y^^ 
 
 CSB9 
 
 H.L.MENCKEN 
 GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 
 
 WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT
 
 r 
 
 V. 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN uieeo / 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 S. L. WRIGHT
 
 160 
 
 H
 
 EUROPE AFTER 8:15
 
 BERLIN
 
 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 H.^ Lf MENCKEN 
 
 GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 
 
 WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT 
 
 WITH DECORATIONS 
 
 By THOMAS H. BENTON 
 
 NEW YORK — JOHN LANE COMPANY 
 TORONTO— BELL & COCKBURN— MCMXIV
 
 Copyright, 1914 
 
 Bt JOHN LANE COMPANY
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface in the Socratic Manner ... 7 
 
 Vienna 35 
 
 Munich 71 
 
 Berlin Ill 
 
 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 Hunger- 
 berg at Innsbruck. It is the half- 
 hour before sunset, and the whole lovely val- 
 ley of the Inn — still wie die Nacht, tief 
 wie das Meer — begins to glow with mauves 
 and apple greens, apricots and silvery 
 blues. Along the peaks of the great snowy 
 mountains which shut it in, as if from the 
 folly and misery of the world, there are 
 touches of piercing primary colours — red, 
 yellow, violet — the palette of a synchro- 
 mist. Far below, hugging the winding 
 river, lies httle Innsbruck, with its checker- 
 board parks and Christmas garden villas.
 
 8 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 A battalion of Austrian soldiers, drilling in 
 the Exerzierplatz, appears as an army of 
 grey ants, now barely visible. Somewhere 
 to the left, beyond the broad flank of the 
 Hungerberg, the night train for Venice 
 labours toward the town. 
 
 It is a superbly beautiful scene, perhaps 
 the most beautiful in all Europe. It has 
 colour, dignity, repose. The Alps here 
 come down a bit and so increase their spell. 
 They are not the harsh precipices of Swit- 
 zerland, nor the too charming stage moun- 
 tains of Northern Italy, but rolling billows 
 of clouds and snow, the high-flung waves 
 of some titanic but stricken ocean. Now 
 and then comes a faint clank of metal from 
 the funicular railway, but the tracks them- 
 selves are hidden among the trees of the 
 lower slopes. The tinkle of an angelus bell 
 (or maj^be it is only a sheep bell) is heard 
 from afar. A great bird, an eagle or a fal- 
 con, sweeps across the crystal spaces. 
 
 Here where we are is a shelf on the moun-
 
 PREFACE 9 
 
 tainside, and the hand of man has converted 
 it into a terrace. To the rear, clinging to 
 the mountain, is an Alpine gasthaus — a bit 
 overdone, perhaps, with its red-framed win- 
 dows and elaborate fretwork, but still genu- 
 inely of the Alps. Along the front of the 
 terrace, protecting sightseers from the sheer 
 drop of a thousand feet, is a stout wooden 
 rail. 
 
 A man in an American sack suit, with a 
 bowler hat on his head, lounges against this 
 rail. His elbows rest upon it, his legs are 
 crossed in the fashion of a figure four, and 
 his face is buried in the red book of Herr 
 Baedeker. It is the volume on Southern 
 Germany, and he is reading the list 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, 
 another man comes ambling along the ter- 
 race, apparently from the direction of the 
 funicular railway station. He, too, carries 
 a red book. It is Baedeker on Austria-
 
 10 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Hungary. After gaping around him a bit, 
 this second man approaches the rail near the 
 other and leans his elbows upon it. Pres- 
 ently he takes a package of chewing gum 
 from his coat pocket, selects two pieces, puts 
 them into his mouth and begins to chew. 
 Then he spits idly into space, idly but 
 homerically, a truly stupendous expectora- 
 tion, a staggering discharge from the Alps 
 to the first shelf of 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 eaten worse."
 
 PREFACE 11 
 
 " Well, they charge you enough for it, 
 whether you get it or not. A man could 
 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 used to be." 
 
 *' That's what everybody tells me. But, 
 as for me, I can't say I found them so bad. 
 I had to send back the potatoes twice and 
 the breakfast bacon once, but they had very 
 good lima beans." 
 
 " Isn't that Enghsh bacon awful stuff to 
 get down? " 
 
 " It certainly is: all meat and gristle. I 
 wonder what an Englishman would say if 
 you put him next to a plate of genuine, 
 crisp, American bacon? " 
 
 " I guess he would yell for the pohce — 
 or choke to death."
 
 12 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 "Did you like the German cooking on 
 the Kroniwinz? '' 
 
 " Well, I did and I didn't. The chicken 
 a 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 and you'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 fel- 
 low near me who set up a holler about his 
 room the minute he saw it — said it was 
 dark and musty and not fit to pen a hog 
 in — and they gave him one twice as large, 
 and the chief steward bowed and scraped to 
 him, and the room stewards danced around 
 him as if he was a duke. And yet I heard 
 later that he was nothing but a Bismarck 
 herring importer from Hoboken." 
 
 " Yes, that's the way to get what you
 
 PREFACE 18 
 
 want. Did you have any nobility on 
 board?" 
 
 *' Yes, there was a Hungarian baron in 
 the automobile business, and two English 
 sirs. The baron was quite a decent fellow: 
 I had a talk with him in the smoking room 
 one night. He didn't put on any airs at 
 all. You would have thought he was an 
 ordinary man. But the sirs kept to them- 
 selves. All they did the whole voyage was 
 to write letters, wear their 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 hues are best, 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 with meals on 
 the French boats." 
 
 " But I hear it's fourth rate wine."
 
 14 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 " Well, you don't have to drink it." 
 
 " That's so. But, as for me, I can't stand 
 a Frenchman. I'd rather do without the 
 wine and travel with the Dutch. Paris is 
 dead compared with Berlin." 
 
 " So it is. But those Germans are get- 
 ting to be awful sharks. The way they 
 charge in Berhn is enough to make you 
 sick." 
 
 " Don't tell me. I have been there. No 
 longer ago than last Tuesday — or was it 
 last Monday? — I went into one of those 
 big restaurants on the Unter den Linden 
 and ordered a small steak, French fried 
 potatoes, a piece of pie and a cup of 
 coffee — and what do you think 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 same meal at home for a dollar. 
 These Germans are running wild. Ameri- 
 can money has gone to their heads. They
 
 PREFACE 15 
 
 think every American they get hold of is a 
 millionaire." 
 
 *' The French are worse. I went into a 
 hotel in Paris and paid ten francs a day for 
 a room for myself and wife, and when we 
 left they charged me one 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 you a 
 krone for it anyhow." 
 
 "Well, well, what next? But, after all, 
 you can't blame them. We Americans 
 come over here and hand them our pocket- 
 books, and we ought to be glad if we get any- 
 thing back at all. The way a man has to 
 tip is something fearful." 
 
 " Isn't it, though ! I stayed in Dresden 
 a week, and when I left there were six
 
 16 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 grafters lined up with their claws out. 
 First came the iporteer. Then came — " 
 
 " How much did you give the ]^orieer? ** 
 
 " 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 out how 
 much the ^porteer ought to get is easy : a fel- 
 low I met in Baden-Baden showed me how 
 to do it. First, you multiply your hotel 
 bill by two, then you divide by twenty- 
 seven, and then you knock off half a mark. 
 Twice forty- two is eighty- four! Twenty- 
 seven into eighty-four goes about three 
 times, and a half from three leaves two and 
 a half. See how easy it is? " 
 
 " It looks easy, anyhow. But you
 
 PREFACE 17 
 
 haven't got much time to do all that figur- 
 mg. 
 
 *' Well, let the -porieer wait. The longer 
 he has to wait the more he appreciates you." 
 
 " But how about the others? " 
 
 " It's just as simple. Your chamber- 
 maid gets a quarter of a mark for every day 
 you have been in the hotel. But if you stay 
 less than four days she gets a whole mark 
 anyhow. If there are two in the party she 
 gets half a mark a day, but no more than 
 three marks in any one week." 
 
 *' But suppose there are two chamber- 
 maids? In Dresden there was one on day 
 duty and one on night duty. I left at six 
 o'clock in the evening, and so they were 
 both on the job." 
 
 " Don't worry. They'd have been on the 
 job anyhow, no matter when you left. 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 into two 
 halves, and give one to each girl. Or, bet-
 
 18 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 ter still, give it all to one girl and tell her 
 to give half to her pal. If there are three 
 chambermaids, as you sometimes find in the 
 swell hotels, you add another fifty 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, plus 
 twenty-five per cent. — but no more than 
 two marks in any one week. The floor 
 waiter gets thirty pfennigs a day straight, 
 but if you stay only one day he gets half a 
 mark, and if j^ou stay more than a week he 
 gets two marks flat a week after the first 
 week. In some hotels the hall porter don't 
 shine shoes. If he don't he gets just as 
 much as if he does, but then the actual 
 * boots ' has to be taken care of. He gets 
 half a mark every two days. Every time 
 you put out an extra pair of shoes he gets 
 fifty per cent, more for that day. If you 
 shine your own shoes, or go without shining
 
 PREFACE 19 
 
 them, the ' boots ' gets half his regular tip, 
 but never less than a mark a week." 
 
 " Certainly it seems simple enough. I 
 never knew there was any such system." 
 
 " I guess you didn't. Very few do. 
 But it's just because Americans don't know 
 it that these foreign blackmailers shake 'em 
 down. Once you let the porte^r see that 
 you know the ropes, he'll pass the word on 
 to the others, and you'll be treated like a 
 native." 
 
 " I see. But how about the elevator 
 boy? I gave the elevator boy in Dresden 
 two marks and he almost fell on my neck, 
 so I figured that I played 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 can sort of reason the thing out if 
 you put your mind on it. When you get on 
 a street car in Germany, what tip do you 
 give the conductor? " 
 
 *' Five pfennigs."
 
 20 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 " Naturally. That's the tip fixed by cus- 
 tom. You may almost say it's the un- 
 written law. If you gave the conductor 
 more, he would hand you change. Well, 
 how I reason it out is this way: If five 
 pfemiigs is enough for a car conductor, who 
 may carry you three miles, why shouldn't 
 it be enough for the elevator boy, who may 
 carry j^ou only three stories? " 
 
 " It seems fair, certainly." 
 
 *' And it is fair. So all you have to do 
 is to keep accomit of the number of times 
 you go up and down in the elevator, and 
 then give the elevator boy five pfennigs for 
 each trip. Say you come down in the morn- 
 ing, go up in the evening, and average one 
 other round trip a day. That makes 
 twent5^-eight trips a week. Five times 
 twenty-eight is one mark forty — and there 
 you are." 
 
 " I see. By the way, what hotel are you 
 stopping at? " 
 
 " The Goldene Esel."
 
 PREFACE 21 
 
 "How is it?" 
 
 " Oh, so-so. Ask for oatmeal at break- 
 fast and they send to the livery stable for 
 a peck of oats and ask you please to be so 
 kind as to show them how to make it." 
 
 " My hotel is even worse. Last night I 
 got into such a sweat under the big Geraian 
 feather bed that I had to throw it off. But 
 when I asked for a single blanket they 
 didn't have any, so I had to wrap up in 
 bath towels." 
 
 " Yes, and you used up every one in 
 town. This morning, when I took a bath, 
 the only towel the chambermaid could find 
 wasn't bigger than a wedding invitation. 
 But while she was hunting around I dried 
 off, so no harm was done." 
 
 *' Well, that's what a man gets for run- 
 ning around in such one-horse countries. 
 In Leipzig they sat a nigger down beside 
 me at the table. In Amsterdam they had 
 cheese for breakfast. In Munich the head 
 waiter had never heard of buckwheat cakes.
 
 22 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 In Mannheim they charged me ten pfennigs 
 extra for a cake of soap." 
 
 " What do you think of the German rail- 
 road trains? " 
 
 " Rotten. That compartment system is 
 all wrong. If nobody comes into your com- 
 partment it's lonesome, and if anybody does 
 come in it's too damn sociable. And if you 
 try to stretch out and get some sleep, some 
 ruffian begins singing in the next compart- 
 ment, or the conductor keeps butting in and 
 jabbering at you." 
 
 " But you can say one thing for these 
 German trains; they get in on time." 
 
 '* So they do, but no wonder! They run 
 so slow they can't lielp it. The w^ay I 
 figure it, a German engineer must have a 
 devil of a time holding his engine in. The 
 fact is, he usually can't, and so he has to 
 wait outside every big town until the 
 schedule catches up to him. They say they 
 never have accidents, but is it any more than
 
 PREFACE 28 
 
 you expect? Did you ever hear of a mud 
 turtle having an accident? " 
 
 " Scarcely. As you say, these countries 
 are far behind the times. I saw a fire in 
 Cologne ; you would have laughed your head 
 off! It was in a feed store near my hotel, 
 and I got there before the firemen. When 
 they came at last, in their tinpot hats, they 
 got out half a dozen big squirts and rushed 
 into the building with them. Then, when it 
 was out, they put the squirts back into their 
 little express wagon and drove off. You 
 never saw such child's play. Not a line of 
 hose run out, not an engine puffing, not a 
 gong heard, not a soul letting out a whoop. 
 It was more hke 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 they never have any." 
 
 *' Well, what can you expect? A coun- 
 tiy where all the charwomen are men and 
 all the garbage men are women I "
 
 24 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 For the moment the two have talked each 
 other out, and so they lounge upon the rail 
 in silence and gaze out over the valley. 
 Anon the gumchewer spits. By now the 
 sun has reached the skyline to the westward 
 and the tops of the ice mountains are in 
 gorgeous conflagration. Scarlets war with 
 golden oranges, and vermilions fade into 
 palpitating pinks. Below, in the valley, 
 the colours begin to fade slowly to a uniform 
 seashell grey. It is a scene of indescribable 
 loveliness; the wild reds of hades splashed 
 riotously upon the cold whites and pale hues 
 of heaven. The night train for Venice, a 
 long line of black coaches, is entering the 
 town. Somewhere below, apparently in 
 the barracks, a sunset gun is fired. After 
 a silence of perhaps two or three minutes, 
 the Americans gather fresh inspiration and 
 resume their conversation. 
 
 " I have seen worse scenery." 
 
 " Very pretty." 
 
 "Yes, sir; it's well worth the money."
 
 PREFACE 25 
 
 ** But the Rockies beat it all hollow." 
 
 *' Oh, of course. They have nothing 
 over here that we can't beat to a whisper. 
 Just consider the Rhine, for instance. The 
 Hudson makes it look like a country creek." 
 
 " Yes, you're right. Take away the 
 castles, and not even a German would give 
 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-agent- 
 ing." 
 
 " I agi'ee with you. There's the ' beauti- 
 ful, blue Danube.' To me it looks like a 
 sewer. If ifs blue, then rm green. A 
 man would hesitate to drown himself in 
 such a mud puddle." 
 
 "But you hear the bands playing that 
 waltz all your life, and so you spend your 
 good monej'^ to come over here to see the 
 river. And when you get back home you 
 don't want to admit that you've been a 
 sucker, so you start touting it from hell to 
 breakfast. And then some other fellow
 
 26 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 comes 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 about Westminster 
 Abbey. Every English book mentions it; 
 it's in the nev^^spapers almost as much as 
 William Jennings Bryan or Caruso. Well, 
 one day you pack your grip, put on your 
 hat and come over to have a look — and 
 what do you find? A one-horse church full 
 of statues! And every statue crying for 
 sapolio ! You expect to see something mag- 
 nificent, something enormous, something to 
 knock your eye out and send you down for 
 the count. What you do see is a second- 
 rate graveyard under roof. And when you 
 examine into it, you find that two-thirds of 
 the graves haven't even got a dead man in 
 them. Whenever a prominent Englishman 
 dies, they put up a statue to him in West- 
 minster Abbey — no matter where he hap- 
 pens to he buried. I call that clever adver- 
 tising. That's the way to get the crowd."
 
 PREFACE 27 
 
 " Yes, these foreigners know the game. 
 They have made millions out of it in Paris. 
 Every time you go to see a musical comedy 
 at home, the second act is laid in Paris, and 
 you see a whole stageful of girls doing the 
 hesitation, and a lot of old sports having the 
 time of their lives. All your life you hear 
 that Paris is something rich and racy, some- 
 thing that makes A^ew York look like 
 Roanoke, Virginia. Well, you fall for the 
 ballyhoo and come over to have your fling — 
 and then you find that Paris is largely bunk. 
 I spent a whole week in Paris, trying to 
 find something really awful. I hired one 
 of those Jew guides at five dollars a daj^ and 
 told him to go the limit. I said to him: 
 ' Don't mind me. I am twenty-one years old. 
 Let me have the genuine goods.' But the 
 worst he could show me wasn't half as bad 
 as what I have seen in Chicago. Every 
 night I would say to that Jew : ' Come on, 
 now Mr. Cohen; let's get away from these 
 tinhorn shows. Lead me to the real stuff.'
 
 28 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Well, I believe the fellow did his damdest, 
 but he always fell down. I almost felt 
 sorry for him. In the end, when I paid him 
 off, I said to him : ' Save up your money, 
 my boy, and come over to the States. Let 
 me know when you land. I'll show you the 
 sights for nothing. You need a little re- 
 laxation. This Baracca Class atmosphere 
 is killing you.' 
 
 " And yet Paris is famous all over the 
 world. 'No American ever came to Europe 
 without dropping off there to have a look. 
 I once saw the Bal Tabarin crowded with 
 Sunday school superintendents returning 
 from Jerusalem. And when the sucker 
 gets home he goes around winking and hint- 
 ing, and so the fake grows. I often tliink 
 the government ought to take a hand. If 
 the beer is inspected and guaranteed in Ger- 
 many, why shouldn't the shows be inspected 
 and guaranteed in Paris? " 
 
 " I guess the trouble is that the French- 
 men themselves never go to their o\\ti shows.
 
 PREFACE 29 
 
 They don't know what is going on. They 
 see thousands of Americans starting out 
 every night from the Place de I'Opera and 
 coming back in the morning all boozed up, 
 and so they assume that everything is up to 
 the mark. You'll find the same thing in 
 Washington. No Washingtonian has ever 
 been up to the top of the Washington monu- 
 ment. 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 the local papers at 
 last, it came from Macon, Georgia. Some 
 honeymooner from down 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 — but I 
 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 my wife got 
 the Ladies' Home Journal of month before
 
 30 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 last. It had been following us around for 
 six weeks, from London to Paris, to Berlin, 
 to Munich, to Vienna, to a dozen other 
 places. Now she's fixed for the night. She 
 won't let up until she's read every word — 
 the advertisements first. And she'll spend 
 all day to-morrow sending oiF for things — 
 new collar hooks, breakfast foods, com- 
 plexion soaps and all that sort of junk. 
 Are you married j^ourself ? " 
 
 "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 and have a 
 civihsed evening. This scenery gives me 
 the creeps." 
 
 " I'm with you. But where are we go- 
 ing to get any chips? " 
 
 " Don't worry. I carry a set with me. 
 I made my wife put it in the bottom of my 
 trunk, along with a bottle of real whiskey
 
 PREFACE 31 
 
 and a couple of porous plasters. A man 
 can't be too careful when he's away from 
 home." 
 
 They start along the terrace toward the 
 station of the funicular railway. The sun 
 has now disappeared behind the great bar- 
 rier of ice and the colours of the scene are 
 fast softening. All the scarlets and ver- 
 milions are gone; a luminous pink bathes 
 the whole scene in its fairy hght. The night 
 train for Venice, leaving the town, appears 
 as a long string of blinking lights. A chill 
 breeze comes from the Alpine vastness to 
 westward. The deep silence of an Alpine 
 night settles down The two Americans 
 continue their talk until they are out of 
 hearing. The breeze interrupts and ob- 
 fuscates their words, but now and then half 
 a sentence comes clearly. 
 
 " Have you seen any American papers 
 lately?" 
 
 " Nothing but the Paris Herald — if you 
 call that a paper."
 
 32 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 " 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 . , ."
 
 VIENN A
 
 VIENNA 
 
 THE casual Sunday School superin- 
 tendent, bursting with visions of lux- 
 urious gaieties, his brain incited by refer- 
 ences to Wiener hlut, his corpuscles trip- 
 ping to the strains of some Viennese 
 schlagermusik, will suffer only disappoint- 
 ment as he sallies forth on his first night in 
 Vienna. He is gorgeously caparisoned 
 with clean linen, talcumed, exuding Jockey 
 Club, prepared for surgical and psychic 
 shock, his legs drilled hollow to admit of 
 precious fluids, his pockets bulging with 
 kronen. He is a lovely, mellow creature, 
 a virtuoso of the domestic virtues when 
 home, but now, at large in Europe, he craves 
 excitement. His timid soul is bent on par- 
 ticipating in the deviltries for which Vienna 
 is famous. His blood is thumping through 
 
 35
 
 36 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 his arteries in three-four time. His mind 
 is inflamed by such strophes as '' Es giebt 
 nur a Kaiserstadt; es giebt nur a Wien '' and 
 "^ Immer luste„ fesch und munter, und der 
 Wiener geht nit unter/' But he is brought 
 gradually to the realisation that something 
 is amiss. Can it be that the vice crusaders 
 have been at work? Have the militant 
 moralists and the professional women 
 hunters, in their heated yearnings to flay 
 the transgressor, fallen foul of Vienna? 
 
 He expected to find a city which would 
 be one roseate and romantic revel, given 
 over to joys of the flesh, to wine-drinking 
 and confetti-throwing, overrun with hussies, 
 gone mad with lascivious waltzes, reeking 
 with Babylonish amours. He dreamed of 
 Vienna as one continual debauch, one never- 
 ceasing saturnalia, an eternal tournament 
 of perfumed hilarities. His lewd dreams 
 of the " gayest city in Europe " have pro- 
 duced in him a marked hallucinosis with 
 visions of Neronic orgies, magnificently
 
 VIENNA 37 
 
 prodigal — deliriums of chromatic disorder. 
 But as he walks down the Karntner- 
 strasse, encircles the Ring and stands with 
 bulging inquisitive eyes on the corner of 
 the Wiedner Hauptstrasse and Karlsplatz, 
 he wonders what can be the matter. 
 Where, indeed, is that prodigality of flowers 
 and spangled satin he has heard so much 
 about? Where are those super-orchestras 
 sweating over the scores of seductive 
 waltzes? Where tlie silken ankles and the 
 ghttering eyes, the kisses and the flutes, the 
 beery laughter and the delirious leg shak- 
 ing? The excesses of merrymaking are no- 
 where discoverable. Des Moines, Iowa, or 
 Camden, New Jersey, would present quite 
 as festive a spectacle, he thinks, as he gazes 
 up at the sepulchral shadows on the gigantic 
 Opernhaus before him. He cannot under- 
 stand the nocturnal solitude of the streets. 
 There is actual desolation about him. A 
 chlorotic girl, her cheeks unskilfully 
 painted, brushes up to him with a careless
 
 38 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 " Geli Rudl, gib ma a Spreitzn." But that 
 might happen in Cleveland, Ohio — and 
 Cleveland is not framed as a modern Tyre. 
 He is puzzled and distressed. He feels like 
 a Heliogabalus on a desert isle. He con- 
 sults his watch. It is past midnight. He 
 has searched for hours. No famous 
 thoroughfare has escaped him. He has 
 reconnoitred diligently and thoroughly, as 
 only a pious tourist bent on forbidden pleas- 
 ures knows how. He is the arch-tj^pe of 
 American traveller ; the God-fearing deacon 
 on the loose; the vestryman returning from 
 Jerusalem. Hopefully, yet fearfully, he 
 has pushed his search. He has traversed 
 the Karntnerring, the Kolowratring, peered 
 into Stadt Park, hit the Stubenring, scouted 
 Franz Josefs Kai, searched the Rotenturm- 
 strasse, 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
 
 VIENNA 39 
 
 strain of the " Blaue Donau " has wooed 
 his ear. No one has nailed him with sachet 
 eggs. He has not been choked bj^ quarts 
 of confetti. His conscience is as pure as 
 the brews of Munich. He is still in a bene- 
 ficent state of primeval and exquisite pro- 
 phylaxis, of benign chemical purity, of pro- 
 tean moral asepsis. He came prepared for 
 deluges of wine and concerted onslaughts 
 from ineffable freimadeiin. But he might 
 as well have attended a drama by Charles 
 Klein for all the rakish romance he has un- 
 earthed. His evening has gone. His legs 
 are weaiy. And nothing has happened to 
 astound or flabbergast him, to send him 
 sprawling with Cheyne- Stokes breathing. 
 In all his promenading he has seen nothing 
 to affect his vasomotor centres or to produce 
 Argyll-Robertson pupils. 
 
 Can it be true, he wonders, that, after all, 
 Viennese gaiety is an illusion, a base fabrica- 
 tion? Is the Wiener hlut, like lowan 
 blood, calm and sluggish? Is Vienna's
 
 40 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 reputation bogus, a snare for tourists, a 
 delusion for the unsophisticated? Where is 
 that far-renowned geiniithlichkeit? Has 
 an American press agent had his foul hand 
 in the advertising of Austria's capital? 
 Perhaps — perhaps ! . . . But what of 
 those Viennese operas? What of those sen- 
 suous waltzes, those lubric bits of Schramm- 
 musik which have come from Vienna? 
 And has he not seen pictures of Viennese 
 women — angels a la mode, miracles of 
 beauty, Loreleis de luxe? Even Baedeker, 
 the papa of the travelling schoolmarms, has 
 admitted Vienna to be a bit frivolous. 
 
 A puzzle, to be sure. A problem for 
 Copernicus — a paradox, a theorem with 
 many decimal points. So thinks the tourist, 
 retiring to his hotel. And figuring thus, he 
 falls to sleep, enveloped in a caressing 
 miasma of almost unearthly respectability. 
 
 But is it true that Vienna is the home of 
 purity, of early retirers, of phlegmatic and 
 virtuous souls? Are its gaieties mere
 
 VIENNA 41 
 
 febrile imaginings of 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 ro- 
 mance, bristhng with intrigue, polluted with 
 perfume? It is. And, furthermore, it is 
 far gayer than its reputation; for all has 
 never been told. Gaiety in Vienna is an 
 end, not a means. It is born in the blood 
 of the people. The carnival spirit reigns. 
 There are almost no restrictions, no engines 
 of repression. Alongside the real Viennese 
 night life, the blatant and spectacular ca- 
 prices of Paris are so much tinsel. The 
 life on the Friedrichstrasse, the brightest 
 and most active street in Europe, becomes 
 tawdry when compared with the secret 
 glories of the Karntnerring. In the one in- 
 stance we have gaiety on parade, in 
 strumpet garb — the simulacrum of sin — 
 gaiety dramatised. In the other instance, 
 it is an ineradicable factor of the city's life. 
 To appreciate these differences, one must
 
 42 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 understand the temperamental appeals of 
 the Viennese. With them gaiety comes un- 
 der the same physiological category as chil- 
 blains, hunger and fatigue. It is accepted 
 as one of the natural and necessary adjuncts 
 of life like eating and sleeping and lovemak- 
 ing. It is an item in their pharmacopoeia. 
 They do not make a business of pleasure any 
 more than the Englishman makes a business 
 of walking, or the American of drinking 
 Peruna or the German of beerbibbing. 
 For this reason, pleasure in Vienna is not 
 elaborate and external. It is a private, in- 
 timate thing in which every citizen partici- 
 pates according to his standing and his 
 pocketbook. The Austrians do not com- 
 mercialize their pleasure in the hope of 
 wheedling dollars from American pockets. 
 Such is not their nature. And so the slum- 
 ming traveller, lusting for obscure and fas- 
 cinating debaucheries, finds little in Vienna 
 to attract him. 
 
 Vienna is perhaps the one city in the
 
 VIENNA 43 
 
 world which maintains a consistent attitude 
 of genuine indifference toward the outsider, 
 which resents the intrusion of snoopers from 
 these palhd States, which dehberately makes 
 it difficult for foreign Florizels to find di- 
 version. The liveliest places in Vienna pre- 
 sent the gloomiest exteriors. The official 
 guides maintain a cloistered silence re- 
 garding those addresses at which Viennese 
 society disports itself when the ledgers are 
 closed and the courts have adjourned. The 
 Viennese, resenting the intrusion of out- 
 siders upon his midnight romances, holds 
 out no encouragement for globe-trotting 
 Don Juans. He refuses to be inspected and 
 criticised by the inquisitive sensation hunters 
 of other nations. Money will not tempt 
 him to commercialize his gaiety and regulate 
 it to meet the morbid demands of the in- 
 terloper. Hence the external aspect of 
 sobriety. Hence the veneer of piety. 
 Hence the sepulchral silence of the midnight 
 thoroughfares. Hence the silence and the
 
 44 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 desolation which meet the roaming tourist. 
 In this respect Vienna is different from 
 any other large city in Europe. The 
 joys of Parisian night life are as artificial 
 as cosmetics. They are organised and exe- 
 cuted by technicians subtly schooled in the 
 psychology of the Puritan mind. To the 
 American, all forms of pleasure are ex- 
 cesses, to be indulged in only at rare in- 
 tervals ; and Paris supplies him with the op- 
 portunities. Berlin, and even Munich, 
 makes a business of gaiety. St. Peters- 
 burg, patterning after Paris, excites the 
 visitor with visions of gaudy glory; and 
 London, outwardly chaste, maintains a 
 series of supper clubs which in the dis- 
 honesty of their subterranean pleasures sur- 
 pass in downright immorality any city in 
 Europe. Budapest is a miniature Babylon 
 burning incense by night which assails the 
 visitor's nostrils and sends him into delirious 
 ecstasies. San Francisco and New York 
 are both equipped with opportunities for
 
 - VIENNA 45 
 
 all-night indulgences. In not one of these 
 cities does the sight seeker or the joy hunter 
 find difficulty in sampling the syrups of sin. 
 Mysterious guides assail him on the street 
 corners, pouring libidinous tales into his 
 furry ears, tempting him with descriptions 
 like Suetonius's account of the Roman cir- 
 cuses. Automobiles with megaphones and 
 placards summon him from the street cor- 
 ners. Electric signs — debauches of writh- 
 ing colour — intoxicate his mind and point 
 the way to haunts of Caracalla. 
 
 But Vienna! He will search in vain for 
 a key to the night life. By bribery he may 
 wring an admission or obtain an address 
 from the hotel clerk; but the menage to 
 which he is directed is, alas, not what he 
 seeks. He may plead with cabmen or buy 
 the honour of taxicab drivers, but little in- 
 formation will he obtain. For these gentle- 
 men, strange as it may seem, are almost as 
 ignorant of the gaiety of Vienna as he him- 
 self. And at last, in the early morning,
 
 46 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 after ineffectual searching, after hours of 
 assiduous nosing, he ends up at some 
 haffeehaus near the Schillerplatz, partakes 
 of a chaste ice with Wiener gehdch and 
 goes dolorously home — a virgin of cir- 
 cumstance, an unwilling and despondent 
 Parsifal, a lofty and exquisite creature 
 through lack of opportunity, the chaste vic- 
 tim of a killjoy conspiracy. He is that 
 most tragic figure — an enforced pietist, 
 a thwarted voluptuar}\ Eheu! Eheu! 
 Dies faustus! 
 
 In order to come into intimate touch with 
 the night life of Vienna one must live there 
 and become a part of it. It is not for spec- 
 tators and it is not public. It involves every 
 family in the city. It is inextricably woven 
 into the home life. It is elaborate because 
 it is genuine, because it is not looked upon 
 as a mere outlet for the repressions of puri- 
 tanism. From an Anglo-Saxon point of 
 view Vienna is perhaps the most degenerate 
 city in the world. But degeneracy is geo-
 
 VIENNA • 47 
 
 graphical; morals are temperamental. 
 This is why the Viennese resents intrusion 
 and spying. His night life involves the na- 
 tional spirit. His gaiety is not a preroga- 
 tive of the demi-monde y but the usufruct of 
 all classes. Joy is not exclusive or solitary 
 with the Viennese. He is not ashamed of 
 his frolics and hilarities. He does not take 
 his pleasures hypocritically after the man- 
 ner of the Occidental moralist. He is a gay 
 bird, a sybarite, a modern Lucullus, a Baron 
 Chevrial — and admits it. 
 
 To be sure, there is in Vienna a miniature 
 night life not unlike that of the other Euro- 
 pean capitals, but it requires constant at- 
 tention and assiduous coddling to keep it 
 alive. The better class Viennese will have 
 none of it. It is a by-product of the un- 
 derworld and is no more characteristic of 
 Vienna than the gilded cafes chantants 
 which cluster round the Place Pigalle on 
 Montmartre are characteristic of Paris. 
 These places correspond to the Palais de
 
 48 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Danse and the Admirals Palast in Berlin; 
 to the Villa Villa and the Astor Club in 
 London ; to Reisenweber's in New York ; to 
 L'Abbaye and the Rat Mort in Paris — 
 allowing of course for the temperamental 
 influences (and legal restrictions) of the 
 different nations. 
 
 Let us arouse a snoring cabman and make 
 the rounds. Why not? All merrymaking 
 is shot through with youth, no matter how 
 dolorous the joy or how expensive the in- 
 dulgence. So let us partake of the feast 
 before us. Our first encounter is with 
 the Tabarin, in the Annagasse, an estab- 
 lishment not unlike the Bal Tabarin 
 in Paris. We hesitate at the entrance, 
 but being assured by the doorkeeper, 
 garbed Hke Louis Seize, that it is " ein dus- 
 serst feines und modernes nacht etahlisse- 
 ment " we enter, 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.
 
 VIENNA 49 
 
 From there we go to the Rauhensteingasse 
 and enter Maxim's, brazenly heralded as the 
 Montmartre of Vienna. Then on to the 
 Wallfischgasse to mingle with the confused 
 visitors of the Trocadero, where we are 
 urged to have supper. But time is fleeting. 
 The cabmeter is going round like a tortured 
 turbine. So we hasten out and seek the 
 Wiehburggasse, where we discover a " Palais 
 de Danse " — seductive phrase, suggestive 
 of ancient orgies. But we cannot tarry — 
 in spite of Mimi Lobner (Ah, lovely lady!) 
 who sings to us " Liebliche Kleine Dinger- 
 chen '* from " Kino-Konigin," and makes 
 us buy her a peach bowle in payment. One 
 more place and we are ready for the resort 
 in the Prater, the Coney Island of Vienna. 
 This last place has no embroidered name. 
 Its existence is emblazoned across the blue 
 skies by an electric sign reading " Etablisse- 
 ment Parisien." It is in the Schellinggasse 
 and justifies itself by the possession of a 
 very fine orchestra whose militdr-kapell-
 
 50 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 meister knows naught but inebriate tanz- 
 musik. 
 
 Again in the open air, headed for the 
 Kaisergarten, we reflect on our evening's 
 search for nachtvergnilgungen. With the 
 lone exception of our half -hour with Mimi, 
 it has been a sad chase. All the places (with 
 the possible exception of the Trocadero) 
 have been cheaply imitative of Paris, with 
 the usual appurtenances of arduous waiters, 
 gorgeously dressed women dancing on red 
 velvet carpets, fortissimo orchestras, ex- 
 pensive wines, hlumenmddl, hothouse straw- 
 berries and other accessories of manufac- 
 tured pleasure. But compared with Paris 
 these places have been second rate. The 
 damen (I except thee, lovely Mimi!) have 
 not inflamed us either with their beauty or 
 with manifestations of their esprit gaulois. 
 For the most part they have been stodgy 
 women witli voluminous bosoms, Eiffel 
 towers of bought hair — bison with astonish- 
 ing hyperboles and parabolas, dressed in all
 
 VIENNA 51 
 
 of the voluptuous splendour but possessing 
 none of the grace of the Rue de la Paix. 
 Furthermore, these establishments have 
 lacked the deportmental abandon which 
 saves their prototypes in Paris from down- 
 right banality. All of their deviltries have 
 been muted, as if the guests suffered from 
 a pathological fear of pleasure. Strangers 
 we were when we entered. As strangers 
 we take our departure. 
 
 Why do I linger thus, you ask, over these 
 hothouse caperings? For the same reason 
 that we are now going to inspect the Kaiser- 
 garten. Because this phase of life repre- 
 sents an unnatural development in the 
 Viennese mode of pleasure, something 
 grafted, yet something characteristic of the 
 impressionability of the Viennese mind. 
 The Viennese are a hybrid and imitative 
 people. They have annexed characteristics 
 distinctly French. In the Kaisergarten 
 these characteristics are more evident than 
 elsewhere. Here is a people's playground
 
 52 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 in which all manner of amusements are 
 thrown together, from the halhaus, where 
 nothing but expensive champagne is sold, 
 to the scenic railway, on which one may ride 
 for fifty heller. This park presents a 
 bizarre and chaotic mingling of outdoor con- 
 certs, variety theatres, bierkabarettSj mov- 
 ing picture halls, promenades and sideshow 
 attractions of the Atlantic City type. The 
 Kaisergarten is the rendezvous of the bour- 
 geoisie, the heaven of hoi polloi — rotund 
 merchants with walrus moustachios, dapper 
 young clerks with flowing ties, high-chokered 
 soldiers, their boots polished into ebony 
 mirrors, fat-jowled maidens in rainbow 
 garb . . . There is lovemaking under the 
 Linden trees, beer drinking on the midway, 
 schnitzel eating in the restaurants. 
 Homely pleasantries are thrown from heavy 
 German youths to the promenading 
 mddchen. One catches such greetings and 
 whisperings as '^ Du hist oba heuf fescJi 
 g'scholnt " and " Ko do net so lang umanan-
 
 VIENNA 53 
 
 derbandln/' There exists a spirit of buoy- 
 ant and genuine fellowship. But here 
 again it is a private and personal brand of 
 gaiety. Let the obvious stranger whisper 
 " Schatz'rV to a powdered Fritzi on the 
 bench next to him, and he will be ignored 
 for his impertinence. The same salutation 
 from a Viennese will call forth a coquettish 
 "^ Raubershua/" Even the Amerikan-har 
 in the centre of the Kaisergarten (in charge 
 of no less a celebrity than Herr Pohnstingl!) 
 will not oifer the tourist the hospitality 
 he hopes to find. He will find neither 
 Americans nor American drinks. The 
 cocktail — that boon to all refined palates, 
 when mixed with artistry and true poetic 
 feeling — circulates incognito at Hen* 
 Pohnstingl's. Such febrifuges as mas- 
 querade under that name are barely recog- 
 nisable by authentic connoisseurs, by Ra- 
 belaises of sensitive esophagi, by true lovers 
 of subtly concocted gin and vermouth and 
 bitters. But the Viennese, soggy with acid
 
 54 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 beer, his throat astringentized by strong 
 coffee, knows not the difference. And so 
 the Amerikan-har flourishes. 
 
 It was here that I discovered Gabrielle, a 
 sad little French girl, alone and forsaken in 
 the midst of merriment, drinking Dubonnet 
 and dreaming of the Boulevard Montpar- 
 nasse. I bought her another Dubonnet — 
 what stranger would have done less? In 
 her was epitomized the sadness of the 
 stranger in Vienna. Lured by lavish tales 
 of gaiety, she had left Paris, to seek an un- 
 savoury fortune in the love marts of Vienna. 
 But her dream had been broken. She was 
 lonely as only a Parisian can be, stranded in 
 an alien countrj^ She knew scarcely a score 
 of German words, in fact no language but 
 her own. Her youth and coquetry did not 
 avail. She was an outsider, a deserted on- 
 looker. She spoke tenderly of the Cafe du 
 Dome, of Fouquet's, the Cafe d'Harcourt, 
 Marigny and the Luxembourg. She in- 
 quired sentimentally about the Bal BulHer.
 
 t^ 
 
 VIENNA
 
 VIENNA 55 
 
 She was pretty, after the anaemic French 
 type of beauty, with pink cheeks, pale blue 
 eyes and hair the colour of wet straw. She 
 had the slender, shapely feet of the French 
 cocotte. Her stockings were of thin pink 
 silk. Her slender, soft fingers were without 
 a ring. Her jewelry, no doubt, had long 
 since gone to the money lender. She 
 seemed childishly happy because I sat and 
 talked to her. Poor Httle Gabriellel Her 
 tragedy was one of genuine bereavement, or 
 perhaps the worst of all tragedies — lone- 
 liness. I shall never think again of Vienna 
 without picturing that stranded girl, sip- 
 ping at her reddish drink in the Amerikan- 
 har in the Kaisergarten. But her case is 
 typical. The Viennese are not hospitable 
 to strangers. They are an intimate, self- 
 sufficient people. 
 
 Let us turn, however, from the little Ga- 
 brielle to a more fascinating and exquisite 
 creature, to a happier and more buoyant 
 denizen of Viennese night Hfe, to a lady of
 
 56 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 more elegant attire. In short, behold Frau- 
 lein Bianca Welse. In her are the alkaloids 
 of gaiety. She irradiates the joy fulness of 
 the city. In her infancy she was hummed 
 to sleep with snatches from the " Wiener 
 Blut," the booziest waltz in all Christendom. 
 Bianca is tall and catlike, but deliciously 
 proportioned. Her hair is an alloy of 
 bronze and gold. Her skin is pale, and in 
 her cheeks 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 a perfect oval. Her lips are 
 full and abnormally red. Her slender, 
 conical hands are always active like those of 
 a child, and she wears but little jewelry. 
 Her gowns come from Paquin's and seem 
 almost a part of her body. 
 
 This is Bianca, the most beautiful woman 
 in all Europe. Do I seem to rave? Then 
 let me answer that perhaps you have not 
 seen Bianca. And to see her is to be her 
 slave, her press agent. It was Bianca's pic-
 
 VIENNA 57 
 
 ture that went emblazoning over two con- 
 tinents a few years ago as the supreme type 
 of modern feminine beauty, according to the 
 physiological experts and the connoisseurs 
 of pulchritude. But it is not because of the 
 lady's gift of beauty that I feature her here. 
 It is because she so perfectly typifies the 
 romance of that whirling city, so accurately 
 embodies the spirit of Vienna's darkened 
 hours. In the afternoon you will find her 
 on the Karntnerstrasse with her black- 
 haired little maid. At five o'clock she goes 
 for haffeetsch'rl to Herr Reidl's Cafe de 
 I'Europe, in the Stefanplatz. With her are 
 always two or three Beau Brummels chat- 
 ting incessantly about music and art, wooing 
 her suavely with magnificent technique, 
 drinking coffee intermittently, and lavishly 
 tipping the kellner. 
 
 These haffeeliduser are the leading public 
 institutions of Vienna. They take the place 
 of private teas, culture clubs, dramatic read- 
 ings and sewing circles in other countries.
 
 58 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 All Vienna society turns out in the after- 
 noon to partake of melange^ kaffee mit 
 schlagohers^ kaimziner, schuoarzen, weckerhi 
 and kttisersemmehi. But no hard drinks, 
 no vulgar pretzels and ^vursts. Only 
 Americans order beer and cognac at the 
 coffee houses, and generally, after once sam- 
 pling them, they follow the bibulous lead 
 of the Viennese. Each kaffeehaus has its 
 own coterie, its own habitues. Thus, at the 
 Cafe de I'Europe one finds the worldly set, 
 the young bloods with artistic leanings. 
 The Cafe de I'Opera, in the Opernring, is 
 patronised by the advocates and legal at- 
 taches. At the Cafe Scheidl, in the Wall- 
 fischgasse, foregather the governmental 
 coterie, the army officers and burgomasters. 
 The merchants discuss their affairs at the 
 Cafe Schwarzenberg, in the Karntnerring. 
 At the Cafe Heinrichshof, in the Opernring, 
 one finds the leading actors and musicians 
 immersed in the small talk of their craft. 
 Thus it goes. In all the leading cafes — -
 
 VIENNA 59 
 
 the Habsburg, Landtmann, Mokesch, Gar- 
 ^enbau, Siller, Priickl — the tables are filled, 
 and the coffee drinking, the haunzerln eat- 
 ing and the gossiping go on till opera time. 
 The theatre in Vienna is a part of the life. 
 It is not indulged in as a mere amusement or 
 diversion, like shooting the chutes or going 
 to church. It is an. evening's obligation. 
 This accounts for the large number of 
 Vienna theatres and for their architectural 
 beauty. But do not think that when you 
 have attended a dozen such places as the 
 Hofoperntheatre, the Hofburgtheatre, the 
 Deutsches Volkstheatre and the Carltheatre 
 you have sensed the entire theatrical appeal 
 of Vienna. Far from it. No city in the 
 world is punctuated with so large a number 
 of semi-private intimate theatres and caba- 
 rets as Vienna — theatres with a seating 
 capacity of forty or fifty. You may know 
 the Kleine Biihne and the Max und Moritz 
 and the Holle, but there are fifty others, 
 and every night finds them crowded.
 
 60 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Theatregoing is occasionally varied with 
 lesser and more primitive pastimes. Go out 
 on the crooked Sieveringerstrasse and be- 
 hold the multitudes waxing mellow over the 
 sweet red heuriger. Go to the Volksgar- 
 ten-Cafe Restaurant any summer night 
 after seven, pay sixty heller, 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 in 
 the florid polyphonies of the Wiener Ton- 
 kilnstler Orcliester. Sundays and holiday 
 nights go to Grinsing and Nussdorf and 
 watch the people at play. Make the rounds 
 of the wine houses — the Rathaus Keller, 
 the Nieder-Oesterreichisches Winzerhaus, 
 the Tommasoni — and behold the spooning 
 and the rough joking. 
 
 All this is part of the night life of Vienna. 
 But it is not the life in which Bianca par- 
 ticipates. Therefore we cannot tarry in 
 the wine houses or at the concerts. Instead 
 let us attend the opera. We go early before
 
 VIENNA 61 
 
 the sun has set. The curtain rises at six- 
 thirty to permit of our leaving by half past 
 ten, for there is much to do before morning. 
 After the performance — dinner! The 
 Viennese are adepts in the gustatory art. 
 Their meals have the heft of German vic- 
 tualty combined with the delicacies and im- 
 aginative quahties of French cooking. An 
 ideal and seductive combination! A rich 
 and toothsome blending! . . . Bianca 
 touches my arm and says we must make 
 haste. This evening I am to be honoured 
 with dinner in her apartment. So we drive 
 to her rooms on the Franzenring overlook- 
 ing 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, 
 the Imperial, the Bristol and the Spaten- 
 brau are deserted in the early evenings. 
 Even after the Opera these restaurants pre- 
 sent little of the life found in the Paris, Ber- 
 lin or London restaurants. The Viennese is
 
 62 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 not a public diner; and here again we find 
 an explanation for the tourist's impressions. 
 When the Viennese goes to dinner, he does 
 so privately. Bianca's dinner that night 
 was typical. There were twelve at table. 
 There was music by a semi-professional 
 pianist. The service was perfect — it was 
 more like a dinner in a cabinet particulier at 
 a Parisian cafe than one in a private apart- 
 ment. But here we catch the spirit of 
 Vienna, the transforming of what the other 
 cities do publicly into the intimacies of the 
 home. 
 
 At one o'clock, the meal finished, the in- 
 timate theatre claimed us. There the glori- 
 ous Bianca met her lovers, her little follow- 
 ing. At these theatres every one know^s 
 every one else. It is the social lure as well 
 as the theatrical appeal that brings the peo- 
 ple there. Bianca chats with the actors, 
 flirts with the admiring Lotharios and drinks 
 champagne. At her side sit the great- 
 est artists and dramatists of the day, princes
 
 VIENNA 63 
 
 and other celebrities. At one of these per- 
 formances I saw her beA\dtching two men — 
 one a composer, the other a writer — whose 
 names lead the artistic activities of South- 
 ern Europe. But Bianca is prodigal with 
 her charms, and before the final curtain was 
 dropped she had shed her fascinations on 
 eveiy patron in the theatre. And I, whose 
 thirty kronen had passed her by the satin- 
 pantalooned and lace-bosomed doorkeeper, 
 was quite forgot. But such is Viennese eti- 
 quette. An escort may pay the fiacre 
 charge and the entrance fee, but such a 
 meagre, vulgar claim does not suffice to ob- 
 tain a ladjT-'s entire attention for the evening. 
 Such selfishness is not understood by the 
 Viennese. 
 
 The real business of the evening came 
 later. The coffee drinking, the theatre and 
 the dining had been so many prehminaries 
 for that form of amusement which forms the 
 basis of all Viennese night life — dancing. 
 The Viennese dance more than any people
 
 64. EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 in the world. During FascJiingzeit there are 
 at least fifty large public balls every night. 
 These balls become gay at one o'clock and 
 last through the entire night. For the most 
 part they are masked, and range from the 
 low to the high, from those where the en- 
 trance fee is but two kronen to the elaborate 
 ones whose demand is thirty kronen. 
 Every night in Vienna during the season 
 fifty thousand people are dancing. Nor 
 are these balls the suave and conventional 
 dances of less frank nations. By the mere 
 presentation of a flower any one may dance 
 with any one else. In every phase of night 
 life in Vienna flowers play an important 
 part. They constitute the language of the 
 carnival. To such an extent is this true 
 that, though you may ask for a dance by 
 presenting a flower, you may not ask ver- 
 bally, though your tongue be polished and 
 your soul ablaze with poetry. And while 
 you are dancing you may not talk to your
 
 VIENNA 65 
 
 partner. She is yours for that dance — but 
 she is yours in silence. Should you meet 
 her the following afternoon in the Prater 
 or on parade in the Karntnerstrasse, her 
 eyes will look past you, for the night has 
 gone, carrying with it its memories and its 
 intoxications. 
 
 It is this spirit of evanescence, this youth- 
 ful buoyancy, snatched out of the passing 
 years, lived for a moment and then forgot, 
 which constitutes the genuine gaiety of 
 Vienna. It is an unconscious gaiety, sensed 
 but not analysed, in the very soul of the 
 people. It keeps the Viennese young and 
 makes him resent, intuitively, the invasion 
 of other nations to whom gaiety is artificial. 
 That is why the dances are open to all, why 
 the formality of introductions would be 
 scoffed at. Their blood has all been tapped 
 from the same fountain head. There are 
 affinities between all Viennese phagocytes. 
 The basis of all romance is ephemeral in its
 
 66 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 nature, and in no people in the world do 
 we find so great an element of transitoriness 
 in pleasure-taking as in the Viennese. 
 
 A description of one of the masked balls 
 would tell you the whole of the night life 
 in Vienna, but until you have become a part 
 of one of them you would not understand 
 them. Not until you yourself had accom- 
 panied the fair Bianca and watched her for 
 a whole evening, could you appreciate how 
 these dances differ from those of other 
 cities. Externally they would appear the 
 same. Photographed, they would look hke 
 any other carnival ball. But there are 
 things which a photographic plate could 
 never catch, and the spirit of meiTiment 
 which runs through these dances is one. If 
 you care to see them, go to the Blumensale 
 or to the Wimberger. The crowds here are 
 typical. However, if you care for a more 
 lavish or elaborate gathering, you will find 
 it at the Musikvereinsale or the Sofiensale. 
 These latter two are more fashionable.
 
 VIENNA 67 
 
 though no one remains at any of the masken- 
 bdlle the whole evening. The dancers go 
 from one ball to another ; and should you, at 
 five in the morning, return to a balhaus 
 where you had been earlier in the evening, 
 you would find an entirely new set of 
 dancers. 
 
 Let us then take our departure, with the 
 masked ball still in full progress, our hearts 
 still thumping to the measures of an intoxi- 
 cating waltz, the golden confetti still glisten- 
 ing in our hair, perfumed powder on our 
 clothes, the murmuring of clandestine whis- 
 pers still in our ears, the rhythm of swaying 
 girls still in our blood. As we pass out into 
 the bleak street, the first faint flush of dawn 
 is in the east. The wdsserer are washing oiF 
 the cabs; a helmeted hauptmann salutes 
 lazily as we pass, and we drive home full of 
 the intoxications of that pagan gaiety which 
 the Viennese, more than any other people, 
 have preserved in all its innocence, its sen- 
 suous splendour, its spontaneity and youth.
 
 68 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Bianca? By now she has forgotten with 
 whom she came to the dance. Next week 
 my name will be but one of her innumerable 
 memories — if, indeed, it does not altogether 
 pass away. For Bianca is Vienna, lavish 
 and joyous and buoyant — and forgetful. 
 I danced with her three times, but my three 
 roses, along with scores of others, have long 
 since been lost in the swirl of the evening. 
 
 I wish I might think only of Bianca as 
 the shadows dissolve from the streets and the 
 grey morning light strikes the great steeple 
 of Stefans-Dom. But another picture 
 presents itself. I see a little French girl, 
 out of touch with all the merriment around 
 her, sipping her Dubonnet in solitude — a 
 forlorn girl with pink cheeks, pale blue eyes 
 and hair the colour of wet straw.
 
 MUNICH
 
 MUNICH 
 
 T ET the most important facts come 
 -■— i first. The best beer in Munich is 
 Spatenbrau ; the best place to get it is at the 
 Hof theatre Cafe in the Residenzstrasse ; the 
 best time to drink it is after 10 p. m., and the 
 best of all girls to serve it is Fraulein Sophie, 
 that tall and resilient creature, with her ap- 
 petizing smile, her distinguished bearing and 
 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 shop- 
 lifters, some as graceful as prime ballerini, 
 but none reaching so high a general level of 
 merit, none so thoroughlj^ satisfying to eye 
 and soul as Fraulein Sophie. She is a lady, 
 every inch of her, a lady presenting to all 
 gentlemanly chents the ideal blend of cordi- 
 
 71
 
 72 EUROPE AFTER 8:16 
 
 ality and dignity, and she serves the best 
 beer in Christendom. Take away that beer, 
 and it is possible, of course, that Sophie 
 would lose some minute granule or globule 
 of her charm; but take away Sophie and I 
 fear the beer would lose even more. 
 
 In fact, I know it, for I have drunk that 
 same beer in the Spatenbraukeller in the 
 Bayerstrasse, at all hours of the day and 
 night, and always the ultimate thrill was 
 missing. Good beer, to be sure, and a hun- 
 dred times better than the common brews, 
 even in Munich, but not perfect beer, not 
 beer de luxe, not super-beer. It is the 
 human equation that counts, in the hierhalle 
 as on the battlefield. One resents, somehow 
 a kellnerin with the figure of a taxicab, no 
 matter how good her intentions and fluent 
 her technique, just as one resents a trained 
 nurse with a double chin or a glass eye. 
 When a personal office that a man might 
 perform, or even an intelhgent machine, is 
 put into the hands of a woman, it is put
 
 MUNICH 73 
 
 there simply and solely because the woman 
 can bring charm to it and irradiate it with 
 romance. If, now, she fails to do so — if 
 she brings, not charm, not beauty, not ro- 
 mance, but the gross curves of an aurochs 
 and a voice of brass — if she offers bulk 
 when the heart cries for gi'ace and adenoids 
 when the order is for music, then the whole 
 thing becomes a hissing and a mocking, and 
 a grey fog is on the world. 
 
 But to get back to the Hoftheatre Cafe. 
 It stands, as I have said, in the Residenz- 
 strasse, where that narrow street bulges out 
 into the Max-Joseph-platz, and facing it, 
 as its name suggests, is the Hoftheatre, the 
 most solemn-looking playhouse in Europe, 
 but the scene of appalling tone debaucheries 
 within. The supreme idea at the Hofthea- 
 tre is to get the curtain down at ten o'clock. 
 If the bill happens to be a short one, say 
 "Hansel and Gretel" or *' Elektra," the 
 three thumps of the starting mallet may 
 not come until eight o'clock or even 8:30,
 
 74 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 but if it is a long one, say " Parsifal " or 
 "Les Huguenots," a beginning is made far 
 back in the afternoon. Always the end ar- 
 rives at ten, with perhaps a moment or two 
 leeway in one direction or the other. And 
 two minutes afterward, without further 
 ceremony or delay, the truly epicurean 
 auditor has his feet under the mahogany at 
 the Hoftheatre Cafe across the platz, with 
 a seidel of that incomparable brew tilted 
 elegantly tow^ard his face and his glad eyes 
 smiling at Fraulein Sophie through the 
 glass bottom. 
 
 How many women could stand that test? 
 How many could bear the ribald distortions 
 of that lens-like seidel bottom and yet keep 
 their charm? How many thus caricatured 
 and vivisected, could command this free 
 reading notice from a casual American, dic- 
 tating against time and space to a red- 
 haired stenogi'apher, three thousand and 
 five hundred miles away? And yet Sophie 
 does it, and not only Sophie, but also Frida,
 
 MUNICH 75 
 
 Elsa, Lili, Kunigunde, Martchen, Therese 
 and Lottchen, her confreres and aides, and 
 even little Rosa, who is half Bavarian and 
 half Japanese, and one of the prettiest girls 
 in Munich, in or out of uniform. It is a 
 pleasure to say a kind word for little Rosa, 
 with her coal black hair and her slanting 
 eyes, for she is too fragile a fraulein to be 
 toting around those gigantic German 
 schnitzels and bifsteks, those mighty double 
 portions of sauerbraten and rostbif, those 
 staggering drinking urns, overballasted and 
 awash. 
 
 Let us not, however, be unjust to the es- 
 timable Herr Wirt of the Hoftheatre Cafe, 
 with his pneumatic tread, his chaste side 
 whiskers and his 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 also the shapeliest. 
 In the Hofbrauhaus and in the open air 
 bierkneipen (for instance, the Mathaser 
 joint, of which more anon) one drinks out
 
 76 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 of earthen cylinders which resemble noth- 
 ing so much as the gaunt towers of Munich 
 cathedral; and elsewhere the orthodox gob- 
 let is a glass edifice following the lines of an 
 old-fashioned silver water pitcher — you 
 know the sort the innocently criminal used 
 to give as wedding presents! — but at the 
 Hoftheatre there is a vessel of special de- 
 sign, hexagonal in cross section and un- 
 usually graceful in general aspect. On top, 
 a pewter hd, ground to an optical fit and 
 highly polished — by Sophie, Rosa et cd, 
 poor girls! To starboard, a stout handle, 
 apparently of reinforced onyx. Above the 
 handle, and attached to the Hd, a metal 
 flange or thumbpiece. Grasp the handle, 
 press your thumb on the thumbpiece — and 
 presto, the lid heaves up. And then, to the 
 tune of a Strauss waltz, played passion- 
 ately by tone artists in oleaginous dress 
 suits, down goes the Spatenbrau — gurgle, 
 gurgle — burble, burble — down goes the 
 Spatenbrau — exquisite, ineff'able! — to
 
 MUNICH 77 
 
 drench the heart in its nut brown flood and 
 fill the arteries with its benign alkaloids and 
 antitoxins. 
 
 Well, well, maybe I grow too eloquent! 
 Such memories loose and craze the tongue. 
 A man pulls himself up suddenly, to find 
 that he has been vulgar. 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. I prefer " Tom 
 Jones " to " The Rosary," Rabelais to the 
 Elsie books, the Old Testament to the New, 
 the expurgated parts of " Gulliver's Trav- 
 els " to those that are left. I delight in beef 
 stews, Hmericks, burlesque shows, New 
 York City and the music of Haydn, that 
 beery.and delightful old rascal! I swear in 
 the presence of ladies and archdeacons. 
 When the mercury is above ninety-five I 
 dine in my shirt sleeves and write poetry 
 naked. I associate habitually with drama- 
 tists, bartenders, medical men and musi- 
 cians. I once, in early youth, kissed a
 
 78 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 waitress at Dennett's. So don't accuse me 
 of vulgarity ; I admit it and flout you. Not, 
 of course, that I have no pruderies, no fas- 
 tidious metes and bounds. Far from it. 
 Babies, for example, are too vulgar for me; 
 I cannot bring myself to touch them. And 
 actors. And evangelists. And the obste- 
 trical anecdotes of ancient dames. But in 
 general, as I have said, I joy in vulgarity, 
 whether it take the form of divorce proceed- 
 ings 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 right to admit that 
 Munich beer is vulgar. On the contrary, it 
 is my obvious duty to deny it, and not only 
 to deny it but also to support my denial 
 with an overwhelming mass of evidence and 
 a shrill cadenza of casuistrj''. But the time 
 and the place, unluckily enough, are not 
 quite fit for the dialectic, and so I content 
 myself with a few pertinent observations. 
 Imprimis, a thing that is unique, incom-
 
 MUNICH 79 
 
 parable, sui generis, cannot be vulgar. 
 Munich beer is unique, incomparable, sui 
 generis. More, it is consummate, trans- 
 cendental, uhernatiirlich. Therefore it 
 cannot be vulgar. Secondly, the folk who 
 drink it day after day do not die of vulgar 
 diseases. Turn to the subhead Todesur- 
 sachen in the instructive Statistischer Mon~ 
 atsbericht der Stadt Milnclien, and you will 
 find records of few if any deaths from de- 
 lirium tremens, boils, hookworm, smallpox, 
 distemper, measles or what the Monatshe- 
 richt calls " liver sickness." The ISIiin- 
 cheners perish more elegantly, more charm- 
 ingly than that. When their time comes it 
 is gout that fetches them, or appendicitis, or 
 neurasthenia, or angina pectoris; or per- 
 chance they cut their throats. 
 
 Thirdly, and to make it short, lastly, the 
 late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich 
 beer, wrote " Hedda Gabler," not to men- 
 tion " Rosmershohn " and " The Lady 
 from the Sea " — wrote them in his fiat in
 
 80 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the pal- 
 ace and the afternoon promenaders, in the 
 late eighties of the present, or Christian era 
 — wrote them there and then took them to 
 the Cafe Luitpold, in the Briennerstrasse, 
 to ponder them, pohsh them and make them 
 perfect. I myself have sat in old Henrik's 
 chair and victualed from the table. It is 
 far back in the main hall of the cafe, to the 
 right as you come in, and hidden from the 
 incomer by the glass vestibule which guards 
 the pantry. Ibsen used to appear every 
 afternoon at three o'clock, to drink his vahze 
 of Lowenbrau and read the papers. The 
 latter done, he would sit in silence, think- 
 ing, thinking, planning, planning. Not 
 often did he say a word, even to Fraulein 
 Mizzi, his favourite hellnerin. So taciturn 
 was he, in truth, that his rare utterances 
 were carefully entered in the archives of the 
 cafe and are now preserved there. By the 
 courtesy of Dr. Adolph Himmelheber, 
 the present curator, I am permitted to tran-
 
 MUNICH 81 
 
 scribe a few, the imperfect German of the 
 poet being preserved: 
 
 November 18, 1889, 4:15 P. m. — Gieht es 
 kein Feuer in diese verfluchte Bierstube? 
 Meine Filsse sind so halt wie Eiszapfen! 
 
 April 12, 1890, 5:20 v.M.— Der Kerl is 
 verrilckt! (Said of an American who en- 
 tered with the stars and stripes flying from 
 his hat.) 
 
 May 22, 1890, 4:40 v,m,— Sie sind so 
 eselhaft wie ein Schauspielei'! (To an as- 
 sistant Herr Wirt who brought him a 
 Sociahst paper in mistake for the London 
 Times.) 
 
 Now and then the great man would con- 
 descend to play a game of billiards in the 
 hall to the rear, usually with some total 
 stranger. He would j)oint out the stranger 
 to Fraulein Mizzi and she would carry his 
 card. The game would proceed, as a rule, 
 in utter silence. But it was for the Lowen- 
 brau and not for the billiards that Ibsen came 
 to the Luitpold, for the Lowenbriiu and
 
 82 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 the high flights of soul that it engendered. 
 He had no great liking for INIunich as a city ; 
 his prime favourite was always Vienna, with 
 Rome second. But he knew that the in- 
 comparable malt liquor of Munich was full 
 of the inspiration that he needed, and so he 
 kept near it, not to bathe in it," not to frivol 
 with it, but to take it discreetly and pro- 
 phylacticalty, and as the exigencies of his art 
 demanded. 
 
 Ibsen's inherent fastidiousness, a quality 
 which urged him to spend hours shining his 
 shoes, was revealed by his choice of the Cafe 
 Luitpold, for of all the cafes in Munich the 
 Luitpold is undoubtedly the most elegant. 
 Its walls are adorned with frescoes by Al- 
 brecht Hildebrandt. The ceiling of the main 
 hall is supported by columns of coloured 
 marble. The tables are of carved mahog- 
 any. The forks and spoons, before Ameri- 
 cans began to steal them, were of real sil- 
 ver. The chocolate with whipped cream, 
 served late in the afternoon, is famous
 
 MUNICH 83 
 
 throughout Europe. The Herr Wirt has 
 the suave sneak of John Drew and is a privy 
 councillor to the King of Bavaria. All the 
 tables along the east wall, 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 there entertains the eminent 
 scientists who constantly visit the city. No 
 orchestra arouses the baser passions with 
 " Wiener Blut." The place has calm, 
 aloofness, intellectuahty, aristocracy, dis- 
 tinction. It was the scene foreordained for 
 the hatching of " Hedda Gabler." 
 
 But don't imagine that Munich, when it 
 comes to elegance, must stand or fall with 
 the Luitpold. Far from it, indeed. There 
 are other cafes of noble and elevating qual- 
 ity in that delectable town — plenty of 
 them, you may be sure. For example, the 
 Odeon, across the street from the Luitpold, 
 a place lavish and luxurious, but with a cer- 
 tain touch of dogginess, a taste of salt. 
 The piccolo who lights your cigar and ac-
 
 84 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 cepts your five pfennigs at the Odeon is an 
 Ethiopian dwarf. Do you sense the ro- 
 mance, the exotic diablerie, the suggestion 
 of Levantine mystery? And somewhat 
 Levantine, too, are the ladies who sit upon 
 the plush benches along the wall and take 
 Russian cigarettes with their kirschenwasser. 
 Not that the atmosphere is frankly one of 
 Sin. No! No! The Odeon is no cabaret. 
 A leg flung in the air would bring the Herr 
 Wirt at a gallop, you may be sure — or, at 
 any rate, his apoplectic corpse. In all New 
 York, I dare say, there is no pubUc eating 
 house so near to the far-flung outposts, the 
 Galapagos Islands of virtue. But one 
 somehow feels that for Munich, at least, the 
 Odeon is just a bit tolerant, just a bit philo- 
 sophical, just a bit Bohemian. One even 
 imagines taking an American show girl 
 there without being warned (by a curt note 
 in one's serviette) that the head waiter's 
 family lives in the house. 
 
 Again, pursuing these haunts of the
 
 MUNICH 85 
 
 baroque and arabesque, there is the restau- 
 rant of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, a mas- 
 terpiece of the Munich glass cutters and up- 
 holsterers. It is in the very heart of things, 
 with the royal riding school directly oppo- 
 site, the palace a block away and the green 
 of the Englischer Garten glimmering down 
 the street. Here, of a fine afternoon, the so- 
 ciety is the best between Vienna and Paris. 
 One may share the vinegar cruet with a 
 countess, and see a general of cavalry eat 
 peas with a knife (hollow ground, like a 
 razor; a Bavarian trick!) and stand aghast 
 while a great tone artist dusts his shoes with 
 a napkin, and observe a Russian grand duke 
 at the herculean labour of drinking himself 
 to death. 
 
 The Vier Jahreszeiten is no place for the 
 common people; such trade is not encour- 
 aged. The dominant note of the establish- 
 ment is that of proud retirement, of elegant 
 sanctuary. One enters, not from the garish 
 Maximilianstrasse, with its motor cars and
 
 86 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 its sinners, but from the Marstallstrasse, a 
 sedate and aristocratic side street. The 
 Vier Jahreszeiten, in its time, has given food, 
 alcohol and lodgings for the night to twenty 
 ero^\7ied heads and a whole shipload of les- 
 ser magnificoes, and despite the rise of other 
 hotels it retains its ancient supremacy. It 
 is the peer of Shepheard's at Cairo, of the 
 Cecil in London, of the old Inglaterra at 
 Havana, of the St. Charles at New Orleans. 
 It is one of the distinguished hotels of the 
 world. 
 
 I could give you a long list of other Mu- 
 nich restaurants of a kingly order — the 
 great breakfast room of the Bayrischer Hof, 
 with its polyglot waiters and its amazing 
 repertoire of English jams; the tea and 
 liquor atelier of the same hostelry, with its 
 high dome and its sheltering palms; the 
 pretty little open air restaurant of the 
 Kiinstlerhaus in the Lenbachplatz; the huge 
 catacomb of the Rathaus, with its mediseval 
 arches and its vintage wines; the lovely al
 
 MUNICH B7 
 
 fresco cafe on Isar Island, with the green 
 cascades of the Isar winging on lazy after- 
 noons; the cafe in the Hofgarten, gay with 
 birds and lovers; that in the Tiergarten, 
 from the terrace of which one watches lions 
 and tigers gamboling in the woods; and so 
 on, and so on. Tiiere is even, I hear, a tem- 
 perance restaurant in JMunich, the Jung- 
 brunnen in the Arcostrasse, where water is 
 sei-ved with meals, but that is only rumour. 
 I myself have never visited it, nor do I know 
 any one who has. 
 
 All this, however, is far from the point. 
 I am here hired to discourse of JMunich beer, 
 and not of vintage wines, bogus cocktails, 
 afternoon chocolate and well water. We 
 are on a beeriad. Avaunt, ye grapes, ye 
 maraschino cherries, ye puerile HoO! 
 
 And so, resuming that beeriad, it appears 
 that we are once again in the Hoftheatre 
 Cafe in the Residenzstrasse, and that 
 Fraulein Sophie, that pleasing creature, has 
 just arrived with two ewers of Spaten-
 
 88 EUROPE AFTJ:R 8:15 
 
 brau — two ewers fresh from the wood — 
 woody, nutty, incomparable ! Ah, those ele- 
 gantly manicured hands! All, that Mona 
 Lisa smile! Ah, that so graceful waist! 
 Ah, malt! Ah, hops! Ach, Miinchen, wie 
 hist du so schon! 
 
 But even Paradise has its nuisances, its 
 scandals, its lacks. The Hoftheatre Cafe, 
 alas, is not the place to eat sauerkraut — 
 not the place, at any rate, to eat sauerkraut 
 de luxe, the supreme and singular master- 
 piece of the Bavarian uplands, the perfect 
 grass embalmed to perfection. The place 
 for that is the Pschorrbrau in the Neuhau- 
 serstrasse, a devious and confusing journey, 
 down past the Pompeian post office, into 
 the narrow Schrammerstrasse, around the 
 old cathedral, and then due south to 
 the Neuhauserstrasse. Sapperment! The 
 TsTeuhauserstrasse is here called the Kauf- 
 ingerstrasse ! Well, well, don't let it fool 
 you. A bit further to the east it is 
 called the Marienplatz, and further still the
 
 MUNICH 89 
 
 Thai, and then the Isarthorplatz, and then 
 the Zweibriickenstrasse, and then the Isar- 
 briicke, and then the Ludwigbriicke, and 
 finally, beyond the river, the Gasteig or the 
 Rosenhennerstrasse, according as one takes 
 its left branch or its right. 
 
 But don't be dismayed by all that ver- 
 satility. Munich streets, like London 
 streets, change their names every two or 
 three blocks. Once you arrive between the 
 two mediaeval arches of the Karlsthor and 
 the Sparkasse, you are in the Neuhauser- 
 strasse, whatever the name on the street 
 sign, and if you move westward toward the 
 Karlsthor you will come inevitably to the 
 Pschorrbrau, and within you will find 
 Fraulein Tilde (to whom my regards), who 
 will laugh at your German with a fine show 
 of pearly teeth and the extreme vibra- 
 tion of her 195 pounds. Tilde, in these god- 
 less states, would be called fat. But ob- 
 serve her in the Pschorrbrau, mellowed by 
 that superb malt, glorified by that consum-
 
 90 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 mate kraut, and you will blush to think her 
 more than plump. 
 
 I give you the Pschorrbrau as the one best 
 eating bet in IMunich — and not forgetting, 
 by any means, the Luitpold, the Rathaus, the 
 Odeon and all the other gilded hells of vic- 
 tualry to northward. Imagine it: every 
 skein of sauerkraut is cooked three times be- 
 fore it reaches your plate! Once in plain 
 water, once in Rhine wine and once in 
 melted snow! A dish, in this benighted re- 
 public, for stevedores and yodlers, a coarse 
 fee for violoncellists, barbers and reporters 
 for the Staats-Zeitung — but the delight, at 
 the Pschorrbrau, of diplomats, the literati 
 and doctors of philosophy. I myself, eat- 
 ing it three times a day, to the accompani- 
 ment of schweinersrippen and honensalat, 
 have composed triolets in the Norwegian 
 language, a feat not matched by Bjom- 
 stjerne Bjornson himself. And I once met 
 an American medical man, in Munich to sit 
 under the learned Prof. Dr. Miiller, who ate
 
 mu:n^ich 91 
 
 no less than five portions of it nightly, after 
 his twelve long hours of clinical prodding 
 and hacking. He found it more nourish- 
 ing, he told me, than pure albumen, and 
 more stimulating to the j added nerves than 
 laparotomy. 
 
 But to many Americans, of course, sauer- 
 kraut does not appeal. Prejudiced against 
 the dish by ridicule and innuendo, they are 
 unable to differentiate between good and 
 bad, and so it's useless to send them to this 
 or that ausschank. Well, let them then go 
 to the Pschorrbrau and order bifstek from 
 the grill, at M. 1.20 the ration. There may 
 be tenderer and more savoury bif steks in the 
 world, bifsteks which sizzle more seductively 
 upon red hot plates, bifsteks with more pro- 
 teids and manganese in them, bifsteks more 
 humane to ancient and hyperesthetic teeth, 
 bifsteks from nobler cattle, more deftly cut, 
 more passionately grilled, more romanti- 
 cally served — but not, believe me, for 
 M. 1.20! Think of it: a cut of tenderloin
 
 92 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 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 dunhle, 
 thirty-two pfennigs. In all, M. 2.17 — an 
 odd mill or so more or less than fifty-two 
 cents. A square meal, perfectly cooked, 
 washed down with perfect beer and served 
 perfectly by Fraulein Tilde — and all for 
 the price of a shampoo! 
 
 From the Pschorrbrau, if the winds be 
 fair, the beeriad takes us westward along 
 the Neuhauserstrasse a distance of eighty 
 feet and six inches, and behold, we are at 
 the August inerbrau. Good beer — a trifle 
 pale, perhaps, and without much grip to it, 
 but still good beer. After all, however, 
 there is something lacking here. Or, to be 
 more accurate, something jars. The or- 
 chestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell 
 of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieu- 
 tenant over there, with his cropped head and 
 his outstanding ears, his backfisch waist and
 
 MUNICH 93 
 
 his mudscow feet — that military gargoyle, 
 half lout and half fop, offends the roving 
 eye. No doubt a handsome man, by Ger- 
 man standards — even, perhaps a cele- 
 brated seducer, a soldier with a future — 
 but the mere sight of him suffices to paralyse 
 an American esophagus. Besides, there is 
 the smell of chocolate, sweet, sickly, ef- 
 feminate, and at two in the afternoon! 
 Again, there is the music of Grieg, clammy, 
 clinging, creepy. Away to the Mathaser- 
 brau, two long blocks by taxi! From the 
 Munich of Berlinish decadence and Prus- 
 sian epaulettes to the Munich of honest 
 Bavarians! From chocolate and maca- 
 roons to pretzels and white radishes ! From 
 Grieg to " Lachende Liebe!" From a 
 boudoir to an inn yard ! From pale beer in 
 fragile glasses to red beer in earthen pots I 
 
 The Mathaserbrau is up a narrow alley, 
 and that alley is always full of Miincheners 
 going in. Follow the crowd, and one comes 
 presently to a row of booths set up by rad-
 
 94 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 ish sellers — ancient dames of incredible 
 diameter, gnarled old peasants in tapestry- 
 waistcoats and country boots; veterans, one 
 half ventures, of the Napoleonic wars, even 
 of the wars of Frederick the Great. A ten- 
 pfennig piece buys a noble white radish, and 
 the seller slices it free of charge, slices it with 
 a silver revolving blade into two score thin 
 schnitzels, and puts salt between each ad- 
 jacent pair. A radish so sliced and salted 
 is the perfect complement of this dark 
 Mathaser beer. One nibbles and drinks, 
 drinks and nibbles, and so slides the lazy 
 afternoon. The scene is an incredible, play- 
 house courtyard, with shrubs in tubs and 
 tables painted scarlet; a fit setting for the 
 first act of " Manon." But instead of chor- 
 isters in short skirts, tripping, the whoop-la 
 and boosting the landlord's wine, one feasts 
 the eye upon Mlinchenese of a rhinocerous 
 fatness, dropsical and gargantuan creatures, 
 bisons in skirts, who pass laboriously 
 among the bibuli, offering bunches of little
 
 MUNICH 95 
 
 pretzels strung upon red strings. Six 
 pretzels for ten pfennigs. A five-pfennig 
 tip for Frau Dickleibig, and she brings you 
 the FUegende Blatter^ Le Eire, the IMunich 
 or Berlin papers, whatever you want. A 
 drowsy, hedonistic, easy-going place. Not 
 much talk, not much ratthng of crockery, 
 not much card plajdng. The mountain, one 
 guesses, of Munich meditation. The incu- 
 bator of Munich gemiltllchkeit. 
 
 Upstairs there is the big Mathiiser hall, 
 with room for three thousand visitors of an 
 evening, a great resort for Bavarian high 
 privates and their best girls, the scene of 
 honest and public courting. Between the 
 Bavarian high private and the Bavarian 
 lieutenant all the diiferences are in favour 
 of the former. He wears no corsets, he is 
 innocent of the monocle, he sticks to native 
 beer. A man of amour like his officer, he 
 disdains the elaborate winks, the complex 
 diahleries of that superior being, and con- 
 fines himself to open hugging. One sees
 
 96 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 him, in these great beer halls, with his arm 
 around his Lizzie. Anon he arouses him- 
 self from his coma of love to offer her a sip 
 from his mass or to whisper some bovine 
 nothing into her ear. Before they depart 
 for the evening he escorts her to the huge 
 sign, " Filr Damen/' and waits patiently 
 while she goes in and fixes her mussed hair. 
 The Bavarians have no false pruderies, 
 no nasty little nicenesses. There is, indeed, 
 no race in Europe more innocent, more 
 frank, more clean-minded. Postcards of a 
 homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale 
 in every Munich stationer's shop, but the 
 connoisseur looks in vain for the studied in- 
 decencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities 
 of the Swiss towns. Munich has little to 
 show the American Sunday school superin- 
 tendent on the loose. The ideal there is not 
 a sharp and stinging deviltry, a swift 
 massacre of all the commandments, but a 
 Hquid and tolerant geniality, a great for- 
 giveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps.
 
 MUNICH 97 
 
 but at any rate it mellows. No Miinchener 
 ever threw a stone. 
 
 And so, passing swiftly over the Burger- 
 brau in the Kaufingerstrasse, the Hacker- 
 brau, the Kreuzbrau, and the Kochelbrau, 
 all hospitable lokale, selling pure beer in 
 honest measures; and over the various 
 Pilsener fountains and the agency for 
 Vienna beer — dish- watery stuff ! — in the 
 Maximilianstrasse ; and over the various 
 summer heller on the heights of Au and 
 Haidhausen across the river, with their 
 spacious teiTaces and their ancient tradi- 
 tions — passing over all these tempting 
 sanctuaries of mass and kellnerin^ we arrive 
 finally at the Lowenbraukeller and the Hof- 
 brauhaus, which is quite a feat of arriving, 
 it must be granted, for the one is in the 
 Nymphenburgerstrasse, in Northwest Mu- 
 nich, and the other is in the Platzl, not two 
 blocks from the royal palace, and the dis- 
 tance from the one to the other is a good 
 mile and a half.
 
 98 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 The Lowenbrau first — a rococo castle 
 sprawling over a whole city block, and with 
 accommodations in its " halls, galleries, 
 loges, verandas, terraces, outlying garden 
 promenades and beer rooms" (I quote the 
 official guide) for eight thousand drinkers. 
 A lordly and impressive establishment is 
 this Lowenbrau, an edifice of countless 
 towers, buttresses, minarets and dungeons. 
 It was designed by the learned Prof. Albert 
 Schmidt, one of the creators of modern 
 Munich, and when it was opened, on June 
 14, 1883, all the military bands in Munich 
 played at once in the great hall, and the 
 royal family of Bavaria turned out in state 
 coaches, and 100,000 eager Miincheners 
 tried to fight their way in. 
 
 How large that great hall may be I don't 
 know, but I venture to guess that it seats 
 four thousand people — not huddled to- 
 gether, as a theatre seats them, but comfort- 
 ably, loosely, spaciously, with plenty of room 
 between the tables for the 250 hellnerinen to
 
 MUNICH 99 
 
 navigate safely with their cargoes of Lowen- 
 brau. Four nights a week a mihtary band 
 plays in this hall or a mdnnerchor rowels the 
 air with song, and there is an admission fee 
 of thirty pfennigs (7/i cents). One 
 night I heard the band of the second Bava- 
 rian (Crown Prince's) Regiment, playing 
 as an orchestra, go through a programme 
 that would have done credit to the New 
 York philharmonic. A young violinist in 
 corporal's stripes hfted the crowd to its feet 
 with the slow movement of the Tschaikow- 
 sky concerto; the band itself began with 
 Wagner's " Siegfried Idyl " and ended with 
 Strauss's " Rosen aus dem Siiden," a su- 
 perb waltz, magnificently perfonned. 
 Three hours of first-rate music for 7^ 
 cents! And a mass of Lowenbrau, twice 
 the size of the seidel sold in this country at 
 twenty cents, for fortj^ pfennigs (9^ 
 cents) ! An inviting and appetizing spot, 
 believe me. A place to stretch your legs. 
 A temple of Lethe. There, when my days
 
 100 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 of moneylust are over, I go to chew my 
 memories and dream my dreams and listen 
 to my arteries hardening. 
 
 By taxicab down the wide Brienner- 
 strasse, past the Luitpold and the Odeon, to 
 the Ludwigstrasse, gay with its after-the- 
 opera crowds, and then to the left into the 
 Residenzstrasse, past the Hoftheatre and 
 its cafe (ah, Sophie, thou angel!), and so 
 to the Maximilianstrasse, to the Neuthurm- 
 strasse, and at last, with a sharp turn, into 
 the Platzl. 
 
 The Hofbrauhaus! One hears it from 
 afar; a loud buzzing, the rattle of mass lids, 
 the sputter of the released dunkle, the sharp 
 cries of pretzel and radish sellers, the 
 scratching of matches, the shuffling of feet, 
 the eternal gurgling of the plain people. 
 Xo palace this, for all its towering battle- 
 ments and the frescos by Ferdinand Wag- 
 ner in the great hall upstairs, but drinking 
 butts for them that labour and are heavy 
 laden: station porter, teamsters, servant
 
 MUNICH 101 
 
 girls, soldiers, bricklayers, blacksmiths, 
 tinners, sweeps. 
 
 There sits the fair lady who gathers cigar 
 stumps from the platz in front of the Bay- 
 erischer Hof, still in her green hat of labour, 
 but now with an earthen cylinder of Hof- 
 brau in her hands. The gentleman beside 
 her, obviously wooing her, is third fireman 
 at the same hotel. At the next table, a 
 squad of yokels just in from the oberland, 
 in their short jackets and their hobnailed 
 boots. Beyond, a noisy meeting of Social- 
 ists, a rehearsal of some liedertafel, a family 
 reunion of four generations, a beer party of 
 gay young bloods from the gas works, a 
 conference of the executive committee of 
 the horse butchers' union. Every second 
 drinker has brought his lunch wrapped in 
 newspaper; half a hlutwurst, two radishes, 
 an onion, a heel of rye bread. The debris 
 of such lunches covers the floor. One wades 
 through escaped beer, among floating 
 islands of radish top and newspaper. Chil-
 
 102 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 dren go overboard and are succoured with 
 shouts. Leviathans of this underground 
 lake, JLusitanias of beer, Pantagruels of the 
 Hofbrauhaus, colhde, draw off, colHde 
 again and are wrecked in the narrow chan- 
 nels. ... A great puffing and blowing. 
 Stranded craft on eveiy 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 
 zahlmeiste?' takes your twenty-eight pfen- 
 nigs and pushes your mass along the 
 counter. Then the perspiring bierbischof 
 fills it from the naked keg, and you carry it 
 to the table of your choice, or drink it stand- 
 ing up and at one suffocating gulp, or take 
 it out into the yard, to wrestle with it be- 
 neath the open sky. Roughnecks enter 
 eternally with fresh kegs; the thud of the 
 mallet never ceases; the rude clamour of 
 the bung-starter is as the rattle of depart-
 
 MUNICH 103 
 
 ing time itself. Huge damsels in dirty 
 aprons — retired hellnerinen, too bulky, 
 even, for that trade of human battleships — 
 go among the tables rescuing empty masse. 
 Each mass returns to the shelf and begins 
 another circuit of faucet, counter and table. 
 A dame so fat that she must remain per- 
 manently at anchor — the venerable Consti- 
 tution of this fleet! — bawls postcards and 
 matches. A man in pinge-nez, a decadent 
 doctor of philosophy, sells pale German 
 cigars at three for ten pfennigs. Here we 
 are among the plain people. They believe in 
 Karl Marx, hlutwurst and the Hofbrauhaus. 
 They speak a German that is half speech 
 and half grunt. One passes them to wind- 
 ward and enters the yard. 
 
 A brighter scene. A cleaner, greener 
 land. In the centre a circular fountain; on 
 four sides the mediseval gables of the old 
 beerhouse; here and there a barrel on end, 
 to serve as table. The yard is most gay on 
 a Sunday morning, when thousands stop on
 
 104 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 their way to church — not only Sociahsts 
 and servant girls, remember, but also solemn 
 gentlemen in plug hats and frock coats, 
 students in their polychrome caps and in all 
 the glory of their astounding duelling scars, 
 citizens' wives in holiday finery. The foun- 
 tain is a great place for gossip. One rests 
 one's mass on the stone coping and engages 
 one's nearest neighbour. He has a cousin 
 who is brewmaster of the largest brewery in 
 Zanesville, Ohio. Is it true that all the 
 policemen in America are convicts? That 
 some of the skyscrapers have more than 
 twenty stories? What a country! And 
 those millionaire Socialists! Imagine a rich 
 man denouncing riches! And then, 
 " Gruss' Gott!"'— and the pots clink. A 
 kindly, hospitable, tolerant folk, these 
 Bavarians! " Griiss' Gott!" — "the com- 
 pliments of God." What other land has 
 such a greeting for strangers? 
 
 On May day all Munich goes to the Hof- 
 brauhaus to " prove " the new bock. I was
 
 MUNICH 105 
 
 there last ]May in company with a Virginian 
 weighing 190 pounds. He wept with joy 
 when he smelled that heavenly brew. It 
 had the coppery glint of old Falernian, the 
 pungent bouquet of good port, the acrid grip 
 of EngUsh ale, and the bubble and bounce 
 of good champagne. A beer to drink rev- 
 erently and silently, as if in the presence of 
 something transcendental, ineffable — but 
 not too slowly, for the supply is limited! 
 One year it ran out in thirty hours and 
 there were riots from the Max-Joseph-Platz 
 to the Isar. But last May day there was 
 enough and to spare — enough, at all events, 
 to last imtil the Virginian and I gave 
 up, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian 
 went to bed at the Bayerischer Hof at 12 :30, 
 leaving a call for 4 p. m. of May 5. 
 
 All, the Hofbriiuhaus! A massive and 
 majestic shrine, the Parthenon of beer drink- 
 ing, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to 
 the connoisseur, but a bit too strenuous, a 
 trifle too cruel, perhaps, for the dilettante.
 
 106 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 The JMiincheners love it as hillinen love the 
 hills. There every one of them returns, soon 
 or late. There he takes his children, to 
 teach them liis hereditary art. There he 
 takes his old grandfather, to say farewell 
 to the world. There, when he has passed 
 out himself, his pallbearers in their gauds of 
 grief will stop to refresh themselves, and 
 to praise him in speech and song, and to 
 weep unashamed for the loss of so gemilth- 
 lich SL fellow. 
 
 But, as I have said, the Hofbrauhaus is 
 no playroom for amateurs. My advice to 
 you, if you would sip the cream of Munich 
 and leave the hot acids and lye, is that you 
 have yourself hauled forthwith to the Hof- 
 theatre Cafe, and that you there tackle a 
 modest seidel of Spatenbrau — first one, 
 and then another, and so on until you mas- 
 ter the science. 
 
 And all that I ask in payment for that 
 tip — the most valuable, perhaps, you have 
 ever got from a book — is that you make
 
 MUNICH 107 
 
 polite inquiry of the Herr Wirt regarding 
 Fraulein Sophie, and that you present to 
 her, when she comes tripping to your table, 
 the respects and compliments of one who 
 forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike 
 glide, her Mona Lisa smile and her leucemic 
 and superbly manicured hands!
 
 BERLIN
 
 BERLIN 
 
 I AM back again, back again in New 
 York. Mj^ 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 beUboys. My trunks are creaking 
 their way down the hall, urged on by a per- 
 spiring, muttering porter. The windows, 
 still locked and gone blue-grey with the 
 August heat, rattle to the eclio of the " L " 
 trains a block away, trains rankling up to 
 Harlem with a sweating, struggling people, 
 the people of the Republic, their day's grind 
 over, jamming their one way to a thousand 
 flat houses, there to await, in an all uncon- 
 scious poverty, the sunrise of still such an- 
 other day. The last crack of a triphammer, 
 
 peckering at a giant pile of iron down the 
 
 111
 
 112 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, 
 rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. 
 A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out a 
 sporting extra. Another " L " train and 
 the panes rattle again. A momentary 
 quiet . . . and from somewhere in a nearby 
 street I hear a grind-organ. What is the 
 tune it is playing? I've heard it, I know — 
 somewhere ; but — no, I can't remember. I 
 try — I try to follow the air — but no use. 
 And then, presently, one of the notes whis- 
 pers into my puckering lips a single word 
 — " MariechenJ" Then other notes whis- 
 per others — " du siisses Viehchen '' ; and 
 then others still others — " du hist mein 
 alles, hist mein Traumf' And the battered 
 bags and the down-at-the-heel walking 
 sticks and the still-damp steamer rugs and 
 the trunks creaking down the hallway and 
 the rattle of the " L " trains fade out of my 
 eyes and ears and again dear little Hulda is 
 with me under the Linden trees — poor 
 dear little Hulda who ever in the years to
 
 BERLIN 113 
 
 come shall bring back to me the starlit ro- 
 mance of youth — and again I feel her so 
 soft hand in mine and again I hear her whis- 
 per the auf wiederseJin that was to be our 
 last good-bye — and I am three thousand 
 miles over the seas. For it's night for me 
 again in Berlin — kronprinzessin of the 
 cities of the world. 
 
 I am again on the hitherward shore of the 
 Hundekehlensee, flashing back its diamond 
 smiles at the setting sun. I am sitting 
 again near the water's edge in the moist 
 shade of the Grunewald, and the trees sing 
 for me the poetry that they once sang to the 
 palette of Leistikow. My nose cools itself 
 in the recesses of a translucent schoppen of 
 Johannisberger, proud beverage in whose 
 every topaz drop lies imprisoned the kiss of 
 a peasant girl of Prussia. From the south- 
 ward side of the Grunewaldsee the horn of 
 a distant hunting lodge seems to call a wel- 
 come to the timid stars; and then I seem to 
 hear another — or is it just an echo? — »
 
 114 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 from somewhere out the spur of the Havel- 
 berge beyond. Or is just the Johamiesber- 
 ger, soul of the most imaginative grape in 
 Christendom? Or — woe is me — am I 
 really back again across the seas in New 
 York, and is what I hear only the horn of 
 the taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below? 
 
 But I open my too-dreaming eyes — and 
 yes ; I am in the Gi'unewald. And the sum- 
 mer sun is saffron in the waters of the lake. 
 And about me, at a thousand tables under 
 the Grunewald trees, are a thousand people 
 and more, the people of the Kaiserland, 
 their day's work over, clinking a thousand 
 wohlseins in a great twilight peace and 
 aw^aiting, in all unconscious opulence, the 
 sunrise of yet such another day. And a 
 great band, swung into the measures by a 
 firm-bellied kapellmeister as gorgeous in his 
 pounds of gold braid as a peafowl, sets sail 
 into " Parsifal " against a spray of salivary 
 brass. And the air about me is full of 
 '' Kellner! "" and " Zwei Seidel, hitte! " and
 
 BERLIN 115 
 
 " Wiener Roasthraten und Stangenspargel 
 mit gesclilagener Butter! " and " Zwei Sei- 
 dell hitte!" and " Junge Kohlrabi mit 
 gehratenen SardeUenklopsen! " and " Zwei 
 Seidely bitte! " and " Sahnenfilets mit 
 Schwenkkartoffeln! " and " Zwei Seidel, 
 bitte! " and a thousand schmeckfs guts and 
 a thousand prosits and '' Zwei Seidel, 
 bitte! " And no outrage upon the ear is in 
 all this guttural B minor, no rape of exo- 
 tic tympani, but a sense rather of superb 
 languor and wholesome tranquillity, of har- 
 monious stomachic socialism, an orchestra- 
 tion of honest ovens and a diapason of 
 honest brdiis and brunners, with their balmy 
 wealth of nostril arpeggios and roulades. 
 
 And thus the evening breeze, come hither 
 through the reeds and cypress from over the 
 purpling Havel hills beyond, takes on an 
 added perfume, an added bouquet, as it 
 transports itself to the sniffer over to the 
 hurrying krebs-suppen and thick brown- 
 gravied platters and dewy seidels. ^ly
 
 116 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 nose, in its day, has engaged with many a 
 seductive aroma. It has met, at Cassis on 
 the Mediterranean, the fimies breathed by 
 hecasse sur canapes and Chateau Lafitte '69 
 — and it has fFd and fFd again and again in 
 an ecstasy of inhalation. It has encoun- 
 tered in Moscow, the regal vapours of nevop 
 astowka Dernidoff sweeping across a slen- 
 der goblet of golden sherry — and it has 
 been abashed at the delirium of scent. On 
 the Grand Boulevards, it has skirmished 
 with punch a la Toscane flavoured with 
 Maraschino and with bitter almonds — and 
 has inhaled as if in a dream. The juicy, 
 dripping cuts of Simpson's in London, the 
 paradisian pudding sueldoiro on the little 
 screened veranda in the shadow of the six- 
 minareted Mosque of El-Azhar in Cairo, 
 the salmon dipped in Chambertin and the 
 artichokes, sauce Barigoule, at Schonbrunn 
 on the road to Vienna, the escaloppes de 
 foie gras a la russe ( favourite dish of the late 
 Beau McAllister) at Delmonico's at home
 
 BERLIN lir 
 
 — all these and more have wooed my nos- 
 tril with their rare fragrances. But, though 
 I have attended many a table and given au- 
 dience to many an attendant perfume, no- 
 where, nor never, has there been borne in 
 upon me the like of that exquisite nasal 
 blend of hratens and hrdus with which the 
 twilight breezes have christened me among 
 the trees of the Grunewald. Forgotten, 
 there, are the roses on the moonlit garden 
 wall in Barbizon, chaperoned by the fairy 
 forest of Fontainebleau ; forgotten the damp 
 wild clover fields of the Indiana of my boy- 
 hood. All vanished, gone, before the olfac- 
 tory transports of this concert of hops and 
 schnitzels, of Rhineland vineyards and up- 
 land kdse. And here it is, here in the great 
 German out-of-doors, on the border of the 
 Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble kellner at 
 my elbow, with the plain, homely German 
 people to the right and left of me, with the 
 stars beginning to silver in the silent water, 
 with the band lifting me, a drab and absurd
 
 118 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, 
 and with the innocent eyes of the fair frau- 
 lein under yonder tree intermittently eng- 
 lishing their coquettish glances from the 
 eisschoholade that should alone engage them 
 
 — here it is that I like best to bide the climb- 
 ing of the moon into the skies over Berlin 
 
 — here it is that I like best to wait upon the 
 city's night. 
 
 Ah, Berhn, how little the world knows 
 you — you and your children ! It sees you 
 fat of figure, an Adam's apple sti*uggling 
 with your every vowel, ponderous of tem- 
 perament. It sees you a sullen and vari- 
 cose mistress, whose draperies hang heavy 
 and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It sees 
 you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine strug- 
 gling awkwardly from out a cyclopean vat 
 of beer. It hears your music in the ta-tata- 
 tata-ta-ta of your " Ach, du lieher Augus- 
 tin " alone ; the sum of your sentiment in 
 your " Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten." 
 Wise American joumahsts, commissioned
 
 BERLIN 119 
 
 to explore your soul, have returned charac- 
 teristically to announce that you " In your 
 German way" (American synonyms: ele- 
 l^hantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, slug- 
 gish) seek desperately to appropriate, in 
 ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the 
 " spirit of Paris " {American synonyms: 
 silk stockings, " wine," Maxim's, jevous- 
 aime. Rat Mort) . Announce they also 
 your " mechanical " pleasures, your weighty 
 light-heartedness, your stolid, stoic essay to 
 take unto yourself, still in tigerish itch to be 
 cosmopolitan, the frou-frouishness of the 
 flirting capital over the frontier. Wise old 
 philosophers! Translating you in terms of 
 your palaces of prostitution, your Palais de 
 Danse, your Admirals-Casinos; translating 
 you in terms of your purposely spurious 
 Victorias, your Riche Cafes, your Fleder- 
 mauses. As well render the spirit of Vi- 
 enna in the key of the Karntnerstrasse at 
 eleven of the Austrian night; as well play 
 the spirit of Paris in the discords of its
 
 120 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Montmartre, in the leaden pitch of its Pre 
 Catelan at sunrise. Sing of London from 
 the Astor Club ; sing of New York from its 
 Bryant Park at moontide, its Rector's, its 
 ridiculous Cafe San Souci and its Madam 
 Hunter's. 'Twere the same. 
 
 Pleasure in the mass, incidentally, is per- 
 force ever mechanical; a levee at Bucking- 
 ham Palace, a fete on the velvet terraces 
 sloping into the Newport sea, a Coney Is- 
 land gangfest, a city's electric den of gilt 
 and tinsel. 
 
 But the essence of a city is never here. 
 Berlin, in the wander] ust of its darkened 
 heavens, is not the ample-bosomed, begar- 
 neted, crimson-lipped Minna angling in its 
 gaudy dance decoy in the Behrenstrasse ; nor 
 the satin-clad, pencilled-eyed Amelie ogling 
 from her " reserved " table in the silly sham 
 called Moulin Rouge; nor yet the more 
 baby-glanced, shirtwaisted Ertrude laugh- 
 ing in the duntoned Cafe Lang. Berlin is 
 not she who beckons by night in the Fried-
 
 BERLIN 121 
 
 riclistrasse; nor the frowsy she who sings in 
 the bier-caharets that hover about the Licht- 
 prunksaal. Berlin, under the stars, is the 
 sound of soldiers singing near the arch of 
 the Brandenburger Tor, the peaceful hauer 
 and his frau Hannah and his young daugh- 
 ters Lilla and Mia lodged before their abend 
 bier at a bare table on the darker side of the 
 far Jagerstrasse. Berlin, when skies are 
 navy blue, is Heinrich, gallant rear private 
 of Regiment 31, publicly and with audible 
 ado encircling the waist of his most recent 
 engel on a bench in the Linden promenade 
 
 — Berlin, in the Inverness of night, is 
 Hulda, little Alsatian rebel — a rebel to 
 France — a rebel to the Vosges and the 
 vineyards — Hulda, the provinces behind 
 her, and in her heart, there to rule forever, 
 the spirit of the capital of Wilhelm der 
 Grosste. For the spirit of Berlin is the 
 laughter of a pretty, clean and healthy girl 
 
 — not the neurotic simper of a devastated 
 ware of the Madeleine highway, not the
 
 122 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 raucous giggle of a bark that sails Picca- 
 dilly, not the meaningfull and toothy beam 
 of a fair American badger — none of these. 
 It is a laugh that has in it not the motive 
 power of Krug and Company or Ruinart 
 pere et fils; it smells not of suspicioned 
 guineas to be enticed; it is not an answer to 
 the baton of necessity. There's heart be- 
 hind it — ^- and it means only that youth is in 
 the air, that youth and steaming blood and 
 a living life, be the world soever stern 
 on the morrow, are a trinity invincible, 
 unconquerable — that the music is good, the 
 seidel full. Ah, Berlin — ah, Hulda — ah, 
 youth ... ah, youth, what things you see 
 that are not, that never will be, never were; 
 foolish, innocent, splendid youth! 
 
 An end to such so tender philosophies, 
 such so blissful ruminations. For even now 
 the kutsche has di*awn us up before the door 
 of Herr Kempinski's victual studio, run- 
 ning from the Leipzigerstrasse through to 
 the Krausenstrasse and constituting what is
 
 BERLIN 123 
 
 probably the largest stomach Senate and 
 House of Representatives in the seven 
 kingdoms. Here, in the multitudinous sale 
 
 — the Mosel-saal, the Berliner-saal, the 
 huge Grauer-saal, the Burgen-saal, the Al- 
 ter-saal, the Erker-saal, the Gelber-saal, the 
 Cadiner-saal, the Eingangs-saal, the Durch- 
 gangs-saal, the Brauner-saal and the vari- 
 ous other chromatic and geographical saals 
 
 — one may listen in dyspeptic Anglo-Saxon 
 abashment to such a concerto of down-going 
 suppen and coteletten and gemiise and 
 down-gurgling Laubenheimer and Marco- 
 brunner and Zeltinger and Brauneberger as 
 one may not hear elsewhere in the palati- 
 nates. And here, in the preface to the 
 night, one may prehend while again eating 
 (for in Germany, you must know, one's 
 eating is limited in so far as time and occa- 
 sion are concerned only by the locks of the 
 alimentary canal and the contumacy of the 
 intestines) the grand democracy of this 
 kaiser city. For in this giant eating hall
 
 124 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 that would hold a round half-dozen TsTew 
 York restaurants and still oifer ample el- 
 bow room for the dissection of a knuckle 
 and the wielding of a stein, one observes a 
 vast and heterogeneous commingling of the 
 human breed such as may not be observed 
 outside an American charity ball. At one 
 table, a lieutenant of Uhlans with his mddel 
 of the moment, at another a jolly old syitz- 
 bub* sending with a loose jest a girl from 
 the chorus of the Theater des Westens into 
 blushes — and being sent himself in return 
 with a looser. At another (one removed 
 from that of a duo of palpable daughters of 
 joy engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand 
 encounter with a colossal roastbif englisch 
 mit Leipzig er allerlei) sl family man with 
 his family. At still another, another family 
 man with his. At another, the Salome from 
 the Konigliches Opemhaus — at another a 
 noted advokat — at another, two little girls 
 (they can't be more than sixteen years old) 
 enjoying their meal and their bottle of
 
 BERLIN 125 
 
 Rhenish wine undisturbed, unogled, un- 
 afraid. 
 
 But why need to pursue the catalogue? 
 This, too, is Berhn. Not the BerHn 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 Esplan- 
 ade, 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 Ger- 
 man people, warm-hearted, mindful only 
 of its own affairs, all-understanding, all- 
 sympathetic, all-human — its larynx eter- 
 nally beseeching liquid succour, its 
 stomach eternally demanding chow. And, 
 too — and note this well — not the Berlin 
 of the rouged menu and silk-stockinged 
 hellner, not the trumped-up Berlin of the 
 vaselined vassal, of the bowing oherkellner, 
 not the Berlin of the affected canteloupe
 
 126 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 (3,50 m.) and the affected biscuit tortoni 
 (2,40 m.) — but the Berhn of heinfleisch im 
 kessel 7nit Meerrettich (90 pf.), the Berhn 
 of krdfibrulie init nudeln (40 pf.) — the 
 Berhn of Mamsch and Traube. 
 
 And now I am again in the streets of the 
 city, ratthng 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 reallj^ 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 lacJit, man leht, 
 man lieht und man kiisst wo's Kilsse gieht " 
 . . . and we and all the world are young. 
 Ah, Hulda, mine oa\ti, mine all, and who is 
 that pretty girl tripping adown the street.
 
 B E R L I ISr 127 
 
 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 yon- 
 der! At home, probably a family man, a
 
 128 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 wearer of mesh underwear, an assiduous de- 
 vourer of the wisdom of George Harvey, a 
 patron of the dramas of Charles Rann Ken- 
 nedy, 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 hlu- 
 men for a battle-scarred veteran who is tell- 
 ing 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.
 
 BERLIN 129 
 
 Soon the bubbles of the grape are percolat- 
 ing 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 arti- 
 ficial. Just to make money out of the vis- 
 itors. And very sordid! " 
 
 At the Moulin Rouge and at the Ad- 
 mirals-Casino, at the Alhambra and the 
 Tabarin, at the Amor-sale and the Rosen- 
 sale, we track down others such, " seeing the 
 night hfe of Berhn." We see them, too, 
 champagne before them, coquetting with 
 Fraulein Ilona, who numbers Militar-Regi- 
 ment 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
 
 130 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 night's wage, assist the skirmish on with in- 
 cendiaiy 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 luxuriose, 
 vornehmstes vergnilgungsplatz, paradies- 
 garten, grosste sehenswurdigkeit Berlins " 
 (in the advertisements) — as the Victoria 
 and the Cafe Riche, the Westminster and 
 the Cafe Opera and — 
 
 "Berlin spirit, huh!" they are telhng 
 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
 
 BERLIN 131 
 
 — are you, too, to be measured thus, as 
 measured you are, by the crimson Hght 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 Fle- 
 dermaus 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 Berhn, the hollow-laughing 
 Berlin, the Berlin decked with rhinestones, 
 set alight with prismatic electroliers and of- 
 fered 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 Gold- 
 fish and on the Isle of Louisa, where watch 
 throughout eternity the graven images of 
 Friedrich Wilhelm the Third and of Wil- 
 helm the First in the years of his boyhood.
 
 132 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 I like best the Berlin that sings with the 
 students in the undiscovered, untainted 
 wein and bier stuhen of the thitherward 
 thoroughfares, the Berlin that dances in the 
 Joachimstrasse, where the mddels, each to 
 herself a Cecilie, shirtwaisted, poor, happy, 
 kick up their German heels, drink up their 
 German beer, assault the Schweizerkase and 
 bring back memories of that paradise of all 
 paradises — the Englischer Garten of 
 Munich the Incomparable, the Divine. 
 
 In such phases of this kaiser city, one is 
 removed from the so-called Tingel-Tangel, 
 or varietes and cabarets, where the visiting 
 narrverein is regaled with such integral and 
 valid elements of Berlin " night life " as 
 '' der cake walk/' " der can-can " and " die 
 matscJiicJie — getanzt von original importi- 
 erten Mexikanerinnen/' So, too, is one re- 
 moved from the garish demi-women of the 
 so-called " Quartier Latin " near the Orani- 
 enburger Tor and from the spurious devil- 
 tries of the Rothenburger Krug and the
 
 BERLIN 133 
 
 Staff elstein, with their " property " stu- 
 dents, cheeks scarred with red ink, singing 
 " Heidelberg" (from " The Prince of Pil- 
 sen") for the edification and impression of 
 foreign visitors, and fiercely and frequently 
 challenging other prop, students to immedi- 
 ate duel. The girls, alas, in these places are 
 not unlovely. Well do I remember the 
 dainty Elsa of the Hopf enbliithe, she of face 
 kissed by the Prussian dawn, and employed 
 at sixteen marks the week to wink dramati- 
 cally 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 Pleas- 
 ure (ltd.). Not the girls in whose hearts
 
 134 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 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-T an- 
 gel with its uniformed bouncer at the gate, 
 with its threadbare piano, with its "^ na 
 kleener Dicker" smirked by soiled decol- 
 letes, its doleful near-naughty ditties — 
 " IcJi lass mich niclit verfilhren, dazu bin ich 
 zu schlau, ich kenne die Manieren der Man- 
 ner 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 Montmarte, 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
 
 BERLIN 135 
 
 French, but the jargon of Broadway. And 
 yet, when finally the fingers work closer, 
 closer still, around that throat, when finally 
 the death giu'gle 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 be- 
 lieve 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 hving, 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 be-
 
 136 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 yond ? Her children spent before their day, 
 hstening 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 bro^vn 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 illu- 
 sions. . . ." 
 
 But again a truce to philosophisings. It 
 gi'ows late apace. (Ah, Hulda, how like 
 opals in the IjT-ic April rain are your eyes 
 in this first faint purple-pink of the tremu- 
 lous dawTi . . . 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 liighways,
 
 BERLIN 137 
 
 sweltering collarless under the loud electric- 
 ity of Times Square. I see a fetid blonde, 
 dangling a patent leather handbag, hurry- 
 ing to an assignation in Forty-fifth Street. 
 I see two actors, pointing their boasts with 
 yellow bamboo canes. A chop suey restau- 
 rant 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 Boweiy, 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 teeter- 
 ing against the window of the Jew's cloth- 
 ing store. The air is dust-filled. An inter- 
 mittent 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
 
 138 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 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, il- 
 lumined 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 BerUn dawn is 
 ours now, fraulein, and have done with in- 
 trusive memories, corroding reflections. 
 What are my people doing in Berhn at this 
 hour? What are these prowling Al-Ras- 
 chids about? Do they know the sorcery of 
 the virgin morning light of Berlin as it falls 
 upon the Siegesallee and gives life again
 
 BERLIN 139 
 
 to the marble heroes of Germany? Have 
 they ever stood with such as j^ou, fraulein, 
 in the coral-tipped hours of the dawning day 
 before the image of Friedrich der Grosse in 
 that wonderful lane and felt, through this 
 dead, cold thing, the thrill of an empire's 
 glory? Do they know the witchery of the 
 withering Berlin night as it plays out its 
 wild fantasia in the leaves of the Linden 
 trees? Have they ever been with such as 
 you, fraulein, at the base of the Pillar of 
 Triumph in Konigsplatz or sat with such as 
 you, fraulein, near the Grotto Lake in the 
 Tiergarten, or stood with such as you, 
 fraulein, on one of the bridges arching 
 the Spree in the first trembling innuendo of 
 morning? 
 
 Where are these, my people? 
 
 You will find them seeking the romance 
 of Berlin's greying night amid the Turkish 
 cigarette smoke and stale wine smells of the 
 half-breed cabarets marshalled along the 
 Jagerstrasse, the Behrenstrasse and their
 
 140 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 tributaries. You will find them up a flight 
 of stairs in one of the all-night Linden cafes, 
 throwing celluloid balls at the weary, pa- 
 tient, left-over women. You will find them 
 sitting in the balcony of the Pavilion Mas- 
 cotte, 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 be- 
 cause 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 morn- 
 ing, 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 even- 
 ing hours that sing always in the heart of a 
 Berlin they can never know. For them,
 
 BERLIN 141 
 
 shall be no memory of that vast and insu- 
 perable gemiltlichheit, that superb and pa- 
 cific 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 sim, 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, bawHng in 
 the street below.
 
 142 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 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
 
 LONDON 
 
 MACAULEY'S New Zealander, so I 
 hear, will view the ruins of St. Paul's 
 from London Bridge; but as for me, I pre- 
 fer 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 Welhngton 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 
 
 145
 
 146 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 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 over- 
 take 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
 
 LONDON 147 
 
 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 trans- 
 cendental wings. ... Do honeymooners
 
 148 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 ever come to Waterloo Bridge? I doubt it. 
 Imagine turning from that sublime sweep of 
 greys and sombre gilts, that perfect arrange- 
 ment 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 deprecat- 
 ingly 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 Simp- 
 son's that I know two of the waiters by 
 their first names. And I could order cor- 
 rectly their famous cuts by looking at 
 my watch, knowing at what hour the mut- 
 ton was ready, at what hour the roast
 
 LONDON 149 
 
 beef was rarest. So long have I worn Eng- 
 lish shirts that even now I find myself crawl- 
 ing into the American brand after the man- 
 ner 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 West- 
 minster 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 stem upon a hummock 
 of Persian j)illows. I know every over- 
 hanging lovers' tree from Richmond to 
 Hampton Court. I have consumed hogs- 
 heads 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 taxi- 
 cabs upholstered in pale grey, and ridden in-
 
 150 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 terminably 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
 
 LONDON 151 
 
 think of London and of night romance was 
 like conjuring up the wildest of anachro- 
 nisms. 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 pol- 
 ished hats and social banahties. 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 ro- 
 mance of cathedrals, towers, palaces, dun- 
 geons and parliamentary buildings. Or the 
 romance of pomp, of horseguards and hel- 
 mets 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
 
 152 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 that London, the severe, the formal; Lon- 
 don, 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 punctihous, the conservative, the 
 static; London, the God-fearing, the episco- 
 pal, the nice, the careful, the scrupulous, the 
 aloof, the decorous, the proper, the digni- 
 fied — who would have thought that Lon- 
 don 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 j^alate thrills and throbs beneath 
 the tricklings of Cordon Rouge. Her steel 
 heart flutters at the touch of a wheedhng 
 phryne. She, too, can wear the strumpet 
 garb of youth. She, too, in the vitals of her
 
 LONDON 153 
 
 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 suffer- 
 ing some of the love quahns 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 mur- 
 murings aside as psychiatric ravings of 
 visionaries and y earners. 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 
 Berhn; or, if time permitted, I sought the 
 glittering presence of Bianca Weise at 
 Vienna. (Ah, Bianca! Du siisser Engel!) 
 Never once did it occur to me that youth
 
 154 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 stalked abroad in the London streets, that 
 gaiety sang among the wine cups in Lon- 
 don 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 in- 
 deed lain mouth to mouth with spring 
 in London? Perhaps. But I doubted him. 
 Therefore, before the lavender appeared, I 
 was beyond the channel.
 
 LONDON 155 
 
 But last spring I met the girl in the flat 
 below me. Her name was Elsie — Win- 
 wood, I think. Of one thing, however, I am 
 sure; she had cold grey eyes and auburn 
 hair — an uncanny combination ; but she was 
 typical of the English girl, the girl who had 
 been educated abroad. This girl and I came 
 face to face on the stairs one day. 
 
 " Why do you always leave London at 
 the best time of the year? " she asked me. 
 
 " I am young," I confessed. " In the 
 spring I live by night, and one may only 
 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 any city in 
 the world had more subtly caught the spirit 
 of youthful buoyancy, the spirit of roman- 
 tic evanescence, the spirit of midnight aban- 
 don. Could it be that he was but a
 
 156 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 " poseur," a dealer in false words, a con- 
 cocter of the non-existent? Did the eyes 
 of dancers never gleam in his? Did 
 Renee never issue forth from that dim arch- 
 way where he waited? Did Nora never 
 dance upon the pavement ? Was Violet but 
 the figment of a poet's dreams? And was 
 that painted angel, Peppina, a mere psychic 
 snare? Could any man — even a poet — 
 write as he did of Muriel at the Opera if 
 there had been no Muriel? It seemed 
 highly improbable. Finally I decided that, 
 ere departing for Reine or Anna or Bianca, 
 I would 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, trust- 
 ing to my own knowledge of the city, intend- 
 ing to follow up vague rumours to which I 
 had lent but half an ear. Later I equipped 
 myself with a guide — not a professional 
 guide, but a man of means and of easy
 
 LONDON 157 
 
 morals, a young barrister in whose family 
 were 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 swarming in the 
 Strand. We were heading for a great arch 
 of incandescent light. 
 
 I was beginning to be disappointed. 
 Visions of the dark-eyed Reine, in veils of 
 mauve and orange, silhouetted against the 
 synchromatic scenery of the Marigny swam 
 before my eyes. I gave vent to a cavernous 
 yawn. I had often had supper at the Savoy. 
 But such a performance was not my idea of 
 romance. I had never considered that 
 luxurious dining room in the light of ad- 
 venture. But with Leonard's suggestion I 
 entered and found that, when the mental 
 lenses are focused correctly, it in truth pos- 
 sesses much of that same gorgeousness and
 
 158 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 lavish spirit which no doubt invested the 
 banquets of Belshazzar. 
 
 Thus begins the night romance of Lon- 
 don: 
 
 Souper. 
 
 Oeufs de Pluvier 
 
 Consomme Double en Tasse 
 
 Fillet de Merlan a I'Anglaise 
 
 Pommes Nature 
 
 Caille Cocotte Armenienne 
 
 Buffet Froid 
 
 Salade 
 
 Petit Glace Parisienne 
 
 Friandises 
 
 This is arbitrary, however. On the 
 crested bill of fare we learn that there are 
 other things to be had, but that they must 
 be ordered a la carte. Glancing down the 
 mammoth card we begin reading such items : 
 Saumon Fume, Pigeon Cocotte Bonne 
 Femme, Rognons Suates, Champignons, 
 Caille Royal aux Raisins, Tournedos Saute 
 Mascotte, Noisette dfAgneau Fines Herhes,
 
 LONDON 159 
 
 Poussin de Hambourg Vapeur, Medcdllon 
 Ris de Veau Colbert, Terrine de Boeuf a la 
 Mode Glacee, Supreme de Chapon Jean- 
 nette . . . and so on, almost indefinitely. 
 I saw nothing in the fact — nor had I seen 
 anything in the fact — that the menu con- 
 tained not one English word; but later in 
 the week these affectations of French dishes 
 became highly significant. They were 
 really the symbol of London's night romance. 
 They were the tuning fork which gave the 
 pitch for London pleasures. For romance 
 and gaiety in London are grafted to an 
 otherwise unromantic and lugubrious hulk. 
 All joys in that terrible city are lugged 
 from overseas, and, in the process of sutur- 
 ing, the spontaneity has been lost, the buoy- 
 ancy has disappeared, the honesty has van- 
 ished. 
 
 But no people can be without romance. 
 No nation can withstand forever the engines 
 of repression. Not all the moral lawmakers 
 of England have succeeded in stamping out
 
 160 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 the natural impulses. Hypocrisy, that 
 great mediator, sits into the game and stacks 
 the cards. There is no more sensuous din- 
 ing room in the world than the Savoy, 
 There is no more impressive vision of hu- 
 man beings in the primitive act of eating 
 than can be gained from the top of the stair- 
 way which leads into that great double room. 
 And nowhere on earth is there a more cos- 
 mopolitan gathering than sits down to the 
 Savoy supper when the theatres are over. 
 Here at least is visual romance ; and when we 
 inspect the people at closer range we glimpse 
 a more intimate romance. One catches 
 snatches of conversation from a dozen lan- 
 guages within the radius of hearing. Here 
 is modern civilisation at apogee — the final 
 word in luxury — the denouement of spec- 
 tacular life. Go to the Aquariimi in St. 
 Petersburg, to the Adlon in Berlin, to the 
 Bristol in Vienna, to the Cafe de Paris; go 
 wherever you will — to Cairo, to Buenos 
 Aires, to Madrid — the Savoy at the supper
 
 LONDON 161 
 
 hour surpasses them all. From the pan- 
 talooned giants who relieve you of your outer 
 garments to the farthest table in the room 
 where the great windows overlook the Em- 
 bankment Gardens, there is not one note to 
 mar the gorgeous ensemble. 
 
 But we must not tarry too long amid the 
 jewelled women, the impeccable music and 
 the subdued conversation of the Savoy. In 
 fact, it is not possible to linger. No sooner 
 have we hastened through the courses of our 
 supper and started to sip a liqueur than we 
 are suddenly plunged into darkness. A 
 hint! A warning! A silent but eloquent 
 reminder that the moral man must hasten 
 to his bed, that midnight is upon us, that 
 respectability demands immediate retire- 
 ment. When the lights come on again there 
 is a gentle fluttering of silken wraps, a 
 shuffling of feet, a movement of chairs. 
 The crowds, preparing to depart, are obey- 
 ing that lofty English law which makes eat- 
 ing illegal after twelve-thirty. If you tarry
 
 162 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 after this signal for departure, a Parisian 
 born waiter taps you gently on the shoulder 
 and begs of you to respect the majesty of 
 the law. Within ten minutes of the dark- 
 ened warning the dining room is empty. 
 Liqueurs are left undrunk. Ices are de- 
 serted. Half-consumed salads are aban- 
 doned. Out into the waiting taxis and 
 limousines pours that vast assemblage. In 
 fifteen minutes an atmosphere of desolation 
 settles upon the streets. The day is 
 ended — completely, finally, irrevocably. 
 The moral subtleties of the fathers have 
 been sensed and obeyed. Virtue snickers 
 triumphantly. 
 
 " And now? " I demand of my companion. 
 
 " S-s-s-hl " he warns. And, leaning over 
 me, he pours strange and lurid information 
 into my gaping ear. " Now," he whispers, 
 " to the Supper Clubs, the real night life 
 of London — wine, women, song and 
 dance." 
 
 There is a mystery in his mien. And,
 
 LONDON 163 
 
 obeying the warning of an admonishing 
 finger, I silentlj^ follow him into a taxicab. 
 A low, guttural order is given to the driver, 
 the import of which is shielded from the in- 
 quisitive world by my companion using his 
 hands as a tube to connect his mouth with 
 the ear of the chauffeur. 
 
 I had heard of these supper clubs, but 
 thej^ had meant nothing to me. I rarely 
 ate supper and detested clubs. Their litera- 
 ture which frequently came to me, had left 
 me cold. But, as I was carried in the taxi- 
 cab through dark alleys and twisted streets, 
 certain intimations in these printed invita- 
 tions came back to me with a new meaning. 
 Lest the iniquity of the London pleasure 
 seeker be underestimated, let me supply you 
 with the details of one of these supper club 
 circulars. I will not tell you the name of 
 the club: it has probably been changed by 
 now. No sooner do the police put one club 
 out of business (so far as I can see, merely 
 to gratify the demand of the moralists that
 
 164 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 all sinners be flayed in 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 after twelve- 
 thirtj^ at night you must be a member of 
 something; and to become a member of a 
 London supper club is not so easy a matter 
 as one might imagine. Traitors are forever 
 worming their way into such societies, and 
 the management exercises typical British 
 discretion in selecting the devotees for its 
 illegal victualing organisation. The club 
 of which I speak, and whose circular — a 
 masterpiece of low cunning — lies before 
 me, has its headquarters on a street so small 
 that in giving the address to even the most 
 erudite of London geographers it is neces- 
 sary to mention two or three larger streets 
 in the neighbourhood. 
 
 The object of this club, it seems, is " to 
 cultivate a form of art previously unknown 
 in England — the Cabaret." A noble and 
 worthy desire! But in the next paragraph
 
 LONDON 165 
 
 we learn that this aristocratic uplift does not 
 begin until eleven-thirty, p. m. ; and by read- 
 ing further we note the implication that it 
 ceases at one-thirty a. m., at which hour the 
 cultivation of this unknown art — the Caba- 
 ret — is supplanted by a Gipsy Orchestra, 
 to say nothing of the International Min- 
 strels. Farther on we learn that once a 
 month the club gives a dinner to its mem- 
 bers, and that this dinner is followed by 
 a " Recital Evening " in honour of and " if 
 possible" (Oh, subtlety!) under the direc- 
 tion of Lascelles Abercrombie, Frank Har- 
 ris, Arthur Machen, T. Sturge ^Moore, Ezra 
 Pound and W. B. Yeats. (Note: Al- 
 though during the last year I have supper- 
 clubbed incessantly whilst staying in 
 London, I think, in all justice to the above- 
 mentioned illustrious men, that it should be 
 stated that not once have I had the pleasure 
 of being personally directed by any one of 
 them. ) 
 
 One evening during the month, so runs
 
 166 E U R O P E A F T E R 8 : 1 5 
 
 the forecast, will be devoted to Jolm David- 
 son (I missed that evening) ; one to Mod- 
 ern Faiiy Tales (I somehow missed that 
 evening also) ; another to Fabian de Castro 
 and " Old Gipsy Folk Lore and Dance " 
 (Alas, alas, that I should have missed that 
 evening, too!). But this loss of culture, so 
 far as I personally was concerned (and 
 other, too, I opine) , was not accompanied by 
 any physical loss; that is to say, the state- 
 ment on the manifest that during the per- 
 formance there would be available " suppers 
 and every kind of refreslmient " is emi- 
 nently correct, and veracious almost to the 
 point of fault. Even when the perform- 
 ance was not given — as seemed always to 
 be the case — there was no cessation in the 
 kitchen activities. Suppers there were and, 
 what is more to the point, every kind of re- 
 freshment. 
 
 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
 
 L O X D O X 167 
 
 trans and the super. I print it in capitals 
 that it may the better penetrate : 
 
 XO FIXED CL05IXG HOUPtS 
 
 Such is the unlucky star under which I 
 was bom that I have escaped at these clubs 
 aU of the artistic and cultural performances. 
 When I have attended them no light has 
 been thrown on the Drama, Opera, Panto- 
 mime, Vocal Music, or "" such dehcate Art 
 of the past as adapts itself to the frame of 
 an intimate stage, and more especially all 
 such new art as in the strength of its sin- 
 cerity allows simplicity." Xor has it been 
 my luck to be present during the production 
 of " Lysistrata," by Aristophanes, or '' Bas- 
 tien et Bastienne." by W. A. Alozart, or 
 '' Orpheus," by Monteverde, or '" Maestro di 
 Capella," by Pergolese, or " Timon of 
 Athens." by PurceU. X'or have I been 
 present when an eminent technician has ren- 
 dered Florent Schmitt's " Palais Hante," or 
 Arnold Schoenberg's " Pierrot Lunaire."
 
 168 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 All of which are booked for production or 
 rendition. And yet I cannot feel that my 
 money has been entirely wasted. It has 
 bought me " every kind of refreshment," and 
 catering by Frenchmen, and the company 
 of lovely ladies — ladies, who, I fear, are 
 more familiar with the works of Victoria 
 Cross than the works of Aristophanes, and 
 whose ears are attuned to the melodies of 
 Theodore iMoses-Tobani rather than to the 
 diabolical intricacies of Schoenberg's piano 
 pieces. 
 
 Let us indulge ourselves for a moment in 
 what is known to ritualists as a responsive 
 service, thus: 
 
 Q. — What is a Supper Club? 
 
 A. — A Supper Club is a legal technical- 
 ity — a system whereby the English law is 
 misconstrued, misapplied, controverted, dis- 
 guised and outdone. Specifically, it is a 
 combination restaurant, cafe, and dance hall, 
 the activities in which begin at about one 
 A. M. and continue so long as there are pa-
 
 LONDON 169 
 
 trons whose expenditures warrant the or- 
 chestra being retained and the electric hghts 
 being left on. A Supper Club is usually 
 downstairs, decorated in the cheap imitation 
 of a grape arbour, furnished with small 
 tables, comfortable wicker chairs, suave and 
 sophisticated waiters, an orchestra of from 
 six to ten pieces and a small polished floor 
 for purposes of dancing. Supper Clubs are 
 run to meet every size of pocketbook. 
 There are those whose patrons do not know 
 the titillating effects of champagne; and 
 there are those where the management seizes 
 no other form of febrifuge. Club members 
 naturally need no introduction to one an- 
 other, with tlie result that such formalities 
 are here entirely dispensed with. In the 
 better grade Supper Clubs the ladies are not 
 admitted unless in evening dress, while at 
 other establisliments even such sartorial for- 
 malities are not insisted upon. The object 
 of a Supper Club is to furnish relaxation to 
 the tired business man, profits to the man-
 
 170 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 agement, usufructs to the police and incomes 
 to the lady patrons. The princij)al activi- 
 ties of a Supper Club are (1) drinking; (2) 
 dancing; (3) wooing. 
 
 There you have it. In the Astor Club (or 
 is it the Palm Club? Or has the name been 
 changed since spring?) one finds the higher 
 type of nocturnal rounder. Evening clothes 
 are obligatory for all. Champagne and 
 expensive wines constitute the only bev- 
 erages served. The orchestra is composed 
 of very creditable musicians; and the lady 
 patrons, chosen by the management by 
 standards of pulchritude rather than of social 
 standing, are attestations to the good taste 
 of the corpulent and amiable Signor Bolis, 
 owner and director. The men whose money 
 pours into the Signor's coffers are obviously 
 drawn from the better class of EngHsh 
 society — clean-cut, clean-shaven youths ; 
 slick and pompous army officers; prosper- 
 ous-looking middle-aged men who, even at 
 a supper club, drop but httle of their genteel
 
 LONDON 171 
 
 dignity. On my numerous visits to this 
 club I failed to find one member who did 
 not have about him in a marked degree an 
 atmosphere of deportmental distinction. 
 Even during those final mellow hours, when 
 the dawn was sifting through the cracks of 
 the window above the stairs, there was little 
 or none of that loud-mouthed boisterousness 
 which follows on the heels of alcoholic im- 
 bibitions in America. Surfacely the Astor 
 Club is an orderly and decorous insti- 
 tution, and so fastidious were the casual 
 '* good evenings " between the men and 
 women that only tlie initiated would have 
 guessed that ere that meeting they had been 
 strangers. Even under the protection of 
 membership and the police, the Englishman 
 does not know how to laugh. He is deco- 
 rous and stilted during the basest of in- 
 triguing. 
 
 I had become a member of the Astor Club 
 after as much red tape, investigation and 
 scrutiny as would have been exerted by a
 
 172 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 board of the most exclusive social club. I 
 had signed my full name, my address and 
 business, beneath which had been appended 
 the names of two of my sponsors. I had had 
 a blue seal pinned beneath my coat lapel and 
 an engraved card sewn in my chemise. 
 After which precautions and rigmarole I 
 was admitted each evening by the gorgeous 
 St. Peter in red zouave breeches and drum 
 major's jacket who guarded the outer por- 
 tal. 
 
 Have I given the impression that, once in- 
 side, I assumed virtues which ill became me ; 
 that I sat apart and watched with critical 
 eyes the merriment around me? Then let 
 the impression be forever blasted. I am not 
 a virtuous man according to theological 
 standards. I have been a hardened sinner 
 since birth. I gamble. Beer is my favour- 
 ite drink. It has been flatteringly whis- 
 pered into my ear that I dance beautifully. 
 I read Celhni and Rabelais and Boccaccio 
 with unfeigned delight. I am enchanted by
 
 LONDON 173 
 
 the music of Charpentier and Wolf-Ferrari. 
 I smoke strong cigars. And I do not flee at 
 the sight of beautiful women. In short, I 
 am a man of sin. Born in iniquity (accord- 
 ing to the moral fathers) I have never been 
 regenerated. Therefore let me admit that 
 the spirit of the vice crusader was not mine 
 as a member of the Astor Club. I spent 
 many a delightful half -hour chatting with 
 Heloise Dessault, formerly at Fouquet's in 
 Champs Elysees; with INIizzi Schwarz, one- 
 time frequenter of the Cafe de I'Europe, in 
 Vienna; with Hedwig Zinkeisen, of Berlin's 
 Palais de Danse. . . . 
 
 Here is a characteristic thing about the 
 London supper club: the majority of the 
 girls and — to London's shame let it be 
 noted — the more attractive girls are all 
 from the Continent. Without these femi- 
 nine importations I doubt if the supper clubs 
 could be maintained. At the musical gal- 
 leries — a third-rate supper place run by the 
 Musical and Theatrical Club at 30 Whit-
 
 174 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 field Street, near Tottenham Court Road, 
 W. — I was approached and greeted by a 
 little French girl, whose knowledge of Eng- 
 lish was almost as limited as is my knowledge 
 of Russian. 
 
 But I was forgetting Elsie Win wood, and 
 to forget Elsie in this shameless chronicle 
 would be disloyalty. At the Astor Club one 
 evening I met her. I realised then what 
 that intimating smile had meant when, the 
 week before, she had met me on the stairs. 
 I thereupon forgot Leonard, and visited the 
 night debaucheries of London in the com- 
 pany of the grey-eyed, auburn-haired Elsie. 
 I have every reason to beheve that ere I 
 sailed back to America I had sounded the 
 depths of London's iniquities. By stealth 
 and copious bribing, plus the influence of my 
 fair companion, I found that, though it was 
 difficult it was nevertheless 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 other city in the
 
 LONDON 175 
 
 world — the only diiFerence being that in 
 London one must act surreptitiously, while 
 other cities permit all of the London indul- 
 gences openly. Surely the night life of 
 London is innocent enough! Why member- 
 ship in expensive clubs is necessary in or- 
 der for one to en j oy it is a question to which 
 only British logic is applicable. The 
 searcher for thrills or the touring shock ab- 
 sorber will find nothing in London to rattle 
 his psychic slats. Even the professional 
 moralist, skilled in the subtle technicalities 
 of sin, can find nothing in England's capi- 
 tal to make him shudder and flee. The chief 
 criticism against London night life is that 
 it is hypocritical, that it is sordid, because it 
 is denied and indulged in subterraneanly. 
 The hypocrisy of it all is doubly accentuated 
 by the curious fact that the British public 
 permits trafl^cking in the promenades of its 
 theatres, such as even New York has balked 
 at these manj'' years. I refer to such 
 theatres — called " music halls," that they
 
 176 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 may be distinguished from the smaller 
 houses in which the serious drama is pro- 
 duced — as the " Alhambra," in Leicester 
 Square ; the *' Empire Theatre of Varieties,'* 
 also in Leicester Square; the "Palace 
 Theatre of Varieties " on Cambridge Circus 
 in Shaftesbury Avenue; the "London 
 Pavilion" in Piccadilly; and the "Hippo- 
 drome " at the corner of Cranbourn Street 
 and Charing Cross Road. Let us inspect 
 their vaudeville oiFerings. Let us snoop 
 into their wares. At these theatres, 
 equipped with numerous and eminently 
 available cafes, women, frail and fair, sit and 
 walk about on the promenades and gener- 
 ously waive introductions when the young 
 gentlemen evince a desire to speak to them. 
 But there is no romance here. These 
 promenades are even without illusion. 
 Here, among the theatres, is where London 
 tries to be Paris. Just as she tries to be 
 New York in Regent Street. Here is where 
 the most moral town in Christendom dis-
 
 LONDON 177 
 
 covers her native hoggishness. Here is the 
 great slave market of the English. 
 
 But we are out for vaudeville and not for 
 slaves, and so we pursue our virtuous way 
 up the stream of amiable fair until we reach 
 the Palace Music Hall, where a poster ad- 
 vertising a Russian dancer inspires us to 
 part with half a dozen shillings. Luxurious 
 seats of red velvet, wide enough for a pair 
 of German contraltos, invite to slumber, and 
 the juggler on the stage does the rest. 
 Twenty times he heaves a cannon ball into 
 the air, and twenty times he catches it safely 
 on his neck. The Russian dancer, we find, 
 is booked for ten-thirty, and it is now but 
 eight-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 tomato singing a song about the derbj^ 
 to an American tune that was stale in 1907. 
 Yet another, and we are in the midst of a 
 tedious ballet founded upon " Carmen," with 
 the music reduced to jigtime and a flute
 
 178 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 playing out of tune. A fourth — and we 
 suffer a pair of comedians who impersonate 
 Americans by saying " Naow " and 
 " Amurican." When they break into " ]My 
 Cousin Carus' " we depart by the fire escape. 
 We have now spent eight dollars on diver- 
 tisement and have failed to be diverted. 
 We take one more chance, and pick a prize 
 — Little Tich, to wit, a harlequin no more 
 than four feet in his shoes, but as full of 
 humour as a fraternal order funeral. 
 
 Before these few lines find you well, Lit- 
 tle Tich, I dare say, ^^all be on Broadway, 
 drawing his four thousand stage dollars a 
 week and longing for a decent cut of mut- 
 ton. But we saw him on his native heath, 
 uncontaminated by press agents, unboomed 
 by a vociferous press, undefiled by contact 
 with acquitted murderers, eminent divorcees, 
 " perfect " women, returned explorers who 
 never got where they went, and suchlike 
 prodigies and nuisances of the Broadway 
 'alls. Tich, as I have said, is but four feet
 
 LONDON 179 
 
 from sole to crown, but there is little of the 
 dwarf's distortion about him. He is simply 
 a man in miniature : in aspect, much like any 
 other man. His specialty is impersonation. 
 First he appears as a drill sergeant, then as 
 a headwaiter, then as a gas collector, then as 
 some other familiar fellow. But what keen 
 insight and penetrating humour in eveiy de- 
 tail of the picture ! How mirth bubbles out I 
 Here we have burlesque, of course, and there 
 is even some horseplay in it, but at bottom 
 how deft it is, and how close to hfe, and how 
 wholly and irresistibly comical! You must 
 see him do the headwaiter — hear him 
 blarney and flabbergast the complaining 
 guest, observe him reckon up his criminal 
 bill, see the subtle condescension of his tip 
 grabbing. This Tich, I assure you, is no 
 common mountebank, but a first-rate comic 
 actor. Given legs eighteen inches longer 
 and an equator befitting the role, he would 
 make the best FalstafF of our generation. 
 Even as he stands, he would do wonders with
 
 180 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Bob Acres — and I'd give four dollars any 
 day to see him play Marguerite Gautier. 
 
 But enough of theatres! There are two 
 night restaurants in London which should 
 be mentioned here. Let what little fame 
 they may attain from being set down in these 
 pages be theirs. They more nearly approxi- 
 mate to youthful whole-heartedness than any 
 institutions in the city. Perhaps this is be- 
 cause they are so distinctly Continental, be- 
 cause they are almost stripped of anything 
 (save the language spoken) w^hich savours 
 of London and the British temperament. 
 They are the Villa Villa, at 37 GeiTard 
 Street (once the residence of Edmund 
 Burke), and JNIaxim's, at 30 Wardour 
 Street. Their reputations are far from 
 spotless, and English society gives them a 
 wide berth. Because of this they have be- 
 come the meeting place of clandestine lovers. 
 Here is the genuine laughter and the way- 
 ward noise of youth. Nine out of every ten 
 of their patrons are young, and four out of
 
 LONDON 181 
 
 eveiy five of the girls are pretty. Music 
 is continuous and lively, and they possess an 
 intimacy found only in Parisian cafes. Do 
 I imply that they are free from sordidness 
 and commercialism? They are not. Far 
 from it. There is no night life in London 
 entirely free from these two disintegrating 
 factors. But their simulacrum of gaiety is 
 far from obvious. When the fifteen-minute 
 warning for evacuation is given a good-na- 
 tured cheer goes up, and a peal of laughter 
 which shakes the chandeliers and drowns out 
 the musicians. The crowd at least sees the 
 humour of the closing law, and, being unable 
 to repeal it, laughs at it. In the Villa Villa 
 and Maxim's, hands meet hngeringly over 
 the table; faces are near together; and a 
 pubHc stolen kiss is not a rarity. When the 
 doors of these restaurants are locked on a 
 deserted room the exiles do not go deco- 
 rously and dolorously home. In another 
 hour you will see many of these same cou- 
 ples dancing at the supper clubs.
 
 182 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Here we are again in Signer Bolis's estab- 
 lishment — which means that we have made 
 the round. . . . Elsie is yawning. I, too, 
 am tired of the dance and sick of the taste of 
 champagne. I motion the waiter and pay 
 the bill. I draw Elsie's long coat about her, 
 and we pass out into the clear London night. 
 We walk home circuitously — down Cran- 
 bourn Street and into Charing Cross Road 
 where it turns past the National Gallery into 
 St. Martin's place. Through Duncannon 
 Street, we enter the Strand, now almost de- 
 serted save for a few stray figures and a 
 hurrying taxicab. We then turn into 
 Vilhers Street, and in a few minutes w^e are 
 on York Terrace, overlooking the Thames 
 embankment. The elm trees and the 
 beeches stand about like green ghosts in the 
 pale night. At the edge of the water Cleo- 
 patra's Needle is a black silhouette. We 
 should like to walk through the Gardens in 
 the starlight, but the formidable iron gates 
 are locked against us. So we tui'n up
 
 LONDON 183 
 
 Robert Street into Adelphi Terrace. We 
 lean for a moment against the railing. 
 
 There below us, a crinkling tapestry of 
 gilts, silvers and coppery pinks, is ancient 
 Father Thames, the emperor and archbishop 
 of all earthly streams. There are the harsh 
 waters (but now so soft I) that the Romans 
 braved, watching furtively for blue savages 
 along the banks, and the Danes after the 
 Romans, and the Normans after the Danes, 
 and innumerable companies of hardy sea- 
 farers in the long years following. At this 
 lovely turning, where the river flouts the 
 geography books by flowing almost due 
 northward for a mile, bloody battles must 
 have been fought in those old, forgotten, 
 far-off times — and battles, I venture, not 
 always ending with Roman cheers. One 
 pictures some young naval lieutenant, just 
 out of the Tiber Annapolis, and brash and 
 nosey hke his kind — one sees some such 
 youngster pushing thus far in his light 
 craft, and perhaps going around on the mud
 
 184 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 of the south bank, and there fighting to the 
 death with Britons of the fog-wrapped 
 marshes, " hairy, horrible, human." And 
 one sees, too, liis return to the fleet so snug 
 at Gravesend, an imperfect carcass lashed 
 to a log, the pioneer and prophet of all that 
 multitude of dead men who have since 
 bobbed down this dirty tide. Dead men, 
 and men alive — men full of divine courage 
 and high hopes, the great dreamers and ex- 
 perimenters of the race. Out of this slug- 
 gish sewer the Anglo-Saxon, that fabulous 
 creature, has gone forth to his blundering 
 conquest of the earth. And conquering, he 
 has brought back his loot to the place of his 
 beginning. The great liners flashing along 
 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, trudg- 
 ing in from ports far-flung and incredible — 
 Surinam, Punta Arenas, Antofagasta, Port 
 Banana, Tang-chow, Noumea, Sarawak.
 
 LONDON 185 
 
 If you think that commerce, yielding to steel 
 and steam, has lost all romance, just give an 
 idle day or two to London docks. The very 
 names upon the street signs are as exotic as 
 a breath of frankincense. Mango Wharf, 
 Kamchatka Wharf, Havannah Street, the 
 Borneo Stores, Greenland Dock, Sealers' 
 Yard — on all sides are these suggestions of 
 adventure beyond the sky-rim, of soft, tropi- 
 cal moons and cold, arctic stars, of strange 
 peoples, strange tongues and strange lands. 
 In one Limehouse barroom you will find 
 sailors from Behring Straits and the China 
 Sea, the Baltic and the River Plate, the 
 Congo and Labrador, all calling London 
 home, all paying an orang-outang's devo- 
 tions to the selfsame London barmaid, all 
 drenched and paralysed by London 
 beer. . . . 
 
 The kaiserstadt of the world, this grim 
 and grey old London! And the river of 
 rivers, this oily, sluggish, inmiemorial 
 Thames ! At its widest, I suppose, it might
 
 186 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 be doubled upon itself and squeezed into the 
 lower Potomac, and no doubt the jNIissis- 
 sippi, even at St. Louis, could swallow it 
 without rising a foot — but it leads from 
 London Bridge to every coast and head- 
 land of the world ! Of all the pathways used 
 by man this is the longest and the greatest. 
 And not onlj'- the greatest, but the loveliest. 
 Grant the Rhine its castles, the Hudson its 
 hills, the Amazon its stupendous i-eaches. 
 Xot one of these can match the wonder and 
 splendour of frail St. Stephen's, wrapped 
 in the mists of a summer night, or the cool 
 dignity of St. Paul's, crowning its historic 
 mount, or the iron beauty of the bridges, or 
 the magic of the ancient docks, or the twin- 
 kling lights o' London, sweeping upward to 
 the stars. . . .
 
 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 a brilliant verity. 
 The phrase is ^^ une helle poire/'' And its 
 Yankee equivalent is " sucker." 
 
 The French, as the world knows, are a 
 kindly, forgiving people; and though they 
 cast the epithet, they do so in manner tol- 
 erant and with light arpeggio ■ — of Yankee 
 sneer and bitterness containing not a trace. 
 They cast it as one casts a coin into the hand 
 of some maundering beggar, with com- 
 mingled oh-wells and philosophical pity. 
 For in the Frenchman of the Paris of to- 
 day, though there run not the blood of 
 Lafayette, and though he detest Americans 
 
 189
 
 190 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 as he detests the Germans, he yet, detesting, 
 sorrows for them, sees them as mere misled 
 yokels, uncosmopolite, obstreperous, of 
 comical posturing in ostensible un-Latin 
 lech, vainglorious and spying — children 
 into whose hands has fallen Zola, children 
 adream, somnambulistic, groping rashly for 
 those things out of life that, groped for, are 
 lost — that may come only as life comes, 
 naturally, calmly, inevitably. 
 
 But the Frenchman, he never laughs at 
 us; that would his culture forbid. And, if 
 he smile, his mouth goes placid before the 
 siege. His attitude is the attitude of one 
 beholding a Comstock come to the hill of 
 Horselberg in Thuringia, there to sniif and 
 snicker in Venus's crimson court. His atti- 
 tude is the attitude of one beholding a Tris- 
 tan 671 voyage for a garden of love and 
 roses he can never reach. His attitude, 
 the attitude of an old and understanding 
 professor, shaking his head musingly as 
 his tender pupils, unmellowed yet in the
 
 PARIS 191 
 
 autumnal fragrances of life, giggle covertly 
 over the pages of Balzac and Flaubert, over 
 the nudes of Manet, over even the innocent 
 yearnings of the bachelor Chopin. 
 
 The American, loosed in the streets of 
 Paris by night, however sees in himself an- 
 other and a worldlier image. Into the crev- 
 ices of his fiat house in his now far-away New 
 York have penetrated from time to time 
 vague whisperings of the laxative deviltries, 
 the bold saucinesses of the city by the Seine. 
 And hither has he come, as comes a jack tar 
 to West Street after protracted cruise upon 
 the ceHbate seas, to smell out, as a very devil 
 of a fellow, quotation-marked life and its 
 attributes. What is romance to such a 
 soul — even were romance, the romance of 
 this Paris, uncurtained to him? Which, for- 
 sooth, the romance seldom is; for though it 
 may go athwart his path, he sees it not, he 
 feels it not, he knows it not, can know it not, 
 for what it is. 
 
 Romance to him means only an elaborate
 
 192 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 and circumspect winking at some perfectly 
 obvious and duly checked little baggage; it 
 means to him only a scarlet-cushioned seat 
 along the mirrored wall of the Cafe Ameri- 
 cain, a thousand incandescents, a string 
 quartette sighing through " Un Peu 
 d' Amour," a quart of " wine." Romance to 
 him is a dinner jacket prowling by night into 
 the comic opera (American libretto) pur- 
 heus of modern Montmartre, with its spuri- 
 ous extravaganzas of rouge and roister, 
 with its spider webs of joy. For him, there 
 is romance in the pleasure girls who sit at 
 the tables touching St. Michel before the 
 Cafe d'Harcourt, making patient pretence 
 of sipping their Byrrh until a passing " Eh, 
 hebe " assails their tjTnpani with its sug- 
 gested tintinnabulation of needed francs: 
 for him — " models." And the Bullier, 
 ghost now of the old Bullier where once ht- 
 tle Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundred 
 palettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier 
 with its coloured electricity and ragtime
 
 PARIS 193 
 
 band and professional treaders of the Ave- 
 nue de rObservatoire, is eke romance to his 
 nostril. And so, too, he finds it atop the 
 Rue Lepic in the now sham Mill of Galette, 
 a capon of its former self, where Germaine 
 and Florie and Mireille, veteran battle- 
 axes of the Rue Victor Masse, pose as mod- 
 est little workgirls of the Batignolles. 
 And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of 
 Broadway, the Cafe de Paris — and in the 
 Moulin Rouge, which died forever from the 
 earth a dozen years ago w^hen the architect 
 Niermans seduced the place with the " art 
 nouveau "—and amid the squalid hussies of 
 the fake Tabarin — and in the Rue Royale, 
 at Maxim's, with its Tzigane orchestra com- 
 posed of German gipsies and its toy bal- 
 loons made by the Elite Novelty Co. of Jer- 
 sey City, U. S. A. 
 
 The American notion of Paris under the 
 guardianship of the French stars, of Paris 
 caressed by the night wind come down from 
 Longchamps and filtered through the chest-
 
 194 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 nut branches of Boulogne, is usually 
 achieved from the Sons of Moses who, in 
 spats and sticks, adorn the entrance of the 
 Olympia and the sidewalks of the Cafe de 
 la Paix and interrogatively guide-sir the 
 passing foreign mob. This Paris consists 
 chiefly of a view of the exotic bathtub of the 
 good King Edward of Britain, quondam 
 Prince of Wales, in the celebrated house of 
 the crystal staircase in the Rue Chabanais, 
 of one of the two " mysterious " midinette 
 speak-easys in the dark Rue de Berlin 
 (where the midinettes range from the ten- 
 der age of forty-five to fifty), of the cellar 
 of the tavern near the Pantheon with its 
 tawdry wenches and beer and butt-soaked 
 floors — of tawdry resorts and tawdrier 
 peoples. 
 
 Do I treat of but a single class of Ameri- 
 cans? Well, maybe so. But the other 
 class — and the class after that — think you 
 these are so different? So different, goes 
 my meaning, in the matter of appropriat-
 
 PARIS 195 
 
 ing to themselves something of the deep and 
 very true romance that sings still in the 
 shadowed corners of this one-time Flavia 
 of capitals, that sounds still, as sounds some 
 far-off steamboat whistle wail in the death- 
 quiet of night, pleading and pathetic, that 
 calls still to the dreamers of all the world 
 from out the tomb of faded triumphs and 
 forgotten memories? 
 
 True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris 
 of Paris's glory — gone that Paris 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 of 
 other days — Degas and Cladel and Astruc 
 and the rest of them — is no more. Gone, 
 as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of 
 Bruant, him of the line of rran9ois Villon 
 — now become a place for the vulgar og- 
 lings of Cook's tourists taxicabbing along 
 the Boulevard Rochechouart. Gone the 
 wild loves, the bravuras, the camaraderie 
 of warm night skies in the old Boulevard de
 
 196 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Clichy, supplanted now with a strident con- 
 catenation of Coney Island sideshows; the 
 " Cabaret de I'Enfer," with its ballyhoo 
 made up as Satan, the " Cabaret du Ciel," 
 with its " grotto " smelling of Sherwin- 
 Williams' light blue paint, the " Cabaret du 
 Neant," with its Atlantic City plate glass 
 trick of metamorphosing the visiting doodle 
 into a skeleton, the " Lune Rousse," with its 
 mean Marie Lloyd species of lyrical con- 
 cupiscence, the " Quat'-z-Arts," with its 
 charge of two francs the glass of beer and 
 its concourse of loafers dressed up like 
 Harry B. Smith " poets," in black velvet, 
 corduroy grimpants and wiggy hirsutal cas- 
 cades to impress " atmosphere " on the 
 minds of the attendant citizenry of Louis- 
 ville. And gone, too, with the song of 
 Clichy, is the song from the heart of St. 
 Michel, the song from the heart of St. Ger- 
 main. " Tea rooms," operated by Ameri- 
 can old maids, have poked their noses into 
 these once genuine boulevards . . . and, as
 
 PARIS 197 
 
 if giving a further fillip to the scenery, 
 clothing shops with windows haughtily re- 
 vealing the nobby art of Kuppenheimer, 
 postcard shops laden to the sill's edge with 
 lithographs disclosing erstwhile Saturday 
 Evening Post cover heroines, and case upon 
 case displaying in lordly enthusiasm the 
 choicest cranial confections of the house of 
 Stetson. . . . 
 
 What once on a time was, is no more. 
 But Romance, notwithstanding, has not yet 
 altogether deserted the Paris that was her 
 loyal sweetheart in the days when the tri- 
 colour was a prouder flag, its subjects a 
 prouder people. There is something of the 
 old spirit of it, the old verve of it, lin- 
 gering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in 
 the edisoned highways of the Left Bank, if 
 not in the hitherward boulevards, then still 
 somewhere. 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 in the heart of the
 
 198 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Parisian man. There, romance has not 
 died — one must beheve, will never die. 
 
 And, having told you, I seem to hear you 
 laugh. " We thought," I would seem to 
 hear you say, " that he was going to tell us 
 of concrete places, of concrete byways, 
 where this so gorgeous romance yet tar- 
 ries." And you are aggrieved and dis- 
 appointed. But I bid you patience. I am 
 still too young to be sentimental: so have 
 you no fear. And yet, bereft of all of sen- 
 timentality, I r^-issue you my challenge: 
 this somewhere is in the eyes of the Parisian 
 girl, this somewhere is in the heart of the 
 Parisian man. 
 
 By Parisian girl I mean not the order of 
 Austrian wenches who twist their tummies 
 in elaborate tango epilepsies in the Place 
 Pigalle, nor the order of female curios who 
 expectorate with all the gusto of American 
 drummers in La Hanneton, nor yet the 
 Forty-niners who foregather in the private 
 entrance of 16 Rue Frochot. I do not
 
 PARIS 199 
 
 mean the dead-eyed joy jades of the cafe 
 concerts in the Champs Elysees. I do not 
 mean the crow-souled scows who steam by 
 night in the channels oiF the Place de la 
 Madeleine. The girl I mean is that girl 
 you notice leaning against the onyx balus- 
 trade at the Opera — that one with lips of 
 Burgundy and cheeks the colour of roses in 
 oHve oil. The girl I mean is that phantom 
 girl ypu see, from your table before the Ro- 
 tonde across the way, slipping past the iron 
 grilling of the Luxembourg Gardens — 
 that girl with faded blouse but with eyes, 
 you feel, a-colour with the lightning of the 
 world's jewels. The girl I mean is that girl 
 you catch sight of — but what matters it 
 where? Or what she leans against or what 
 she wears or what her lips and eyes? If you 
 know Paris, you know her. Whether in 
 the Allee des Acacias or in the boulevard 
 Montparnasse, she is the same: the real 
 French girl of still abiding Parisian ro- 
 mance; the real French girl in whose baby
 
 200 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 daughter, some day, will be perpetuated the 
 laughter of the soul of a city that will not 
 fade. And in whose baby girl in turn, 
 some day long after that, it will be born 
 anew. 
 
 Ah, me, the cynic in you! Do you pro- 
 test that the girl of the balustrade, the girl 
 of the Luxembourg, are very probably 
 American girls here for visit? Well, well! 
 Tu te paye ma tete. Who has heard of 
 romance in an American girl ? I grant you, 
 and I make grant quickly, that the Ameri- 
 can girl is, in the mass, more ocularly mas- 
 saging, more nimble with the niblick, more 
 more in several wayiS than her sister of 
 France; but in her eyes, however otherwise 
 lovely, is glint of steel where should be 
 dreaming pansies, in her heart reverie of 
 banknotes where should be billets douce. 
 
 And so by Parisian man I mean, not the 
 chorus men of Des Italiens, betalcumed and 
 odoriferous with the scents of Pinaud, those
 
 PARIS 201 
 
 weird birds who are guarded by the casual 
 Yankee as typical and symbolic of the na- 
 tion. Nor do I mean the fish-named, liver- 
 faced denizens of the region down from the 
 Opera, those spaniel-eyed creatures who 
 live in the tracks of petite Sapphos, who 
 spend the days in cigarette smoke, the 
 nights in scheming ambuscade. Nor yet 
 the Austrian cross-breeds who are to be be- 
 held behind the gulasch in the Rue d'Hau- 
 teville, nor the semi-Milanese who sibilate 
 the minestrone at Aldegani's in the Passage 
 des Panoramas, nor the Frenchified Span- 
 iards and Portuguese who gobble the guis- 
 illo madrilefio at Don Jose's in the Rue 
 Helder, nor the half-French Cossacks amid 
 the potrohlia in the Restaurant Cubat, nor 
 the Orientals with the waxed moustachios 
 and girlish waists who may be obsen^ed at 
 moontide dawdling over their cafe a la 
 Turque at Madame Louna Sonnak's. 
 These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more
 
 202 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 than the habitues of Back Bay are the 
 Americans of Boston, no more than the 
 Americans of Boston are — Americans. 
 
 ^p *T* '1^ '^ 
 
 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 
 Elysees the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist 
 leaves like a million topaz tears. And the 
 boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of 
 living. Are you, now far away and deep 
 in the American winter, with me once again 
 in memorj^ over the seas in this warm and 
 wonderful and fugitive world? And do 
 you hear with me again the twang of guitars 
 come out the hedges of the Avenue Ma- 
 rigny? And do you smell with me the 
 rare perfume of the wet asphalt and 
 feel with me the wanderlust in the 
 spirit soul of the Seine? Through the 
 frost on the windows can you look out
 
 PARIS 203 
 
 across the world and see with me once again 
 the trysting tables in the Boulevard Ras- 
 pail, a-whisper with soft and wondrous 
 monosyllables, and can you hear little Ninon 
 laughing and Fleurette sighing, and little 
 Helene (just passed nineteen) weeping be- 
 cause life is so short and death so long? 
 Are you young again and do memories sing 
 in your brain? And does the snow melt 
 from the landscape of your life and in its 
 place bloom again the wild poppies of the 
 Saint Cloud roadways, telegraphing their 
 drowsy content through the evening air to 
 Paris? 
 
 Or is the only rosemary of Paris that you 
 have carried back with you the 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 
 without once stopping to prove to the on- 
 lookers in the Rat Mort that an American 
 can drink more than a damned Frenchman,
 
 204 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 the memory of that fine cut of roast 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 of British-American hotels that sur- 
 round the Place Vendome and march up the 
 Rue de Castiglione or of such nondescripts 
 as the Tavernes Roy ale and Anglaise — but 
 Paiisian. For instance, my good man, 
 caneton a la higarade, or duckling garnished 
 with the oozy, saliva-provoking sauce of the 
 peel of bitter oranges. There is a dish for 
 you, a philter wherewith to woo the appe- 
 tite I For example, my good fellow, sole 
 Momay (no, no, not the " sole Mornay " 
 you know!), the sole Mornay whose each 
 and every drop of shrimp sauce carries with 
 it to palate and nostril the faint suspicion 
 of champagne. Oysters, too. Not the 
 Portuguese — those arrogant shysters of a 
 proud line — but the Arcachons Marennes
 
 PARIS 205 
 
 and Cancales superieures: baked in the 
 shell with mushrooms and cheese, and 
 washed down exquisitely with the juice of 
 grapes goldened by the French suns. And 
 salmon, cold, with sauce Criliche; and arti- 
 chokes made sentimental with that Beetho- 
 ven-like fluid orchestrated out of caviar, 
 grated sweet almonds and small onions ; and 
 ham boiled in claret and touched up with 
 sjDinach au gratin. The romance of it — 
 and the wonder! 
 
 But other things, alackaday, must con- 
 cern us. Au 'voir, my beloveds, au 'voir! 
 Au 'voir to thee. La Matelote, thou fair and 
 fair and toothsome fish stew, and to thee, 
 Perdreau Farci a la Stuert, thou aristo- 
 cratic twelve-franc seducer of the esopha- 
 gus! Au 'voir, my adored ones, au 'voir. 
 
 Viola! And now again are we afield 
 under the French moon. What if no more 
 are the grisettes of Paul de Kock and Mur- 
 ger to fascinate the eye with wistful dia- 
 bleries? What if no more the old Vachette
 
 206 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 of the Boul' Mich' and the Rue des Ecoles, 
 last of the cafes litteraires, once the guz- 
 zling ground of Voltaire and Rousseau and 
 many such another profound imbiber? 
 What if no more the simple Montmartroise 
 of other times, and in her stead the elaborate 
 wench of Le Coq d'Or, redolent of new 
 satin and parfum Dolce Mia? Other times, 
 other manners — and other girls ! And if, 
 forsooth, Ninette and Manon, Gabrielle and 
 Fifi, arch little mousmes of another and 
 ma3^hap lovelier day, have long since gone 
 to put deeper soul into the cold harps of the 
 other angels of heaven, there still are with 
 us other Ninettes, other Manons and other 
 Gabrielles and Fifis. " La vie de Boheme " 
 is but a cobwebbed memory: yet its hosts, 
 though scattered and scarred, in spirit go 
 marching on. The Marseillaise of romance 
 is not stilled. In the little Yvette whose 
 heart is weeping because the glass case in 
 the Cafe du Dome this day reveals no letter 
 from her so grand Andre, gone to Cassis
 
 PARIS 207 
 
 and there to transfer the sapphire of the 
 sea and mesmerism of roses to canvas, is 
 the heart of the httle Yvette of the Second 
 Empire. In the hps of Diane that smile 
 and in the eyes of Helene that dream and 
 in the toes of Therese that dance is the smile, 
 is the dream, is the dance in echo of the Paris 
 of a day bygone. 
 
 Look you with me into the Rue de la 
 Gaite, into the Gaite-Montparnasse, still 
 comparatively hberated from the intrusion 
 of foreign devils, and say to me if there is 
 not something of old Paris here. Not the 
 Superba, Fantasma Paris of Anglo-Saxon 
 fictioneers, not the Broadwayed, Strandified, 
 dandified Paris of the Folies-Bergere and 
 the Alcazar, but the Paris still primitive in 
 innocent and unbribed pleasure. And into 
 the Bobino, its sister music hall of the com- 
 mon people, where the favourite Stradel and 
 the beloved Berthe Delny, ''petite poupee 
 jolie'' as she so modestly terms herself, 
 bring the grocer and his wife and children
 
 208 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 and the baker and his wife and children 
 temporarily out of their glasses of Bock to 
 yell their immense approval and clap their 
 hands. I have heard many an audience ap- 
 plaud. I have heard applause for Tree at 
 His Majesty's in London, for Schroth at 
 the Kleines in Berlin, for Feraudy at the 
 Comedie Fran9aise, for Skinner at the 
 Knickerbocker — and it was stentorian ap- 
 plause and sincere — but I have never heard 
 applause like the applause of the audience 
 of these drabber halls. The thunders of 
 the storm king are as a sonata against the 
 staggering artillery of approbation when 
 Pharnel of the JNIontparnasse sings " C'est 
 pas difficile "; the bowlings of the north 
 wind are as zephyrs against the din of eu- 
 logy when JMarius Reybas of the Bobino 
 lifts a mighty larynx in " Mahi Mahi." 
 Great talent? Well, maybe not. But 
 show me a group of vaudevillians and acro- 
 bats who, like this group at the Gaite, can
 
 PARIS 209 
 
 amuse one night with risque ballad and 
 somersault and the next with Moliere — 
 and not be shot dead on the spot! 
 
 Leave behind you Fysher's, where the 
 smirking monsieur fills the red upholstery 
 with big-spending American hinds by 
 warbling into their liquored bodies cocoa 
 butter ballades of love and passion, and 
 come over to the untufted Maillol's. And 
 hear Maillol sing for the price of a beer. 
 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 souffles Javanaise; 
 leave the blatant Boulevard des Itahens for 
 the timid histrop of Monsieur 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 suf- 
 fering from the St. Vitus and quivering
 
 210 EUROPEAFTER8:15 
 
 against the tables as you eat; with its 
 marked napkins in a rack, like the shaving 
 cups in a rural barber shop, one napkin a 
 week to each regular patron. Avaunt, ye 
 gauds of Americanized Paris. Here are 
 poor and starving artists come to dine aris- 
 tocratically on seventy-five centimes — fif- 
 teen cents. Here are no gapings of Cook's ; 
 here no Broadway prowlers. A dank hole, 
 yes, but in its cracked plaster the sense of 
 Romany simsets of yonder times. Leave 
 behind the dazzling dance places of theatri- 
 cal Montmartre, American, and come back 
 of the wine shop in the Rue de la Montagne- 
 Sainte-Genevieve ! Leave behind the turn- 
 ing mill wheel, American, and come into the 
 Avenue de Choisy, where over a preglacial 
 store a couple of comets baffle the night and 
 set a hundred feet in motion, feet from the 
 Gobelin quarter, feet from the Butte-aux- 
 Cailles! More leathery feet, to be sure, 
 than the suede feet of the Ziegfeld Mont-
 
 PARIS 211 
 
 martre, but kicking up a different wax dust, 
 
 the wax dust of a different Paris. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 It is springtime in Paris! It is night in 
 the Paris of a thousand memories. Can 
 you, now remote in the American winter, 
 hear again through the bang of the steaming 
 radiator and the crunch on the winter's snows 
 the song that Sauterne sang into your heart 
 on the terrace named after the lilacs — on 
 that wonderful, star-born evening when all 
 the world seemed like a baby's first laugh; 
 all full of dreams and hopes and thrilling 
 futures? And can you rub the white cold 
 off the panes and look out across the Atlan- 
 tic to a warmer land and see again the Gar- 
 dens of the Tuileries sleeping in the moon 
 glow and Sacre Cceur sentinelled against 
 the springtime sky and the tables of the 
 cafes along the Grand Boulevards agog and 
 a-glitter and the green-yellow lights of the 
 Ambassadeurs tucked away in the trees and
 
 212 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 the al fresco amours at Fouquet's and the 
 gay crowds on the Avenue de I'Opera and 
 the massive splendour of Notre Dame bless- 
 ing the night with its towered hands and 
 girls shooting ebony arrows from the bows 
 of ebony eyes? And no smell of Child's 
 cooking filters into the open to offend the 
 nostril, for the sachet of the Bois de Bou- 
 logne breeze is again on the world. Ah, 
 Bois de Boulogne, silent now under the 
 slumbering heavens, where your equal? 
 From the Prater to the Prado, from the 
 Cassine to Central Park, one may not find 
 
 the like of you, fairy wood of France! 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Romance hunter, come with me. Stom- 
 ach-turned at the fat niggers dressed up 
 like Turks and Algerians and made to lend 
 an " air '* to the haunt of the nocturnal 
 belly dancers in the Rue Pigalle, sickened 
 at the stupid lewdities of the Rue Biot, dis- 
 gusted at the brassy harlotries of the Lapin
 
 PARIS 213 
 
 Agil', come with me into that auberge of the 
 Avenue Trudaine where are banned catch- 
 coin stratagems, fleshly pyrotechnics, that 
 little refuge whose wall gives forth the tab- 
 leau of Salis, he of the Niagaran whiskers 
 and the old Chat Noir, strangling the 
 adolescent versifiers of Montmartre, the 
 tableau of the crimson rose of Poetry blos- 
 soming from out their strangling pools of 
 blood. Come with me and sing a chorus 
 with the crowd in the " conservatoire " of 
 the Boulevard Rochechouart and beat time, 
 like the rest of it, with knife on plate, with 
 glass on table. Come away from the Bras- 
 serie des Sirenes of Mademoiselle Marthe 
 in the Faubourg Poissonniere, from the Rue 
 Dancourt, from the Moulin Rose in the 
 Mazagran — from all such undiluted cellars 
 of vicious prostitution — if these be Paris, 
 then West Twenty-eighth Street in New 
 York. 
 
 Look you, romance seeker, rather into the
 
 214 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 places of Montepin and Eugene 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 and 
 marauding cabs. It is dark, very. And 
 very quiet. And the sniff of unknown 
 things is to be had in the air. Dens of drink 
 with their furtive thieves . . . the enigma 
 of the shadows of the church of Saint Eus- 
 tache . . . slinking feet to the rear of you 
 ... at length, the Rue Pirouette and the 
 sign of the angel Gabriel on the lantern 
 before the house. Here is good company 
 to be found ! Well do I remember the bon- 
 camaraderie of Henri Laverte, that most 
 successful of Parisian burglars, of the good 
 Jean Darteau, that most artistic of all 
 Parisian second story virtuosi, of pretty 
 Mado Veralment, who was not convicted 
 for the murder of her erstwhile lover Aber- 
 nal, nor, at a later date, for that of her erst- 
 while lover Crepeat, both of whom, so it had 
 been rudely whispered by her enemies, had
 
 PARIS 215 
 
 rashly believed to desert her for another 
 charmer. Witty and altogether excellent 
 folk. Indeed, I might go further from the 
 truth than to say that in no woman have 
 ever I found a deeper, a more authentic 
 appreciation of the poetry of Verlaine than 
 in this JMademoiselle Mado. 
 
 So, too, up the stone steps and into the 
 Caveau of the Rue des Innocents . . . and 
 here — likewise a jolly party. Inquire of 
 most persons about Le Caveau and you will 
 be apprised that it is a " vile hole," " a place 
 of the lowest order." It is dirty, so much 
 I will grant; and it is of a Brobdingnagian 
 smell. Also, is it frequented almost en- 
 tirely by 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 is immeasurably superior to the 
 tinselled inn of the Rue Royale. And its 
 habitues constitute an infinitely more re- 
 spectable lodge. If the left wall of the cav- 
 ern contains its " roll of honour " — the
 
 216 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 names of all the erstwhile noted gentlemen 
 patrons of the establishment who have, be- 
 cause of some slight carelessness or over- 
 sight, ended their days in the company of 
 the public executioner — I still cannot ap- 
 preciate that the list is any the less civilised 
 than the head waiter's " roll of honour " at 
 the celebrated tavern in the Avenue de 
 r Opera. Nor do tlie numerous scribbled 
 inscriptions on the other walls, such saucy 
 epigrams as " To hell with the prefect of 
 police," *' The police are damned low flea- 
 full dogs " and the like impress me less fa- 
 vourably than the scribbled inscriptions on 
 notes of assignation placed covertly by sub- 
 sidised waiters into the serviettes of the Cal- 
 lot-adorned Thai'ses in the spectacularized 
 haunts of the Bois. The piano in Le 
 Caveau may be diabetic, senescent, and its 
 operator half blind and all knuckles (as he 
 is), but the music it gives forth is full of tlie 
 romance of Sheppard and Turpin, of stage 
 coach days and dark and nervous highways,
 
 PARIS 217 
 
 of life when life was in the world and all the 
 world was young. 
 
 Paris when your skies are greying, how 
 many of us know you? Do we know your 
 Rue du Pont Neuf, with its silent melo- 
 drama under the dawning heavens, or do 
 we know only the farce of your Montmar- 
 tre? Do we know the drama of your 
 Comptoir, of your Rue INIontorgueil, when 
 your skies are faintl}^ lighting, or do we 
 know only the burlesque of j^our Maxim's 
 and your Catelans? Do we, when the 
 week's work of your humbler people is done, 
 see the laughter in dancing eyes in the Rue 
 IVIoufFetard or, in the revel of your Satur- 
 day night, do we see only the belladonna'd 
 leer of the drabs in the Place Pigalle? Do 
 we hear the romance of your concertinas 
 setting thousands of hobnailed boots a-clat- 
 ter with Terpsichore in the Boulevard de la 
 Chapelle, in Polonceau and ^lyrrha, or do 
 we hear only your union orchestra sough- 
 ing through Mascagni in the Cafe de Paris?
 
 218 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Do we know the romance of your peoples 
 
 or the romance of your restaurateurs? 
 
 Which? I wonder. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Paris has changed ... it isn't the Paris 
 of other days . . . and Paquerette, httle 
 Easter daisy in whose lips new worlds were 
 born to you, little flower of France the 
 music and perfume of whose youth are yours 
 still to remember through the guerrilla war- 
 fare of the mounting years — little Paquer- 
 ette is dead. And you are old now and mar- 
 ried, and there are the children to look out 
 for — they're at the school age — and life's 
 quondam melody is full of rests and skies 
 are not always as blue as once they were. 
 And Paris, four thousand miles beyond the 
 seas — Paris isn't what it used to be I 
 
 But Paris is. For Paris is not a city 
 — it is Youth. And Youth never dies. 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 be tri-
 
 PARIS 219 
 
 umphed o'er. The Paris of Villon and 
 Murger and Du Maurier is still there by the 
 Seine: it is only Villon and Murger and 
 Du Maurier who ai*e not. And if your 
 Paquerette is gone forever, there is Zinette 
 — some other fellow's Paquerette — in her 
 place. And to him new worlds are born in 
 her lips even as new worlds were born to 
 you in the kisses of another's yesterday . . . 
 and the music and the perfume of Zinette's 
 youth shall, too, be rosemary some day to 
 this other. 
 
 The only thing that changes in Paris is 
 the Paris of the Americans, that foul swell- 
 ing at the Carrara throat of Youth's fairy- 
 land. It is this Paris, cankered with the 
 erosions of foreign gold and foreign itch, 
 that has placed " souvenirs " on sale at the 
 Tomb of Napoleon, that vends obscenities 
 on the boulevards, that has raised the price 
 of bouillabaisse to one franc fifty, that has 
 installed ice cream at the Brasserie Zimmer, 
 that has caused innumerable erstwhile re-
 
 220 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 spectable French working girls to don short 
 yellow skirts, stick roses in their mouths, 
 wield castanets and become Spanish dancers 
 in the restaurants. It is this Paris that 
 celebrates the hour of the apertif with Bronx 
 cocktails and " stingers," that has put 
 Chicken a la King on the menu of the Souf- 
 flet, that has enabled the ober-keUner of 
 Ledoyen to purchase a six-cylinder Benz, 
 that has introduced forks in the Rue Fal- 
 guiere, that has made the beguins at the an- 
 nual Quat'-z-Arts ball conscious of the visi- 
 bility of their legs. It is this ' Paris that 
 puts on evening clothes in order to become 
 properly soused at Maxim's and cast con- 
 fetti at the Viennese Magdalenes, that 
 lights the cabmen, that sings " We Won't 
 Go Home Till Morning" at the Catelan, 
 that buys a set of Maupassant in the orig- 
 inal French (and then can't read it), that 
 sits in front of the Cafe de la Paix reading 
 the New York Morning Telegraph and 
 wondering what Jake and the rest of the
 
 PARIS 221 
 
 gang are doing back home, that gives the 
 Pittsburgh high sign to every good-looking 
 woman walking on the boulevards in the be- 
 lief that all French women are in the con- 
 stant state of desiring a liaison, that callouses 
 its hands in patriotic music hall applause for 
 that great American, Harry Pilcer, that 
 trips the turkey trot with all the Castle inter- 
 polations at the Tabarin. It is this Paris 
 that changes year by year — from bad to 
 worse. It is this Paris that remembers Gaby 
 Deslys and forgets Cecile Sorel, that re- 
 members Madge Lessing and arches its eye- 
 brow 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 the Parisians! 
 The little studio in the Rue Leopold Robert 
 . . . Alinette and Reine and Renee . . . 
 the road to Auteuil under the moon-shot 
 baldaquin of French stars . . . the crowd 
 in the old gathering place in the Boulevard
 
 222 EUROPE AFTER 8:15 
 
 Raspail . . . the music of the heathen 
 streets . . . dawn in the Gardens of the 
 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 the world with youth's wild am- 
 bitions. Always it's there, across the seas, 
 for some one — maybe no longer you and 
 me, exiles of the years in this far-away 
 America — but still for some one younger, 
 some one for whom the loves and adven- 
 tures and the hazards of life are still so 
 all-wondrous, so all-worth-while, so al- 
 mighty. But, however old, however hard- 
 ened by the trickeries of passing decades, 
 those who have loved Paris, those to whom 
 Paris has hfted her lips in youth, these never 
 say good-bye to her. For in their hearts 
 sings on her romance, for in their hearts 
 march on the million memories of her gipsy 
 days and nights. 
 
 THE END
 
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