CHAPTER XIXToC
GERMAN SUNDAYS
There was to be singing in the forest on Sunday afternoon, we were told, when we arrived at our little Black Forest town; and we were on no account to miss it. We did not want to miss anything, for whenever we looked out of our windows or strolled through the streets we were entertained and enchanted. From the hotel we could see women and girls pass to and fro all day with the great wooden buckets they carried on their backs and filled at the well close by. As dusk fell the oldest woman in the community hobbled out, let down the iron chains slung across the street, and lighted the oil lamps swinging from them. All the gossips of the place gathered at the well of evenings, and throughout the day barefooted children played there. Behind the main street there were gabled houses with ancient wooden balconies and gardens crammed with pinks. The population mostly sat out of doors after dark, and as it was hot weather no one went to bed early. Even in the dead of night the timber waggons drawn by oxen passed through the town, and the driver did his best to wake us by cracking his long whip. For though a Black Forest town is mediæval in its ways, it is not restful. It may soothe you by suggestion, the people seem so leisurely and the life so easy going; but there is not an hour in the twenty-four when you are secure from noise. The Sunday in question began with the bustle occasioned in a country inn by an unusual strain on its resources. There must be an extra good dinner for the expected influx of guests, said the landlord's niece, who kept house for him, while the wife and daughters ran a second hotel higher up the valley. We escaped to the forest, where the morning hours of a hot June day were fresh and scented, and we were sorry we had to return to the hotel for a long hot midday dinner. When it was over, we sat in the garden and wondered why people held a festival on the top of a hill on such a sleepy afternoon. However, when the time came we joined the leisurely procession making the ascent. An hour's stroll took us to the concert hall, a forest glade where people sat about in groups waiting for the music to begin. Barrels of beer had been rolled up here, and children were selling Kringel, crisp twists of bread sprinkled with salt. There were more children present than adults, and we observed, as you nearly always will in Germany, that though they belonged to the poorer classes they wore neat clothes and had quiet, modest manners. The older people often let them drink out of their glasses, for it was a thirsty afternoon, and when the singing began the children joined in some of the songs. The occasion of the festival was the friendly meeting of several choirs, and they sang fine anthems as well as Volkslieder. The effect of the music in the heart of the forest was enchanting, and we stayed till the end. These choral competitions or reunions often take place on a Sunday in Germany, and in summer are often held in an inn garden. They bring some custom to the innkeeper, but drunkenness and disorder are almost unknown. In fact, all the cases of drunkenness I have seen in Germany have been in the Munich comic papers. You never by any chance hear of it as you do in England amongst people you know, and you may spend hours at the Berlin Zoo on a Whit-Monday and see no one who is not sober. University students get drunk and have fights with innkeepers and policemen, but that is etiquette rather than vice. Next day they suffer from Katzenjammer, but feel that they are upholding ancient tradition. Real intemperance is found almost entirely amongst the dregs of the big cities and the lowest class of peasants.
In Berlin the better class of artisans and small tradespeople escape from their flats on Sundays to their allotment gardens. You see whole tracts of these gardens on the outskirts of the city, and many of them have some kind of summer house or rough shelter. Here the family spends the whole day in fresher air, and presumably finds out how to grow the simpler kinds of flowers and vegetables. Those who have no garden and can afford a few pence for fares go farther afield. They carry food for the day in tin satchels, or rolls that look as if they ought to accompany butterfly nets and contain entomological specimens. But they are usually in the hands of a stout alpaca-clad middle-class mater-familias, who looks rather anxious and flustered while she herds her flock and hunts for a garden with the announcement, "Hier können Familien Kaffee kochen." There for a trifling indemnity she can be accommodated with seats, cups and saucers, and hot water; just as people can in an English tea-garden. Provisions she has with her in her Pickenick Rolle. If fate takes you to Potsdam on a fine summer Sunday, you will think that the whole bourgeoisie of Berlin has elected to come by the same train and steamer, and that everyone but you has brought food for the day in a green tin. You need not expect to find a seat either in the train or the steamer at certain hours of the day, and as you stand wedged in the crowd on the dangerously overladen boat, and look about you as best you can at the chain of wooded lakes, you wonder how it is that such overcrowding is permitted in a police-governed land. At home we take such things for granted as part of our system or want of system. But in Germany the moment you cross the frontier a thousand trifles make you feel that you are a unit in an army, drilled and kept under by the bureaucracy and the police. It surprises you to see an unmanageable crowd in a train or on a steamer, much as it would surprise you to see soldiers swarm at will into a troopship. You expect them to march precisely, each man to his place. And in Germany this nearly always happens in civil life; while even on a Sunday or a public holiday the mob behaves itself. At the Berlin Zoo, for instance, there are such masses of people every Sunday that you see nothing but people. It is impossible, or rather would not be agreeable, to force your way through the crowd surrounding the cages. But the people are interesting, and it is to see them that you have ventured here. You soon find, however, that it is not a venture at all. No one will offend you, no one is drunken or riotous. The gardens are packed with decent folk, mostly of the lower middle classes, and the only unseemly thing you see them do is to eat small hot sausages with their fingers in the open-air restaurants.
Sunday is the great day of the week at German theatres. In all the large towns there are afternoon performances at popular prices, and this means that people who can pay a few pence for a seat can see all the great classical plays and most of the successful modern ones; and they can hear many of the great operas as well as a variety of charming light ones never heard in this country. On one Sunday afternoon in Berlin, Hoffmann's Erzählungen was played at one theatre, and at others Gorky's Nachtasyl, Tolstoy's Power of Darkness, Hauptmann's Versunkene Glocke, the well known military play Zapfenstreich, and Lortzing's light opera Der Waffenschmied. The star players and singers do not usually appear at these popular performances, and the Wagnerian Ring has, as far as I know, never yet been given. But on Sunday afternoons all through the winter the playhouses are crowded with people who cannot pay week-day prices, and yet are intelligent enough to enjoy a fairly good performance of Hamlet or Egmont; who are musical and choose a Mozart opera; or who are interested in the problems of life presented by Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoy, or their own great fellow-countryman Gerhardt Hauptmann. When summer comes, as long as the theatres are open the whole audience streams out between the acts to have coffee or beer in the garden, or when there is no garden, in the nearest restaurant; and then comes your chance of appraising the people who take their pleasure in this way. They look for the most part as if they belonged to the small official and shop-keeper class. If the play is a suitable one, there are sure to be a great many young people present, and at the State-supported theatres these Sunday performances are such as young people are allowed to see.
In the evening the Sunday play or opera is always one of the most important of the week; the play everyone wishes to see or the opera that is most attractive. A Wagner opera is often played on a Sunday evening in the theatre that undertakes Wagner. The smaller stages will give some old favourite, Der Freischütz, Don Juan, Oberon, or Die Zauberflöte. In fact, all through the winter the upper and middle classes make the play and the opera their favourite Sunday pastime. The lower classes depend a good deal on the public dancing saloons, which seem to do as much harm as our public-houses, and to be disliked and discouraged by all sensible Germans.
So far this account of a German Sunday suggests that Germans always go from home for their weekly holiday, and it is true that when Sunday comes the German likes to amuse himself. But he is not invariably at the play or in inn gardens. It is the day when scattered members of a family will meet most easily, and when the branch of the family that can best do so will entertain the others. Some years ago in a North German city I was often with friends who had a dining-room and narrow dinner table long enough for a hotel. The host and hostess, when they were by themselves, dined in a smaller room, sitting next to each other on the sofa; but on Sundays their children and grandchildren, some spinster cousins, some Stammgäste (old friends who came every week) all met in the drawing-room at five o'clock, and sat down soon after to a dinner of four or five courses in a long dining-room. It was a company of all ages and some variety of station, and the patriarchal arrangement placed the venerable and beloved host and hostess side by side at the top of the room, with their friends in order of importance to right and left of them, until you came, below the salt as it were, to the Mamsells and the little children at the foot of the table. But the Mamsells did not leave the room when the sweets arrived. Everyone ate everything, including the preserved fruits that came round with the roast meat, and the pudding that arrived after the cheese. In those days it was not considered proper in Germany for ladies to eat cheese, and no young lady would dream of taking one of the little glasses of Madeira offered on a tray. They were exclusively for die Herren, and always gave a fillip to the conversation, which was also more or less a masculine monopoly. Just before the end of the dinner it was the business of the Mamsell belonging to the house to light a little army of Vienna coffee machines standing ready on the sideboard, so that coffee could be served when everyone went back to the drawing-room. The men smoked their cigars there too, and someone would play the piano, and when no music was going on there was harmless, rather dull, family conversation. The spinster cousins got out their embroidery, the Mamsells disappeared with the children, die Herren either talked to each other or had a quiet game of Skat. The women and some of the men had been to church in the morning, but this did not prevent them from spending the rest of the day as it pleased them.
It will be seen that from the English point of view Sunday is not observed at all in Germany; yet this does not mean, as is often announced from English pulpits, that the whole nation is without religion. Un-belief is more widely professed than here, and many people who call themselves Christians openly reject certain vital doctrines of Evangelical faith,—are Unitarians, in fact, but will not say so. But the whole question of religious belief in Germany is a difficult and contentious one, for according to the people you meet you will be told that the nation lacks faith or possesses it. If you use your own judgment you must conclude that there is immensely more scepticism there than here, and that there is also a good deal of vague belief, a belief, that is, in a personal God and a life after death. But you must admit that except in an "evangelical" set belief sits lightly on both men and women. Certainly it has nothing to do with the way they spend Sunday, and if they go to church in the morning they are as likely as not to go to the theatre in the afternoon. They sew, they dance, they fiddle, they act, they travel on the day of rest, more on that day than on any other, and when they come to England there is nothing in our national life they find so tedious and unprofitable as our Sundays. They cannot understand why a people with so strong a tendency to drink should make the public-house the only counter attraction to the church on the working man's day of leisure; and when they are in a country place, and see our groups of idle, aimless young louts standing about not knowing what to do, they ask why in the name of common sense they should not play an outdoor game. The Idealist expresses the German point of view very well in her Memoirs, and in so far as she misunderstands our English point of view she is only on a line with those amongst us who denounce the continental Sunday as an orgy of noisy and godless pleasures. She says: "I had a thousand opportunities of noticing that the religious life did not mean a deep life-sanctifying belief, but simply one of those formulas that are a part of 'respectability,' as they understand it both in the family and in society." Nothing proves this better than their truly shocking way of keeping holy the Sabbath day, which is the very reverse of holy, inasmuch as it paves the way to the heaviest boredom and slackness of spirit. I have been in English houses on Sundays where the gentlemen threw themselves from one easy chair to the other, and proclaimed their empty state of mind by their awful yawns; where the children wandered about hopelessly depressed, because they might neither play nor read an amusing book, not even Grimm's Fairy Tales; where all the mental enjoyment of the household consisted of so-called 'sacred music,' which some young miss strummed on the piano or, worse still, sang. A young girl once spoke to me in severe terms about the Germans who visit theatres and concerts on Sundays. I asked her whether, if she put it to her conscience, she could honestly say that she had holier feelings and higher thoughts, whether, in fact, she felt herself a better human being on her quiet Sunday, than when she heard a Beethoven Symphony, saw a Shakespeare play, or any other noble work of art. She confessed with embarrassment that she could not say so, but nevertheless arrived at the logical conclusion that, for all that, it was very wicked of the Germans not to keep Sunday more holy. Another lady, a cultured liberal-minded person, invited me once to go with her to the Temple Church, one of the oldest and most beautiful London churches in the city, belonging to the great labyrinth of Temple Bar where English justice has its seat. The music of the Temple Church is famous, and I had expressed a wish to hear it. So I went with my house-mate and the lady in question, and sat between them. During the sermon I had great trouble not to fall asleep, but fought against it for the sake of decorum. To my surprise, when I glanced at my right-hand neighbour I saw that she was fast asleep, and when I glanced at the one on my left I saw that she was asleep too. I looked about at other people, and saw more than one sunk in a pious Nirvana. As we left the church I asked the Englishwoman, who had a strong sense of humour, whether she had slept well. 'Yes,' she said, laughing, 'it did me a lot of good.' 'But why do you go?' I said. 'Oh, my dear,' said she, 'what can one do? It has to be on Sundays.'
"But this narrow Sunday observance is worse for the lower than for the upper classes. At that time the great dispute was just beginning as to whether the people should be admitted to the Crystal Palace, to museums, and suchlike institutions. The question was discussed in Parliament, and decided in the negative. It was feared that the churches would remain empty, and that morals would suffer if the people began to like heathen gods, works of art and natural curiosities, better than going to church. At least, this is the only explanation one can give of such a decision. The churches and the public-houses remained the only public places open on Sundays. The churches were all very well for a few hours in the morning, but what about the afternoon and evening? Then the beer-house was the only refuge for the artisan or proletarian bowed down by the weight of hard work, unused and untaught to wile away the idle hours of Sunday in any intellectual occupation, and having no friendly attractive home to make the peace of his own hearth the best refreshment after the exhausting week. And so it turned out: the public-houses were full to overflowing, and the holiness of Sunday was only too often desecrated by the unholy sight of drunken men and, more horrible still, drunken women; but this was not all, for so strong was the temptation thrust upon them, that the workman's hardly earned week's wages went in drink, and the children were left without bread and not a penny was saved to lighten future distress. The coarse animal natures of the only half-human beings became coarser and more animal through the degrading passion for drink that only too often has murder in its train, and murder in its most terrible and brutal guise!"
There is not one idea or argument in this passage that I have not heard over and over again from the lips of every German who has anything to say about our English Sunday, and every German who has been in England or heard much of English life invariably attacks what he considers this weak joint in our armour.
"What is the use?" he asks, "of going to church in the morning if you get drunk and beat your wife at night?"
"But the same man does not usually do both things in one day," you represent to him. "One set of people goes to church and keeps Sunday strictly, and another set goes to public-houses and is drunk and disorderly. You should try to get out of your head your idea that we are all exactly alike."
"But you are—exactly alike. Everyone of you goes to church with a solemn face, sings psalms, and comes back to his roast beef and apple-pie. All the afternoon you are asleep; and at night the streets and parks are not fit for respectable people."
"At night," you explain, "all the respectable people are at home eating cold beef and cold pie. The others...."
"The others you drive to drink and fight and kill by your pharisaical methods. You shut the doors of your theatres and your art galleries, and you set wide the doors of your drinking hells. How you can call yourself a religious people—it is Satanic...."
"But, my dear man," you say, taking a long breath, "the people who go to public-houses don't want theatres and art galleries. They are on too low a level."
"It is the business of the State to raise them—not to push them down. Besides, there is drinking—much drinking—in England on the higher levels too, as you well know...."
"Of course I know," you say impatiently. "All I am saying is that we do not bring it about by shutting the British Museum on Sundays."
But next time the subject comes up for discussion your German will say again, as he has said ever since he could speak, that the English Sunday is anathema, and a standing witness to British Heuchelei, because people sing psalms in the morning and get drunk and beat their wives at night. You can easily imagine the Hypocrite's Progress painted by a German Hogarth, and it would begin with a gentleman in a black coat and tall hat on his way to church, and would end with the same gentleman in the last stage of delirium tremens surrounded by his slaughtered family. For in Germany one of the curious deep rooted notions about us, who as people go are surely indifferent honest, is that we are ein falsches Volk. With the want of logic that makes human nature everywhere so entertaining, a German will nearly always cash a cheque offered by an English stranger when he would refuse to do so for a countryman. As far as one can get at it, what Germans really mean by our Heuchelei when they speak without malice is our regard for the unwritten social law. This is so strong in us from old habit and tradition that most of us do not feel the shackles; but the stranger within our gates feels it at every step.
CHAPTER XXToC
SPORT AND GAMES
The word Sport has been taken into the German language lately, but Germans use it when we should use "hobby." "It is my sport," says an artist when he shows you furniture of his own design. He means that his business in life is to paint pictures, but his pleasure is to invent beautiful chairs and tables. When the talk turns on the absurd extreme to which the Marthas of Germany carry their housekeeping zeal, a German friend will turn to you in defence of his countrywomen. "It is their 'sport,'" says he, and you understand his point of view. Yet another will tell you that the English have only become sportsmen in modern times, and that the Germans are rapidly catching them up; but this is the kind of information you receive politely, disagree with profoundly, and do not discuss because you have not all the facts at your fingers' ends. But you know that the British love of sport, be it vice or virtue, is as ingrained in Britons as their common sense, and as old as their history.
In Germany the country gentleman is a sportsman. He rides, he shoots, he hunts the wild boar which he preserves in his great forests. "You have no country (Land)," said a German to me, using the word as opposed to town. "In Germany we have country still." He meant that England is thickly populated, and that we have no vast tracts of heath and forest where wild animals live undisturbed. I told him there were a few such places still in Scotland, but that they all belonged to American and Jewish millionaires; however, he would not believe it. He said he had spent a fortnight in England and had not heard of them.
It is not such a matter of course with Germans of a certain class to ride as it is with us. You see a few men, women, and children on horseback in Berlin, but not many; and in most German towns you see no one riding except cavalry officers. I am told that the present Emperor tried to institute a fashionable hour for riding in the Tiergarten, but that it fell through partly because there were not enough people to bring decent carriages and horses. On the great estates in East Prussia the women as well as the men of the family ride, and go great distances in this way to see their friends; but in cities you cannot fail to observe the miserable quality and condition of the horses and the scarcity of private carriages. In fact, the German does not make as much of animals as the Englishman does. If he lives in the country, or if he means to be a man of fashion, he will have dogs and horses, but he will not have one or both, by hook or by crook, whether he is rich or poor, as the Briton does. You see dogs in any German city that remind you of a paragraph that once appeared in an Italian paper, a paragraph about a case of dog stealing. The dog was produced in court, said the paper, and was either a fox terrier or a Newfoundland. But you often see a fine Dachs; in Heidelberg the students are proud of their great boar-hounds, and in the Black Forest there are numbers of little black Pomeranians.
In German towns where there is water, the traffic on it both for business and amusement is as busy as with us, and in some respects better managed. Hamburg life, for instance, is largely on the basin of the Alster; either in the little steamers that carry you from city to suburb, or in the small craft that crowd its waters on a summer night. It is as usual in Hamburg as on the Thames to own boats and understand their management, and there are the same varieties to be seen there: the pleasure boats with people of all ages, the racing outrigger full of strenuous, lightly clad young men, and the little sail boats scurrying across the water before the breeze. On the Rhine the big steamers do a roaring traffic all the summer, and catch the public that likes a good dinner with their scenery; and on the Rhine, as well as on most of the other rivers of Germany, there are a great many swimming baths; for every German who has a chance learns to swim. In Hamburg on a summer evening you meet troops of little boys and girls going to the baths, many of them belonging to the poorer classes; for where there are no swimming baths attached to the school they get tickets free or at a very low rate. About fishing I can only speak from hearsay, for I have never caught a minnow myself, but I have met Germans who are keen anglers, and I have found that they knew every London shop beloved of anglers, and the English name of every fly.
Germans get more amusement out of their water-ways in winter than we do, for the winters there are long and hard, so that there is always skating. I have seen the Alster frozen for weeks, and the whole city of Hamburg playing on the ice. It was not what we call good ice, and not what we call good skating. For the most part people were content to get over the ground, to mix with their friends, to have hot drinks at the booths that sprang up in long lines by the chief track, and even to stroll about without skates and watch the fun. All classes, all ages, and both sexes skate nowadays, but some fifty or sixty years ago German ladies were not seen on the ice at all. Skating, like most exercises that are healthy and agreeable, was considered unfeminine, and men had the fun to themselves. In the mountain districts of Germany winter sports are growing in favour every year, and people go to the Riesengebirge or to the Black Forest for tobogganing and ski-ing. The German illustrated papers constantly have articles about these winter pastimes, and portraits of the distinguished men and women who took part in them. The history of cycling in Germany is not unlike its history here. The boom subsided some years ago, but a steady industry survives. In Berlin you see officers in uniform on bicycles, but you see hardly any ladies. That is because the Emperor and Empress disapprove of cycling for women, and their disapproval has made it unfashionable. Ten years ago, two years, that is, after the English boom, no woman on a bicycle had ever been seen in the remoter valleys of the Black Forest. One who ventured there used to be followed by swarms of wondering children, who wished her All Heil at the top of their voices. They did not heave bricks at her.
Tennis has not been blighted by the imperial frown, and is extremely popular in Germany. Hockey, as far as I know, is not played yet; certainly not by women. Cricket and football are played, but not very much. An Englishman teaching at a gymnasium, told me that the authorities discouraged outdoor games, as they were considered waste of time. Gymnastics is the form of athletics really enjoyed and practised by Germans. Every boy, even every girl, begins them at school, and the boy when he leaves school joins a Turnverein. For wherever Germans foregather, and whatever they do, you may be sure they have a Verein, and that the Verein has feasts in winter and Ausflüge in summer. When a man is young and lusty, the delights of the Verein, the Ausflug, the feast, and the walking tour are often combined. You meet a whole gang of pleasure pilgrims ascending the broad path that leads to the restaurant on the top of a German mountain, or you encounter them in the restaurant itself making speeches to the honour and glory of their Verein; and you find that they are the gymnasts or the fire brigade, or the architects or what not of an adjacent town, and that once a year they make an excursion together, beginning with a walk or a journey by rail or by steamer, and culminating in a restaurant where they dine and drink and speechify. Every age, every trade, and every pastime has its Verein and its anniversary rites. I was much amused and puzzled in Berlin one afternoon by a procession that filed slowly past the tram in which I sat, and was preceded and attended by such a rabble of sightseers that the ordinary traffic was stopped for a time. I thought at first it was a demonstration in connection with temperance or teetotalism, because there were so many broad blue ribbons about, and I was surprised, because I know that Germans club together to drink beer and not to abstain from it, and that they are a sober nation. At the head of the procession came a string of boys on bicycles, each boy carrying a banner. Then came four open carriages garlanded with flowers. There was a garland round each wheel, as well as round the horses' necks and the coachmen's hats, and anywhere else where a garland would rest. In each carriage sat four damsels robed in white, and they wore garlands instead of hats. After them walked a large, stout, red-faced man in evening dress, and he carried a staff. After him walked the music, men puffing and blowing into brass instruments, and, like their leader, wearing evening dress and silk hats. They were followed by a procession that seemed as if it would stretch to the moon, a procession of elderly, portly men all wearing evening dress, all wearing broad blue ribbons and embroidered scarves, and all marching with banners bearing various devices. The favourite device was Heil Gambrinus, and when I saw that I knew that the blue ribbons had nothing to do with total abstention. The next banner explained things. It was the Verein of the Schenkwirte of Berlin,—the publicans, in fact, of Berlin having their little holiday.
All through the summer the German nation amuses itself out of doors, and leads an outdoor life to an extent unknown and impossible in our damp climate. A house that has a garden nearly always has a garden room where all meals are served. Sometimes it is a detached summer house, but more often it opens from the house and is really a big verandah with a roof and sides of glass. In country places the inn gardens are used as dining-rooms from morning till night, and you may if you choose have everything you eat and drink brought to you out of doors. Most inns have a skittle alley, for skittles are still played in Germany by all classes. The peasants play it on Sunday afternoons, and the dignified merchant has his skittle club and spends an evening there once a week. The favourite card game of Germany is still Skat, but bridge has been heard of and will probably supersede it in time. Skat is a good game for three players, with a system of scoring that seems intricate till you have played two or three times and got used to it. In Germany it is always die Herren who play these serious games, while the women sit together with their bits of embroidery. At the Ladies' Clubs in Berlin there is some card playing, but these two or three highly modern and emancipated establishments do not call the tune for all Germany. Directly you get away from Berlin you find that men and women herd separately, far more than in England, take their pleasures separately, and have fewer interests in common. It is still the custom for the man of the family to go to a beer-house every day, much as an Englishman goes to his club. Here he meets his friends, sees the papers, talks, smokes, and drinks his Schoppen. Each social grade will have its own haunts in this way, or its own reserved table in a big public room. At the Hof Bräuhaus in Munich one room is set apart for the Ministers of State, and I was told some years ago that the appointments of it were just as plain and rough as those in the immense public hall where anyone who looked respectable could have the best beer in the world and a supper of sorts.
It is dull uphill work to write about sport and outdoor games in Germany, because you may have been in many places and met a fair variety of people without seeing any enthusiasm for either one or the other. The bulk of the nation is, as a matter of fact, not interested in sport or in any outdoor games except indifferent tennis, swimming, skating, and in some places boating. When a German wants to amuse himself, he sits in a garden and listens to a good band; if he is young and energetic, he walks on a well-made road to a restaurant on the top of a hill. In winter he plays skat, goes to the theatre or to a concert, or has his music at home. Also he reads a great deal, and he reads in several tongues. This, at any rate, is the way of Germans in cities and summer places, and it is a very small proportion of the educated classes who lead what we call a country life. "Elizabeth" knows German country life, and describes it in her charming books; perhaps she will some day choose to tell us how the men in her part of the world amuse themselves, and whether they are good sportsmen. I must confess that I have only once seen a German in full sporting costume. It was most impressive, though, a sort of pinkish grey bound everywhere with green, and set off by a soft felt hat and feathers. As we were having a walk with him, and it was early summer, we ventured to ask him what he had come to kill. "Bees," said he, and killed one the next moment with a pop-gun.
CHAPTER XXIToC
INNS AND RESTAURANTS
English people who have travelled in Germany know some of the big well-kept hotels in the large towns, and know that they are much like big hotels in other continental cities. It is not in these establishments that you can watch national life or discover much about the Germans, except that they are good hotel-keepers; and this you probably discovered long ago abroad or at home. If you are a woman, you may be impressed by the fineness, the whiteness, the profusion, and the embroidered monograms of the linen, whether you are in a huge caravanserai or a wayside inn. Otherwise a hotel at Cologne or Heidelberg has little to distinguish it from a hotel at Brussels or Bâle. The dull correct suites of furniture, the two narrow bedsteads, even the table with two tablecloths on it, a thick and a thin, the parqueted floor, and the small carpet are here, there, and everywhere directly you cross the Channel.
The modern German tells you with pride that this apparent want of national quality and colour is to be felt in every corner of life, and that what you take to be German is not peculiarly German at all, but common to the whole continent of Europe. This may be true in certain cases and in a certain sense, but there is another sense in which it is never true. For instance, the women of continental nations wear high-necked gowns in the evening. It is only English women who wear evening gowns as a matter of course every day of their lives. I have been told in Germany that, so far from being a sign of civilisation, this fashion is merely a stupid survival from the times when all the women of Europe went barenecked all day. However this may be, there is no doubt that whether the gown be high or low, worn by sunlight or lamplight, you can see at a glance whether the woman who wears it is English, French, or German. Every nation has its own features, its own manners, and its own tone, instantly recognised by foreigners, and apparently hidden from itself. The German assures you that the English manner is quite unmistakable, and he will even describe and imitate for your amusement some of his silly countryfolk who were talking to him quite naturally, but suddenly froze and stiffened at the approach of English friends whose national manner they wished to assume. In England we are not conscious of having a stiff frozen manner, and we never dream that everyone has the same manner. It takes a foreigner to perceive this; and so in Germany it takes a foreigner to appreciate and even to see the characteristic trifles that give a nation a complexion of its own.
Some of the most comfortable hotels in Germany are the smaller ones supported entirely by Germans. A stray Englishman, finding one of these starred in Baedeker and put in the second class, may try it from motives of economy, but in many of them he would only meet merchants on their travels and the unmarried men of the neighbourhood who dine there. In such establishments as these the table d'hôte still more or less prevails, while if you go to fashionable hotels you dine at small tables nowadays and see nothing of your neighbours. The part played during dinner by the hotel proprietor varies considerably. In a big establishment he is represented by the Oberkellner, and does not appear at all. The Oberkellner is a person of weight and standing; so much so that when you are in a crowded beer garden and can get no one to attend to you, you call out Ober to the first boy waiter who passes, and he is so touched by the compliment that he serves you before your turn. But in a real old-fashioned German inn you have personal relations with the proprietor, for he takes the head of his table and attends to the comfort of his customers as carefully as if they were his guests. This used to be a universal custom, but you only find it observed now in the Sleepy Hollows of Germany. I have stayed in a most comfortable and well-managed hotel where the proprietor and his brother waited on their guests all through dinner, but never sat down with them. There were hired men, but they played a subordinate part. In small country inns the host still arrives in the garden when your meal is served, asks if you have all you want, wishes you guten Appetit, and after a little further conversation waddles away to perform the same office at some other table. Except in the depths of the country where the inn-keepers are peasants, a German hotel-keeper invariably speaks several languages, and has usually been in Paris and London or New York. His business is to deal with the guests and the waiters, and to look after the cellar and the cigars; while his wife or his sister, though she keeps more in the background than a French proprietress, does just as much work as a Frenchwoman, and, as far as one can judge, more than any man in the establishment. She superintends the chambermaids and has entire care of the vast stock of linen; in many cases she has most of it washed on the premises, and she helps to iron and repair it. She buys the provisions, and sees that there is neither waste nor disorder in the kitchen; she often does a great part of the actual cooking herself. When I was a girl I happened to spend a winter in a South German hotel of old standing, kept for several generations in the same family, and now managed by two brothers and a sister. The sister, a well-educated young woman of twenty-five, used to get up at five winter and summer to buy what was wanted for the market, and one day she took me with her. It was a pretty lesson in the art of housekeeping as it is understood and practised in Germany. All the peasant women in the duchy could not have persuaded my young woman to have given the fraction of a farthing more for her vegetables than they were worth that day, or to take any geese except the youngest and plumpest. She went briskly from one part of the market to the other, seeming to see at a glance where it was profitable to deal this morning. She did not haggle or squabble as inferior housewives will, because she knew just what she wanted and what it was prudent to pay for it. When she got home she sat down to a second breakfast that seemed to me like a dinner, a stew of venison and half a bottle of light wine; but, as she said, hotel keeping is exhausting work, and hotel-keepers must needs live well.
At some hotels in this part of Germany wine is included in the charge for dinner, and given to each guest in a glass carafe or uncorked bottle. It is kept on tap even in the small wayside inns, where you get half a litre for two or three pence when you are out for a walk and are thirsty. If you dislike thin sour wine you had better avoid the grape-growing lands and travel in Bavaria, where every country inn-keeper brews his own beer. Many of these small inns entertain summer visitors, not English and Americans who want luxuries, but their own countryfolk, whose purses and requirements are both small. As far as I know by personal experience and by hearsay, the rooms in these inns are always clean. The bedding all over Germany is most scrupulously kept and aired. In country places you see the mattresses and feather beds hanging out of the windows near the pots of carnations every sunny day. The floors are painted, and are washed all over every morning. The curtains are spotless. In each room there is the inevitable sofa with the table in front of it, a most sensible and comfortable addition to a bedroom, enabling you to seek peace and privacy when you will. If you wander far enough from the beaten track, you may still find that all the water you are supposed to want is contained in a good-sized glass bottle; but if you are English your curious habits will be known, and more water will be brought to you in a can or pail. My husband and I once spent a summer in a Thuringian inn that had never taken staying guests before, and even here we found that the proprietress had heard of English ways, and was willing, with a smile of benevolent amusement, to fill a travelling bath every day. This inn had a summer house where all our meals were served as a matter of course, and where people from a fashionable watering-place in the next valley came for coffee or beer sometimes. The household itself consisted of the proprietress, her daughter, and her maidservant, and during the four months we spent there I never knew them to sit down to a regular meal. They ate anything at any time, as they fancied it. The summer house in which we had our meals was large and pleasant, with a wide view of the hills and a near one of an old stone bridge and a trout stream. The trees near the inn were limes, and their scent while they were in flower overpowered the scent of pines coming at other times with strength and fragrance from the surrounding forest. The only drawback to our comfort was a hornets' nest in an old apple-tree close to the summer-house. The hornets used to buzz round us at every meal, and at first we supposed they might sting us. This they never did, though we waged war on them fiercely. But no one wants to be chasing and killing hornets all through breakfast and dinner, so we asked the maid of the inn what could be done to get rid of them. She smiled and said Jawohl, which was what she always said; and we went out for a walk. When we came back and sat down to supper there were no hornets. Jawohl had just stood on a chair, she said, poured a can of water into the nest, and stuffed up the opening with grass. She had not been stung, and we were not pestered by a hornet again that summer. I have sometimes told this story to English people, and seen that though they were too polite to say so they did not believe it. But that is their fault. The story as I have told it is true. We found immense numbers of hornets in one wild uninhabited valley where we sometimes walked that summer, but we were never stung.
The proprietress of this inn, like most German women, was a fair cook. Besides the inn she owned a small brewery, and employed a brewer who lived quite near, and showed us the whole process by which he transferred the water of the trout stream into foaming beer. His mistress had no rival in the village, and the village was a small one, so sometimes the beer was a little flat. When Jawohl brought a jug from a cask just broached, she put it on the table with a proud air, and informed us that it was frisch angesteckt. We once spent a summer in a Bavarian village where a dozen inns brewed their own beer, and it was always known which one had just tapped a cask. Then everyone crowded there as a matter of course. In all these country inns there is one room with rough wooden tables and benches, and here the peasants sit smoking their long pipes and emptying their big mugs or glasses, and as a rule hardly speaking. They do not get drunk, but no doubt they spend more than they can afford out of their scanty earnings.
In the Bavarian village the inns were filled all through the summer with people from Nuremberg, Erlangen, Augsburg, Erfurth, and other Bavarian towns. The inn-keeper used to charge five shillings a week for a scrupulously clean, comfortably furnished room, breakfast was sixpence, dinner one and two-pence, and supper as you ordered it. For dinner they gave you good soup, Rindfleisch, either poultry or roast meat, and one of the Mehlspeisen for which Bavaria is celebrated, some dish, that is, made with eggs and flour. There was a great variety of them, but I only remember one clearly, because I was impressed by its disreputable name. It was some sort of small pancake soaked in a wine sauce, and it was called versoffene Jungfern. Most of these inns kept no servants, and except in the Kurhaus there was not a black-coated waiter in the place. Our inn-keeper tilled his own fields, grew his own hops, and brewed his own beer; and his wife, wearing her peasant's costume, did all the cooking and cleaning, assisted by a daughter or a cousin. When you met her out of doors she would be carrying one of the immense loads peasant women do carry up hill and down dale in Germany. She was hale and hearty in her middle age, and always cheerful and obliging. At that inn, too, we never had a meal indoors from May till October. Everything was brought out to a summer-house, from which we looked straight down the village, its irregular Noah's Ark-like houses, and its background of mountains and forest.
When you first get back to England from Germany, you have to pull yourself together and remember that in your own country, even on a hot still summer evening, you cannot sit in a garden where a band is playing and have your dinner in the open air, unless you happen to be within reach of Earl's Court. In German towns there are always numbers of restaurants in which, according to the weather, meals can be served indoors or out. You see what use people make of them if, for instance, you happen to be in Hamburg on a hot summer night. All round the basin of the Alster there are houses, hotels, and gardens, and every public garden is so crowded that you wonder the waiters can pass to and fro. Bands are playing, lights are flashing, the little sailing boats are flitting about. The whole city after its day's work has turned out for air and music and to talk with friends. And as you watch the scene you know that in every city, even in every village of the empire, there is some such gala going on: in gardens going down to the Rhine from the old Rhenish towns; in the gardens of ancient castles set high above the stifling air of valleys; in the forest that comes to the very edge of so many little German towns; even in the streets of towns where a table set on the pavement will be pleasanter than in a room on such a night as this. You can sit at one of these restaurants and order nothing but a cup of coffee or a glass of beer; or you can dine, for the most part, well and cheaply. If you order a halbe Portion of any dish, as Germans do, you will be served with more than you can eat of it. The variety offered by some of the restaurants in the big cities, the excellence of the cooking, the civilisation of the appointments, and the service, all show that the German must be the most industrious creature in the world, and the thriftiest and one of the cleverest. In London we have luxurious restaurants for people who can spend a great deal of money, but in Berlin they have them for people who cannot spend much. That is the difference between the two cities. How Berlin does it is a mystery. In the restaurants I have seen there is neither noise nor bustle nor garish colours nor rough service nor any other of the miseries we find in our own cheap eating-houses. In one of them the walls were done in some kind of plain fumed wood with a frieze and ceiling of soft dull gold. In another each room had a different scheme of colour.
"So according to your Stimmung you will choose your room," said the friends who took me. "To-night we are rather cheerful. We will go to the big room on the first floor. That is all pale green and ivory."
"You have nothing like this in England," said the artist as we went up the lift. "It is terrible in England. When I asked for my lunch at three or four o'clock I was told that lunch was over. Das hat keinen Zweck,—I want my lunch when I am hungry."
"But you are terribly behindhand in some ways in Berlin," I said, for I knew the artist liked an argument. "In London you can shop all through the night by telephone. It is most convenient."
"Have you ever done it?"
"I'm not on the telephone, and I am generally asleep at night. But other people...."
"Verrückt," said the artist. "Who in his senses wants to do shopping at night? Now look at this room, and admit that you have nothing at all like it."
The first swift impression of the place was that Liberty had brought his stuffs, his furniture, and his glass from London and set up as a restaurateur in Berlin. The whole thing was certainly well done. It was not as florid and fussy as our expensive restaurants. The colours were quiet, and the necessary draperies plain. The glass was thin and elegant; so were the coffee cups; and the table linen was white and fine. Nothing about it, however, would be worth describing if it had been expensive. But the menu, which covered four closely printed pages, showed that the most expensive dish offered there cost one and threepence, while the greater number cost ninepence, sixpence, or threepence each. The hungry man would begin with crayfish, which were offered to him prepared in ten various ways; for the Germans, like the French, are extremely fond of crayfish. He would have them in soup, for instance, or with asparagus, with salad or dressed with dill. Then he would find the week's bill of fare on his card, three or four dishes for each day, some cooked in small casseroles and served so to any guest who orders one. If it was a Friday he could have a ragoût of chicken in the Bremen style, or a slice from a Hamburg leg of mutton with cream sauce and celery salad, or ox-tongue cooked with young turnips. If he was a Catholic he would find two kinds of fish ready for him,—trout, cooked blue, and a ragoût of crayfish with asparagus and baked perch. But these are just the special dishes of the day, and he is not bound to try them. There are seven kinds of soup, including real turtle, and it is not for me to say how real turtle can be supplied in Berlin for 30 pfennig. There are seven kinds of fish and too many varieties of meat, poultry, salads, vegetables and sweets, both hot and cold, to count. A man can have any kind of cooking he fancies, too; his steak may be German, Austrian, or French; he can have English roast beef, Russian caviare, a Maltese rice pudding, apples from the Tyrol, wild strawberries from a German forest, all the cheeses of France and England, a Welsh rarebit, and English celery. The English celery is as mysterious as the real turtle, for it was offered in June. Pheasants and partridges, I can honestly say, however, were not offered. Under the head of game there were only venison, geese, chickens, and pigeons.
I am sorry now that when I dined at this restaurant I did not order real turtle soup, Roast beef Engl. mit Schmorkartoffeln, celery, and a Welsh rarebit, because then I should have discovered whether these old British friends were recognisable in their Berlin environment. But it was more amusing at the time to ask for ham cooked in champagne and served with radish sauce, and other curious inviting combinations.
"But at home," I said to the artist,—"at home we just eat to live. We have a great contempt for people who pay much attention to food."
"I stayed in an English house last year, and never did I hear so much about food," said he. "One would eat nothing but grape-nuts and cheese, and another swore by toast and hot water and little Pastetchen of beef, and the third would have large rice puddings, and the fourth asked for fruit at every meal, and the fifth said all the others were wrong and that he wanted a good dinner. The poor hostess would have been distracted if she had not been one of those who love a new fad and try each one in turn. Also there were two eminent physicians in the house, and one of these drank champagne every night, while the other would touch nothing but Perrier and said champagne was poison. Directly we sat down we discussed these things, ... and everyone assured me that if I tried his regime I should improve in health most marvellously."
"Which did you try?" I asked.
"The good dinner and the champagne, of course. But I did not find they affected my health one way or the other."