Part 10

As you look out across the Scheveningen dunes and watch the day declining, stirring thoughts come trooping to mind of the gallant scenes these bleak shores have witnessed. Off yonder, two centuries and a half ago, fell the brave Tromp, hero of thirty-three sea fights. On the bridge of his lofty-sterned Brederode he died, as every true warrior longs to die, in the foremost thick of the fray. “I am done; but keep up a good heart,” were his last words as they carried him into his cabin. Next day they brought his body to these shores and bore it away to lie in the old gray church at Delft beside the revered William the Silent. “The bravest are the tenderest,” and his war-hardened sailors were not ashamed to weep as heartily for him as the little children, fifty years before, had wept in the streets for the great William. Half a dozen years later a shouting multitude thronged this beach and waved a _bon voyage_ to Charles II of England as he sailed homeward to his recovered throne, to restore a licentious court and renew such royal revels as had already cost England a revolution. Another dozen years roll around, and Scheveningen looks on while the fleets of France and England are battered to wreckage by the cannon of Holland’s pet hero, the intrepid De Ruyter. A century or so more, and once again this village is the storm centre of Holland’s hopes and fears as William Frederick I eludes the pursuing French troops and a little Scheveningen fishing-smack bears the whole royal family away in safety to Germany. And when he came back in triumph, twenty years later, it was at Scheveningen that he landed, and at the very spot where yonder gray obelisk now stands in commemoration.

And now through chilly mists the sun, a vast bloated orange, settles down into the glowing wastes of the desolate North Sea. The roaring surf spreads glittering carpets far up the beach. It has suddenly become a region of placid power and glory, something quite other than the fabled home of monsters and terrors, of tempest and shipwreck. That vessel in the offing, with the black hull and the crimson sails, may be the very Flying Dutchman’s own; but still you would like to be on it and so much nearer the sinking sun. The sky is astounding; like a glorified Holland! There you see cloud-islands more wonderful than Walcheren; gray wastes that beggar the Zuyder Zee; sky dunes that stretch beyond Helder or the Hook; meadows more gorgeous than the tulip fields of Haarlem; celestial flora more pure and palpitating than any fairest, faintest bloom in any rarest, dimmest glade throughout the whole woodland of The Hague. It is Holland _in excelsis_.

BERLIN

6 P.M. TO 7 P.M.

While the sun is still sinking behind the Potsdam hills that victorious old Fighting Fritz loved so well, and the hero himself, astride his bronze charger, in cloak and cocked hat in the statue group on the Linden, seems riding slowly home to his neighboring palace with the lengthening shadows, the vast industrial army of the German capital issues in myriad units from its individual barracks and debouches on the spacious squares and broad avenues in quest of the evening’s diversions. It is the lull hour. The long, hard day’s work over, the amusements of the night are shortly to begin. In this pleasant interval the bustling, aggressive city seems pervaded with a spirit of relaxation, and no more opportune moment presents for catching the Berliner off his guard and really seeing him as his intimates know him.

This man, it should be borne in mind, is a type unto himself. The light-hearted Rhinelander, the solemn Bavarian, and the plodding, self-reliant Saxon are only half-brothers to the energetic, systematic, masterful Prussian whose most boisterous and irrepressible development is the Berliner. He plays as hard as he works, yielding to none in the thoroughness of either. He has a strong individuality, but with something of coarseness in feeling. He is enormously self-assertive, indefatigable, and patient, but scratch through his veneer of culture and you find a basis that is rude and often boorish. His optimism is sublime and his spirits correspondingly high. At work he is engrossed and determined, but when it is laid aside for the day he enters as eagerly upon his pastimes; and it is then one finds him witty and merry to a degree, but, at times, with the loudness and ostentation of a mischievous, unruly schoolboy. He is the sort of man that has a great time in zoölogical gardens, and goes picnicking in his best clothes. Intellectually, he is still as Buckle described him in the “History of Civilization in Europe,” the foremost man in the world when he is a scholar and the most ordinary in the main. Europeans dub him “a practical hedonist”; in America we should refer to him as “rough and ready.”

As soon as supper is over these joyous and virile people display their primitive scorn of roofs and flock into the open for fun and frolic; yet supper, itself, has been one of Gargantuan proportions at which an observer, recalling Rabelais, might well have trembled for palmers in the cabbage. From the four quarters they gather in force to hang about the fountains in the roomy squares or loaf on the Linden benches until the call of the concert-hall or the comfortable, tree-shaded beer-garden allures to those bibulous indulgences that old Tacitus, eighteen centuries ago, noted as peculiarly their own. For silent now are the forges and furnaces of Spandau, the clothing _Fabriks_ of the northeast suburbs, the factories of the east end, and all the skilled industries of the south. The artist colony of Moabit may no longer complain of drilling regiments, and the mammoth business blocks they call _Höfe_ have swelled the throng of clerks on Friedrich and Leipziger Strassen. All have supped; and merchant and laborer fare forth _en famille_ to take the evening air.

With what heartiness and placidity does this multitude enjoy its ease! It is a trick your highstrung peoples beyond the borders can never get the hang of. It calms one merely to look on at the contentment and satisfaction with which they stroll slowly and merrily along, chattering animatedly in their deep guttural speech, and greeting friends with punctilious bows and infinite hat-raisings. With every other word they “bend their backs and they bow their heads,” like the celebrated character of “Dorothy.” There is an agreeable absence of rush and hurry. Ponderous and massive, but with an erectness bred of military training, they wear their sombre, loose-fitting clothes with palpable relish, for comfort and inconspicuousness are virtues of price with the Teuton. The stately _gnädige Frau_ treads heavily in rustling silk, the mincing _Fräulein_ favors ribbons and flounces, and _mein Sohn_ is dapper in a tight suit, lavender gloves, and the indispensable little cane. Chaperons, of course, abound; for if a young man were to walk abroad alone with an unmarried girl in Berlin he would be consigning her at once to a plane with the painted _nymphe de pavé_.

The surroundings are animated. Motor-cars roll sedately along with the least din possible and with scrupulous regard for speed limits, and a prodigious assortment of cheap and comfortable _Droschke_ cabs hovers expectantly about with their drivers decked out in long coats and patent-leather hats. From time to time an officer in brilliant uniform or a diplomat in severe black, with a row of orders across his breast, posts past hurriedly to dine out in formal state; and with knowledge of the terrifying discomfort of a German social function comes confidence that most of them look from their smart broughams with profound envy at the jovial, care-free crowds that are so boisterously happy along the way.

The visitor, who is struggling with an uncomfortable suspicion that he may be missing something in the other two rings of the circus, might do well to climb the Kreuzberg and take the whole show in like a map. He has probably already learned that although the city lies prostrate on a level sandy plain as guiltless of a hill as a billiard table, yet the indomitable Berliner has repaired this oversight of nature by himself building a fine little mountain at a convenient spot due south. That is one of the advantages in rearing your own hills—you can have them where you want them.

In the sullen red of the dying day one beholds from the battlements of the Kreuzberg’s Gothic tower a monster plain, twenty-five miles in an irregular circle, smothered in house-tops, and barred and seamed with an intricate entanglement of carefully made streets. He sees parks and squares in surprising profusion, and an abundance of foliage in spite of the sand; and there is a sluggish river winding a serpentine course, a _Ringbahn_ encircling the suburbs, an elevated road that dives underground and becomes a subway, and surface lines without number. One could fancy a great cross in the centre of the city, whose upright is the long Friedrichstrasse and whose broad crosspiece is the splendid Unter den Linden. The last rays of the sun gild the roofs and spires of each of the “town districts,” which the Prussian Diet has recently merged into a Greater Berlin of four million souls—Wilmersdorf, whose “millionaire peasants” became rich overnight by selling their lands to speculators; Charlottenburg the Pampered, that has increased tenfold in thirty years; Rixdorf the Prosperous; and Schöneberg the Renowned—which is well worth a sentimental journey to the graves of the Brothers Grimm under the cypresses of St. Matthew’s Cemetery, if only out of gratitude for the familiar versions of “Cinderella,” “Tom Thumb,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and so many others of our childhood’s companions. The sunset glory falls where glory is due—on a region at our feet of ancient martial fame; the little village that the Knights Templar held for centuries, and the broad Tempelhofer Feld,—Prussian drill-ground for two hundred years,—whither all Berliners turn holiday-faces when the Kaiser reviews the Guards in spring and autumn, and journey cockishly homeward when the show is over, “snapping their fingers at the foeman’s taunts.”

In every section that the Kreuzberg looks down upon, and still farther away under the fading western skies, pleasant signs of recreation abound. The Linden overflows, the lesser streets are swollen streams, and every open square is a ruffled lake of leisurely humanity. A strong tide of loiterers sets through the most popular of Berlin’s breathing-places—the stately Tiergarten—and ripples there about the bases of statues and monuments, the marble settles of the Sieges-Allée, and the sculptured benches of the _Anlagen_ of the Brandenburg Gate. There is the usual deep eddy before the graceful statue of the adored Queen Louise, which is half-buried in flowers by a grateful people every March 10. The bridle-paths teem with lines of aristocratic riders, with possibly the Kaiser himself among them. Indeed, no other part of the city may compare with the Tiergarten at this hour, so beautiful is it in turf and tree and so delightful in heavy fragrance. No wonder that Berliners have so long regarded it as the best last glimpse of life—to fight duels in by dawn in other days, and to take their own lives in now.

All Berlin is now out of doors. The millionaires of the exclusive Tiergarten purlieus are cooling themselves in their villa gardens, and the middle-class man is beaming at the band at the Zoo, where the restaurant-terraces are overflowing into the flowered walks among the trees. There is a boisterous coterie of shouting children to every prim fountain in the prim squares. Out under the pines and cypresses of Grunewald crowds returning from the races are gazing admiringly at the pretty white villas that rim the verges of the placid forest lakes; and others are turning aside for the spectacular amusements of Luna Park. At Steglitz the bicycle races are ending and merrymakers are swarming into the Botanic Gardens to marvel over the cacti and palms of the long hot-houses. Capital boating is in progress on the Spree, and sailing at Wannsee, and steamer trips all through the suburbs. Bands are crashing in the noisy penny-shows of the tumultuous Zeltern; they are having beer in crowded _Weinhandlungen_, chocolate at dainty _Conditoreien_, and much besides in the jolly Vienna cafés that open out invitingly to the street. In every part of the city rise music and laughter and the sound of early revelry in pretty, tree-shaded summer gardens. It is an audible expression of the Berliners’ joy of living—their cherished _Lebensfreude_.

Could we rise with Zeppelin we should find it the same now at Charlottenburg, and over at Potsdam. Charlottenburg the Prosperous is having its serene and dignified companies sauntering in quiet evening talk along the broad, handsome streets. The gay are at the lively _Orangerie_, the philosophic in the trim, pert little parks, and the sentimental among the flaming roses and fragrant trellises of the charming Palace Garden. In solemn and conscious superiority the great Technical High School and famed Reichanstalt shroud their learned cornices in the gloaming of tree-tops, and that chiefest mecca of all, the royal mausoleum, embowers its gleaming marble walls in heavy shrubbery at the bottom of its avenue of pines. No loiterer, you may be sure, but thinks reverently of the recumbent snowy effigies of the dead rulers that lie in the hushed gloom of that dim interior.

Potsdam, Germany’s Versailles, steeped in the melancholy beauties of the Havelland pine forests, redolent of old Frederick the Great and his dream of an earthly Sans Souci, thinks nothing of drawing Berliners twenty miles to its twilight peace and calm. Exuberance tempers to the dignity and beauty of those parks and palaces where the Kaiser has his favorite royal seat. Up the broad Hauptweg they stroll by hundreds and gladden their patriotic eyes with the colonnades, porticoes, and statues of the vast New Palace that proved to the foes of defiant old Fritz that the sturdy warrior was far from bankrupt despite the Seven Years’ War. Nor do they forget that it was here the late emperor, beloved “Unser Fritz,” learned how

“unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square.”

The classic Town Palace of Potsdam is receiving its compliments, as usual, and no less the artistic Lustgarten, opulent in marbles and fountains; and many will be wandering even out to the cool and spacious park that lies about the charming Babelsberg Château. But old Frederick remains the local hero, and there is sure to be a crowd at the venerable lime-tree where petitioners used to stand to catch the eye of the king, and a kind of procession will be passing reverently before the garrison church, where lie his remains in the vault before which Napoleon outdid himself in eulogy the while he pilfered the old warrior’s sword. And the leaping column of the Great Fountain will be the centre of an admiring throng, and scores will be going up and down the vista of broad stairs and fruited terraces that lead to the long, low palace of Sans Souci. As to the latter, a stranger might be pardoned if he were to mistake it for a casino, which it strikingly resembles, with its flat-domed entrance, line of caryatids like pedestal busts, and the row of stone urns on the balustraded top of the façade. At this hour there is no admission, but one may peer through the low French windows and, in fancy, people Voltaire’s room with a miserly ghost of the crafty old philosopher, see him fraternizing and quarreling with the king, imagine a royal _soirée_ in progress with Frederick playing skillfully on the flute, recall the brilliant talk of the Round Table, and think with pity of the cheerless, childless old soldier toiling wearily on those histories that Macaulay praised, and winding his big clock, and yearning all the while to lie buried among his dogs out on the terrace. To many will come visions wrought from the extravagant fiction of Luise Mühlbach. What moral observations and theatrical posings fell to poor Frederick’s lot in her “Berlin and Sans Souci,” sandwiched in among the woeful loves of Amelia and Baron Trenck and of the dancer Barbarina and the High Chancellor’s son! But perhaps such literature helps one to understand the application to Frederick of the celebrated characterization of a very different personage, the “wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind.”

In Berlin proper there are two fine squares that best serve the well-advised as start-and-finish places for the most interesting evening walk to be had in the city—the Lustgarten before the Royal Palace and the Königs-Platz at the Tiergarten corner. By this notable route one arrives, within the smoking of two cigars, at something like an intelligent comprehension of Berlin and Berliners.

The gracious expanse of the Lustgarten is so appealing in the melancholy light of sunset that one almost feels, at the very beginning of the stroll, like going no farther for fear of faring worse, but rather remaining where he is among the trees and fountains and artistic shrubbery and watching the children playing _Hashekater_ around the colossal Granite Basin, or _Ringer-Ringer-Rosa_ at the marble stairs of Frederick William’s lofty statue. Soft splashes of deep colors warm the long rows of blinking windows in the Royal Palace on the left, and flush the domes of the cathedral and the columns of the Old Museum’s Ionic portico. Hundreds of Berliners are idling along the asphalt walks that entice to the Palace Bridge that arches the Spree in a double line of marble groups and so opens up the long, tree-shaded perspective of the Linden. To see it at this hour one would not guess that this fair Lustgarten had once been a neglected palace-close and even a dusty drill-ground; no more than one could believe that the occasional decrepit church or twisting, narrow street in the district in the rear is all that marks antiquity in the whole of the city. For the furious _tempo_ of Berlin’s development has swept everything before it. Three out of every four buildings, all over town, are garishly modern. Indeed, it is all so utterly of the present moment that it is hard to believe that even a group of fishermen’s huts could have stood here beside the Spree so long as seven hundred years ago. Were one to see no more of Germany than its capital he might very easily imagine a Chicago or two somewhere in the empire, but certainly not a Nuremberg.

Sunset imparts an air of cordiality to the ponderous, baroque, seven-hundred-roomed Royal Palace, whose four stories of regular window lines suggest an ornate and elaborate factory that had been diverted from its original purpose by the addition of the chapel dome on the west wing. However, for those who cross its low terrace and enter the sculptured portals there awaits a revelation of pomp and majesty, of throne-room splendors and saloon magnificence, that rivals the best of Versailles and Vienna. Unhappily we cannot here see the windows of the royal family’s apartments, for they are on the second floor of the opposite wing; whence the Kaiser looks out on the Neptune fountain of the Schloss-Platz and the elaborate façade of the royal stables when the purple banner that denotes his presence flies from the palace standard.

In the gloaming the high portico columns, “Lion Killer,” “Amazon,” and shadowy sculptured groups of the vestibule of the classic Old Museum gleam through the dark branches of the trees with charming grace and effectiveness. Not all the imposing galleries on Museum Island, just beyond, can displace this well-beloved old temple of the arts in the affectionate regard of Berliners. The commanding Dom, or cathedral, dominates the Lustgarten and all the city besides, but in the modest and inoffensive manner that is becoming in an architectural _débutante_ of only six seasons—though that is quite long enough for a building to become _passé_ in Berlin. Its granite walls, copper domes, high-vaulted portals, elaborately carved cornices, and profusion of statuary stand out in beautiful relief against the darkness of the trees beyond.

At this hour the sturdy, besculptured Palace Bridge is thronged with loiterers leaning over the broad balustrades to admire the festoons of lichen on the opposite masonry embankment or gaze down into the languid blue Spree. These waters have journeyed wearily all the way from distant Saxony, and with little enough to delight them along the road, excepting, perhaps, the scenes of the romantic and picturesque forest—Venice of Spreewald, where the strange Wendish people in outlandish garb pole flat market-barges through the labyrinth of canals and jabber to each other in a foreign tongue. Even on reaching the capital, the career of the Spree continues uneventful and dejected; and shortly after clearing the city it gives up in discouragement and empties itself into the Havel at Spandau. One finds a pleasant evening-life along its masonry banks, however, in spite of the personal indifference of the stream itself, and sometimes even of a brisk and important nature, thanks to the shipping from the canals. Beside these urban embankments one sees, here and there, a narrow sidewalk between the wall and the houses that instantly recalls the delightful little _rivas_ along the Venice canals. It is interesting to watch the swift, pert little steamers that dash up and down the stream and to take note of the air of bravado with which they plunge under the low bridges. Then, there are the soldiers washing their linen service uniforms on floating docks. But best of all are the canal boats. These invariably have a fat woman at the tiller and an excited dog dancing from end to end, while a sturdy husband propels a snail-like passage by means of a long pole which he sets to his shoulder like a crutch and inserts the other end into niches in the walls and so plods the entire length of the deck, with the boat advancing slowly under his feet.