youths to the promenading _mädchen_. One catches suchgreetings and whisperings as "_Du bist oba heut' fesch g'scholnt_" and"_Ko do net so lang umananderbandln_. " There exists a spirit of buoyantand genuine fellowship. But here again it is a private and personalbrand of gaiety. Let the obvious stranger whisper "_Schatz'rl_" to apowdered Fritzi on the bench next to him, and he will be ignored for hisimpertinence. The same salutation from a Viennese will call forth acoquettish "_Raubersbua_. " Even the _Amerikan-bar_ in the centre of theKaisergarten (in charge of no less a celebrity than Herr Pohnstingl!)will not offer the tourist the hospitality he hopes to find. He willfind neither Americans nor American drinks. The cocktail--that boon toall refined palates, when mixed with artistry and true poeticfeeling--circulates _incognito_ at Herr Pohnstingl's. Such febrifuges asmasquerade under that name are barely recognisable by authenticconnoisseurs, by Rabelaises of sensitive esophagi, by true lovers ofsubtly concocted gin and vermouth and bitters. But the Viennese, soggywith acid beer, his throat astringentized by strong coffee, knows notthe difference. And so the _Amerikan-bar_ flourishes. 

[Illustration: VIENNA]

It was here that I discovered Gabrielle, a sad little French girl, alone and forsaken in the midst of merriment, drinking Dubonnet anddreaming of the Boulevard Montparnasse. I bought her anotherDubonnet--what stranger would have done less? In her was epitomized thesadness of the stranger in Vienna. Lured by lavish tales of gaiety, shehad left Paris, to seek an unsavoury fortune in the love marts ofVienna. But her dream had been broken. She was lonely as only a Parisiancan be, stranded in an alien country. She knew scarcely a score ofGerman words, in fact no language but her own. Her youth and coquetrydid not avail. She was an outsider, a deserted onlooker. She spoketenderly of the Café du Dôme, of Fouquet's, the Café d'Harcourt, Marignyand the Luxembourg. She inquired sentimentally about the Bal Bullier. She was pretty, after the anæmic French type of beauty, with pinkcheeks, pale blue eyes and hair the colour of wet straw. She had theslender, shapely feet of the French cocotte. Her stockings were of thinpink silk. Her slender, soft fingers were without a ring. Her jewelry, no doubt, had long since gone to the money lender. She seemed childishlyhappy because I sat and talked to her. Poor little Gabrielle! Hertragedy was one of genuine bereavement, or perhaps the worst of alltragedies--loneliness. I shall never think again of Vienna withoutpicturing that stranded girl, sipping at her reddish drink in the_Amerikan-bar_ in the Kaisergarten. But her case is typical. TheViennese are not hospitable to strangers. They are an intimate, self-sufficient people. 

Let us turn, however, from the little Gabrielle to a more fascinatingand exquisite creature, to a happier and more buoyant denizen ofViennese night life, to a lady of more elegant attire. In short, beholdFräulein Bianca Weise. In her are the alkaloids of gaiety. Sheirradiates the joyfulness of the city. In her infancy she was hummed tosleep with snatches from the "Wiener Blut, " the booziest waltz in allChristendom. Bianca is tall and catlike, but deliciously proportioned. Her hair is an alloy of bronze and gold. Her skin is pale, and in hercheeks there is the barest bit of rose, like a flame seen through ivory. Her eyes are large, and their blue is almost primary. Her face is aperfect oval. Her lips are full and abnormally red. Her slender, conicalhands are always active like those of a child, and she wears but littlejewelry. Her gowns come from Paquin's and seem almost a part of herbody. 

This is Bianca, the most beautiful woman in all Europe. Do I seem torave? Then let me answer that perhaps you have not seen Bianca. And tosee her is to be her slave, her press agent. It was Bianca's picturethat went emblazoning over two continents a few years ago as the supremetype of modern feminine beauty, according to the physiological expertsand the connoisseurs of pulchritude. But it is not because of the lady'sgift of beauty that I feature her here. It is because she so perfectlytypifies the romance of that whirling city, so accurately embodies thespirit of Vienna's darkened hours. In the afternoon you will find her onthe Kärntnerstrasse with her black-haired little maid. At five o'clockshe goes for _kaffeetsch'rl_ to Herr Reidl's Café de l'Europe, in theStefanplatz. With her are always two or three Beau Brummels chattingincessantly about music and art, wooing her suavely with magnificenttechnique, drinking coffee intermittently, and lavishly tipping the_kellner_. 

These _kaffeehäuser_ are the leading public institutions of Vienna. They take the place of private teas, culture clubs, dramatic readingsand sewing circles in other countries. All Vienna society turns out inthe afternoon to partake of _melange_, _kaffee mit schlagobers_, _kapuziner_, _schwarzen_, _weckerln_ and _kaisersemmeln_. But no harddrinks, no vulgar pretzels and wursts. Only Americans order beer andcognac at the coffee houses, and generally, after once sampling them, they follow the bibulous lead of the Viennese. Each _kaffeehaus_ has itsown coterie, its own habitués. Thus, at the Café de l'Europe one findsthe worldly set, the young bloods with artistic leanings. The Café del'Opéra, in the Opernring, is patronised by the advocates and legalattachés. At the Café Scheidl, in the Wallfischgasse, foregather thegovernmental coterie, the army officers and burgomasters. The merchantsdiscuss their affairs at the Café Schwarzenberg, in the Kärntnerring. Atthe Café Heinrichshof, in the Opernring, one finds the leading actorsand musicians immersed in the small talk of their craft. Thus it goes. In all the leading cafés--the Habsburg, Landtmann, Mokesch, Gartenbau, Siller, Prückl--the tables are filled, and the coffee drinking, the_baunzerln_ eating and the gossiping go on till opera time. 

The theatre in Vienna is a part of the life. It is not indulged in as amere amusement or diversion, like shooting the chutes or going tochurch. It is an evening's obligation. This accounts for the largenumber of Vienna theatres and for their architectural beauty. But do notthink that when you have attended a dozen such places as theHofoperntheatre, the Hofburgtheatre, the Deutsches Volkstheatre and theCarltheatre you have sensed the entire theatrical appeal of Vienna. Farfrom it. No city in the world is punctuated with so large a number ofsemi-private intimate theatres and cabarets as Vienna--theatres with aseating capacity of forty or fifty. You may know the Kleine Bühne andthe Max und Moritz and the Hölle, but there are fifty others, and everynight finds them crowded. 

Theatregoing is occasionally varied with lesser and more primitivepastimes. Go out on the crooked Sieveringerstrasse and behold themultitudes waxing mellow over the sweet red _heuriger_. Go to theVolksgarten-Café Restaurant any summer night after seven, pay sixtyheller, and see the crowds gathered to hear the military band concerts;or seek the halls in winter and join the audiences who come to wallow inthe florid polyphonies of the _Wiener Tonkünstler Orchester_. Sundaysand holiday nights go to Grinsing and Nussdorf and watch the people atplay. Make the rounds of the wine houses--the Rathaus Keller, theNieder-Oesterreichisches Winzerhaus, the Tommasoni--and behold thespooning and the rough joking. 

All this is part of the night life of Vienna. But it is not the life inwhich Bianca participates. Therefore we cannot tarry in the wine housesor at the concerts. Instead let us attend the opera. We go early beforethe sun has set. The curtain rises at six-thirty to permit of ourleaving by half past ten, for there is much to do before morning. Afterthe performance--dinner! The Viennese are adepts in the gustatory art. Their meals have the heft of German victualty combined with thedelicacies and imaginative qualities of French cooking. An ideal andseductive combination! A rich and toothsome blending!. .. Bianca touchesmy arm and says we must make haste. This evening I am to be honouredwith dinner in her apartment. So we drive to her rooms on theFranzenring overlooking the Volksgarten. 

The Viennese dinner hour is eleven, and this is why the tourist, fingering his guide book, looks in vain for the diners. Sacher's, theImperial, the Bristol and the Spatenbräu are deserted in the earlyevenings. Even after the Opera these restaurants present little of thelife found in the Paris, Berlin or London restaurants. The Viennese isnot a public diner; and here again we find an explanation for thetourist's impressions. When the Viennese goes to dinner, he does soprivately. Bianca's dinner that night was typical. There were twelve attable. There was music by a semi-professional pianist. The service wasperfect--it was more like a dinner in a _cabinet particulier_ at aParisian café than one in a private apartment. But here we catch thespirit of Vienna, the transforming of what the other cities do publiclyinto the intimacies of the home. 

At one o'clock, the meal finished, the intimate theatre claimed us. There the glorious Bianca met her lovers, her little following. At thesetheatres every one knows every one else. It is the social lure as wellas the theatrical appeal that brings the people there. Bianca chats withthe actors, flirts with the admiring Lotharios and drinks champagne. Ather side sit the greatest artists and dramatists of the day, princes andother celebrities. At one of these performances I saw her bewitching twomen--one a composer, the other a writer--whose names lead the artisticactivities of Southern Europe. But Bianca is prodigal with her charms, and before the final curtain was dropped she had shed her fascinationson every patron in the theatre. And I, whose thirty kronen had passedher by the satin-pantalooned and lace-bosomed doorkeeper, was quiteforgot. But such is Viennese etiquette. An escort may pay the _fiacre_charge and the entrance fee, but such a meagre, vulgar claim does notsuffice to obtain a lady's entire attention for the evening. Suchselfishness is not understood by the Viennese. 

The real business of the evening came later. The coffee drinking, thetheatre and the dining had been so many preliminaries for that form ofamusement which forms the basis of all Viennese night life--dancing. TheViennese dance more than any people in the world. During _Faschingzeit_there are at least fifty large public balls every night. These ballsbecome gay at one o'clock and last through the entire night. For themost part they are masked, and range from the low to the high, fromthose where the entrance fee is but two kronen to the elaborate oneswhose demand is thirty kronen. Every night in Vienna during the seasonfifty thousand people are dancing. Nor are these balls the suave andconventional dances of less frank nations. By the mere presentation of aflower any one may dance with any one else. In every phase of night lifein Vienna flowers play an important part. They constitute the languageof the carnival. To such an extent is this true that, though you may askfor a dance by presenting a flower, you may not ask verbally, thoughyour tongue be polished and your soul ablaze with poetry. And while youare dancing you may not talk to your partner. She is yours for thatdance--but she is yours in silence. Should you meet her the followingafternoon in the Prater or on parade in the Kärntnerstrasse, her eyeswill look past you, for the night has gone, carrying with it itsmemories and its intoxications. 

It is this spirit of evanescence, this youthful buoyancy, snatched outof the passing years, lived for a moment and then forgot, whichconstitutes the genuine gaiety of Vienna. It is an unconscious gaiety, sensed but not analysed, in the very soul of the people. It keeps theViennese young and makes him resent, intuitively, the invasion of othernations to whom gaiety is artificial. That is why the dances are open toall, why the formality of introductions would be scoffed at. Their bloodhas all been tapped from the same fountain head. There are affinitiesbetween all Viennese phagocytes. The basis of all romance is ephemeralin its nature, and in no people in the world do we find so great anelement of transitoriness in pleasure-taking as in the Viennese. 

A description of one of the masked balls would tell you the whole ofthe night life in Vienna, but until you have become a part of one ofthem you would not understand them. Not until you yourself hadaccompanied the fair Bianca and watched her for a whole evening, couldyou appreciate how these dances differ from those of other cities. Externally they would appear the same. Photographed, they would looklike any other carnival ball. But there are things which a photographicplate could never catch, and the spirit of merriment which runs throughthese dances is one. If you care to see them, go to the Blumensäle or tothe Wimberger. The crowds here are typical. However, if you care for amore lavish or elaborate gathering, you will find it at theMusikvereinsäle or the Sofiensäle. These latter two are morefashionable, though no one remains at any of the _maskenbälle_ the wholeevening. The dancers go from one ball to another; and should you, atfive in the morning, return to a _balhaus_ where you had been earlier inthe evening, you would find an entirely new set of dancers. 

Let us then take our departure, with the masked ball still in fullprogress, our hearts still thumping to the measures of an intoxicatingwaltz, the golden confetti still glistening in our hair, perfumed powderon our clothes, the murmuring of clandestine whispers still in our ears, the rhythm of swaying girls still in our blood. As we pass out into thebleak street, the first faint flush of dawn is in the east. The_wässerer_ are washing off the cabs; a helmeted _hauptmann_ saluteslazily as we pass, and we drive home full of the intoxications of thatpagan gaiety which the Viennese, more than any other people, havepreserved in all its innocence, its sensuous splendour, its spontaneityand youth. 

Bianca? By now she has forgotten with whom she came to the dance. Nextweek my name will be but one of her innumerable memories--if, indeed, itdoes not altogether pass away. For Bianca is Vienna, lavish and joyousand buoyant--and forgetful. I danced with her three times, but my threeroses, along with scores of others, have long since been lost in theswirl of the evening. 

I wish I might think only of Bianca as the shadows dissolve from thestreets and the grey morning light strikes the great steeple ofStefans-Dom. But another picture presents itself. I see a little Frenchgirl, out of touch with all the merriment around her, sipping herDubonnet in solitude--a forlorn girl with pink cheeks, pale blue eyesand hair the colour of wet straw. 

MUNICH

[Illustration: MUNICH]

MUNICH

Let the most important facts come first. The best beer in Munich isSpatenbräu; the best place to get it is at the Hoftheatre Café in theResidenzstrasse; the best time to drink it is after 10 P. M. , and thebest of all girls to serve it is Fräulein Sophie, that tall andresilient creature, with her appetizing smile, her distinguished bearingand her superbly manicured hands. 

I have, in my time, sat under many and many superior _kellnerinen_, some as regal as grand duchesses, some as demure as shoplifters, some asgraceful as _prime ballerini_, but none reaching so high a general levelof merit, none so thoroughly satisfying to eye and soul as FräuleinSophie. She is a lady, every inch of her, a lady presenting to allgentlemanly clients the ideal blend of cordiality and dignity, and sheserves the best beer in Christendom. Take away that beer, and it ispossible, of course, that Sophie would lose some minute granule orglobule of her charm; but take away Sophie and I fear the beer wouldlose even more. 

In fact, I know it, for I have drunk that same beer in theSpatenbräukeller in the Bayerstrasse, at all hours of the day and night, and always the ultimate thrill was missing. Good beer, to be sure, and ahundred times better than the common brews, even in Munich, but notperfect beer, not beer _de luxe_, not super-beer. It is the humanequation that counts, in the _bierhalle_ as on the battlefield. Oneresents, somehow a _kellnerin_ with the figure of a taxicab, no matterhow good her intentions and fluent her technique, just as one resents atrained nurse with a double chin or a glass eye. When a personal officethat a man might perform, or even an intelligent machine, is put intothe hands of a woman, it is put there simply and solely because thewoman can bring charm to it and irradiate it with romance. If, now, shefails to do so--if she brings, not charm, not beauty, not romance, butthe gross curves of an aurochs and a voice of brass--if she offers bulkwhen the heart cries for grace and adenoids when the order is for music, then the whole thing becomes a hissing and a mocking, and a grey fog ison the world. 

But to get back to the Hoftheatre Café. It stands, as I have said, inthe Residenzstrasse, where that narrow street bulges out into theMax-Joseph-platz, and facing it, as its name suggests, is theHoftheatre, the most solemn-looking playhouse in Europe, but the sceneof appalling tone debaucheries within. The supreme idea at theHoftheatre is to get the curtain down at ten o'clock. If the billhappens to be a short one, say "Hänsel and Gretel" or "Elektra, " thethree thumps of the starting mallet may not come until eight o'clock oreven 8:30, but if it is a long one, say "Parsifal" or "Les Huguenots, " abeginning is made far back in the afternoon. Always the end arrives atten, with perhaps a moment or two leeway in one direction or the other. And two minutes afterward, without further ceremony or delay, the trulyepicurean auditor has his feet under the mahogany at the Hoftheatre Caféacross the platz, with a seidel of that incomparable brew tiltedelegantly toward his face and his glad eyes smiling at Fräulein Sophiethrough the glass bottom. 

How many women could stand that test? How many could bear the ribalddistortions of that lens-like seidel bottom and yet keep their charm?How many thus caricatured and vivisected, could command this freereading notice from a casual American, dictating against time and spaceto a red-haired stenographer, three thousand and five hundred milesaway? And yet Sophie does it, and not only Sophie, but also Frida, Elsa, Lili, Kunigunde, Märtchen, Thérèse and Lottchen, her confrères andaides, and even little Rosa, who is half Bavarian and half Japanese, andone of the prettiest girls in Munich, in or out of uniform. It is apleasure to say a kind word for little Rosa, with her coal black hairand her slanting eyes, for she is too fragile a fräulein to be totingaround those gigantic German schnitzels and bifsteks, those mightydouble portions of sauerbraten and rostbif, those staggering drinkingurns, overballasted and awash. 

Let us not, however, be unjust to the estimable Herr Wirt of theHoftheatre Café, with his pneumatic tread, his chaste side whiskers andhis long-tailed coat, for his drinking urns, when all is said and done, are quite the smallest in Munich. And not only the smallest, but alsothe shapeliest. In the Hofbräuhaus and in the open air _bierkneipen_(for instance, the Mathäser joint, of which more anon) one drinks out ofearthen cylinders which resemble nothing so much as the gaunt towers ofMunich cathedral; and elsewhere the orthodox goblet is a glass edificefollowing the lines of an old-fashioned silver water pitcher--you knowthe sort the innocently criminal used to give as wedding presents!--butat the Hoftheatre there is a vessel of special design, hexagonal incross section and unusually graceful in general aspect. On top, a pewterlid, ground to an optical fit and highly polished--by Sophie, Rosa _etal. _, poor girls! To starboard, a stout handle, apparently of reinforcedonyx. Above the handle, and attached to the lid, a metal flange orthumbpiece. Grasp the handle, press your thumb on the thumbpiece--andpresto, the lid heaves up. And then, to the tune of a Strauss waltz, played passionately by tone artists in oleaginous dress suits, down goesthe Spatenbräu--gurgle, gurgle--burble, burble--down goes theSpatenbräu--exquisite, ineffable!--to drench the heart in its nut brownflood and fill the arteries with its benign alkaloids and antitoxins. 

Well, well, maybe I grow too eloquent! Such memories loose and crazethe tongue. A man pulls himself up suddenly, to find that he has beenvulgar. If so here, so be it! I refuse to plead to the indictment;sentence me and be hanged to you! I am by nature a vulgar fellow. Iprefer "Tom Jones" to "The Rosary, " Rabelais to the Elsie books, the OldTestament to the New, the expurgated parts of "Gulliver's Travels" tothose that are left. I delight in beef stews, limericks, burlesqueshows, New York City and the music of Haydn, that beery and delightfulold rascal! I swear in the presence of ladies and archdeacons. When themercury is above ninety-five I dine in my shirt sleeves and write poetrynaked. I associate habitually with dramatists, bartenders, medical menand musicians. I once, in early youth, kissed a waitress at Dennett's. So don't accuse me of vulgarity; I admit it and flout you. Not, ofcourse, that I have no pruderies, no fastidious metes and bounds. Farfrom it. Babies, for example, are too vulgar for me; I cannot bringmyself to touch them. And actors. And evangelists. And the obstetricalanecdotes of ancient dames. But in general, as I have said, I joy invulgarity, whether it take the form of divorce proceedings or of"Tristan und Isolde, " of an Odd Fellows' funeral or of Munich beer. 

But here, perhaps, I go too far again. That is to say, I have no rightto admit that Munich beer is vulgar. On the contrary, it is my obviousduty to deny it, and not only to deny it but also to support my denialwith an overwhelming mass of evidence and a shrill cadenza of casuistry. But the time and the place, unluckily enough, are not quite fit for thedialectic, and so I content myself with a few pertinent observations. _Imprimis_, a thing that is unique, incomparable, _sui generis_, cannotbe vulgar. Munich beer is unique, incomparable, _sui generis_. More, itis consummate, transcendental, _übernatürlich_. Therefore it cannot bevulgar. Secondly, the folk who drink it day after day do not die ofvulgar diseases. Turn to the subhead _Todesursachen_ in the instructive_Statistischer Monatsbericht der Stadt München_, and you will findrecords of few if any deaths from delirium tremens, boils, hookworm, smallpox, distemper, measles or what the _Monatsbericht_ calls "liversickness. " The Müncheners perish more elegantly, more charmingly thanthat. When their time comes it is gout that fetches them, orappendicitis, or neurasthenia, or angina pectoris; or perchance they cuttheir throats. 

Thirdly, and to make it short, lastly, the late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler, " not to mention"Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea"--wrote them in his flat in theMaximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, or Christian era--wrote them thereand then took them to the Café Luitpold, in the Briennerstrasse, toponder them, polish them and make them perfect. I myself have sat in oldHenrik's chair and victualed from the table. It is far back in the mainhall of the café, to the right as you come in, and hidden from theincomer by the glass vestibule which guards the pantry. Ibsen used toappear every afternoon at three o'clock, to drink his vahze of Löwenbräuand read the papers. The latter done, he would sit in silence, thinking, thinking, planning, planning. Not often did he say a word, even toFräulein Mizzi, his favourite _kellnerin_. So taciturn was he, in truth, that his rare utterances were carefully entered in the archives of thecafé and are now preserved there. By the courtesy of Dr. AdolphHimmelheber, the present curator, I am permitted to transcribe a few, the imperfect German of the poet being preserved:

November 18, 1889, 4:15 P. M. --_Giebt es kein Feuer in diese verfluchteBierstube? Meine Füsse sind so kalt wie Eiszapfen!_

April 12, 1890, 5:20 P. M. --_Der Kerl is verrückt!_ (Said of an Americanwho entered with the stars and stripes flying from his hat. )

May 22, 1890, 4:40 P. M. --_Sie sind so eselhaft wie ein Schauspieler!_(To an assistant Herr Wirt who brought him a Socialist paper in mistakefor the London _Times_. )

Now and then the great man would condescend to play a game of billiardsin the hall to the rear, usually with some total stranger. He wouldpoint out the stranger to Fräulein Mizzi and she would carry his card. The game would proceed, as a rule, in utter silence. But it was for theLöwenbräu and not for the billiards that Ibsen came to the Luitpold, forthe Löwenbräu and the high flights of soul that it engendered. He had nogreat liking for Munich as a city; his prime favourite was alwaysVienna, with Rome second. But he knew that the incomparable malt liquorof Munich was full of the inspiration that he needed, and so he keptnear it, not to bathe in it, not to frivol with it, but to take itdiscreetly and prophylactically, and as the exigencies of his artdemanded. 

Ibsen's inherent fastidiousness, a quality which urged him to spendhours shining his shoes, was revealed by his choice of the CaféLuitpold, for of all the cafés in Munich the Luitpold is undoubtedly themost elegant. Its walls are adorned with frescoes by AlbrechtHildebrandt. The ceiling of the main hall is supported by columns ofcoloured marble. The tables are of carved mahogany. The forks andspoons, before Americans began to steal them, were of real silver. Thechocolate with whipped cream, served late in the afternoon, is famousthroughout Europe. The Herr Wirt has the suave sneak of John Drew and isa privy councillor to the King of Bavaria. All the tables along the eastwall, which is one vast mirror, are reserved from 8 P. M. To 2 A. M. Nightly by the faculty of the University of Munich, which thereentertains the eminent scientists who constantly visit the city. Noorchestra arouses the baser passions with "Wiener Blut. " The place hascalm, aloofness, intellectuality, aristocracy, distinction. It was thescene foreordained for the hatching of "Hedda Gabler. "

But don't imagine that Munich, when it comes to elegance, must stand orfall with the Luitpold. Far from it, indeed. There are other cafés ofnoble and elevating quality in that delectable town--plenty of them, youmay be sure. For example, the Odéon, across the street from theLuitpold, a place lavish and luxurious, but with a certain touch ofdogginess, a taste of salt. The _piccolo_ who lights your cigar andaccepts your five pfennigs at the Odéon is an Ethiopian dwarf. Do yousense the romance, the exotic _diablerie_, the suggestion of Levantinemystery? And somewhat Levantine, too, are the ladies who sit upon theplush benches along the wall and take Russian cigarettes with theirkirschenwasser. Not that the atmosphere is frankly one of Sin. No! No!The Odéon is no cabaret. A leg flung in the air would bring the HerrWirt at a gallop, you may be sure--or, at any rate, his apoplecticcorpse. In all New York, I dare say, there is no public eating house sonear to the far-flung outposts, the Galapagos Islands of virtue. But onesomehow feels that for Munich, at least, the Odéon is just a bittolerant, just a bit philosophical, just a bit Bohemian. One evenimagines taking an American show girl there without being warned (by acurt note in one's serviette) that the head waiter's family lives in thehouse. 

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

The Vier Jahreszeiten is no place for the common people; such trade isnot encouraged. The dominant note of the establishment is that of proudretirement, of elegant sanctuary. One enters, not from the garishMaximilianstrasse, with its motor cars and its sinners, but from theMarstallstrasse, a sedate and aristocratic side street. The VierJahreszeiten, in its time, has given food, alcohol and lodgings for thenight to twenty crowned heads and a whole shipload of lessermagnificoes, and despite the rise of other hotels it retains its ancientsupremacy. It is the peer of Shepheard's at Cairo, of the Cecil inLondon, of the old Inglaterra at Havana, of the St. Charles at NewOrleans. It is one of the distinguished hotels of the world. 

I could give you a long list of other Munich restaurants of a kinglyorder--the great breakfast room of the Bayrischer Hof, with its polyglotwaiters and its amazing repertoire of English jams; the tea and liquoratelier of the same hostelry, with its high dome and its shelteringpalms; the pretty little open air restaurant of the Künstlerhaus in theLenbachplatz; the huge catacomb of the Rathaus, with its mediæval archesand its vintage wines; the lovely _al fresco_ café on Isar Island, withthe green cascades of the Isar winging on lazy afternoons; the café inthe Hofgarten, gay with birds and lovers; that in the Tiergarten, fromthe terrace of which one watches lions and tigers gamboling in thewoods; and so on, and so on. There is even, I hear, a temperancerestaurant in Munich, the Jungbrunnen in the Arcostrasse, where water isserved with meals, but that is only rumour. I myself have never visitedit, nor do I know any one who has. 

All this, however, is far from the point. I am here hired to discourseof Munich beer, and not of vintage wines, bogus cocktails, afternoonchocolate and well water. We are on a beeriad. Avaunt, ye grapes, yemaraschino cherries, ye puerile H_{2}O!

And so, resuming that beeriad, it appears that we are once again in theHoftheatre Café in the Residenzstrasse, and that Fräulein Sophie, thatpleasing creature, has just arrived with two ewers of Spatenbräu--twoewers fresh from the wood--woody, nutty, incomparable! Ah, thoseelegantly manicured hands! Ah, that Mona Lisa smile! Ah, that sograceful waist! Ah, malt! Ah, hops! _Ach, München, wie bist du soschön!_

But even Paradise has its nuisances, its scandals, its lacks. TheHoftheatre Café, alas, is not the place to eat sauerkraut--not theplace, at any rate, to eat sauerkraut _de luxe_, the supreme andsingular masterpiece of the Bavarian uplands, the perfect grass embalmedto perfection. The place for that is the Pschorrbräu in theNeuhauserstrasse, a devious and confusing journey, down past thePompeian post office, into the narrow Schrammerstrasse, around the oldcathedral, and then due south to the Neuhauserstrasse. _Sapperment!_ TheNeuhauserstrasse is here called the Kaufingerstrasse! Well, well, don'tlet 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 theZweibrückenstrasse, and then the Isarbrücke, and then the Ludwigbrücke, and finally, beyond the river, the Gasteig or the Rosenheimerstrasse, according as one takes its left branch or its right. 

But don't be dismayed by all that versatility. Munich streets, likeLondon streets, change their names every two or three blocks. Once youarrive between the two mediæval arches of the Karlsthor and theSparkasse, you are in the Neuhauserstrasse, whatever the name on thestreet sign, and if you move westward toward the Karlsthor you will comeinevitably to the Pschorrbräu, and within you will find Fräulein Tilde(to whom my regards), who will laugh at your German with a fine show ofpearly teeth and the extreme vibration of her 195 pounds. Tilde, inthese godless states, would be called fat. But observe her in thePschorrbräu, mellowed by that superb malt, glorified by that consummatekraut, and you will blush to think her more than plump. 

I give you the Pschorrbräu as the one best eating bet in Munich--andnot forgetting, by any means, the Luitpold, the Rathaus, the Odéon andall the other gilded hells of victualry to northward. Imagine it: everyskein 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 coarse fee forvioloncellists, barbers and reporters for the _Staats-Zeitung_--but thedelight, at the Pschorrbräu, of diplomats, the literati and doctors ofphilosophy. I myself, eating it three times a day, to the accompanimentof _schweinersrippen_ and _bonensalat_, have composed triolets in theNorwegian language, a feat not matched by Björnstjerne Björnson himself. And I once met an American medical man, in Munich to sit under thelearned Prof. Dr. Müller, who ate no less than five portions of itnightly, after his twelve long hours of clinical prodding and hacking. He found it more nourishing, he told me, than pure albumen, and morestimulating 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 todifferentiate between good and bad, and so it's useless to send them tothis or that _ausschank_. Well, let them then go to the Pschorrbräu andorder bifstek from the grill, at M. 1. 20 the ration. There may betenderer and more savoury bifsteks in the world, bifsteks which sizzlemore seductively upon red hot plates, bifsteks with more proteids andmanganese in them, bifsteks more humane to ancient and hyperestheticteeth, bifsteks from nobler cattle, more deftly cut, more passionatelygrilled, 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 _mass_ of _dunkle_, thirty-two pfennigs. Inall, M. 2. 17--an odd mill or so more or less than fifty-two cents. Asquare meal, perfectly cooked, washed down with perfect beer and servedperfectly by Fräulein Tilde--and all for the price of a shampoo!

From the Pschorrbräu, if the winds be fair, the beeriad takes uswestward along the Neuhauserstrasse a distance of eighty feet and sixinches, and behold, we are at the Augustinerbräu. Good beer--a triflepale, perhaps, and without much grip to it, but still good beer. Afterall, however, there is something lacking here. Or, to be more accurate, something jars. The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell ofchocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with hiscropped head and his outstanding ears, his _backfisch_ waist and hismudscow feet--that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offendsthe roving eye. No doubt a handsome man, by German standards--even, perhaps a celebrated seducer, a soldier with a future--but the meresight of him suffices to paralyse an American esophagus. Besides, thereis the smell of chocolate, sweet, sickly, effeminate, and at two in theafternoon! Again, there is the music of Grieg, clammy, clinging, creepy. Away to the Mathäserbräu, two long blocks by taxi! From the Munich ofBerlinish decadence and Prussian epaulettes to the Munich of honestBavarians! From chocolate and macaroons to pretzels and white radishes!From Grieg to "Lachende Liebe!" From a boudoir to an inn yard! From palebeer in fragile glasses to red beer in earthen pots!

The Mathäserbräu is up a narrow alley, and that alley is always fullof Müncheners going in. Follow the crowd, and one comes presently to arow of booths set up by radish sellers--ancient dames of incrediblediameter, gnarled old peasants in tapestry waistcoats and country boots;veterans, one half ventures, of the Napoleonic wars, even of the wars ofFrederick the Great. A ten-pfennig piece buys a noble white radish, andthe seller slices it free of charge, slices it with a silver revolvingblade into two score thin schnitzels, and puts salt between eachadjacent pair. A radish so sliced and salted is the perfect complementof this dark Mathäser beer. One nibbles and drinks, drinks and nibbles, and so slides the lazy afternoon. The scene is an incredible, playhousecourtyard, with shrubs in tubs and tables painted scarlet; a fit settingfor the first act of "Manon. " But instead of choristers in short skirts, tripping, the whoop-la and boosting the landlord's wine, one feasts theeye upon Münchenese of a rhinocerous fatness, dropsical and gargantuancreatures, bisons in skirts, who pass laboriously among the bibuli, offering bunches of little pretzels strung upon red strings. Sixpretzels for ten pfennigs. A five-pfennig tip for Frau Dickleibig, andshe brings you the _Fliegende Blätter_, _Le Rire_, the Munich or Berlinpapers, whatever you want. A drowsy, hedonistic, easy-going place. Notmuch talk, not much rattling of crockery, not much card playing. Themountain, one guesses, of Munich meditation. The incubator of Munich_gemütlichkeit_. 

Upstairs there is the big Mathäser hall, with room for three thousandvisitors of an evening, a great resort for Bavarian high privates andtheir best girls, the scene of honest and public courting. Between theBavarian high private and the Bavarian lieutenant all the differencesare in favour of the former. He wears no corsets, he is innocent of themonocle, he sticks to native beer. A man of amour like his officer, hedisdains the elaborate winks, the complex _diableries_ of that superiorbeing, and confines himself to open hugging. One sees him, in thesegreat beer halls, with his arm around his Lizzie. Anon he arouseshimself from his coma of love to offer her a sip from his _mass_ or towhisper some bovine nothing into her ear. Before they depart for theevening he escorts her to the huge sign, "_Für Damen_, " and waitspatiently 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, moreclean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for salein every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain forthe studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swisstowns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday schoolsuperintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stingingdeviltry, a swift massacre of all the commandments, but a liquid andtolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps, but at any rate it mellows. No Münchener ever threw a stone. 

And so, passing swiftly over the Burgerbräu in the Kaufingerstrasse, the Hackerbräu, the Kreuzbräu, and the Kochelbräu, all hospitable_lokale_, selling pure beer in honest measures; and over the variousPilsener fountains and the agency for Vienna beer--dish-waterystuff!--in the Maximilianstrasse; and over the various summer _keller_on the heights of Au and Haidhausen across the river, with theirspacious terraces and their ancient traditions--passing over all thesetempting sanctuaries of _mass_ and _kellnerin_, we arrive finally at theLöwenbräukeller and the Hofbräuhaus, which is quite a feat of arriving, it must be granted, for the one is in the Nymphenburgerstrasse, inNorthwest Munich, and the other is in the Platzl, not two blocks fromthe royal palace, and the distance from the one to the other is a goodmile and a half. 

The Löwenbräu 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 theofficial guide) for eight thousand drinkers. A lordly and impressiveestablishment is this Löwenbräu, 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 wasopened, on June 14, 1883, all the military bands in Munich played atonce in the great hall, and the royal family of Bavaria turned out instate coaches, and 100, 000 eager Müncheners tried to fight their way in. 

How large that great hall may be I don't know, but I venture to guessthat it seats four thousand people--not huddled together, as a theatreseats them, but comfortably, loosely, spaciously, with plenty of roombetween the tables for the 250 _kellnerinen_ to navigate safely withtheir cargoes of Löwenbräu. Four nights a week a military band plays inthis hall or a _männerchor_ rowels the air with song, and there is anadmission fee of thirty pfennigs (7-1/5 cents). One night I heard theband of the second Bavarian (Crown Prince's) Regiment, playing as anorchestra, go through a programme that would have done credit to the NewYork philharmonic. A young violinist in corporal's stripes lifted thecrowd to its feet with the slow movement of the Tschaikowsky concerto;the band itself began with Wagner's "Siegfried Idyl" and ended withStrauss's "Rosen aus dem Süden, " a superb waltz, magnificentlyperformed. Three hours of first-rate music for 7-1/5 cents! And a _mass_of Löwenbräu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country attwenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting andappetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple ofLethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew mymemories and dream my dreams and listen to my arteries hardening. 

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

The Hofbräuhaus! One hears it from afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of_mass_ lids, the sputter of the released _dunkle_, the sharp cries ofpretzel and radish sellers, the scratching of matches, the shuffling offeet, the eternal gurgling of the plain people. No palace this, for allits towering battlements and the frescos by Ferdinand Wagner in thegreat hall upstairs, but drinking butts for them that labour and areheavy laden: station porter, teamsters, servant girls, soldiers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, tinners, sweeps. 

There sits the fair lady who gathers cigar stumps from the platz infront of the Bayerischer Hof, still in her green hat of labour, but nowwith an earthen cylinder of Hofbräu in her hands. The gentleman besideher, obviously wooing her, is third fireman at the same hotel. At thenext table, a squad of yokels just in from the oberland, in their shortjackets and their hobnailed boots. Beyond, a noisy meeting ofSocialists, a rehearsal of some _liedertafel_, a family reunion of fourgenerations, a beer party of gay young bloods from the gas works, aconference 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 débris ofsuch lunches covers the floor. One wades through escaped beer, amongfloating islands of radish top and newspaper. Children go overboard andare succoured with shouts. Leviathans of this underground lake, _Lusitanias_ of beer, Pantagruels of the Hofbräuhaus, collide, draw off, collide again and are wrecked in the narrow channels. .. . A great puffingand 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 andpushes your _mass_ along the counter. Then the perspiring _bierbischof_fills it from the naked keg, and you carry it to the table of yourchoice, or drink it standing up and at one suffocating gulp, or take itout into the yard, to wrestle with it beneath the open sky. Roughnecksenter eternally with fresh kegs; the thud of the mallet never ceases;the rude clamour of the bung-starter is as the rattle of departing timeitself. Huge damsels in dirty aprons--retired _kellnerinen_, too bulky, even, for that trade of human battleships--go among the tables rescuingempty _mässe_. Each _mass_ returns to the shelf and begins anothercircuit of faucet, counter and table. A dame so fat that she must remainpermanently at anchor--the venerable _Constitution_ of thisfleet!--bawls postcards and matches. A man in _pinçe-nez_, a decadentdoctor of philosophy, sells pale German cigars at three for tenpfennigs. Here we are among the plain people. They believe in Karl Marx, _blutwurst_ and the Hofbräuhaus. They speak a German that is half speechand half grunt. One passes them to windward and enters the yard. 

A brighter scene. A cleaner, greener land. In the centre a circularfountain; on four sides the mediæval gables of the old beerhouse; hereand there a barrel on end, to serve as table. The yard is most gay on aSunday morning, when thousands stop on their way to church--not onlySocialists and servant girls, remember, but also solemn gentlemen inplug hats and frock coats, students in their polychrome caps and in allthe glory of their astounding duelling scars, citizens' wives in holidayfinery. 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 cousinwho is brewmaster of the largest brewery in Zanesville, Ohio. Is it truethat all the policemen in America are convicts? That some of theskyscrapers have more than twenty stories? What a country! And thosemillionaire Socialists! Imagine a rich man denouncing riches! And then, "_Grüss' Gott!_"--and the pots clink. A kindly, hospitable, tolerantfolk, these Bavarians! "_Grüss' Gott!_"--"the compliments of God. " Whatother land has such a greeting for strangers?

On May day all Munich goes to the Hofbräuhaus to "prove" the new bock. I was there last May in company with a Virginian weighing 190 pounds. Hewept with joy when he smelled that heavenly brew. It had the copperyglint of old Falernian, the pungent bouquet of good port, the acrid gripof English ale, and the bubble and bounce of good champagne. A beer todrink reverently and silently, as if in the presence of somethingtranscendental, ineffable--but not too slowly, for the supply islimited! One year it ran out in thirty hours and there were riots fromthe Max-Joseph-Platz to the Isar. But last May day there was enough andto spare--enough, at all events, to last until the Virginian and I gaveup, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian went to bed at the BayerischerHof at 12:30, leaving a call for 4 P. M. Of May 5. 

Ah, the Hofbräuhaus! A massive and majestic shrine, the Parthenon ofbeer drinking, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to the connoisseur, but a bit too strenuous, a trifle too cruel, perhaps, for thedilettante. The Müncheners love it as hillmen love the hills. Thereevery one of them returns, soon or late. There he takes his children, toteach them his hereditary art. There he takes his old grandfather, tosay farewell to the world. There, when he has passed out himself, hispallbearers in their gauds of grief will stop to refresh themselves, andto praise him in speech and song, and to weep unashamed for the loss ofso _gemüthlich_ a fellow. 

But, as I have said, the Hofbräuhaus is no playroom for amateurs. Myadvice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hotacids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to theHoftheatre Café, and that you there tackle a modest seidel ofSpatenbräu--first one, and then another, and so on until you master thescience. 

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 inquiryof the Herr Wirt regarding Fräulein Sophie, and that you present to her, when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments ofone who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisasmile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!

BERLIN

[Illustration: BERLIN]

BERLIN

I am back again, back again in New York. My rooms are littered withbattered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-dampsteamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlinbellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on bya perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and goneblue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the "L" trains ablock away, trains rankling up to Harlem with a sweating, strugglingpeople, the people of the Republic, their day's grind over, jammingtheir one way to a thousand flat houses, there to await, in an allunconscious poverty, the sunrise of still such another day. The lastcrack of a triphammer, peckering at a giant pile of iron down theblock, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the streetbelow, grunts its horn. A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out asporting extra. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. Amomentary quiet . .. And from somewhere in a nearby street I hear agrind-organ. What is the tune it is playing? I've heard it, Iknow--somewhere; but--no, I can't remember. I try--I try to follow theair--but no use. And then, presently, one of the notes whispers intomy puckering lips a single word--"_Mariechen_. " Then other noteswhisper others--"_du süsses Viehchen_"; and then others stillothers--"_du bist mein alles, bist mein Traum_. " And the battered bagsand the down-at-the-heel walking sticks and the still-damp steamerrugs 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 iswith me under the Linden trees--poor dear little Hulda who ever in theyears to come shall bring back to me the starlit romance of youth--andagain 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 threethousand miles over the seas. For it's night for me again inBerlin--_kronprinzessin_ of the cities of the world. 

I am again on the hitherward shore of the Hundekehlensee, flashing backits diamond smiles at the setting sun. I am sitting again near thewater's edge in the moist shade of the Grunewald, and the trees sing forme the poetry that they once sang to the palette of Leistikow. My nosecools itself in the recesses of a translucent _schoppen_ ofJohannisberger, proud beverage in whose every topaz drop lies imprisonedthe kiss of a peasant girl of Prussia. From the southward side of theGrunewaldsee the horn of a distant hunting lodge seems to call a welcometo the timid stars; and then I seem to hear another--or is it just anecho?--from somewhere out the spur of the Havelberge beyond. Or is justthe Johannesberger, soul of the most imaginative grape in Christendom?Or--woe is me--am I really back again across the seas in New York, andis what I hear only the horn of the taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the streetbelow?

But I open my too-dreaming eyes--and yes; I am in the Grunewald. Andthe summer sun is saffron in the waters of the lake. And about me, at athousand tables under the Grunewald trees, are a thousand people andmore, the people of the Kaiserland, their day's work over, clinking athousand _wohlseins_ in a great twilight peace and awaiting, in allunconscious opulence, the sunrise of yet such another day. And a greatband, swung into the measures by a firm-bellied _kapellmeister_ asgorgeous in his pounds of gold braid as a peafowl, sets sail into"Parsifal" against a spray of salivary brass. And the air about me isfull of "_Kellner!_" and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" and "_WienerRoastbraten und Stangenspargel mit geschlagener Butter!_" and "_ZweiSeidel, 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 athousand _prosits_ and "_Zwei Seidel, bitte!_" And no outrage upon theear is in all this guttural B minor, no rape of exotic tympani, but asense rather of superb languor and wholesome tranquillity, of harmoniousstomachic socialism, an orchestration of honest ovens and a diapason ofhonest _bräus_ and _brunners_, with their balmy wealth of nostrilarpeggios and roulades. 

And thus the evening breeze, come hither through the reeds andcypress from over the purpling Havel hills beyond, takes on an addedperfume, an added bouquet, as it transports itself to the sniffer overto the hurrying _krebs-suppen_ and thick brown-gravied platters and dewyseidels. My nose, in its day, has engaged with many a seductive aroma. It has met, at Cassis on the Mediterranean, the fumes breathed by_bécasse sur canapés_ and Château Lafitte '69--and it has ffd and ffdagain and again in an ecstasy of inhalation. It has encountered inMoscow, the regal vapours of _nevop astowka Dernidoff_ sweeping across aslender goblet of golden sherry--and it has been abashed at the deliriumof scent. On the Grand Boulevards, it has skirmished with punch _à laToscane_ flavoured with Maraschino and with bitter almonds--and hasinhaled as if in a dream. The juicy, dripping cuts of Simpson's inLondon, the paradisian pudding _sueldoiro_ on the little screenedveranda in the shadow of the six-minareted Mosque of El-Azhar in Cairo, the salmon dipped in Chambertin and the artichokes, sauce Barigoule, atSchönbrunn on the road to Vienna, the _escaloppes de foie gras à larusse_ (favourite dish of the late Beau McAllister) at Delmonico's athome--all these and more have wooed my nostril with their rarefragrances. But, though I have attended many a table and given audienceto many an attendant perfume, nowhere, nor never, has there been bornein upon me the like of that exquisite nasal blend of _bratens_ and_bräus_ with which the twilight breezes have christened me among thetrees of the Grunewald. Forgotten, there, are the roses on the moonlitgarden wall in Barbizon, chaperoned by the fairy forest ofFontainebleau; forgotten the damp wild clover fields of the Indiana ofmy boyhood. All vanished, gone, before the olfactory transports of thisconcert of hops and schnitzels, of Rhineland vineyards and upland_käse_. And here it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on theborder of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble _kellner_ at my elbow, with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, withthe stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band liftingme, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, andwith the innocent eyes of the fair fräulein under yonder treeintermittently englishing their coquettish glances from the_eisschokolade_ that should alone engage them--here it is that I likebest to bide the climbing of the moon into the skies over Berlin--hereit is that I like best to wait upon the city's night. 

Ah, Berlin, how little the world knows you--you and your children! Itsees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your everyvowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicosemistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. Itsees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out acyclopean vat of beer. It hears your music in the ta-tata-tata-ta-ta ofyour "_Ach, du lieber Augustin_" alone; the sum of your sentiment inyour "_Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten_. " Wise Americanjournalists, commissioned to explore your soul, have returnedcharacteristically to announce that you "In your German way" (_Americansynonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish_) seekdesperately 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 untoyourself, still in tigerish itch to be cosmopolitan, thefrou-frouishness of the flirting capital over the frontier. Wise oldphilosophers! Translating you in terms of your palaces of prostitution, your Palais de Danse, your Admirals-Casinos; translating you in terms ofyour purposely spurious Victorias, your Riche Cafés, your Fledermauses. As well render the spirit of Vienna in the key of the Kärntnerstrasse ateleven of the Austrian night; as well play the spirit of Paris in thediscords of its Montmartre, in the leaden pitch of its Pré Catélan atsunrise. Sing of London from the Astor Club; sing of New York from itsBryant Park at moontide, its Rector's, its ridiculous Café San Souci andits Madam Hunter's. 'Twere the same. 

Pleasure in the mass, incidentally, is perforce ever mechanical; a leveeat Buckingham Palace, a fête on the velvet terraces sloping into theNewport sea, a Coney Island gangfest, a city's electric den of gilt andtinsel. 

But the essence of a city is never here. Berlin, in the wanderlust ofits darkened heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begarneted, crimson-lipped Minna angling in its gaudy dance decoy in theBehrenstrasse; nor the satin-clad, pencilled-eyed Amelie ogling from her"reserved" table in the silly sham called Moulin Rouge; nor yet the morebaby-glanced, shirtwaisted Ertrude laughing in the duntoned Café Lang. Berlin is not she who beckons by night in the Friedrichstrasse; nor thefrowsy she who sings in the _bier-cabarets_ that hover about theLichtprunksaal. Berlin, under the stars, is the sound of soldierssinging near the arch of the Brandenburger Tor, the peaceful _bauer_ andhis frau Hannah and his young daughters Lilla and Mia lodged beforetheir _abend bier_ at a bare table on the darker side of the farJägerstrasse. Berlin, when skies are navy blue, is Heinrich, gallantrear private of Regiment 31, publicly and with audible ado encirclingthe waist of his most recent _engel_ on a bench in the Lindenpromenade--Berlin, in the Inverness of night, is Hulda, little Alsatianrebel--a rebel to France--a rebel to the Vosges and thevineyards--Hulda, the provinces behind her, and in her heart, there torule forever, the spirit of the capital of Wilhelm der Grösste. For thespirit of Berlin is the laughter of a pretty, clean and healthygirl--not the neurotic simper of a devastated ware of the Madeleinehighway, not the raucous giggle of a bark that sails Piccadilly, not themeaningfull and toothy beam of a fair American badger--none of these. Itis a laugh that has in it not the motive power of Krug and Company orRuinart _père et fils_; it smells not of suspicioned guineas to beenticed; it is not an answer to the baton of necessity. There's heartbehind it--and it means only that youth is in the air, that youth andsteaming blood and a living life, be the world soever stern on themorrow, are a trinity invincible, unconquerable--that the music is good, the seidel full. Ah, Berlin--ah, Hulda--ah, youth . .. Ah, youth, whatthings 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 HerrKempinski's victual studio, running from the Leipzigerstrasse through tothe Krausenstrasse and constituting what is probably the largest stomachSenate and House of Representatives in the seven kingdoms. Here, in themultitudinous _säle_--the Mosel-saal, the Berliner-saal, the hugeGrauer-saal, the Burgen-saal, the Alter-saal, the Erker-saal, theGelber-saal, the Cadiner-saal, the Eingangs-saal, the Durchgangs-saal, the Brauner-saal and the various other chromatic and geographicalsaals--one may listen in dyspeptic Anglo-Saxon abashment to such aconcerto of down-going _suppen_ and _coteletten_ and _gemüse_ anddown-gurgling Laubenheimer and Marcobrunner and Zeltinger andBrauneberger as one may not hear elsewhere in the palatinates. And here, in the preface to the night, one may prehend while again eating (for inGermany, you must know, one's eating is limited in so far as time andoccasion are concerned only by the locks of the alimentary canal and thecontumacy of the intestines) the grand democracy of this kaiser city. For in this giant eating hall that would hold a round half-dozen NewYork restaurants and still offer ample elbow room for the dissection ofa knuckle and the wielding of a stein, one observes a vast andheterogeneous commingling of the human breed such as may not be observedoutside an American charity ball. At one table, a lieutenant of Uhlanswith his _mädel_ of the moment, at another a jolly old _spitzbub'_sending with a loose jest a girl from the chorus of the Theater desWestens into blushes--and being sent himself in return with a looser. Atanother (one removed from that of a duo of palpable daughters of joyengaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with a colossal _roastbifenglisch mit Leipziger allerlei_) a family man _with_ his family. Atstill another, another family man with his. At another, the Salome fromthe Königliches Opernhaus--at another a noted _advokat_--at another, twolittle girls (they can't he more than sixteen years old) enjoying theirmeal and their bottle of Rhenish wine undisturbed, unogled, unafraid. 

But why need to pursue the catalogue? This, too, is Berlin. Not theBerlin of Herr Adlon's inn, gilded with the leaf of Broadway and theStrand to flabbergast and ensnare the American snooper--not the Berlinof the Bristol, with its imitation cocktails--not the Berlin of theEsplanade, gaudy dump of the Bellevuestrasse, with its sugar tongs, finger bowls and kindred criteria of degeneracy--not this Berlin; butthe real Berlin of the German people, warm-hearted, mindful only of itsown affairs, all-understanding, all-sympathetic, all-human--its larynxeternally beseeching liquid succour, its stomach eternally demandingchow. And, too--and note this well--not the Berlin of the rouged menuand silk-stockinged _kellner_, not the trumped-up Berlin of thevaselined vassal, of the bowing _oberkellner_, not the Berlin of theaffected canteloupe (3, 50 m. ) and the affected biscuit tortoni (2, 40m. )--but the Berlin of _beinfleisch im kessel mit Meerrettich_ (90 pf. ), the Berlin of _kräftbruhe mit nudeln_ (40 pf. )--the Berlin of Mamsch andTraube. 

And now I am again in the streets of the city, rattling with the racingflotilla of things awheel. (Or is the rattle that I hear only the rattleof the "L" trains a block away, and am I really back in New York?) Butno; for still I see in the brilliant Berlin moonlight the bronzeQuadriga of Victory atop the distant Gate of Brandenburg and still Ihear a group of students singing in the Café Mozart, and still--but whatis moonlight beside the fairy light in your eyes, fair Hulda? What issong beside the soft melody of your smile? Normandy is in the night air. .. "_man lacht, man lebt, man liebt und man küsst wo's Küsse 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 therewith 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 likesleeping sapphires and a smile as melodious as mandolins by the summersea? As melodious as your own, fair Hulda. 

 * * * * *

The play is over and I have alternated a contemplation of the lovesand fears, the tremors and triumphs of some obese stage princess with alusty entr'-acte excursion into Culmbacher and the cheese sandwich, served, as is the appealing custom, in the theatre promenade. And thusfortified against the night, I pass again into the thoroughfares stilla-rattle with the musketry of wheels. I perceive that many amateurAmerican Al-Raschids are abroad in the land, pockets echoing thetintinnabulation of manifold marks and eyes abulge at the prospect ofmidnight diableries. See that fellow yonder! At home, probably a familyman, a wearer of mesh underwear, an assiduous devourer of the wisdom ofGeorge Harvey, a patron of the dramas of Charles Rann Kennedy, a spankerof children, an entertainer at his board of the visiting clergyman, apantophagous subscriber, a silk hat wearer--in brief, a leading citizen. See him oleaginate his grin at the sight of a passing painted paver. (Tohis mind, probably a barmaid out for an innocent lark. ) See him make forthe Palais de Danse where (so he has read in the _Saturday EveningPost_) one may purchase the Berliner spirit at so much per pound. Wetrack him, and presently we behold him seated at a table in thissplendiferous hall of Terpsichore and Thaïs "opening wine" andpurchasing _blumen_ for a battle-scarred veteran who is telling himconfidentially that she just got in that afternoon from her poor home ina little Bavarian village and that she feels so alone in this big, greatcity, with its lures and temptations, its snares and its pitfalls. Soonthe bubbles of the grape are percolating through his arteries and soonthe "Grosse Rosinen" waltzes have mellowed his conscience and soon. .. . 

 * * *

"Berlin spirit, huh!" he is telling his wife a month later--"Berlinspirit? 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 theTabarin, at the Amor-säle and the Rosen-säle, we track down others such, "seeing the night life of Berlin. " We see them, too, champagne beforethem, coquetting with Fräulein Ilona, who numbers Militär-Regiment 42 asher gentleman friend, and with innocent-looking little Hedwig, who inher day has tramped the streets of Brussels and Paris, of London andVienna; we see them intriguing elaborately with these sisters of sorrow, who, intriguing in turn against the night's wage, assist the skirmish onwith incendiary quip and tender touch of foot and similar cantharides offinancial amour. And we track them later to such institutions as theFledermaus--"_der grosse luxuriöse, vornehmstes vergnügungsplatz, paradiesgarten, grösste sehenswürdigkeit Berlins_" (in theadvertisements)--as the Victoria and the Café Riche, the Westminster andthe Café Opéra and--

 * * *

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

 * * *

Ah, Cairo dreaming in the Nile's moon-haze--are you to be judged thusby the narrow street that snakes into the dark of Bulak? And Budapest bythe Danube--are you to be judged by the wreckage of the Stefansplatzthat has drifted on your shores? And you, Vienna, and you, Paris--areyou, too, to be measured thus, as measured you are, by the crimson lightof your half-worlds that for some obscures your stars?

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

But the Berlin that I know and love is not this Berlin, the Berlin ofAmericans, not the spangled Berlin, the hollow-laughing Berlin, theBerlin decked with rhinestones, set alight with prismatic electroliersand offered up as mistress to foreign gold. When the River Spree isamethystine under springtime skies and the city's lights are yellow inthe linden trees, I like best the Berlin that sips its beer in the peaceof the little by-streets, the Berlin that laughs in the Tiergarten nearthe Lake of the Goldfish and on the Isle of Louisa, where watchthroughout eternity the graven images of Friedrich Wilhelm the Third andof Wilhelm the First in the years of his boyhood. I like best the Berlinthat sings with the students in the undiscovered, untainted _wein_ and_bier stuben_ of the thitherward thoroughfares, the Berlin that dancesin the Joachimstrasse, where the _mädels_, each to herself a Cecilie, shirtwaisted, poor, happy, kick up their German heels, drink up theirGerman beer, assault the Schweizerkäse and bring back memories of thatparadise of all paradises--the Englischer Garten of Munich theIncomparable, the Divine. 

In such phases of this kaiser city, one is removed from the so-calledTingel-Tangel, or _variétés_ 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 "_diematschiche--getanzt von original importierten Mexikanerinnen_. " So, too, is one removed from the garish demi-women of the so-called "QuartierLatin" near the Oranienburger Tor and from the spurious deviltries ofthe Rothenburger Krug and the Staffelstein, with their "property"students, cheeks scarred with red ink, singing "Heidelberg" (from "ThePrince of Pilsen") for the edification and impression of foreignvisitors, and fiercely and frequently challenging other prop. Studentsto immediate duel. The girls, alas, in these places are not unlovely. Well do I remember the dainty Elsa of the Hopfenblüthe, she of facekissed by the Prussian dawn, and employed at sixteen marks the week towink dramatically at the old roués and give the resort "an air. " Welldoes memory repeat to me the loveliness of delicate little Anna, shewith hair like the waving golden grass in the fields that skirt theroadways from Targon to Villandraut, and paid so much the month to laughuproariously every time the hands of the clock point the quarter-hour. And Rika and Dessa and Julia and Paulina--all sweet of look, allprofessional actresses; Bernhardts of Fun (inc. ), Duses of Pleasure(ltd. ). Not the girls in whose hearts Berlin is beating, not the girlsin whose _élan_ Berlin lives and laughs. Leave behind all places such asthese, seeker after the soul of Berlin. Leave behind the Tingel-Tangelwith its uniformed bouncer at the gate, with its threadbare piano, withits "_na kleener Dicker_" smirked by soiled _decolletés_, its dolefulnear-naughty ditties--"_Ich lass mich nicht verführen, dazu bin ich zuschlau, ich kenne die Manieren der Männer ganz genau_"--"I won't be ledastray, I am too slick for that, I know the ways of mankind, I've gotthem all down pat. " Leave behind the Berlin of the Al-Raschids and keepto the Berlin of the Germans. 

Just as the worst of Paris came from America, so has the worst ofBerlin come from America by way of Paris. The maquereau spirit ofMontmartre, with its dollar lust and its poisoned blood, has not yet thethroat of this German night city full in its fists; but the fists aretightening slowly--and the voice behind them speaks not French, but thejargon of Broadway. And yet, when finally the fingers work closer, closer still, around that throat, when finally the death gurgle ofspontaneous pleasure and of clean, honest, fearless night skiescomes--and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from thedunghill. I must believe it. For they--_we_--may kill the laughter ofBerlin's streets--as we have killed it in Paris--but we can never killthe heart, the spirit and the living, quivering corpuscles of Germanblood. The French may drink stronger stuffs, eat richer foods and loveoftener than the Germans, and may be better fighters--but they cannotlaugh, they cannot sing as the Germans laugh and sing. And Berlin is thenew Germany, the Germany of to-day and to-morrow . .. The Germany whoselaughter will grow louder as the decades pass and whose song will echoclearer from the distant hills. While Paris (to go to Conrad)--is notParis and her land already at Bankok, and far, far beyond? Her childrenspent before their day, listening to the too-soon lecture of Time? Andall 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 astill sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; ourfaces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyeslooking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out oflife, that while it is expected is already gone--has passed unseen, in asigh, in a flash--together with the youth, with the strength, with theromance 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 faintpurple-pink of the tremulous dawn. .. . Were I a Heine!) In my far-awayAmerica, Hulda, in far-away New York, it is now onto midnight. I seeBroadway, strumpet of the highways, sweltering collarless under the loudelectricity of Times Square. I see a fetid blonde, dangling a patentleather handbag, hurrying to an assignation in Forty-fifth Street. I seetwo actors, pointing their boasts with yellow bamboo canes. A chop sueyrestaurant flashes its sign. And I can hear the racking ragtime out ofShanley's. A big sightseeing bus is howling the fictitious lure of theBowery, Chinatown and the Ghetto to gaping groups from the hinterlands. A streetwalker. Another. Another. In the subway entrance across thestreet, a blind man is selling papers. A "dip" calls a friendly "Hello, Dan" to the policeman in front of the drugstore and works his steps overthe car tracks toward the drunk teetering against the window of theJew's clothing store. The air is dust-filled. An intermittent bakinggust from the river sends a cast-aside _Journal_ fluttering aloft. Adirt-encrusted bum begs the price of a coffee. Another streetwalker, appearing from the backwaters of Seventh Avenue, grins in thedrugstore's green light. .. . 

But to your eyes, Hulda, must be given no such picture. Yet such is theNew York I come from; such the New York, stunning by day in its NewWorld strength and splendour, loathsome by night in its hot, illuminedbawdry. Ah, city by the Hudson, forgetting Riverside Drive twinklingamid the long tiara of trees, forgetting the still of the lake and coolof the boulders that plead in Central Park, forgetting the superbmajesty of Cathedral Heights and the mighty peace of thebyways--forgetting these all for a Broadway!

But the symphony of the Berlin dawn is ours now, fräulein, and havedone with intrusive memories, corroding reflections. What are my peopledoing 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 itfalls upon the Siegesallee and gives life again to the marble heroes ofGermany? Have they ever stood with such as you, fräulein, in thecoral-tipped hours of the dawning day before the image of Friedrich derGrosse in that wonderful lane and felt, through this dead, cold thing, the thrill of an empire's glory? Do they know the witchery of thewithering Berlin night as it plays out its wild fantasia in the leavesof the Linden trees? Have they ever been with such as you, fräulein, atthe base of the Pillar of Triumph in Königsplatz or sat with such asyou, fräulein, near the Grotto Lake in the Tiergarten, or stood withsuch as you, fräulein, on one of the bridges arching the Spree in thefirst trembling innuendo of morning?

Where are these, my people?

You will find them seeking the romance of Berlin's greying night amidthe Turkish cigarette smoke and stale wine smells of the half-breedcabarets marshalled along the Jägerstrasse, the Behrenstrasse and theirtributaries. You will find them up a flight of stairs in one of theall-night Linden cafés, throwing celluloid balls at the weary, patient, left-over women. You will find them sitting in the balcony of thePavilion Mascotte, blowing up toy balloons and hurling small cones ofcoloured paper down at the benign harlotry. You will see them, hatless, shooting up the Friedrichstrasse in an open taxicab, singing "Give MyRegards to Broadway" in all the prime ecstasy of a beer souse. You willfind them in the rancid Tingel-Tangel, blaspheming the _kellner_ becausethey can't get a highball. You will find them in the Nollendorfplatzgaping at the fairies. You will see them, green-skinned in the tyranniclight of early morning, battering at the iron grating of their hotel forthe porter to open up and let them in. 

For them, are no souvenirs of happy evening hours that sing always inthe heart of a Berlin they can never know. For them, shall be no memoryof that vast and insuperable _gemütlichkeit_, that superb and pacificdemocracy, that dwells and shall dwell forever by night in the spirit ofthe German people. They will never know the Berlin that lifts its seidelto the setting sun, the Berlin that greets the moonrise, the Berlin thatmeets the dawn. The Berlin that they know is a Berlin of Frenchchampagnes, Italian confetti, Spanish dancers, English-trained waiters, Austrian courtesans and American hilarities. They interpret a city byits leading all-night restaurant; a nation by the _demi-mondaine_ whohappens 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 windouble-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. Myrooms are littered with battered bags and down-at-the-heel walkingsticks and still-damp steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from thehands of maudlin bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down thehall, urged on by a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, stilllocked and gone blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo ofthe rankling "L" trains. The last crack of a triphammer, peckering at agiant 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 andthe panes rattle again. A momentary quiet . .. And from somewhere in anearby street I hear again the grind-organ. 

It is playing "Alexander's Ragtime Band. "

LONDON

[Illustration: LONDON]

LONDON

Macauley's New Zealander, so I hear, will view the ruins of St. Paul'sfrom London Bridge; but as for me, I prefer that more westerly archwhich celebrates Waterloo, there to sniff and immerse myself in thetown. The hour is 8:15 _post meridien_ and the time is early summer. Ihave just rolled down Wellington Street from the Strand, smoking aninepence Vuelta Abajo, humming an ancient air. One of Simpson'sincomparable English dinners--salmon with lobster sauce, a cut from thejoint, two vegetables, a cress salad, a slice of old Stilton and a mugof bitter--has lost itself, amazed and enchanted, in my interminablerecesses. My board is paid at Morley's. I have some thirty-eight dollarsto my credit at Brown's, a ticket home is sewn to my lingerie, there isa friendly jingle of shillings and sixpences in my pocket. The stonecoping invites; I lay myself against it, fold my arms, blow a smoke ringtoward the sunset, and give up my soul to recondite and mellowmeditation. 

There are thirteen great bridges between Fulham Palace and the Isle ofDogs, and I have been at pains to try every one of them; but the best ofall, for such needs as overtake a well fed and ruminative man on asummer evening, is that of Waterloo. Look westward and the towers of St. Stephen's are floating in the haze, a greenish slate colour with edgesof peroxide yellow and seashell pink. Look eastward and the fine olddome of St. Paul's is slipping softly into greasy shadows. Look downwardand the river throws back its innumerable hues--all the coal tar dyesplus all the duns and drabs of Thames mud. The tide is out and along thesouth bank a score of squat barges are high and dry upon the flats. Opposite, on the embankment, the lights are beginning to blink, and fromthe little hollow behind Charing Cross comes the faint, far-away brayingof a brass band. 

All bands are in tune at four hundred yards, the reason whereof youmust not ask me now. This one plays a melody I do not know, a melodyplaintive and ingratiating, of clarinet arpeggios all compact. Some layof amour, I venture, breathing the hot passion of the Viennese Jew whowrote it. But so heard, filtered through that golden haze, echoed backfrom that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of humanfrailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something whollychastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes thejoys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must befed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger isfrankly a brute; but once he has yielded he departs forthwith from hisgorged carcass and flaps his transcendental wings. .. . Do honeymoonersever come to Waterloo Bridge? I doubt it. Imagine turning from thatsublime sweep of greys and sombre gilts, that perfect arrangement ofblank masses and sweeping lines, to the mottled pink of a cheek latelyvirgin, the puny curve of a modish eyebrow, the hideous madness of atrousseau hat!. .. 

I am no stranger to these moods and whims. I am not merely a casualoutsider who has looked about him, sniffed deprecatingly and taken thetrain for Dover--which leads to Calais--which leads to Paris--whichleads to youthful romance. I have wallowed in London as the asceticwallows in his punitive rites, with a strange, keen joy. I have been avoluntary St. Simeon on its cold grey street corners. I have eaten sooften--and so much--at Simpson's that I know two of the waiters by theirfirst names. And I could order correctly their famous cuts by looking atmy watch, knowing at what hour the mutton was ready, at what hour theroast beef was rarest. So long have I worn English shirts that even nowI find myself crawling into the American brand after the manner of thewoodchuck burrowing into his hole. Frequently I find myself profferingdimes to the fair uniformed vestals of our theatres who present me withprogrammes. I have read each separate slab in Westminster Abbey. I havemade suave and courtly love to a thousand nursemaids in Hyde Park. Ihave exuded great globules of perspiration rowing on the Thames, whilethe fair beneficiary of my labours lolled placidly in the boat's sternupon a hummock of Persian pillows. I know every overhanging lovers' treefrom Richmond to Hampton Court. I have consumed hogsheads of ale at "TheSign of the Cock. " I have followed the horses at Epsom and Newmarket, atGoodwood and Ascot. I have browsed for hours in French's book store. Ihave lounged in luxurious taxicabs upholstered in pale grey, and riddeninterminably back and forth through the Mall, Constitution Hill andPiccadilly. .. . 

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

Although for years one could not lose me in London, or flabbergast mewith those leaning-tower-of-Pisa addresses (the items piled one upon theother in innumerable strata), I knew nothing of the goings-on when thewindows of London became patches of orange light. In fact, I assumedthat when I slept London also snored. To think of London and of nightromance was like conjuring up the wildest of anachronisms. Romance therewas in London, but to me it had always been shot through with sunshine. It had been the hard commercial romance of the Stock Exchange. Or thecourteous and impeccable romance of polished hats and social banalities. Or the gustatory romance of Cheddar cheese, musty ale, roast lamb andgreens. Or it had been the romance of the Cook's tourist--the romance ofcathedrals, towers, palaces, dungeons and parliamentary buildings. Orthe romance of pomp, of horseguards and helmets and epaulettes and brassbuttons and guns at "present arms. " Or it had been the anæmic romance ofCeylon tea, toasted muffins and _petits fours_. As for amours andintrigues and subdued lights and dances and cabarets and sparkling_demi-mondaines_ and all-night orchestras and liquid jousting bouts andperfume and champagne and rouge and kohl--who would have thought thatLondon, 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, theGod-fearing, the episcopal, the nice, the careful, the scrupulous, thealoof, the decorous, the proper, the dignified--who would have thoughtthat London would loosen up and relax and partake of the potions of Erosand Bacchus?

And yet--and yet--back of London's grim and formidable exterior therelurks 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 thetricklings of _Cordon Rouge_. Her steel heart flutters at the touch of awheedling phryne. She, too, can wear the strumpet garb of youth. She, too, in the vitals of her nature, longs for the gay romance of theBoulevard Montparnasse ere the American possessed it. She, too, admiresthe rhythmic parabolic curve of bare shoulders. Silken ankles andamorous whisperings stir her--if not to deeds of valour, then at leastto deeds of indiscretion. London, it seems, cannot look upon the moonwithout suffering some of the love qualms of Endymion. In fine, London, the mentalized, is human. 

It was only last year that the rumours of London's night life sankinto the depths of my sensitive ears. At first I put such murmuringsaside as psychiatric ravings of visionaries and yearners. Always at thefirst signs of neurosis--the inevitable result of the simple life--Idashed to Paris, to the golden-haired Reine at the Marigny; or else Icabled to Anna of the Admiral's Palast in Berlin; or, if time permitted, I sought the glittering presence of Bianca Weise at Vienna. (Ah, Bianca!_Du süsser Engel!_) Never once did it occur to me that youth stalkedabroad in the London streets, that gaiety sang among the wine cups inLondon cafés, that romance went drunk amid the mazes of abandoneddancing. London had always seemed to me essentially senile--grey-hairedand sedate. And so I devoted myself to the labours of youth, as did theyouthful George Moore; and when the first crocuses of the springappeared, and the lilacs came forth, and the April primroses got into myblood, and the hawthorn sent forth its pink and white shoots, I soughtthe Luxembourg or the Tiergarten or the Prater. Why, indeed, I thought, should spring come to London? Why should Henley, an Englishman, havecalled Spring "the wild, the sweet-blooded, wonderful harlot"? And whyshould the year's first crocus have brought him luck? Had he indeed lainmouth to mouth with spring in London? Perhaps. But I doubted him. Therefore, before the lavender appeared, I was beyond the channel. 

But last spring I met the girl in the flat below me. Her name wasElsie--Winwood, I think. Of one thing, however, I am sure; she had coldgrey eyes and auburn hair--an uncanny combination; but she was typicalof the English girl, the girl who had been educated abroad. This girland I came face to face on the stairs one day. 

"Why do you always leave London at the best time of the year?" she askedme. 

"I am young, " I confessed. "In the spring I live by night, and one mayonly sleep in London at night. "

"But you do not know London, " she told me. 

She smiled intimatingly and disappeared into the gloom of her studio. 

That night I thought of Arthur Symons's "London Nights. " Nobody in anycity in the world had more subtly caught the spirit of youthfulbuoyancy, the spirit of romantic evanescence, the spirit of midnightabandon. Could it be that he was but a "poseur, " a dealer in falsewords, a concocter of the non-existent? Did the eyes of dancers nevergleam in his? Did Renée never issue forth from that dim arch-way wherehe waited? Did Nora never dance upon the pavement? Was Violet but thefigment of a poet's dreams? And was that painted angel, Peppina, a merepsychic snare? Could any man--even a poet--write as he did of Muriel atthe Opera if there had been no Muriel? It seemed highly improbable. Finally I decided that, ere departing for Reine or Anna or Bianca, Iwould sally forth into the night of London and see if, after all, romance did not lurk in the darkened corners. 

At first I started without a guide, trusting to my own knowledge of thecity, intending to follow up vague rumours to which I had lent but halfan ear. Later I equipped myself with a guide--not a professional guide, but a man of means and of easy morals, a young barrister in whose familywere R. A. 's, M. P. 's and K. C. 's. 

"Shall we see it all?" asked Leonard. 

"All, " I replied. "From the high to the low. "

We set forth. It was eleven o'clock, and the theatregoers were swarmingin the Strand. We were heading for a great arch of incandescent light. 

I was beginning to be disappointed. Visions of the dark-eyed Reine, inveils of mauve and orange, silhouetted against the synchromatic sceneryof the Marigny swam before my eyes. I gave vent to a cavernous yawn. Ihad often had supper at the Savoy. But such a performance was not myidea of romance. I had never considered that luxurious dining room inthe light of adventure. But with Leonard's suggestion I entered andfound that, when the mental lenses are focused correctly, it in truthpossesses much of that same gorgeousness and lavish spirit which nodoubt invested the banquets of Belshazzar. 

Thus begins the night romance of London:

 Souper. Oeufs de Pluvier Consommé Double en Tasse Fillet de Merlan à l'Anglaise Pommes Nature Caille Cocotte Arménienne Buffet Froid Salade Petit Glace Parisienne Friandises

This is arbitrary, however. On the crested bill of fare we learn thatthere are other things to be had, but that they must be ordered _à lacarte_. Glancing down the mammoth card we begin reading such items:_Saumon Fumé_, _Pigeon Cocotte Bonne Femme_, _Rognons Sautés_, _Champignons_, _Caille Royal aux Raisins_, _Tournedos Sauté Mascotte_, _Noisette d'Agneau Fines Herbes_, _Poussin de Hambourg Vapeur_, _Médaillon Ris de Veau Colbert_, _Terrine de Boeuf à la Mode Glacée_, _Suprême de Chapon Jeannette_ . .. And so on, almost indefinitely. I sawnothing in the fact--nor had I seen anything in the fact--that the menucontained not one English word; but later in the week these affectationsof French dishes became highly significant. They were really the symbolof London's night romance. They were the tuning fork which gave thepitch for London pleasures. For romance and gaiety in London are graftedto an otherwise unromantic and lugubrious hulk. All joys in thatterrible city are lugged from overseas, and, in the process of suturing, the spontaneity has been lost, the buoyancy has disappeared, the honestyhas vanished. 

But no people can be without romance. No nation can withstand foreverthe engines of repression. Not all the moral lawmakers of England havesucceeded in stamping out the natural impulses. Hypocrisy, that greatmediator, sits into the game and stacks the cards. There is no moresensuous dining room in the world than the Savoy. There is no moreimpressive vision of human beings in the primitive act of eating thancan be gained from the top of the stairway which leads into that greatdouble room. And nowhere on earth is there a more cosmopolitan gatheringthan sits down to the Savoy supper when the theatres are over. Here atleast is visual romance; and when we inspect the people at closer rangewe glimpse a more intimate romance. One catches snatches of conversationfrom a dozen languages within the radius of hearing. Here is moderncivilisation at apogee--the final word in luxury--the _dénouement_ ofspectacular life. Go to the Aquarium in St. Petersburg, to the Adlon inBerlin, to the Bristol in Vienna, to the Café de Paris; go wherever youwill--to Cairo, to Buenos Aires, to Madrid--the Savoy at the supper hoursurpasses them all. From the pantalooned giants who relieve you of yourouter garments to the farthest table in the room where the great windowsoverlook the Embankment Gardens, there is not one note to mar thegorgeous _ensemble_. 

But we must not tarry too long amid the jewelled women, the impeccablemusic and the subdued conversation of the Savoy. In fact, it is notpossible to linger. No sooner have we hastened through the courses ofour supper and started to sip a liqueur than we are suddenly plungedinto darkness. A hint! A warning! A silent but eloquent reminder thatthe moral man must hasten to his bed, that midnight is upon us, thatrespectability demands immediate retirement. When the lights come onagain there is a gentle fluttering of silken wraps, a shuffling of feet, a movement of chairs. The crowds, preparing to depart, are obeying thatlofty English law which makes eating illegal after twelve-thirty. If youtarry after this signal for departure, a Parisian born waiter taps yougently on the shoulder and begs of you to respect the majesty of thelaw. Within ten minutes of the darkened warning the dining room isempty. Liqueurs are left undrunk. Ices are deserted. Half-consumedsalads are abandoned. Out into the waiting taxis and limousines poursthat vast assemblage. In fifteen minutes an atmosphere of desolationsettles upon the streets. The day is ended--completely, finally, irrevocably. The moral subtleties of the fathers have been sensed andobeyed. Virtue snickers triumphantly. 

"And now?" I demand of my companion. 

"S-s-s-h!" he warns. And, leaning over me, he pours strange and luridinformation into my gaping ear. "Now, " he whispers, "to the SupperClubs, the real night life of London--wine, women, song and dance. "

There is a mystery in his mien. And, obeying the warning of anadmonishing finger, I silently follow him into a taxicab. A low, guttural order is given to the driver, the import of which is shieldedfrom the inquisitive world by my companion using his hands as a tube toconnect his mouth with the ear of the chauffeur. 

I had heard of these supper clubs, but they had meant nothing to me. Irarely ate supper and detested clubs. Their literature which frequentlycame to me, had left me cold. But, as I was carried in the taxicabthrough dark alleys and twisted streets, certain intimations in theseprinted invitations came back to me with a new meaning. Lest theiniquity of the London pleasure seeker be underestimated, let me supplyyou with the details of one of these supper club circulars. I will nottell you the name of the club: it has probably been changed by now. Nosooner do the police put one club out of business (so far as I can see, merely to gratify the demand of the moralists that all sinners be flayedin public) than it changes its name and reopens to the old membership. Let it be noted here that in order to eat or drink in London aftertwelve-thirty at night you must be a member of something; and to becomea member of a London supper club is not so easy a matter as one mightimagine. Traitors are forever worming their way into such societies, andthe management exercises typical British discretion in selecting thedevotees for its illegal victualing organisation. The club of which Ispeak, and whose circular--a masterpiece of low cunning--lies before me, has its headquarters on a street so small that in giving the address toeven the most erudite of London geographers it is necessary to mentiontwo or three larger streets in the neighbourhood. 

The object of this club, it seems, is "to cultivate a form of artpreviously unknown in England--the Cabaret. " A noble and worthy desire!But in the next paragraph we learn that this aristocratic uplift doesnot begin until eleven-thirty P. M. ; and by reading further we note theimplication that it ceases at one-thirty A. M. , at which hour thecultivation of this unknown art--the Cabaret--is supplanted by a GipsyOrchestra, to say nothing of the International Minstrels. Farther on welearn that once a month the club gives a dinner to its members, and thatthis dinner is followed by a "Recital Evening" in honour of and "ifpossible" (Oh, subtlety!) under the direction of Lascelles Abercrombie, Frank Harris, Arthur Machen, T. Sturge Moore, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. (Note: Although during the last year I have supper-clubbedincessantly whilst staying in London, I think, in all justice to theabove-mentioned illustrious men, that it should be stated that not oncehave I had the pleasure of being personally directed by any one ofthem. )

One evening during the month, so runs the forecast, will be devoted toJohn Davidson (I missed that evening); one to Modern Fairy Tales (Isomehow missed that evening also); another to Fabian de Castro and "OldGipsy Folk Lore and Dance" (Alas, alas, that I should have missed thatevening, too!). But this loss of culture, so far as I personally wasconcerned (and other, too, I opine), was not accompanied by any physicalloss; that is to say, the statement on the manifest that during theperformance there would be available "suppers and every kind ofrefreshment" is eminently correct, and veracious almost to the point offault. Even when the performance was not given--as seemed always to bethe case--there was no cessation in the kitchen activities. Suppersthere were and, what is more to the point, every kind of refreshment. 

The most important item on this manifest I have saved until the last. There is in it something of the epic, of the beyond, of the trans andthe super. I print it in capitals that it may the better penetrate:

NO FIXED CLOSING HOURS

Such is the unlucky star under which I was born that I have escaped atthese clubs all of the artistic and cultural performances. When I haveattended them no light has been thrown on the Drama, Opera, Pantomime, Vocal Music, or "such delicate Art of the past as adapts itself to theframe of an intimate stage, and more especially all such new art as inthe strength of its sincerity allows simplicity. " Nor has it been myluck to be present during the production of "Lysistrata, " byAristophanes, or "Bastien et Bastienne, " by W. A. Mozart, or "Orpheus, "by Monteverde, or "Maestro di Capella, " by Pergolese, or "Timon ofAthens, " by Purcell. Nor have I been present when an eminent technicianhas rendered Florent Schmitt's "Palais Hanté, " or Arnold Schoenberg's"Pierrot Lunaire. " All of which are booked for production or rendition. And yet I cannot feel that my money has been entirely wasted. It hasbought me "every kind of refreshment, " and catering by Frenchmen, andthe company of lovely ladies--ladies, who, I fear, are more familiarwith the works of Victoria Cross than the works of Aristophanes, andwhose ears are attuned to the melodies of Theodore Moses-Tobani ratherthan to the diabolical intricacies of Schoenberg's piano pieces. 

Let us indulge ourselves for a moment in what is known to ritualists asa responsive service, thus:

Q. --What is a Supper Club?

A. --A Supper Club is a legal technicality--a system whereby theEnglish law is misconstrued, misapplied, controverted, disguised andoutdone. Specifically, it is a combination restaurant, café, and dancehall, the activities in which begin at about one A. M. And continue solong as there are patrons whose expenditures warrant the orchestra beingretained and the electric lights being left on. A Supper Club is usuallydownstairs, decorated in the cheap imitation of a grape arbour, furnished with small tables, comfortable wicker chairs, suave andsophisticated waiters, an orchestra of from six to ten pieces and asmall polished floor for purposes of dancing. Supper Clubs are run tomeet every size of pocketbook. There are those whose patrons do not knowthe titillating effects of champagne; and there are those where themanagement serves no other form of febrifuge. Club members naturallyneed no introduction to one another, with the result that suchformalities are here entirely dispensed with. In the better grade SupperClubs the ladies are not admitted unless in evening dress, while atother establishments even such sartorial formalities are not insistedupon. The object of a Supper Club is to furnish relaxation to the tiredbusiness man, profits to the management, usufructs to the police andincomes to the lady patrons. The principal activities of a Supper Clubare (1) drinking; (2) dancing; (3) wooing. 

There you have it. In the Astor Club (or is it the Palm Club? Or hasthe name been changed since spring?) one finds the higher type ofnocturnal rounder. Evening clothes are obligatory for all. Champagne andexpensive wines constitute the only beverages served. The orchestra iscomposed of very creditable musicians; and the lady patrons, chosen bythe management by standards of pulchritude rather than of socialstanding, are attestations to the good taste of the corpulent andamiable Signor Bolis, owner and director. The men whose money pours intothe Signor's coffers are obviously drawn from the better class ofEnglish society--clean-cut, clean-shaven youths; slick and pompous armyofficers; prosperous-looking middle-aged men who, even at a supper club, drop but little of their genteel dignity. On my numerous visits to thisclub I failed to find one member who did not have about him in a markeddegree an atmosphere of deportmental distinction. Even during thosefinal mellow hours, when the dawn was sifting through the cracks of thewindow above the stairs, there was little or none of that loud-mouthedboisterousness which follows on the heels of alcoholic imbibitions inAmerica. Surfacely the Astor Club is an orderly and decorousinstitution, and so fastidious were the casual "good evenings" betweenthe men and women that only the initiated would have guessed that erethat meeting they had been strangers. Even under the protection ofmembership and the police, the Englishman does not know how to laugh. Heis decorous and stilted during the basest of intriguing. 

I had become a member of the Astor Club after as much red tape, investigation and scrutiny as would have been exerted by a board of themost exclusive social club. I had signed my full name, my address andbusiness, beneath which had been appended the names of two of mysponsors. I had had a blue seal pinned beneath my coat lapel and anengraved card sewn in my chemise. After which precautions and rigmaroleI was admitted each evening by the gorgeous St. Peter in red zouavebreeches and drum major's jacket who guarded the outer portal. 

Have I given the impression that, once inside, I assumed virtues whichill became me; that I sat apart and watched with critical eyes themerriment around me? Then let the impression be forever blasted. I amnot a virtuous man according to theological standards. I have been ahardened sinner since birth. I gamble. Beer is my favourite drink. Ithas been flatteringly whispered into my ear that I dance beautifully. Iread Cellini and Rabelais and Boccaccio with unfeigned delight. I amenchanted by the music of Charpentier and Wolf-Ferrari. I smoke strongcigars. And I do not flee at the sight of beautiful women. In short, Iam a man of sin. Born in iniquity (according to the moral fathers) Ihave never been regenerated. Therefore let me admit that the spirit ofthe vice crusader was not mine as a member of the Astor Club. I spentmany a delightful half-hour chatting with Héloïse Dessault, formerly atFouquet's in Champs Elysées; with Mizzi Schwarz, one-time frequenter ofthe Café de l'Europe, in Vienna; with Hedwig Zinkeisen, of Berlin'sPalais de Danse. .. . 

Here is a characteristic thing about the London supper club: themajority of the girls and--to London's shame let it be noted--the moreattractive girls are all from the Continent. Without these feminineimportations I doubt if the supper clubs could be maintained. At themusical galleries--a third-rate supper place run by the Musical andTheatrical Club at 30 Whitfield Street, near Tottenham Court Road, W. --Iwas approached and greeted by a little French girl, whose knowledge ofEnglish was almost as limited as is my knowledge of Russian. 

But I was forgetting Elsie Winwood, and to forget Elsie in thisshameless chronicle would be disloyalty. At the Astor Club one evening Imet her. I realised then what that intimating smile had meant when, theweek before, she had met me on the stairs. I thereupon forgot Leonard, and visited the night debaucheries of London in the company of thegrey-eyed, auburn-haired Elsie. I have every reason to believe that ereI sailed back to America I had sounded the depths of London'siniquities. By stealth and copious bribing, plus the influence of myfair companion, I found that, though it was difficult it wasnevertheless possible to eat and drink and dance in London till dawn. Yet at no place to which we went could I find anything unlike any othercity in the world--the only difference being that in London one must actsurreptitiously, while other cities permit all of the London indulgencesopenly. Surely the night life of London is innocent enough! Whymembership in expensive clubs is necessary in order for one to enjoy itis a question to which only British logic is applicable. The searcherfor thrills or the touring shock absorber will find nothing in London torattle his psychic slats. Even the professional moralist, skilled in thesubtle technicalities of sin, can find nothing in England's capital tomake him shudder and flee. The chief criticism against London night lifeis that it is hypocritical, that it is sordid, because it is denied andindulged in subterraneanly. The hypocrisy of it all is doublyaccentuated by the curious fact that the British public permitstrafficking in the promenades of its theatres, such as even New York hasbalked at these many years. I refer to such theatres--called "musichalls, " that they may be distinguished from the smaller houses in whichthe serious drama is produced--as the "Alhambra, " in Leicester Square;the "Empire Theatre of Varieties, " also in Leicester Square; the "PalaceTheatre of Varieties" on Cambridge Circus in Shaftesbury Avenue; the"London Pavilion" in Piccadilly; and the "Hippodrome" at the corner ofCranbourn Street and Charing Cross Road. Let us inspect their vaudevilleofferings. Let us snoop into their wares. At these theatres, equippedwith numerous and eminently available cafés, women, frail and fair, sitand walk about on the promenades and generously waive introductions whenthe young gentlemen evince a desire to speak to them. But there is noromance here. These promenades are even without illusion. Here, amongthe theatres, is where London tries to be Paris. Just as she tries to beNew York in Regent Street. Here is where the most moral town inChristendom discovers her native hoggishness. Here is the great slavemarket of the English. 

But we are out for vaudeville and not for slaves, and so we pursue ourvirtuous way up the stream of amiable fair until we reach the PalaceMusic Hall, where a poster advertising a Russian dancer inspires us topart with half a dozen shillings. Luxurious seats of red velvet, wideenough for a pair of German contraltos, invite to slumber, and thejuggler on the stage does the rest. Twenty times he heaves a cannon ballinto the air, and twenty times he catches it safely on his neck. TheRussian dancer, we find, is booked for ten-thirty, and it is now buteight-fifty. "Why wait?" says the fair Elsie. "It will never kill him. "So we try another hall--and find a lady with a face like a tomatosinging a song about the derby, to an American tune that was stale in1907. Yet another, and we are in the midst of a tedious ballet foundedupon "Carmen, " with the music reduced to jigtime and a flute playing outof tune. A fourth--and we suffer a pair of comedians who impersonateAmericans by saying "Naow" and "Amurican. " When they break into "MyCousin Carus'" we depart by the fire escape. We have now spent eightdollars on divertisement and have failed to be diverted. We take onemore chance, and pick a prize--Little Tich, to wit, a harlequin no morethan four feet in his shoes, but as full of humour as a fraternal orderfuneral. 

Before these few lines find you well, Little Tich, I dare say, will beon Broadway, drawing his four thousand stage dollars a week and longingfor a decent cut of mutton. But we saw him on his native heath, uncontaminated by press agents, unboomed by a vociferous press, undefiled by contact with acquitted murderers, eminent divorcées, "perfect" women, returned explorers who never got where they went, andsuchlike prodigies and nuisances of the Broadway 'alls. Tich, as I havesaid, is but four feet from sole to crown, but there is little of thedwarf's distortion about him. He is simply a man in miniature: inaspect, much like any other man. His specialty is impersonation. Firsthe appears as a drill sergeant, then as a headwaiter, then as a gascollector, then as some other familiar fellow. But what keen insight andpenetrating humour in every detail of the picture! How mirth bubblesout! Here we have burlesque, of course, and there is even some horseplayin it, but at bottom how deft it is, and how close to life, and howwholly and irresistibly comical! You must see him do theheadwaiter--hear him blarney and flabbergast the complaining guest, observe him reckon up his criminal bill, see the subtle condescension ofhis tip grabbing. This Tich, I assure you, is no common mountebank, buta first-rate comic actor. Given legs eighteen inches longer and anequator befitting the rôle, he would make the best Falstaff of ourgeneration. Even as he stands, he would do wonders with Bob Acres--andI'd give four dollars any day to see him play Marguerite Gautier. 

But enough of theatres! There are two night restaurants in Londonwhich should be mentioned here. Let what little fame they may attainfrom being set down in these pages be theirs. They more nearlyapproximate to youthful whole-heartedness than any institutions in thecity. Perhaps this is because they are so distinctly Continental, because they are almost stripped of anything (save the language spoken)which savours of London and the British temperament. They are the VillaVilla, at 37 Gerrard Street (once the residence of Edmund Burke), andMaxim's, at 30 Wardour Street. Their reputations are far from spotless, and English society gives them a wide berth. Because of this they havebecome the meeting place of clandestine lovers. Here is the genuinelaughter and the wayward noise of youth. Nine out of every ten of theirpatrons are young, and four out of every five of the girls are pretty. Music is continuous and lively, and they possess an intimacy found onlyin Parisian cafés. Do I imply that they are free from sordidness andcommercialism? They are not. Far from it. There is no night life inLondon entirely free from these two disintegrating factors. But theirsimulacrum of gaiety is far from obvious. When the fifteen-minutewarning for evacuation is given a good-natured cheer goes up, and a pealof laughter which shakes the chandeliers and drowns out the musicians. The crowd at least sees the humour of the closing law, and, being unableto repeal it, laughs at it. In the Villa Villa and Maxim's, hands meetlingeringly over the table; faces are near together; and a public stolenkiss is not a rarity. When the doors of these restaurants are locked ona deserted room the exiles do not go decorously and dolorously home. Inanother hour you will see many of these same couples dancing at thesupper clubs. 

Here we are again in Signor Bolis's establishment--which means that wehave made the round. .. . Elsie is yawning. I, too, am tired of the danceand sick of the taste of champagne. I motion the waiter and pay thebill. I draw Elsie's long coat about her, and we pass out into the clearLondon night. We walk home circuitously--down Cranbourn Street and intoCharing Cross Road where it turns past the National Gallery into St. Martin's place. Through Duncannon Street, we enter the Strand, nowalmost deserted save for a few stray figures and a hurrying taxicab. Wethen turn into Villiers Street, and in a few minutes we are on YorkTerrace, overlooking the Thames embankment. The elm trees and thebeeches stand about like green ghosts in the pale night. At the edge ofthe water Cleopatra's Needle is a black silhouette. We should like towalk through the Gardens in the starlight, but the formidable iron gatesare locked against us. So we turn up Robert Street into Adelphi Terrace. We lean for a moment against the railing. 

There below us, a crinkling tapestry of gilts, silvers and copperypinks, is ancient Father Thames, the emperor and archbishop of allearthly streams. There are the harsh waters (but now so soft!) that theRomans braved, watching furtively for blue savages along the banks, andthe Danes after the Romans, and the Normans after the Danes, andinnumerable companies of hardy seafarers in the long years following. Atthis lovely turning, where the river flouts the geography books byflowing almost due northward for a mile, bloody battles must have beenfought in those old, forgotten, far-off times--and battles, I venture, not always ending with Roman cheers. One pictures some young navallieutenant, just out of the Tiber Annapolis, and brash and nosey likehis kind--one sees some such youngster pushing thus far in his lightcraft, and perhaps going around on the mud of the south bank, and therefighting to the death with Britons of the fog-wrapped marshes, "hairy, horrible, human. " And one sees, too, his return to the fleet so snug atGravesend, an imperfect carcass lashed to a log, the pioneer and prophetof all that multitude of dead men who have since bobbed down this dirtytide. Dead men, and men alive--men full of divine courage and highhopes, the great dreamers and experimenters of the race. Out of thissluggish sewer the Anglo-Saxon, that fabulous creature, has gone forthto his blundering conquest of the earth. And conquering, he has broughtback his loot to the place of his beginning. The great liners flashingalong their policed and humdrum lanes, have long since abandoned London, but every turn of the tide brings up her fleet of cargo ships, straggling, weather-worn and grey, trudging in from ports far-flung andincredible--Surinam, Punta Arenas, Antofagasta, Port Banana, Tang-chow, Noumea, Sarawak. If you think that commerce, yielding to steel andsteam, has lost all romance, just give an idle day or two to Londondocks. The very names upon the street signs are as exotic as a breath offrankincense. Mango Wharf, Kamchatka Wharf, Havannah Street, the BorneoStores, Greenland Dock, Sealers' Yard--on all sides are thesesuggestions of adventure beyond the sky-rim, of soft, tropical moons andcold, arctic stars, of strange peoples, strange tongues and strangelands. In one Limehouse barroom you will find sailors from BehringStraits and the China Sea, the Baltic and the River Plate, the Congo andLabrador, all calling London home, all paying an orang-outang'sdevotions to the selfsame London barmaid, all drenched and paralysed byLondon beer. .. . 

The _kaiserstadt_ of the world, this grim and grey old London! And theriver of rivers, this oily, sluggish, immemorial Thames! At its widest, I suppose, it might be doubled upon itself and squeezed into the lowerPotomac, and no doubt the Mississippi, even at St. Louis, could swallowit without rising a foot--but it leads from London Bridge to every coastand headland of the world! Of all the pathways used by man this is thelongest and the greatest. And not only the greatest, but the loveliest. Grant the Rhine its castles, the Hudson its hills, the Amazon itsstupendous reaches. Not one of these can match the wonder and splendourof frail St. Stephen's, wrapped in the mists of a summer night, or thecool dignity of St. Paul's, crowning its historic mount, or the ironbeauty of the bridges, or the magic of the ancient docks, or thetwinkling lights o' London, sweeping upward to the stars. .. . 

PARIS

[Illustration: PARIS]

PARIS

For the American professional seeker after the night romance of Paris, the French have a phrase which, be it soever inelegant, retains still abrilliant verity. The phrase is "_une belle poire_. " And its Yankeeequivalent is "sucker. "

The French, as the world knows, are a kindly, forgiving people; andthough they cast the epithet, they do so in manner tolerant and withlight arpeggio--of Yankee sneer and bitterness containing not a trace. They cast it as one casts a coin into the hand of some maunderingbeggar, with commingled oh-wells and philosophical pity. For in theFrenchman of the Paris of to-day, though there run not the blood ofLafayette, and though he detest Americans as he detests the Germans, heyet, detesting, sorrows for them, sees them as mere misled yokels, uncosmopolite, obstreperous, of comical posturing in ostensible un-Latinlech, vainglorious and spying--children into whose hands has fallenZola, children adream, somnambulistic, groping rashly for those thingsout of life that, groped for, are lost--that may come only as lifecomes, naturally, calmly, inevitably. 

But the Frenchman, he never laughs at us; that would his cultureforbid. And, if he smile, his mouth goes placid before the siege. Hisattitude is the attitude of one beholding a Comstock come to the hill ofHörselberg in Thuringia, there to sniff and snicker in Venus's crimsoncourt. His attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Tristan _envoyage_ for a garden of love and roses he can never reach. His attitude, the attitude of an old and understanding professor, shaking his headmusingly as his tender pupils, unmellowed yet in the autumnal fragrancesof life, giggle covertly over the pages of Balzac and Flaubert, over thenudes of Manet, over even the innocent yearnings of the bachelor Chopin. 

The American, loosed in the streets of Paris by night, however sees inhimself another and a worldlier image. Into the crevices of his flathouse in his now far-away New York have penetrated from time to timevague whisperings of the laxative deviltries, the bold saucinesses ofthe city by the Seine. And hither has he come, as comes a jack tar toWest Street after protracted cruise upon the celibate seas, to smellout, as a very devil of a fellow, quotation-marked life and itsattributes. What is romance to such a soul--even were romance, theromance of this Paris, uncurtained to him? Which, forsooth, the romanceseldom is; for though it may go athwart his path, he sees it not, hefeels it not, he knows it not, can know it not, for what it is. 

Romance to him means only an elaborate and circumspect winking at someperfectly obvious and duly checked little baggage; it means to him onlya scarlet-cushioned seat along the mirrored wall of the Café Américain, a thousand incandescents, a string quartette sighing through "Un Peud'Amour, " a quart of "wine. " Romance to him is a dinner jacket prowlingby night into the comic opera (American libretto) purlieus of modernMontmartre, with its spurious extravaganzas of rouge and roister, withits spider webs of joy. For him, there is romance in the pleasure girlswho sit at the tables touching St. Michel before the Café d'Harcourt, making patient pretence of sipping their Byrrh until a passing "_Eh, bébé_" assails their tympani with its suggested tintinnabulation ofneeded francs: for him--"models. " And the Bullier, ghost now of the oldBullier where once little Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundredpalettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier with its colouredelectricity and ragtime band and professional treaders of the Avenue del'Observatoire, is eke romance to his nostril. And so, too, he finds itatop the Rue Lepic in the now sham Mill of Galette, a capon of itsformer self, where Germaine and Florie and Mireille, veteran battle-axesof the Rue Victor Massé, pose as modest little workgirls of theBatignolles. And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of Broadway, theCafé de Paris--and in the Moulin Rouge, which died forever from theearth a dozen years ago when the architect Niermans seduced the placewith the "art nouveau"--and amid the squalid hussies of the fakeTabarin--and in the Rue Royale, at Maxim's, with its Tzigane orchestracomposed of German gipsies and its toy balloons made by the EliteNovelty Co. Of Jersey City, U. S. A. 

The American notion of Paris under the guardianship of the Frenchstars, of Paris caressed by the night wind come down from Longchamps andfiltered through the chestnut branches of Boulogne, is usually achievedfrom the Sons of Moses who, in spats and sticks, adorn the entrance ofthe Olympia and the sidewalks of the Café de la Paix and interrogativelyguide-sir the passing foreign mob. This Paris consists chiefly of a viewof the exotic bathtub of the good King Edward of Britain, quondam Princeof Wales, in the celebrated house of the crystal staircase in the RueChabanais, of one of the two "mysterious" midinette speak-easys in thedark Rue de Berlin (where the midinettes range from the tender age offorty-five to fifty), of the cellar of the tavern near the Panthéon withits tawdry wenches and beer and butt-soaked floors--of tawdry resortsand tawdrier peoples. 

Do I treat of but a single class of Americans? Well, maybe so. But theother class--and the class after that--think you _these_ are sodifferent? So different, goes my meaning, in the matter of appropriatingto themselves something of the deep and very true romance that singsstill in the shadowed corners of this one-time Flavia of capitals, thatsounds still, as sounds some far-off steamboat whistle wail in thedeath-quiet of night, pleading and pathetic, that calls still to thedreamers of all the world from out the tomb of faded triumphs andforgotten memories?

True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris of Paris's glory--gone thatParis that called to Louise with the luring melody of a zithered soul. True, alas, it is, that the Paris of the Guerbois, with its crowd ofother days--Degas and Cladel and Astruc and the rest of them--is nomore. Gone, as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of Bruant, him ofthe line of François Villon--now become a place for the vulgar oglingsof Cook's tourists taxicabbing along the Boulevard Rochechouart. Gonethe wild loves, the bravuras, the _camaraderie_ of warm night skies inthe old Boulevard de Clichy, supplanted now with a stridentconcatenation of Coney Island sideshows: the "Cabaret de l'Enfer, " withits ballyhoo made up as Satan, the "Cabaret du Ciel, " with its "grotto"smelling of Sherwin-Williams' light blue paint, the "Cabaret du Néant, "with its Atlantic City plate glass trick of metamorphosing the visitingdoodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse, " with its mean Marie Lloydspecies of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts, " with its charge oftwo francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed uplike Harry B. Smith "poets, " in black velvet, corduroy _grimpants_ andwiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of theattendant citizenry of Louisville. And gone, too, with the song ofClichy, is the song from the heart of St. Michel, the song from theheart of St. Germain. "Tea rooms, " operated by American old maids, havepoked their noses into these once genuine boulevards . .. And, as ifgiving a further fillip to the scenery, clothing shops with windowshaughtily revealing the nobby art of Kuppenheimer, postcard shops ladento the sill's edge with lithographs disclosing erstwhile _SaturdayEvening Post_ cover heroines, and case upon case displaying in lordlyenthusiasm the choicest cranial confections of the house of Stetson. .. . 

What once on a time was, is no more. But Romance, notwithstanding, hasnot yet altogether deserted the Paris that was her loyal sweetheart inthe days when the tricolour was a prouder flag, its subjects a prouderpeople. There is something of the old spirit of it, the old verve of it, lingering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in the edisoned highwaysof the Left Bank, if not in the hitherward boulevards, then stillsomewhere. But where, ask you, is this somewhere? And I shall tell you. This somewhere is in the eyes of the Parisian girl; this somewhere is inthe heart of the Parisian man. There, romance has not died--one mustbelieve, will never die. 

And, having told you, I seem to hear you laugh. "We thought, " I wouldseem to hear you say, "that he was going to tell us of concrete places, of concrete byways, where this so gorgeous romance yet tarries. " And youare aggrieved and disappointed. But I bid you patience. I am still tooyoung to be sentimental: so have you no fear. And yet, bereft of all ofsentimentality, I _re_-issue you my challenge: this somewhere is in theeyes of the Parisian girl, this somewhere is in the heart of theParisian man. 

By Parisian girl I mean not the order of Austrian wenches who twisttheir tummies in elaborate tango epilepsies in the Place Pigalle, northe order of female curios who expectorate with all the gusto ofAmerican drummers in La Hanneton, nor yet the Forty-niners whoforegather in the private entrance of 16 Rue Frochot. I do not mean thedead-eyed joy jades of the café concerts in the Champs Elysées. I do notmean the crow-souled scows who steam by night in the channels off thePlace de la Madeleine. The girl I mean is that girl you notice leaningagainst the onyx balustrade at the Opéra--that one with lips of Burgundyand cheeks the colour of roses in olive oil. The girl I mean is thatphantom girl you see, from your table before the Rotonde across the way, slipping past the iron grilling of the Luxembourg Gardens--that girlwith faded blouse but with eyes, you feel, a-colour with the lightningof the world's jewels. The girl I mean is that girl you catch sightof--but what matters it where? Or what she leans against or what shewears or what her lips and eyes? If you know Paris, you know her. Whether in the Allée des Acacias or in the boulevard Montparnasse, sheis the same: the real French girl of still abiding Parisian romance; thereal French girl in whose baby daughter, some day, will be perpetuatedthe laughter of the soul of a city that will not fade. And in whose babygirl in turn, some day long after that, it will be born anew. 

Ah, me, the cynic in you! Do you protest that the girl of thebalustrade, the girl of the Luxembourg, are very probably American girlshere for visit? Well, well! _Tu te paye ma tête. _ Who has heard ofromance in an American girl? I grant you, and I make grant quickly, thatthe American girl is, in the mass, more ocularly massaging, more nimblewith the niblick, more more in several ways than her sister of France;but in her eyes, however otherwise lovely, is glint of steel whereshould be dreaming pansies, in her heart reverie of banknotes whereshould be _billets doux_. 

And so by Parisian man I mean, not the chorus men of Des Italiens, betalcumed and odoriferous with the scents of Pinaud, those weird birdswho are guarded by the casual Yankee as typical and symbolic of thenation. Nor do I mean the fish-named, liver-faced denizens of the regiondown from the Opéra, those spaniel-eyed creatures who live in the tracksof petite Sapphos, who spend the days in cigarette smoke, the nights inscheming ambuscade. Nor yet the Austrian cross-breeds who are to bebeheld behind the _gulasch_ in the Rue d'Hauteville, nor thesemi-Milanese who sibilate the _minestrone_ at Aldegani's in the Passagedes Panoramas, nor the Frenchified Spaniards and Portuguese who gobblethe _guisillo madrileño_ at Don José's in the Rue Helder, nor thehalf-French Cossacks amid the _potrokha_ in the Restaurant Cubat, northe Orientals with the waxed moustachios and girlish waists who may beobserved at moontide dawdling over their _café à la Turque_ at MadameLouna Sonnak's. These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more than thehabitués of Back Bay are the Americans of Boston, no more than theAmericans of Boston are--Americans. 

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It is night in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaveslike a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with themelody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderfuland fugitive world? And do you hear with me again the twang of guitarscome out the hedges of the Avenue Marigny? And do you smell with me therare perfume of the wet asphalt and feel with me the wanderlust in thespirit soul of the Seine? Through the frost on the windows can you lookout across the world and see with me once again the trysting tables inthe Boulevard Raspail, a-whisper with soft and wondrous monosyllables, and can you hear little Ninon laughing and Fleurette sighing, and littleHélène (just passed nineteen) weeping because life is so short and deathso long? Are you young again and do memories sing in your brain? Anddoes the snow melt from the landscape of your life and in its placebloom again the wild poppies of the Saint Cloud roadways, telegraphingtheir drowsy, content through the evening air to Paris?

Or is the only rosemary of Paris that you have carried back with youthe memory of a two-step danced with some painted bawd at the Abbaye, the memory of the night when you drank six quarts of champagne withoutonce stopping to prove to the onlookers in the Rat Mort that an Americancan drink more than a damned Frenchman, the memory of that fine cut ofroast beef you succeeded in obtaining at the Ritz?

 * * * * *

Did I mention food? Ah-h-h, the night romance of Parisian nutriment!Parisian, said I. Not the low hybrid dishes of the bevy ofBritish-American hotels that surround the Place Vendôme and march up theRue de Castiglione or of such nondescripts as the Tavernes Royale andAnglaise--but _Parisian_. For instance, my good man, _caneton à labigarade_, or duckling garnished with the oozy, saliva-provoking sauceof the peel of bitter oranges. There is a dish for you, a philterwherewith to woo the appetite! For example, my good fellow, sole Mornay(no, no, not the "sole Mornay" you know!), the sole Mornay whose eachand every drop of shrimp sauce carries with it to palate and nostril thefaint suspicion of champagne. Oysters, too. Not the Portuguese--thosearrogant shysters of a proud line--but the Arcachons Marennes andCancales _supérieures_: baked in the shell with mushrooms and cheese, and washed down exquisitely with the juice of grapes goldened by theFrench suns. And salmon, cold, with sauce Criliche; and artichokes madesentimental with that Beethoven-like fluid orchestrated out of caviar, grated sweet almonds and small onions; and ham boiled in claret andtouched up with spinach _au gratin_. The romance of it--and the wonder!

But other things, alackaday, must concern us. _Au 'voir_, my beloveds, _au 'voir_! _Au 'voir_ to thee, _La Matelote_, thou fair and fair andtoothsome fish stew, and to thee, _Perdreau Farci à la Stuért_, thouaristocratic twelve-franc seducer of the esophagus! _Au 'voir_, myadored ones, _au 'voir_. 

_Voilà!_ And now again are we afield under the French moon. What if nomore are the grisettes of Paul de Kock and Murger to fascinate the eyewith wistful diableries? What if no more the old Vachette of the Boul'Mich' and the Rue des Ecoles, last of the _cafés littéraires_, once theguzzling ground of Voltaire and Rousseau and many such another profoundimbiber? What if no more the simple Montmartroise of other times, and inher stead the elaborate wench of Le Coq d'Or, redolent of new satin andparfum Dolce Mia? Other times, other manners--and other girls! And if, forsooth, Ninette and Manon, Gabrielle and Fifi, arch little mousmés ofanother and mayhap lovelier day, have long since gone to put deeper soulinto the cold harps of the other angels of heaven, there still are withus other Ninettes, other Manons and other Gabrielles and Fifis. "La viede Bohéme" is but a cobwebbed memory: yet its hosts, though scatteredand scarred, in spirit go marching on. The Marseillaise of romance isnot stilled. In the little Yvette whose heart is weeping because theglass case in the Café du Dôme this day reveals no letter from her sogrand André, gone to Cassis and there to transfer the sapphire of thesea and mesmerism of roses to canvas, is the heart of the little Yvetteof the Second Empire. In the lips of Diane that smile and in the eyes ofHélène that dream and in the toes of Thérèse that dance is the smile, isthe dream, is the dance in echo of the Paris of a day bygone. 

Look you with me into the Rue de la Gaité, into theGaité-Montparnasse, still comparatively liberated from the intrusion offoreign devils, and say to me if there is not something of old Parishere. Not the Superba, Fantasma Paris of Anglo-Saxon fictioneers, notthe Broadwayed, Strandified, dandified Paris of the Folies-Bergère andthe Alcazar, but the Paris still primitive in innocent and unbribedpleasure. And into the Bobino, its sister music hall of the commonpeople, where the favourite Stradel and the beloved Berthe Delny, "_petite poupée jolie_, " as she so modestly terms herself, bring thegrocer and his wife and children and the baker and his wife and childrentemporarily out of their glasses of Bock to yell their immense approvaland clap their hands. I have heard many an audience applaud. I haveheard applause for Tree at His Majesty's in London, for Schroth at theKleines in Berlin, for Féraudy at the Comédie Française, for Skinner atthe Knickerbocker--and it was stentorian applause and sincere--but Ihave never heard applause like the applause of the audience of thesedrabber halls. The thunders of the storm king are as a sonata againstthe staggering artillery of approbation when Pharnel of the Montparnassesings "_C'est pas difficile_"; the howlings of the north wind are aszephyrs against the din of eulogy when Marius Reybas of the Bobino liftsa mighty larynx in "Mahi Mahi. " Great talent? Well, maybe not. But showme a group of vaudevillians and acrobats who, like this group at theGaité, can amuse one night with risqué ballad and somersault and thenext with Molière--and not be shot dead on the spot!

Leave behind you Fysher's, where the smirking monsieur fills the redupholstery with big-spending American hinds by warbling into theirliquored bodies cocoa butter ballades of love and passion, and come overto the untufted Maillol's. And hear Maillol sing for the price of abeer. Maillol's lyrics are not for the American virgin: but, at that, they sing laughter in place of Fysher lech. Leave behind you Paillard's, vainglorious in its bastard salades Danicheff, its soufflés Javanaise;leave the blatant Boulevard des Italiens for the timid _bistrop_ ofMonsieur Delmas in the scrawny Rue Huygens, with its _soupe aux legumes_at twenty centimes the bowl, its _cotelette de veau_ at fifty the plate. A queer oasis, this, with old Delmas's dog suffering from the St. Vitusand quivering against the tables as you eat; with its marked napkins ina rack, like the shaving cups in a rural barber shop, one napkin a weekto each regular patron. Avaunt, ye gauds of Americanized Paris. Here arepoor and starving artists come to dine aristocratically on seventy-fivecentimes--fifteen cents. Here are no gapings of Cook's; here no Broadwayprowlers. A dank hole, yes, but in its cracked plaster the sense ofRomany sunsets of yonder times. Leave behind the dazzling dance placesof theatrical Montmartre, American, and come back of the wine shop inthe Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève! Leave behind the turning millwheel, American, and come into the Avenue de Choisy, where over apreglacial store a couple of cornets baffle the night and set a hundredfeet in motion, feet from the Gobelin quarter, feet from theButte-aux-Cailles! More leathery feet, to be sure, than the suéde feetof the Ziegfeld Montmartre, but kicking up a different wax dust, the waxdust of a different Paris. 

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It is springtime in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousandmemories. Can you, now remote in the American winter, hear again throughthe bang of the steaming radiator and the crunch on the winter's snowsthe song that Sauterne sang into your heart on the terrace named afterthe lilacs--on that wonderful, star-born evening when all the worldseemed like a baby's first laugh; all full of dreams and hopes andthrilling futures? And can you rub the white cold off the panes and lookout across the Atlantic to a warmer land and see again the Gardens ofthe Tuileries sleeping in the moon glow and Sacré Coeur sentinelledagainst the springtime sky and the tables of the cafés along the GrandBoulevards agog and a-glitter and the green-yellow lights of theAmbassadeurs tucked away in the trees and the al fresco amours atFouquet's and the gay crowds on the Avenue de l'Opéra and the massivesplendour of Notre Dame blessing the night with its towered hands andgirls shooting ebony arrows from the bows of ebony eyes? And no smell ofChild's cooking filters into the open to offend the nostril, for thesachet of the Bois de Boulogne breeze is again on the world. Ah, Bois deBoulogne, silent now under the slumbering heavens, where your equal?From the Prater to the Prado, from the Cassine to Central Park, one maynot find the like of you, fairy wood of France!

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Romance hunter, come with me. Stomach-turned at the fat niggers dressedup like Turks and Algerians and made to lend an "air" to the haunt ofthe nocturnal belly dancers in the Rue Pigalle, sickened at the stupidlewdities of the Rue Biot, disgusted at the brassy harlotries of theLapin Agil', come with me into that _auberge_ of the Avenue Trudainewhere are banned catch-coin stratagems, fleshly pyrotechnics, thatlittle refuge whose wall gives forth the tableau of Salis, he of theNiagaran whiskers and the old Chat Noir, strangling the adolescentversifiers of Montmartre, the tableau of the crimson rose of Poetryblossoming from out their strangling pools of blood. Come with me andsing a chorus with the crowd in the "conservatoire" of the BoulevardRochechouart and beat time, like the rest of it, with knife on plate, with glass on table. Come away from the Brasserie des Sirènes ofMademoiselle Marthe in the Faubourg Poissonnière, from the Rue Dancourt, from the Moulin Rose in the Mazagran--from all such undiluted cellars ofvicious prostitution--if these be Paris, then West Twenty-eighth Streetin New York. 

Look you, romance seeker, rather into the places of Montépin andEugène Sue. The moon is down. The sound of dance is stilled in the city. So go we into the Rue Croissant, with its shaveless thuggeries andmarauding cabs. It is dark, very. And very quiet. And the sniff ofunknown things is to be had in the air. Dens of drink with their furtivethieves . .. The enigma of the shadows of the church of Saint Eustache. .. Slinking feet to the rear of you . .. At length, the Rue Pirouetteand the sign of the angel Gabriel on the lantern before the house. Hereis good company to be found! Well do I remember the _bon-camaraderie_ ofHenri Lavérte, that most successful of Parisian burglars, of the goodJean Darteau, that most artistic of all Parisian second story virtuosi, of pretty Mado Veralment, who was not convicted for the murder of hererstwhile lover Abernal, nor, at a later date, for that of her erstwhilelover Crepeat, both of whom, so it had been rudely whispered by herenemies, had rashly believed to desert her for another charmer. Wittyand altogether excellent folk. Indeed, I might go further from the truththan to say that in no woman have ever I found a deeper, a moreauthentic appreciation of the poetry of Verlaine than in thisMademoiselle Mado. 

So, too, up the stone steps and into the Caveau of the Rue desInnocents . .. And here--likewise a jolly party. Inquire of most personsabout Le Caveau and you will be apprised that it is a "vile hole, " "aplace of the lowest order. " It _is_ dirty, so much I will grant; and it_is_ of a Brobdingnagian smell. Also, is it frequented almost entirelyby murderers, garroters, and thieves. But to say it is a "vile hole" or"a place of the lowest order" is to say what is not true. It isimmeasurably superior to the tinselled inn of the Rue Royale. And itshabitués constitute an infinitely more respectable lodge. If the leftwall of the cavern contains its "roll of honour"--the names of all theerstwhile noted gentlemen patrons of the establishment who have, becauseof some slight carelessness or oversight, ended their days in thecompany of the public executioner--I still cannot appreciate that thelist is any the less civilised than the head waiter's "roll of honour"at the celebrated tavern in the Avenue de l'Opéra. Nor do the numerousscribbled inscriptions on the other walls, such saucy epigrams as "Tohell with the prefect of police, " "The police are damned low flea-fulldogs" and the like impress me less favourably than the scribbledinscriptions on notes of assignation placed covertly by subsidisedwaiters into the serviettes of the Callot-adorned Thaïses in thespectacularized haunts of the Bois. The piano in Le Caveau may bediabetic, senescent, and its operator half blind and all knuckles (as heis), but the music it gives forth is full of the romance of Sheppard andTurpin, of stage coach days and dark and nervous highways, of life whenlife was in the world and all the world was young. 

Paris when your skies are greying, how many of us know you? Do we knowyour Rue du Pont Neuf, with its silent melodrama under the dawningheavens, or do we know only the farce of your Montmartre? Do we know thedrama of your Comptoir, of your Rue Montorgueil, when your skies arefaintly lighting, or do we know only the burlesque of your Maxim's andyour Catélans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler people isdone, see the laughter in dancing eyes in the Rue Mouffetard or, in therevel of your Saturday night, do we see only the belladonna'd leer ofthe drabs in the Place Pigalle? Do we hear the romance of yourconcertinas setting thousands of hobnailed boots a-clatter withTerpsichore in the Boulevard de la Chapelle, in Polonceau and Myrrha, ordo we hear only your union orchestra soughing through Mascagni in theCafé de Paris? Do we know the romance of your peoples or the romance ofyour restaurateurs? Which? I wonder. 

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Paris has changed . .. It isn't the Paris of other days . .. AndPaquerette, little Easter daisy in whose lips new worlds were born toyou, little flower of France the music and perfume of whose youth areyours still to remember through the guerrilla warfare of the mountingyears--little Paquerette is dead. And you are old now and married, andthere are the children to look out for--they're at the school age--andlife's quondam melody is full of rests and skies are not always as blueas once they were. And Paris, four thousand miles beyond the seas--Parisisn't what it used to be!

[Illustration: PARIS]

But Paris is. For Paris is not a city--it is Youth. And Youth neverdies. To Youth, while youth is in the arteries, Paris is ever Paris, a-throb with dreams, a-dream with love, a-love with triumphs to betriumphed o'er. The Paris of Villon and Murger and Du Maurier is stillthere by the Seine: it is only Villon and Murger and Du Maurier who arenot. And if your Paquerette is gone forever, there is Zinette--someother fellow's Paquerette--in her place. And to him new worlds are bornin her lips even as new worlds were born to you in the kisses ofanother's yesterday . .. And the music and the perfume of Zinette's youthshall, too, be rosemary some day to this other. 

The only thing that changes in Paris is the Paris of the Americans, that foul swelling at the Carrara throat of Youth's fairyland. It isthis Paris, cankered with the erosions of foreign gold and foreign itch, that has placed "souvenirs" on sale at the Tomb of Napoleon, that vendsobscenities on the boulevards, that has raised the price ofbouillabaisse to one franc fifty, that has installed ice cream at theBrasserie Zimmer, that has caused innumerable erstwhile respectableFrench working girls to don short yellow skirts, stick roses in theirmouths, wield castanets and become Spanish dancers in the restaurants. It is this Paris that celebrates the hour of the apéritif with Bronxcocktails and "stingers, " that has put Chicken à la King on the menu ofthe Soufflet, that has enabled the _ober-kellner_ of Ledoyen to purchasea six-cylinder Benz, that has introduced forks in the Rue Falguiére, that has made the _beguins_ at the annual Quat'-z-Arts ball conscious ofthe visibility of their legs. It is this Paris that puts on eveningclothes in order to become properly soused at Maxim's and cast confettiat the Viennese Magdalenes, that fights the cabmen, that sings "We Won'tGo Home Till Morning" at the Catélan, that buys a set of Maupassant inthe original French (and then can't read it), that sits in front of theCafé de la Paix reading the New York _Morning Telegraph_ and wonderingwhat Jake and the rest of the gang are doing back home, that gives thePittsburgh high sign to every good-looking woman walking on theboulevards in the belief that all French women are in the constant stateof desiring a liaison, that callouses its hands in patriotic music hallapplause for that great American, Harry Pilcer, that trips the turkeytrot with all the Castle interpolations at the Tabarin. It is this Paristhat changes year by year--from bad to worse. It is this Paris thatremembers Gaby Deslys and forgets Cécile Sorel, that remembers MadgeLessing and arches its eyebrow in interrogation as to Marie Leconte. This is the Paris of Sniff and Snicker, this the Paris of New York. 

But the other Paris, the Paris of the canorous night, the Paris of theParisians! The little studio in the Rue Leopold Robert . .. Alinette andReine and Renée . .. The road to Auteuil under the moon-shot baldaquin ofFrench stars . .. The crowd in the old gathering place in the BoulevardRaspail . .. The music of the heathen streets . .. Dawn in the Gardens ofthe Luxembourg. .. . 

Yes, there's a Paris that never changes. Always it's there for some one, some one still young, still dreaming, still with eyes that sweep theworld with youth's wild ambitions. Always it's there, across the seas, for some one--maybe no longer you and me, exiles of the years in thisfar-away America--but still for some one younger, some one for whom theloves and adventures and the hazards of life are still so all-wondrous, so all-worth-while, so almighty. But, however old, however hardened bythe trickeries of passing decades, those who have loved Paris, those towhom Paris has lifted her lips in youth, these never say good-bye toher. For in their hearts sings on her romance, for in their hearts marchon the million memories of her gipsy days and nights. 

THE END

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 +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Notes: | | | | Page 54: Dome amended to Dôme | | Page 58: Kartnerring amended to Kärtnerring; italics to | | "and" removed ("and kaisersemmln") | | Page 75: Théresè amended to Thérèse | | Page 76: _et al_ amended to _et al. _ | | Page 90: Yodlers _sic_ | | Page 91: jadded amended to jaded | | Page 103: _mässe_ and _pinçe-nez sic_ | | Page 119: _jevousaime sic_ | | Page 120: Catelan amended to Catélan | | Page 122: _pére_ amended to _père_; | | meaningfull _sic_ | | Page 134: Montmarte amended to Montmartre | | Page 158: _Suatés_ amended to _Sautés_ | | Page 194: speakeasys _sic_ | | Page 205: _violà_ amended to _voilà_ | | Page 210: _suéde sic_ | | Page 220: _apértif_ amended to _apéritif_ | | | | Where there is an equal number of instances of a word | | being hyphenated and unhyphenated, or an equal number of | | instances of a spelling of a word, both versions have | | been retained: oberkellner/ober-kellner; | | Max-Joseph-Platz/Max-Joseph-platz; and | | Johannisberger/Johannesberger. | | | +------------------------------------------------------------+

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