Europe After 8:15
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H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright >> Europe After 8:15
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But why need to pursue the catalogue? This, too, is Berlin. Not the
Berlin of Herr Adlon's inn, gilded with the leaf of Broadway and the
Strand to flabbergast and ensnare the American snooper--not the Berlin
of the Bristol, with its imitation cocktails--not the Berlin of the
Esplanade, gaudy dump of the Bellevuestrasse, with its sugar tongs,
finger bowls and kindred criteria of degeneracy--not this Berlin; but
the real Berlin of the German people, warm-hearted, mindful only of its
own affairs, all-understanding, all-sympathetic, all-human--its larynx
eternally beseeching liquid succour, its stomach eternally demanding
chow. And, too--and note this well--not the Berlin of the rouged menu
and silk-stockinged _kellner_, not the trumped-up Berlin of the
vaselined vassal, of the bowing _oberkellner_, not the Berlin of the
affected canteloupe (3,50 m.) and the affected biscuit tortoni (2,40
m.)--but the Berlin of _beinfleisch im kessel mit Meerrettich_ (90 pf.),
the Berlin of _kraeftbruhe mit nudeln_ (40 pf.)--the Berlin of Mamsch and
Traube.
And now I am again in the streets of the city, rattling with the racing
flotilla of things awheel. (Or is the rattle that I hear only the rattle
of the "L" trains a block away, and am I really back in New York?) But
no; for still I see in the brilliant Berlin moonlight the bronze
Quadriga of Victory atop the distant Gate of Brandenburg and still I
hear a group of students singing in the Cafe Mozart, and still--but what
is moonlight beside the fairy light in your eyes, fair Hulda? What is
song beside the soft melody of your smile? Normandy is in the night air
... "_man lacht, man lebt, man liebt und man kuesst wo's Kuesse giebt_"
... and we and all the world are young. Ah, Hulda, mine own, mine all,
and who is that pretty girl tripping adown the street, that one there
with the corals at her throat and the devil at the curtain of her glance
... and _that_ girl who has just passed, that little minx with eyes like
sleeping sapphires and a smile as melodious as mandolins by the summer
sea? As melodious as your own, fair Hulda.
* * * * *
The play is over and I have alternated a contemplation of the loves
and fears, the tremors and triumphs of some obese stage princess with a
lusty entr'-acte excursion into Culmbacher and the cheese sandwich,
served, as is the appealing custom, in the theatre promenade. And thus
fortified against the night, I pass again into the thoroughfares still
a-rattle with the musketry of wheels. I perceive that many amateur
American Al-Raschids are abroad in the land, pockets echoing the
tintinnabulation of manifold marks and eyes abulge at the prospect of
midnight diableries. See that fellow yonder! At home, probably a family
man, a wearer of mesh underwear, an assiduous devourer of the wisdom of
George Harvey, a patron of the dramas of Charles Rann Kennedy, a spanker
of children, an entertainer at his board of the visiting clergyman, a
pantophagous subscriber, a silk hat wearer--in brief, a leading citizen.
See him oleaginate his grin at the sight of a passing painted paver. (To
his mind, probably a barmaid out for an innocent lark.) See him make for
the Palais de Danse where (so he has read in the _Saturday Evening
Post_) one may purchase the Berliner spirit at so much per pound. We
track him, and presently we behold him seated at a table in this
splendiferous hall of Terpsichore and Thais "opening wine" and
purchasing _blumen_ for a battle-scarred veteran who is telling him
confidentially that she just got in that afternoon from her poor home in
a little Bavarian village and that she feels so alone in this big, great
city, with its lures and temptations, its snares and its pitfalls. Soon
the bubbles of the grape are percolating through his arteries and soon
the "Grosse Rosinen" waltzes have mellowed his conscience and soon....
* * *
"Berlin spirit, huh!" he is telling his wife a month later--"Berlin
spirit? All artificial. Just to make money out of the visitors. And
_very_ sordid!"
* * *
At the Moulin Rouge and at the Admirals-Casino, at the Alhambra and the
Tabarin, at the Amor-saele and the Rosen-saele, we track down others such,
"seeing the night life of Berlin." We see them, too, champagne before
them, coquetting with Fraeulein Ilona, who numbers Militaer-Regiment 42 as
her gentleman friend, and with innocent-looking little Hedwig, who in
her day has tramped the streets of Brussels and Paris, of London and
Vienna; we see them intriguing elaborately with these sisters of sorrow,
who, intriguing in turn against the night's wage, assist the skirmish on
with incendiary quip and tender touch of foot and similar cantharides of
financial amour. And we track them later to such institutions as the
Fledermaus--"_der grosse luxurioese, vornehmstes vergnuegungsplatz,
paradiesgarten, groesste sehenswuerdigkeit Berlins_" (in the
advertisements)--as the Victoria and the Cafe Riche, the Westminster and
the Cafe Opera and--
* * *
"Berlin spirit, huh!" _they_ are telling _their_ wives a month
later--"Berlin spirit? All artificial. Just to make money out of the
visitors. And _very_ sordid!"
* * *
Ah, Cairo dreaming in the Nile's moon-haze--are you to be judged thus
by the narrow street that snakes into the dark of Bulak? And Budapest by
the Danube--are you to be judged by the wreckage of the Stefansplatz
that has drifted on your shores? And you, Vienna, and you, Paris--are
you, too, to be measured thus, as measured you are, by the crimson light
of your half-worlds that for some obscures your stars?
The Berlin of the Palais de Danse is the Paris of L'Abbaye; the Berlin
of the Fledermaus is the New York of Jack's.
But the Berlin that I know and love is not this Berlin, the Berlin of
Americans, not the spangled Berlin, the hollow-laughing Berlin, the
Berlin decked with rhinestones, set alight with prismatic electroliers
and offered up as mistress to foreign gold. When the River Spree is
amethystine under springtime skies and the city's lights are yellow in
the linden trees, I like best the Berlin that sips its beer in the peace
of the little by-streets, the Berlin that laughs in the Tiergarten near
the Lake of the Goldfish and on the Isle of Louisa, where watch
throughout eternity the graven images of Friedrich Wilhelm the Third and
of Wilhelm the First in the years of his boyhood. I like best the Berlin
that sings with the students in the undiscovered, untainted _wein_ and
_bier stuben_ of the thitherward thoroughfares, the Berlin that dances
in the Joachimstrasse, where the _maedels_, each to herself a Cecilie,
shirtwaisted, poor, happy, kick up their German heels, drink up their
German beer, assault the Schweizerkaese and bring back memories of that
paradise of all paradises--the Englischer Garten of Munich the
Incomparable, the Divine.
In such phases of this kaiser city, one is removed from the so-called
Tingel-Tangel, or _varietes_ and cabarets, where the visiting
_narrverein_ is regaled with such integral and valid elements of Berlin
"night life" as "_der cake walk_," "_der can-can_" and "_die
matschiche--getanzt von original importierten Mexikanerinnen_." So, too,
is one removed from the garish demi-women of the so-called "Quartier
Latin" near the Oranienburger Tor and from the spurious deviltries of
the Rothenburger Krug and the Staffelstein, with their "property"
students, cheeks scarred with red ink, singing "Heidelberg" (from "The
Prince of Pilsen") for the edification and impression of foreign
visitors, and fiercely and frequently challenging other prop. students
to immediate duel. The girls, alas, in these places are not unlovely.
Well do I remember the dainty Elsa of the Hopfenbluethe, she of face
kissed by the Prussian dawn, and employed at sixteen marks the week to
wink dramatically at the old roues and give the resort "an air." Well
does memory repeat to me the loveliness of delicate little Anna, she
with hair like the waving golden grass in the fields that skirt the
roadways from Targon to Villandraut, and paid so much the month to laugh
uproariously every time the hands of the clock point the quarter-hour.
And Rika and Dessa and Julia and Paulina--all sweet of look, all
professional actresses; Bernhardts of Fun (inc.), Duses of Pleasure
(ltd.). Not the girls in whose hearts Berlin is beating, not the girls
in whose _elan_ Berlin lives and laughs. Leave behind all places such as
these, seeker after the soul of Berlin. Leave behind the Tingel-Tangel
with its uniformed bouncer at the gate, with its threadbare piano, with
its "_na kleener Dicker_" smirked by soiled _decolletes_, its doleful
near-naughty ditties--"_Ich lass mich nicht verfuehren, dazu bin ich zu
schlau, ich kenne die Manieren der Maenner ganz genau_"--"I won't be led
astray, I am too slick for that, I know the ways of mankind, I've got
them all down pat." Leave behind the Berlin of the Al-Raschids and keep
to the Berlin of the Germans.
Just as the worst of Paris came from America, so has the worst of
Berlin come from America by way of Paris. The maquereau spirit of
Montmartre, with its dollar lust and its poisoned blood, has not yet the
throat of this German night city full in its fists; but the fists are
tightening slowly--and the voice behind them speaks not French, but the
jargon of Broadway. And yet, when finally the fingers work closer,
closer still, around that throat, when finally the death gurgle of
spontaneous pleasure and of clean, honest, fearless night skies
comes--and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from the
dunghill. I must believe it. For they--_we_--may kill the laughter of
Berlin's streets--as we have killed it in Paris--but we can never kill
the heart, the spirit and the living, quivering corpuscles of German
blood. The French may drink stronger stuffs, eat richer foods and love
oftener than the Germans, and may be better fighters--but they cannot
laugh, they cannot sing as the Germans laugh and sing. And Berlin is the
new Germany, the Germany of to-day and to-morrow ... the Germany whose
laughter will grow louder as the decades pass and whose song will echo
clearer from the distant hills. While Paris (to go to Conrad)--is not
Paris and her land already at Bankok, and far, far beyond? Her children
spent before their day, listening to the too-soon lecture of Time? And
all hopelessly nodding at him: "the man of finance, the man of accounts,
the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a
still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our
faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes
looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of
life, that while it is expected is already gone--has passed unseen, in a
sigh, in a flash--together with the youth, with the strength, with the
romance of illusions...."
But again a truce to philosophisings. It grows late apace. (Ah, Hulda,
how like opals in the lyric April rain are your eyes in this first faint
purple-pink of the tremulous dawn.... Were I a Heine!) In my far-away
America, Hulda, in far-away New York, it is now onto midnight. I see
Broadway, strumpet of the highways, sweltering collarless under the loud
electricity of Times Square. I see a fetid blonde, dangling a patent
leather handbag, hurrying to an assignation in Forty-fifth Street. I see
two actors, pointing their boasts with yellow bamboo canes. A chop suey
restaurant flashes its sign. And I can hear the racking ragtime out of
Shanley's. A big sightseeing bus is howling the fictitious lure of the
Bowery, Chinatown and the Ghetto to gaping groups from the hinterlands.
A streetwalker. Another. Another. In the subway entrance across the
street, a blind man is selling papers. A "dip" calls a friendly "Hello,
Dan" to the policeman in front of the drugstore and works his steps over
the car tracks toward the drunk teetering against the window of the
Jew's clothing store. The air is dust-filled. An intermittent baking
gust from the river sends a cast-aside _Journal_ fluttering aloft. A
dirt-encrusted bum begs the price of a coffee. Another streetwalker,
appearing from the backwaters of Seventh Avenue, grins in the
drugstore's green light....
But to your eyes, Hulda, must be given no such picture. Yet such is the
New York I come from; such the New York, stunning by day in its New
World strength and splendour, loathsome by night in its hot, illumined
bawdry. Ah, city by the Hudson, forgetting Riverside Drive twinkling
amid the long tiara of trees, forgetting the still of the lake and cool
of the boulders that plead in Central Park, forgetting the superb
majesty of Cathedral Heights and the mighty peace of the
byways--forgetting these all for a Broadway!
But the symphony of the Berlin dawn is ours now, fraeulein, and have
done with intrusive memories, corroding reflections. What are my people
doing in Berlin at this hour? What are these prowling Al-Raschids about?
Do they know the sorcery of the virgin morning light of Berlin as it
falls upon the Siegesallee and gives life again to the marble heroes of
Germany? Have they ever stood with such as you, fraeulein, in the
coral-tipped hours of the dawning day before the image of Friedrich der
Grosse in that wonderful lane and felt, through this dead, cold thing,
the thrill of an empire's glory? Do they know the witchery of the
withering Berlin night as it plays out its wild fantasia in the leaves
of the Linden trees? Have they ever been with such as you, fraeulein, at
the base of the Pillar of Triumph in Koenigsplatz or sat with such as
you, fraeulein, near the Grotto Lake in the Tiergarten, or stood with
such as you, fraeulein, on one of the bridges arching the Spree in the
first trembling innuendo of morning?
Where are these, my people?
You will find them seeking the romance of Berlin's greying night amid
the Turkish cigarette smoke and stale wine smells of the half-breed
cabarets marshalled along the Jaegerstrasse, the Behrenstrasse and their
tributaries. You will find them up a flight of stairs in one of the
all-night Linden cafes, throwing celluloid balls at the weary, patient,
left-over women. You will find them sitting in the balcony of the
Pavilion Mascotte, blowing up toy balloons and hurling small cones of
coloured paper down at the benign harlotry. You will see them, hatless,
shooting up the Friedrichstrasse in an open taxicab, singing "Give My
Regards to Broadway" in all the prime ecstasy of a beer souse. You will
find them in the rancid Tingel-Tangel, blaspheming the _kellner_ because
they can't get a highball. You will find them in the Nollendorfplatz
gaping at the fairies. You will see them, green-skinned in the tyrannic
light of early morning, battering at the iron grating of their hotel for
the porter to open up and let them in.
For them, are no souvenirs of happy evening hours that sing always in
the heart of a Berlin they can never know. For them, shall be no memory
of that vast and insuperable _gemuetlichkeit_, that superb and pacific
democracy, that dwells and shall dwell forever by night in the spirit of
the German people. They will never know the Berlin that lifts its seidel
to the setting sun, the Berlin that greets the moonrise, the Berlin that
meets the dawn. The Berlin that they know is a Berlin of French
champagnes, Italian confetti, Spanish dancers, English-trained waiters,
Austrian courtesans and American hilarities. They interpret a city by
its leading all-night restaurant; a nation by the _demi-mondaine_ who
happens to be nearest their table. For them, there is no--
But hark, what is that?
What is that strange sound that comes to me?
* * *
"Extra! _Evening Telegram_, extra! All 'bout the Giants win
double-header!"
* * *
A newsboy in neuralgic yowl, bawling in the street below.
Alas, it is true: after all, I am really back again in New York. My
rooms are littered with battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking
sticks and still-damp steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the
hands of maudlin bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the
hall, urged on by a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still
locked and gone blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of
the rankling "L" trains. The last crack of a triphammer, peckering at a
giant pile of iron down the block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab,
rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. Another "L" train and
the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a
nearby street I hear again the grind-organ.
It is playing "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
LONDON
[Illustration: LONDON]
LONDON
Macauley's New Zealander, so I hear, will view the ruins of St. Paul's
from London Bridge; but as for me, I prefer that more westerly arch
which celebrates Waterloo, there to sniff and immerse myself in the
town. The hour is 8:15 _post meridien_ and the time is early summer. I
have just rolled down Wellington Street from the Strand, smoking a
ninepence Vuelta Abajo, humming an ancient air. One of Simpson's
incomparable English dinners--salmon with lobster sauce, a cut from the
joint, two vegetables, a cress salad, a slice of old Stilton and a mug
of bitter--has lost itself, amazed and enchanted, in my interminable
recesses. My board is paid at Morley's. I have some thirty-eight dollars
to my credit at Brown's, a ticket home is sewn to my lingerie, there is
a friendly jingle of shillings and sixpences in my pocket. The stone
coping invites; I lay myself against it, fold my arms, blow a smoke ring
toward the sunset, and give up my soul to recondite and mellow
meditation.
There are thirteen great bridges between Fulham Palace and the Isle of
Dogs, and I have been at pains to try every one of them; but the best of
all, for such needs as overtake a well fed and ruminative man on a
summer evening, is that of Waterloo. Look westward and the towers of St.
Stephen's are floating in the haze, a greenish slate colour with edges
of peroxide yellow and seashell pink. Look eastward and the fine old
dome of St. Paul's is slipping softly into greasy shadows. Look downward
and the river throws back its innumerable hues--all the coal tar dyes
plus all the duns and drabs of Thames mud. The tide is out and along the
south bank a score of squat barges are high and dry upon the flats.
Opposite, on the embankment, the lights are beginning to blink, and from
the little hollow behind Charing Cross comes the faint, far-away braying
of a brass band.
All bands are in tune at four hundred yards, the reason whereof you
must not ask me now. This one plays a melody I do not know, a melody
plaintive and ingratiating, of clarinet arpeggios all compact. Some lay
of amour, I venture, breathing the hot passion of the Viennese Jew who
wrote it. But so heard, filtered through that golden haze, echoed back
from that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of human
frailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something wholly
chastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes the
joys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must be
fed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger is
frankly a brute; but once he has yielded he departs forthwith from his
gorged carcass and flaps his transcendental wings.... Do honeymooners
ever come to Waterloo Bridge? I doubt it. Imagine turning from that
sublime sweep of greys and sombre gilts, that perfect arrangement of
blank masses and sweeping lines, to the mottled pink of a cheek lately
virgin, the puny curve of a modish eyebrow, the hideous madness of a
trousseau hat!...
I am no stranger to these moods and whims. I am not merely a casual
outsider who has looked about him, sniffed deprecatingly and taken the
train for Dover--which leads to Calais--which leads to Paris--which
leads to youthful romance. I have wallowed in London as the ascetic
wallows in his punitive rites, with a strange, keen joy. I have been a
voluntary St. Simeon on its cold grey street corners. I have eaten so
often--and so much--at Simpson's that I know two of the waiters by their
first names. And I could order correctly their famous cuts by looking at
my watch, knowing at what hour the mutton was ready, at what hour the
roast beef was rarest. So long have I worn English shirts that even now
I find myself crawling into the American brand after the manner of the
woodchuck burrowing into his hole. Frequently I find myself proffering
dimes to the fair uniformed vestals of our theatres who present me with
programmes. I have read each separate slab in Westminster Abbey. I have
made suave and courtly love to a thousand nursemaids in Hyde Park. I
have exuded great globules of perspiration rowing on the Thames, while
the fair beneficiary of my labours lolled placidly in the boat's stern
upon a hummock of Persian pillows. I know every overhanging lovers' tree
from Richmond to Hampton Court. I have consumed hogsheads of ale at "The
Sign of the Cock." I have followed the horses at Epsom and Newmarket, at
Goodwood and Ascot. I have browsed for hours in French's book store. I
have lounged in luxurious taxicabs upholstered in pale grey, and ridden
interminably back and forth through the Mall, Constitution Hill and
Piccadilly....
All of these things have I done. And more. In brief, I have lived the
dashing and reckless life of a dozen Londoners. But--and here is the
point!--I have lived it _in the daytime_. When the shadows began to
drift into the fogs and the twilight settled over the grey masonry of
the city, I would generally fly to the theatre and afterward to my
garish rooms in Adams Street; or, as was often the case, I would merely
fly to my flat, giving up my evenings to the low humour of Rabelais, or
to deep, deep sleep.
Although for years one could not lose me in London, or flabbergast me
with those leaning-tower-of-Pisa addresses (the items piled one upon the
other in innumerable strata), I knew nothing of the goings-on when the
windows of London became patches of orange light. In fact, I assumed
that when I slept London also snored. To think of London and of night
romance was like conjuring up the wildest of anachronisms. Romance there
was in London, but to me it had always been shot through with sunshine.
It had been the hard commercial romance of the Stock Exchange. Or the
courteous and impeccable romance of polished hats and social banalities.
Or the gustatory romance of Cheddar cheese, musty ale, roast lamb and
greens. Or it had been the romance of the Cook's tourist--the romance of
cathedrals, towers, palaces, dungeons and parliamentary buildings. Or
the romance of pomp, of horseguards and helmets and epaulettes and brass
buttons and guns at "present arms." Or it had been the anaemic romance of
Ceylon tea, toasted muffins and _petits fours_. As for amours and
intrigues and subdued lights and dances and cabarets and sparkling
_demi-mondaines_ and all-night orchestras and liquid jousting bouts and
perfume and champagne and rouge and kohl--who would have thought that
London, the severe, the formal; London, the saintly, the high-collared,
the stiff; London, the serious, the practical, the kid-gloved; London,
the arctic, the methodical, the fixed, the ceremonious, the starched,
the precise, the punctilious, the conservative, the static; London, the
God-fearing, the episcopal, the nice, the careful, the scrupulous, the
aloof, the decorous, the proper, the dignified--who would have thought
that London would loosen up and relax and partake of the potions of Eros
and Bacchus?
And yet--and yet--back of London's grim and formidable exterior there
lurks a smile. Her stiff and proper legs know how to shake themselves.
Her cold and sluggish blood grows warm to the strains of dance music.
Her desensitized and asphalt palate thrills and throbs beneath the
tricklings of _Cordon Rouge_. Her steel heart flutters at the touch of a
wheedling phryne. She, too, can wear the strumpet garb of youth. She,
too, in the vitals of her nature, longs for the gay romance of the
Boulevard Montparnasse ere the American possessed it. She, too, admires
the rhythmic parabolic curve of bare shoulders. Silken ankles and
amorous whisperings stir her--if not to deeds of valour, then at least
to deeds of indiscretion. London, it seems, cannot look upon the moon
without suffering some of the love qualms of Endymion. In fine, London,
the mentalized, is human.
It was only last year that the rumours of London's night life sank
into the depths of my sensitive ears. At first I put such murmurings
aside as psychiatric ravings of visionaries and yearners. Always at the
first signs of neurosis--the inevitable result of the simple life--I
dashed to Paris, to the golden-haired Reine at the Marigny; or else I
cabled 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 suesser Engel!_) Never once did it occur to me that youth stalked
abroad in the London streets, that gaiety sang among the wine cups in
London cafes, that romance went drunk amid the mazes of abandoned
dancing. London had always seemed to me essentially senile--grey-haired
and sedate. And so I devoted myself to the labours of youth, as did the
youthful George Moore; and when the first crocuses of the spring
appeared, and the lilacs came forth, and the April primroses got into my
blood, and the hawthorn sent forth its pink and white shoots, I sought
the Luxembourg or the Tiergarten or the Prater. Why, indeed, I thought,
should spring come to London? Why should Henley, an Englishman, have
called Spring "the wild, the sweet-blooded, wonderful harlot"? And why
should the year's first crocus have brought him luck? Had he indeed lain
mouth to mouth with spring in London? Perhaps. But I doubted him.
Therefore, before the lavender appeared, I was beyond the channel.
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