Chapter 3

Theatregoing is occasionally varied with lesser and more primitive pastimes. Go out on the crooked Sieveringerstrasse and behold the multitudes waxing mellow over the sweet red _heuriger_. Go to the Volksgarten-Café 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 Tonkünstler Orchester_. 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 participates. Therefore we cannot tarry in the wine houses or at the concerts. Instead let us attend the opera. We go early before 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 victualty combined with the delicacies and imaginative qualities 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 overlooking the Volksgarten.

The Viennese dinner hour is eleven, and this is why the tourist, fingering his guide book, looks in vain for the diners. Sacher's, the Imperial, the Bristol and the Spatenbräu are deserted in the early evenings. Even after the Opera these restaurants present little of the life found in the Paris, Berlin or London restaurants. The Viennese is 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 café than one in a private apartment. 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 intimate theatre claimed us. There the glorious Bianca met her lovers, her little following. At these theatres every one knows every one else. It is the social lure as well as the theatrical appeal that brings the people there. Bianca chats with the actors, flirts with the admiring Lotharios and drinks champagne. At her side sit the greatest artists and dramatists of the day, princes and other celebrities. At one of these performances I saw her bewitching two men--one a composer, the other a writer--whose names lead the artistic activities of Southern Europe. But Bianca is prodigal with her charms, and before the final curtain was dropped she had shed her fascinations on every 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 etiquette. An escort may pay the _fiacre_ charge and the entrance fee, but such a meagre, vulgar claim does not suffice to obtain a lady'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 preliminaries for that form of amusement which forms the basis of all Viennese night life--dancing. The Viennese dance more than any people in the world. During _Faschingzeit_ 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 entrance 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 verbally, though your tongue be polished and your soul ablaze with poetry. And while you are dancing you may not talk to your 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 Kärntnerstrasse, 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 youthful 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 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 accompanied 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 like any other carnival ball. But there are things which a photographic plate could never catch, and the spirit of merriment which runs through these dances is one. If you care to see them, go to the Blumensäle 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 Musikvereinsäle or the Sofiensäle. These latter two are more fashionable, though no one remains at any of the _maskenbälle_ 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 intoxicating waltz, the golden confetti still glistening in our hair, perfumed powder on our clothes, the murmuring of clandestine whispers still in our ears, the rhythm of swaying girls still in our blood. As we pass out into the bleak street, the first faint flush of dawn is in the east. The _wässerer_ are washing off 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 sensuous splendour, its spontaneity and youth.

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

Let the most important facts come first. The best beer in Munich is Spatenbräu; the best place to get it is at the Hoftheatre Café in the Residenzstrasse; the best time to drink it is after 10 P.M., and the best of all girls to serve it is Fräulein Sophie, that tall and resilient creature, with her appetizing 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 shoplifters, some as graceful as _prime ballerini_, but none reaching so high a general level of merit, none so thoroughly satisfying to eye and soul as Fräulein Sophie. She is a lady, every inch of her, a lady presenting to all gentlemanly clients the ideal blend of cordiality 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 Spatenbräukeller 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 hundred 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 _bierhalle_ 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 intelligent machine, is put into the hands of a woman, it is put 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 romance, but the gross curves of an aurochs and a voice of brass--if she offers bulk when the heart cries for grace and adenoids when the order is for music, then the whole thing becomes a hissing and a mocking, and a grey fog is on the world.

But to get back to the Hoftheatre Café. It stands, as I have said, in the Residenzstrasse, 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 Hoftheatre is to get the curtain down at ten o'clock. If the bill happens to be a short one, say "Hänsel and Gretel" or "Elektra," the three thumps of the starting mallet may not come until eight o'clock or even 8:30, but if it is a long one, say "Parsifal" or "Les Huguenots," a beginning is made far back in the afternoon. Always the end arrives 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 Café across the platz, with a seidel of that incomparable brew tilted elegantly toward his face and his glad eyes smiling at Fräulein 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, dictating against time and space to a red-haired stenographer, three thousand and five hundred miles away? And yet Sophie does it, and not only Sophie, but also Frida, Elsa, Lili, Kunigunde, Märtchen, Thérèse and Lottchen, her confrères 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 fräulein 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 estimable Herr Wirt of the Hoftheatre Café, 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 Hofbräuhaus and in the open air _bierkneipen_ (for instance, the Mathäser joint, of which more anon) one drinks out of earthen cylinders which resemble nothing so much as the gaunt towers of Munich cathedral; and elsewhere the orthodox goblet 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 design, hexagonal in cross section and unusually graceful in general aspect. On top, a pewter lid, ground to an optical fit and highly polished--by Sophie, Rosa _et al._, poor girls! To starboard, a stout handle, apparently of reinforced onyx. Above the handle, and attached to the lid, 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 passionately by tone artists in oleaginous dress suits, down goes the Spatenbräu--gurgle, gurgle--burble, burble--down goes the Spatenbräu--exquisite, ineffable!--to 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 Travels" to those that are left. I delight in beef stews, limericks, 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 dramatists, bartenders, medical men and musicians. I once, in early youth, kissed a waitress at Dennett's. So don't accuse me of vulgarity; I admit it and flout you. Not, of course, that I have no pruderies, no fastidious 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 obstetrical anecdotes of ancient dames. But in general, as I have said, I joy in vulgarity, whether it take the form of divorce proceedings or of "Tristan und Isolde," of an Odd Fellows' funeral or of Munich beer.

But here, perhaps, I go too far again. That is to say, I have no 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 casuistry. 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, incomparable, _sui generis_, cannot be vulgar. Munich beer is unique, incomparable, _sui generis_. More, it is consummate, transcendental, _übernatürlich_. Therefore it cannot be vulgar. Secondly, the folk who drink it day after day do not die of vulgar diseases. Turn to the subhead _Todesursachen_ in the instructive _Statistischer Monatsbericht der Stadt München_, and you will find records of few if any deaths from delirium tremens, boils, hookworm, smallpox, distemper, measles or what the _Monatsbericht_ calls "liver sickness." The Müncheners perish more elegantly, more charmingly than that. When their time comes it is gout that fetches them, or appendicitis, or neurasthenia, or angina pectoris; or perchance they cut their throats.

Thirdly, and to make it short, lastly, the late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler," not to mention "Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea"--wrote them in his flat in the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, or Christian era--wrote them there and then took them to the Café Luitpold, in the Briennerstrasse, to ponder them, polish 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 café, 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 Löwenbräu and read the papers. The latter done, he would sit in silence, thinking, thinking, planning, planning. Not often did he say a word, even to Fräulein Mizzi, his favourite _kellnerin_. So taciturn was he, in truth, that his rare utterances were carefully entered in the archives of the café and are now preserved there. By the courtesy of Dr. Adolph Himmelheber, the present curator, I am permitted to transcribe a few, the imperfect German of the poet being preserved:

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

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

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

Now and then the great man would condescend to play a game of billiards in the hall to the rear, usually with some total stranger. He would point out the stranger to Fräulein Mizzi and she would carry his card. The game would proceed, as a rule, in utter silence. But it was for the Löwenbräu and not for the billiards that Ibsen came to the Luitpold, for the Löwenbräu and the high flights of soul that it engendered. He had no great liking for Munich as a city; his prime favourite was always Vienna, with Rome second. But he knew that the incomparable 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 prophylactically, 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 Café Luitpold, for of all the cafés in Munich the Luitpold is undoubtedly the most elegant. Its walls are adorned with frescoes by Albrecht Hildebrandt. The ceiling of the main hall is supported by columns of coloured marble. The tables are of carved mahogany. The forks and spoons, before Americans began to steal them, were of real silver. The chocolate with whipped cream, served late in the afternoon, is famous 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, intellectuality, aristocracy, distinction. 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 cafés of noble and elevating quality in that delectable town--plenty of them, you may be sure. For example, the Odéon, across the street from the Luitpold, a place lavish and luxurious, but with a certain touch of dogginess, a taste of salt. The _piccolo_ who lights your cigar and accepts your five pfennigs at the Odéon is an Ethiopian dwarf. Do you sense the romance, 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 Odéon 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 public eating house so near to the far-flung outposts, the Galapagos Islands of virtue. But one somehow feels that for Munich, at least, the Odéon is just a bit tolerant, just a bit philosophical, 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 baroque and arabesque, there is the restaurant of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, a masterpiece of the Munich glass cutters and upholsterers. It is in the very heart of things, with the royal riding school directly opposite, the palace a block away and the green of the Englischer Garten glimmering down the street. Here, of a fine afternoon, the society 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 encouraged. The dominant note of the establishment is that of proud retirement, of elegant sanctuary. One enters, not from the garish Maximilianstrasse, with its motor cars and 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 crowned heads and a whole shipload of lesser 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 Munich 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 Künstlerhaus in the Lenbachplatz; the huge catacomb of the Rathaus, with its mediæval arches and its vintage wines; the lovely _al fresco_ café on Isar Island, with the green cascades of the Isar winging on lazy afternoons; the café 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. There is even, I hear, a temperance restaurant in Munich, the Jungbrunnen in the Arcostrasse, where water is served 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 Munich 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 H_{2}O!