Home Life in Germany

CHAPTER XXIIToC

LIFE IN LODGINGS

As rents are high in Germany, it is usual for people of small means to let off one or two rooms, either furnished or unfurnished. But it is not usual to supply a lodger with any meal except his coffee and rolls in the morning. If you wish to take lodgings in a German town, and work through the long list of them in a local paper, you will probably find no one willing to provide for you in the English fashion.

"Cooking!" they say with horror,—"cooking! You want to eat in your room. No. That can we not undertake. Coffee in the morning, yes; and rolls with it and butter and even two eggs, but nothing further. Just round the corner in the Königstrasse are two very fine restaurants, where the Herrschaften can eat what they will at any hour of the day, and for moderate prices."

If you insist, the most they will promise, and that not willingly, is to provide you with a knife and fork and a tablecloth for a pyramid of courses sent hot from one of the very fine adjacent restaurants for 1 mark or 1 mark 20 pf. Supper in Germany is the easiest meal in the day to provide, as you buy the substantial part of it at a Delikatessenhandlung, and find that even a German landlady will condescend to get you rolls and butter and beer. This sounds like the Simple Life, to be sure; but if you are in German lodgings for any length of time you probably desire for one reason or the other to lead it. The plan of having your dinner sent piping hot from a restaurant in nice clean white dishes rather like monster soufflé dishes is not a bad one if the restaurant keeps faith with you. It is rather amusing to begin at the top with soup and work through the various surprises and temptations of the pyramid till you get to Biskuit-Pudding mit Vanille Sauce at the bottom. But in nine cases out of ten the restaurant fails you, sends uneatable food, is absurdly unpunctual or says plainly it can't be bothered. Then you have to wander about and out of doors for your food in all weathers and all states of health. This is amusing for a time, but not in the long run. It is astonishing how tired you can get of the "very fine" restaurants within reach, of their waitresses, their furniture, their menus, and their daily guests. At least, this is so in a small town where the best restaurant is not "very fine," although both food and service will be better than in an English town of the same size. If you are in Berlin and can go to the good restaurants, there you will be in danger of becoming a gourmet and losing your natural affection for cold mutton.

In a university or a big commercial town it is easy to get rooms for less than we pay in England; but in a small Residenz I have found it difficult. There were rooms to let, but no one wanted us, because we were not officers with soldier servants to wait on us; nor did we want to engage rooms as the officers did for at least six months. In fact, we found ourselves as unpopular as ladies are in a London suburb where all the lodging-house keepers want "gentlemen in the city" who are away all day and give no trouble. At last, after searching through every likely street in the town, we found a dentist with exuberant manners, who said he would overlook our shortcomings, and allow us to inhabit his rooms at a high price on condition we gave no trouble. We said we never gave trouble anywhere, and left both hotels and lodging-houses with an excellent character, so the bargain was concluded. I saw that his wife was not a party to it, but he overruled her, and as he was a big red-faced noisy man, and she was a small rat of a woman, I thought he would continue to do so. One is always making these stupid elementary mistakes about one's fellow-creatures. But a little later in the day I had occasion to call at the rooms to complete some arrangement about luggage, and then the wife received me alone. I asked her if she could put a small table into a room that only had a big one. I forget why I wanted it.

"Table!" she said rudely. "What can you want another table for? Isn't that one enough?"

"I should like another," I said,—"any little one would do."

"I don't keep tables up my sleeve," said she. "You see what you can have, ... just what is there. If it doesn't suit you...."

"But it does suit me," I said hurriedly, for the search had been long and exhausting, and the rooms were pleasant enough. I thought we need not deal much with the woman.

"No meals except coffee in the morning; you understand that?" she said in a truculent tone.

"Oh yes, I understand. We shall go out at midday and at night. Afternoon tea I always make myself with a spirit lamp...."

Never in my life have I been so startled. I thought the woman was going to behave like a rat in a corner, and fly at me. She shook her fist and shouted so loud that she brought the dentist on the scene.

"Spiritus," she screamed. "Spiritus—Spiritus leid' ich nicht."

"Bless us!" I said in English. "What's the matter?"

"Was ist's?" said the dentist, and he looked downright frightened.

"Sie will kochen," said his wife, shaking her fist at me again. "She has a spirit lamp. She wants to turn my beautiful bestes Zimmer into a kitchen. She will take all the polish off my furniture, just as the last people did when they cooked for themselves."

"Cooked!" I said. "Who speaks of cooking?—I spoke of a cup of tea."

"Spiritus leid' ich nicht," shrieked the woman.

"No," said the dentist, "we can't have cooking here."

"Spiritus leid'...."

But I fled. Luckily, we had not paid any rent in advance. I made up my mind that I would never confess to my small harmless Etna in German lodgings again, and would bolt the door while I boiled water for tea in it. We found rooms after another weary search, but they were extremely noisy and uncomfortable. We had to take them for six weeks, and could only endure them for a fortnight, and though we paid them the full six weeks' rent when we left, they charged us for every jug of hot water we had used, and added a Trinkgeld for the servant.

"We did not engage to pay extra either for hot water or for Trinkgeld," we said, turning, as worms will even in a Residenz, where everyone is a worm who is not Militär.

"But Engländer never give a Trinkgeld. That is why we have put it in the bill. The girl expects it, and has earned it."

"The girl will have it," we said; "but we shall give it her ourselves. And what have you to say about the hot water?"

"Without coal it is impossible to have hot water. We let you our rooms, but we did not let you our coal. It is quite simple. Have you any other complaint to make?"

We had, but we did not make them. We went to one of the big cities, where the civilian is still a worm, but where he has a large number and variety of other worms to keep him company. In Berlin or Hamburg or Leipzig there are always furnished rooms delighted to receive you. There may be a difficulty, however, if you are a musician. The police come in with their regulations; or your fellow-lodgers may be students of medicine or philosophy, and driven wild by your harmonies. I knew a young musician who always took rooms in the noisiest street in Berlin, and practised with his windows open. He said the din of electric trams, overhead trains, motor cars, and heavy lorries helped his landlady and her family to suffer a Beethoven sonata quite gladly.

One of the insoluble mysteries of German life is the cheapness of furnished lodgings as compared with the high rent and rates. To be sure, the landlady does not cook for you, and the bed-sitting-room is not considered sordid in Germany. In fact, the separate sitting-room is almost unknown, though it is easy to arrange one by shifting some furniture. The pattern of the room and its appointments hardly vary in any part of Germany, though of course the size and quality vary with the price. If you take a small room you have one straight window, and if you take a large one you have several. Or you may have a broad balcony window opening on to a balcony. You have the parqueted or painted floor, the porcelain stove, the sofa, the table, the wooden bedstead, and the wooden hanging cupboard wherever you are. It is always sensible, comfortable furniture, and usually plain. When people over there know no better they buy themselves tawdry horrors, just as they do here. The German manufacturers flood the world with such things. But people who let lodgings put their treasures in a sacred room they call das beste Zimmer, and only use on festive occasions. They fob you off with old-fashioned stuff they do not value, a roomy solid cupboard, a family sofa, a chest of drawers black with age, and a hanging mirror framed in old elm-wood; and if it were not for a bright green rep tablecloth, snuff-coloured curtains, and a wall paper with a brown background and yellow snakes on it, you would like your quarters very well indeed. Rooms are usually let by the month, except in watering-places, where weekly prices prevail. In Leipzig you can get a room for 10s. a month. It will be a parterre or a fourth-floor room, rather gloomy and rather shabby, but a possible room for a student who happens to be hard up. For £1 a month you can get a room on a higher floor, and better furnished, while for £1, 10s. a month in Hamburg I myself have had two well-furnished rooms commanding a fine view of the Alster, and one of them so large that in winter it was nearly impossible to keep warm. Then my Hamburg friends told me I was paying too much, and that they could have got better lodgings for less money. They were nearer the sky than I should like in these days, but the old German system of letting the higher flats in a good house for a low rent benefits people who care about a "select" neighbourhood and yet cannot pay very much. The modern system of lifts will gradually make it impossible to get a flat or lodgings in a good street without paying as much for the fifth floors as for the first.

You do not see much of a German landlady, as she does not cater for you. She is often a widow, and when you know the rent of a flat you wonder how she squeezes a living out of what her lodgers pay her. She cannot even nourish herself with their scraps, or warm herself at a kitchen fire for which they pay. Some of them perform prodigies of thrift, especially when they have children to feed and educate. At the end of a long severe winter, when the Alster had been frozen for months, I found out by chance that my landlady, a sad aged widow with one little boy, had never lighted herself a fire. She let every room of her large flat, except a kitchen and a Kammer opening out of it. The little food she needed she cooked on an oil stove, at night she had a lamp, and of course she never by any chance opened a window. She said she could not afford coals, and that her son and she managed to keep warm. The miracle is that they both kept alive and well. Another German landlady was of a different type, a big buxom bustling creature, who spent most of the day in her husband's coal sheds, helping him with his books and taking orders. Although she was so busy she undertook to cook for me, and kept her promise honourably; and she cooked for herself, her husband, and their work-people. She used sometimes to show me the huge dishes of food they were about to consume, food that was cheap to buy and nourishing to eat, but troublesome to prepare. She did all her own washing too, and dried it in the narrow slip of a room her husband and she used for all purposes. I discovered this by going in to see her when she was ill one day, and finding rows of wet clothes hung on strings right across her bed. I made no comment, for nothing that is an outrage of the first laws of hygiene will surprise you if you have gone here and there in the byways of Germany. An English girl told me that when she was recovering from a slight attack of cholera in a Rhenish Pension, they were quite hurt because she refused stewed cranberries. "Das schadet nichts, das ist gesund," they said. I could hear them say it. Only the summer before a kindly hotel-keeper had brought me a ragoût of Schweinefleisch and vanilla ice under similar circumstances. The German constitution seems able to survive anything, even roast goose at night at the age of three.

A Pension in Germany costs from £3 a month upwards. That is to say, you will get offers of a room and full board for this sum, but I must admit that I never tried one at so low a rate, and should not expect it to be comfortable. Rent and food are too dear in the big towns to make a reasonable profit possible on such terms, unless the household is managed on starvation lines. To have a comfortable room and sufficient food, you must pay from £5 to £7 a month, and then if you choose carefully you will be satisfied. The society is usually cosmopolitan in these establishments, and the German spoken is a warning rather than a lesson. It is not really German life that you see in this way, though the proprietress and her assistants may be German. In most of the university towns some private families take "paying guests," and when they are agreeable people this is a pleasanter way of life than any Pension.

Before you have been in Germany a fortnight the police expects to know all about you. You have to give them your father's Christian and surname, and tell them how he earned his living, and where he was born; also your mother's Christian and maiden name, and where she was born. You must declare your religion, and if you are married give your husband's Christian and surname; also where he was born, and what he does for a living. If you happen to do anything yourself, though, you need not mention it. They do not expect a woman to be anything further than married or single. But you must say when and where you were last in Germany, and how often you have been, and why you have come now, and what you are doing, and how long you propose to stay. They tell you in London you do not need a passport in Germany, and they tell you in Berlin that you must either produce one or be handed over for inquiry to your Embassy. Last year when I was there I produced one twenty-three years old. I had not troubled to get a new one, but I came across this, quite yellow with age, and I thought it might serve to make some official happy; for I had once seen my husband get himself, me, and our bicycles over the German frontier and into Switzerland, and next morning back into Germany, by showing the gendarmes on the bridge his C.T.C. ticket. I cannot say that my ancient passport made my official exactly happy. Twenty-three years ago he was certainly in a Steckkissen, and no doubt he felt that in those days, in a world without him to set it right, anything might happen.

"Twenty-three years," he bellowed at the top of his voice, for he saw that I was fremd, and wished to make himself clear. We are not the only people who scream at foreigners that they may understand. "Twenty-three years. But it is a lifetime."

It was for him no doubt. I admitted that twenty-three years was—well, twenty-three years, and explained that I had been told at a Reisebureau that a passport was unnecessary.

"They know nothing in England," he said gloomily. "With us a passport is necessary; but what is a passport twenty-three years old?"

I admitted that, from the official point of view, it was not much, and he made no further difficulties. As a rule you need not go to the police bureau at all. The people you are with will get the necessary papers, and fill them in for you; but I wanted to see whether the German jack-in-office was as bad as his reputation makes him. Germans themselves often complain bitterly of the treatment they receive at the hands of these lower class officials.

"I went to the police station," said a German lady who lived in England, and was in her own country on a visit. "I went to anmelden myself, but not one of the men in the office troubled to look up. When I had stood there till I was tired I said that I wished someone to attend to me. Every pen stopped, every head was raised, astounded by my impertinence. But no one took any notice of my request. I waited a little longer, and then fetched myself a chair that someone had left unoccupied. I did not do it to make a sensation. I was tired. But every pen again stopped, and one in authority asked in a voice like thunder what I made here. I said that I had come to anmelden myself, and he began to ask the usual questions with an air of suspicion that was highly offensive. You can see for yourself that I do not look like an anarchist or anything but what I am, a respectable married woman of middle age. I told the man everything he wanted to know, and at every item he grunted as if he knew it was a lie. In the end he asked me very rudely how long a stay I meant to make in Germany.

"Not a day longer than I can help," I said; "for your manners do not please me."

All the pens stopped again till I left the office, and when I got back to my mother she wept bitterly; for she said that I should be prosecuted for Beamtenbeleidigung and put in prison.

"But the really interesting fact about the system is that it doesn't work," said a German to me; "when I wanted my papers a little while ago I could not get them. Nothing about me could be discovered. Officially I did not exist."

Yet he had inherited a name famous all over the world, was a distinguished scientific man himself, and had been born in the city where his existence was not known to the police.

"Take care you don't go in at an Ausgang or out at an Eingang," said an Englishman who had just come back from Berlin. "Take care you don't try to buy stamps at the Post Office out of your turn. Remember that you can't choose your cab when you arrive. A policeman gives you a number, and you have to hunt amongst a crowd of cabs for that number, even if it is pouring with rain. Remember that the police decides that you must buy your opera tickets on a Sunday morning, and stand queue for hours till you get them. If you have a cold in your head, stay at home. Last winter a man was arrested for sneezing loudly. It was considered Beamtenbeleidigung. The Englishwoman who walked on the grass in the Tiergarten was not arrested, because the official who saw her died of shock at the sight, and could not perform his duty."

Wherever you go in Germany you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can hardly have been visible from the street, but my landlady came to me excitedly and said the police would be on her before the day was out if the jug was left there. The police allowed nothing on a window-sill in that town, lest it should fall on a citizen's head. Each town or district has its own restrictions, its own crimes. In one you will hear that a butcher boy is not allowed on the side-path carrying his tray of meat. If a policeman catches him at it, he, or his employer, is fined. In another town the awning from a shop window must not exceed a certain length, and you are told of a poor widow, who, having just had a new one put up at great expense, was compelled by the police to take the whole thing down, because the flounce was a quarter of an inch longer than the regulations prescribed. You hear of a poor man laboriously building a toy brick wall round the garden in his Hof, and having to pull it to pieces because "building" is not allowed except with police permission. In some towns the length of a woman's gown is decided in the Polizeibureau, and the officers fine any woman whose skirt touches the ground. In one town you may take a dog out without a muzzle; in another it is a crime. A merchant on his way to his office, in a city where there was a muzzling order, found to his annoyance, one morning, that his mother's dog had followed him unmuzzled. He had no string with him, he could not persuade the dog to return, and he could not go back with it, because he had an important appointment. So he risked it and went on. Before long, however, he met a policeman. The usual questions were asked, his name and address were taken, and he was told that he would be fined. Hardly had he got to the end of the street when he met a second policeman. He explained that the matter was settled, but this was not the opinion of the policeman. Was the dog not at large, unmuzzled, on his the policeman's beat? With other policemen he had nothing to do. The dog was his discovery, the name and address of the owner were required, and there was no doubt, in the policeman's mind, that the owner would have to pay a second fine. The merchant went his ways, still followed by an unmuzzled unled dog. Before long he met a third policeman, gave his name and address a third time, and was assured that he would have to pay a third time.

"Dann war es mir zu bunt," said the merchant, and he picked up the dog and carried it the rest of the way to his office. When he got there he sent it home in a cab.

CHAPTER XXIIIToC

SUMMER RESORTS

If you choose to leave the railroad you may still travel by diligence in Germany, and rumble along the roads in its stuffy interior. As you pass through a village the driver blows his horn, old and young run out to enjoy the sensation of the day, the geese cackle and flutter from you in the dust, you catch glimpses of a cobble-stoned market-place, a square church-tower with a stork's nest on its summit, Noah's Ark-like houses with thatched or gabled roofs, tumble-down balconies, and outside staircases of wood. Sometimes when the official coach is crowded you may have an open carriage given you without extra charge, but you cannot expect that to happen often; nor will you often be driven by postillion nowadays. Indeed, for all I know the last one may have vanished and been replaced by a motor bus. You can take one to a mountain inn in the Black Forest nowadays, over a pass I travelled a few years ago in a mail coach. In those times it was a jog-trot journey occupying the long lazy hours of a summer morning. I suppose that now you whizz and hustle through the lovely forest scenery pursued by clouds of dust and offended by the fumes of petrol, but no doubt you get to your destination quicker than you used. The pleasantest way to travel in Germany, if you are young and strong, is on your feet. It is enchanting to walk day after day through the cool scented forest and sleep at night in one of the clean country inns. You must choose your district and your inn, for if you went right off the traveller's track and came to a peasant's house you would find nothing approaching the civilisation of an English farmhouse. But in most of the beautiful country districts of Germany there are fine inns, and there are invariably good roads leading to them. This way of travelling is too tame for English people as a rule. They laugh at the broad well-made path winding up the side of a German mountain, and still more at the hotel or restaurant to be found at the top. From the English point of view a walk of this kind is too tame and easy either for health or pleasure. But the beauty of it, especially in early summer, can never be forgotten; and so it is worth while, even if you are young and cherish a proper scorn for broad roads and good dinners. You would probably come across some dinners that were not good, tough veal, for instance, and greasy vegetables. The roads you would have to accept, and walk them if you choose in tennis shoes. Indeed, you would forget the road and eat the dinner unattending; for all that's made would be a green thought in a green shade for you by the end of the day, and as you shut your eyes at night you would see forest, forest with the sunlight on the young tips of the pines, forest unfolding itself from earth to sky as you climbed hour after hour close to the ferns and boulders of the foaming mountain stream your pathway followed, forest too on the opposite side of the valley, with wastes of golden broom here and there, and fields of rye and barley swept gently by the breeze. You may walk day by day in Germany through such a paradise as this, and meet no one but a couple of children gathering wild strawberries, or an old peasant carrying faggots, or the goose-girl herding her fussy flock. You may even spend your summer holiday in a crowded watering-place, and yet escape quite easily into the heart of the forest where the crowd never comes. The crowd sits about on benches planted by a Verschönerungsverein within a mile of their hotel, or on the verandah of the hotel itself. Some of the benches will command a view, and these will be most in demand. Those that are nearly a mile away will be reached by energetic elderly ladies, and at dinner you will hear that they have been to the Rabenstein this morning, and that the Aussicht was prachtvoll and the Luft herrlich, but that they must decline to go farther afield this afternoon as the morning's exertions have tired them. But some of die Herren say they are ready for anything, and even propose to scale the mountain behind the hotel and drink a glass of beer at the top. You readily agree to go with them, for by this time you know that even if you are a poor walker you can toddle half way up a German hill and down again; and the hotel itself has been built high above the valley. But after dinner you find that nearly everyone disappears for a siesta, while the few who keep outside are asleep over their coffee and cigar. Even Skat hardly keeps awake the three Herren who proposed a walk; and your friend the Frau Geheimrath Schultze warns you solemnly against the insanity of stirring a step before sundown; for summer in South Germany is summer indeed. The sun comes suddenly with power and glory, bursting every sheathed bud and ripening crops in such a hurry that you walk through new mown hayfields while your English calendar tells you it is still spring. Later in the year the heat is often intense all through the middle of the day, and the young men who make their excursions on foot start at dawn, so that they may arrive at a resting place by ten or eleven. "For many years our boys have wandered cheaply and simply through their German Fatherland," says a leaflet advertising a society that organises walking tours for girls; Saturday afternoon walks, Sunday walks, and holiday walks extending over six or eight days. "Simplicity, cheerful friendly intercourse, gaiety in fresh air, these are the companions of our pilgrimage.... We wish to provide the German nation with mothers who are at home in woods and meadows, who have learned to observe the beauties of nature, who have strengthened their health and their perceptions of everything that is great and beautiful by happy walks.... Anyone wanderfroh who has been at a higher school or who is still attending one is eligible. The card of membership only costs 3 marks for a single member and 4 marks for a whole family. Some of the excursions are planned to include brother pilgrims, and their character is gay and cheerful, without flirting or coquetry, a genuine friendly intercourse between girls and boys, young men and maidens, a pure and beautiful companionship such as no dancing lesson and no ballroom can create, and which is nevertheless the best training for life." So nowadays gangs of girls, and even mixed gangs of boys and girls, are to swarm through the pleasant forests of Germany, ascend the easy pathways of her mountains, and fill her country inns to overflowing. How horrified the little Backfisch would have been at such a suggestion, how unmaidenly her excellent aunt would have deemed it, how profoundly they would both have disapproved of any exercise that heightens the colour or disturbs the neatness of a young lady's toilet. I myself have heard German men become quite violent in their condemnation of Englishwomen who play games or take walks that make them temporarily dishevelled. It never seemed to occur to them that a woman might think their displeasure at her appearance of less account than her own enjoyment. "No," they said, "ask not that we should admire Miss Smith. She has just come in from a six hours' walk with her brother. Her face is as red as a poppy, her blouse is torn, and her boots are thick and muddy."

As a matter of fact, I had not asked them to admire Miss Smith. I knew that the lady they admired was arch, and had a persuasive giggle. Nevertheless I tried to break a lance for my countrywoman.

"You will see," I assured them, "she will remove the torn blouse and the muddy boots; and when she comes down her face will be quite pale."

"But she often looks like that," said one of the men. "At least once a day she plays a game or takes a walk that is more of a strain on her appearance than it should be. A young woman must always consider what effect things have on her appearance."

"Why?"

"Why?—Because she is a woman. There is no sense in a question like that. It goes back to the beginning of all things. It is unanswerable. Every young woman wishes to please."

"But is it not conceivable," I asked, "that a young woman may sometimes wish to please herself even at the expense of her appearance. Miss Smith assures me that she enjoys long walks and games,—oh, games that you have not seen her play here—hockey, for instance, and cricket."

"Verrückt!" said the men in chorus. "A young woman should not think of herself at all. The Almighty has created her to please us, and it does not please us when she wears muddy boots and is as red as a poppy; at least, not while she is young. When she is married, and her place is in the kitchen, she may be as red as she pleases. That is a different matter."

"Is it?" I said, and I wanted to ask why again; but I held my tongue. Some questions, as they said, lead one too far afield.

The majority of visitors at a German watering-place take very little exercise of any kind. They sit about the forest as our seaside visitors sit about the sands, and though they cannot fill in their mornings by sea bathing, there are often medicinal baths that take as much time. Then the Badearzt probably prescribes so many glasses of water from his favourite spring each day, and a short walk after each glass, and a long rest after the midday dinner. Dinner is the really serious business of the day, and often occupies two hours. Where there is still a table d'hôte it is a tedious, noisy affair, conducted in a stuffy room, and even if you are greedy enough to like the good things brought round you wish very soon that you were on a Cumberland fell-side with a mutton sandwich and a mountain stream. You wish it even although you hate mutton sandwiches and like meringues filled with Alpine strawberries and whipped cream; for the clatter and the clack going on around you, and the asphyxiating air, bring on a demoralising somnolence that you despise and cannot easily throw off. You sit about as lazily as anyone else half through the golden afternoon, drink a cup of coffee at four o'clock, look at mountains of cake, and then start for the restaurant, which is said to be eine gute Stunde from the hotel. You find, as you expected, that you saunter gently uphill on a broad winding road through the forest, and that you have a charming walk, but not what anyone in this country would call exercise till they were about seventy. In case you should be weary you pass seats every hundred yards or so, and when you have made your ascent you are received by a bustling waiter or a waitress in costume, who expects to serve you with beer or coffee before you venture down the hill again. By the time you get back to the hotel everyone is streaming in to supper, which is not as long as dinner, but quite as noisy. After supper everyone sits about the verandah or the garden. The men play cards, and smoke and drink coffee and Kirsch, the married women talk and do embroidery, the maidens stroll about in twos and threes or sit down to Halma. There are never many young men in these summer hotels, and the few there are herd with the older men or with each other more than young men do in this country. What we understand by flirtation is not encouraged, unless it is almost sure to lead to marriage; and what the Germans understand by flirtation is justly considered scandalous and reprehensible. For the Germans have taken the word into use, but taken away the levity and innocence of its meaning. They make it a term of serious reproach, and those who dislike us condemn the shocking prevalence of Flirt (they make a noun of the verb) in our decadent society.

The Pension price at a German summer hotel varies from four to fifteen marks, according to the general style of the establishment and the position of the rooms engaged. In one frequented by Germans the sitting-rooms are bare and formal, and as English visitors are not expected no English papers are taken. The season begins in June and lasts till the end of September, and you must be a successful hotel-keeper yourself to understand how so much can be provided for so little, miles away from any market. Many of these summer hotels have been built high up in the forest, and with no others near them. Some are run as a speculation by doctors. There is hardly a woman or girl in Germany who has not needed a Kur at some time of her life, or who does not need one every year if she has money and pretty gowns. The Badereise and everything connected with it serves the German professional humorist much as the mother-in-law and the drop too much serve the English one, perennially and faithfully. For the wife is determined to have her Badereise, and the husband is not inclined to pay for it, and the family doctor is called in to prescribe it. The artifices and complications arising suggest themselves, and to judge by the postcards and farces of Germany never weary the public they are designed to amuse.

In Berlin, when the hot weather comes, you see the family luggage and bedding going off to the sea-coast, for people who take a house take part of their bedding with them. There is so little seaside and so much Berlin that prices rule high wherever there is civilised accommodation. In Ruegen £1 a week per room is usual, and the room you get for that may be a very poor one. In most German watering-places, both on the coast and in the forest, you can have furnished rooms if you prefer them to hotel life, but as a rule you must either cook your own dinner or go out to a hotel for it. The cooking landlady is as rare in the country as in the town. Then in some places, at Oberhof, for instance, high upon the hills above Gotha, there are charming little furnished bungalows. Friends of mine go there or to one of the neighbouring villages every year, and never enter a hotel. They either take a servant with them, or find someone on the spot to do what is necessary. When there are no mineral waters or sea baths to give a place importance, Germans say they have come there to do a Luftkur. A delightful Frenchwoman who has written about England lately is amused by our everlasting babble about a "change." This one needs a change, she says, and that one is away for a change, and the other means to have a change next week. So the Germans amuse us by their eternal "cures." One tries air, and the other water, and the next iron, and the fourth sulphur, while the number and variety of nerve cures, Blutarmut cures, diet cures, and obesity cures are bewildering. It is difficult to believe that life in a hotel can cure anyone anywhere. However, in Germany, if you are under a capable Badearzt, there may be some salvation for you, since he orders your baths, measures your walks, and limits your diet so strictly. At one of the well-known places where people who eat too much all the year round go to reduce their figures, there is in the chief hotels a table known as the Corpulententisch, and a man who sits there is not allowed an ounce of bread beyond what his physician has prescribed.

But the German Luxusbad, the fashionable watering-place where the guests are cosmopolitan and the prices high—Marienbad, Homburg, Karlsbad, Schwalbach, Wiesbaden—all these places are as well known to English people as their own Bath and Buxton. Homburg they have swallowed, and I have somewhere come across a paragraph from an English newspaper objecting to the presence of Germans there. It is the quiet German watering-place where no English come that is interesting and not impossible to find. During the summer I spent in a Bavarian forest village I only saw one English person the whole time, except my own two or three friends. I heard the other day that the village and the life there have hardly altered at all, but that some English people have discovered the trout streams and come every year for fishing. In my time no one seemed to care about fishing. You went for walks in the forest. There was nothing else to do, unless you played Kegel and drank beer; for it was only a Luftkur. There was no Badearzt and no mineral water. To be sure, there were caves, huge limestone caves that you visited with a guide the day after you arrived, and never thought about again. There were various ruined castles, too, in the neighbourhood that made a goal for a drive in cases where there was a restaurant attached, and not far off there was a curious network of underground beer-cellars that I did not see, but which seemed to attract the men of our party sometimes. There were several inns in the straggling village, for the place lay high up amongst the dolomite hills of Upper Franconia, and people came there from the neighbouring towns for Waldluft. The summer I was there Richard Wagner passed through with his family, and we saw him more than once. He stayed at the Kurhaus, a hotel of more pretentions than the village inns, for it had a good sized garden and did not entertain peasants. My inn, recommended by an old Nuremberg friend, was owned and managed by a peasant proprietor, his wife, their elderly daughter, and two charming orphan grandchildren in their early teens. The peasant customers had as usual a large rough room to themselves, the town guests had their plain bare Speisesaal, and we Britishers possessed the summer house; so we were all happy. The whole glory of the place was in the forest; for it was not flat sandy forest that has no undergrowth, and wearies you very soon with its sameness and its still, oppressive air. It was up hill and down dale forest, full of lovely glades, broken by massive dolomite rocks; the trees not set in serried rows, but growing for the most part as the birds and the wind planted them; a varied natural forest tended but not dragooned by man. The flowers there were a delight to us, for we arrived early enough in the year to find lilies of the valley growing in great quantities amongst the rocks, while a little later the stream and pathways were bordered by oak and beech fern and by many wild orchises that are rare now with us. It was not here, however, but in another German forest, where, one day when I had no time to linger, I met people with great bunches of the Cypripedium calceolus that they had gathered as we gather primroses. At the Bavarian watering-place we had the whole forest as much to ourselves as the summer house, for no one seemed to wander farther than the seats placed amongst the trees by the Verschönerungsverein.

says Goethe, and most Germans out for their summer holiday seem to take his advice in the most literal way, and find their happiness as near home as they possibly can.

When you begin to think about the actual process of travelling in Germany, the tiresome business of getting from the city to the forest village, for instance, you at once remember both the many complaints you have heard Germans make of our system, or rather want of system, and the bitter scorn poured on German fussiness by travelling Britons. The ways of one nation are certainly not the ways of another in this respect. Directly I cross the German frontier I know that I am safe from muddle and mistakes, that I need not look after myself or my luggage, that I cannot get into a wrong train or alight at a wrong station, or suffer any injury through carelessness or mismanagement. Everything is managed for me, and on long journeys in the corridor trains things are well managed. But your carriage is far more likely to be unpleasantly crowded in Germany than in England; and as hand-luggage is not charged for, the public takes all it can, and fills the racks, the seats, and the floor with heavy bags and portmanteaux. In bygone years the saying was that none travelled first class save fools and Englishmen, but nowadays Germans travel in their own first-class carriages a good deal. The third-class accommodation is wretched, more fit for animals than men. In some districts there are fourth-class uncovered seats on the roof of the carriages, but I have only seen these used in summer. When I was last in Germany a year ago there was much excitement and indignation over certain changes that were to make travelling dearer for everyone. All luggage in the van was to be paid for in future, first-class fares were to be raised, and no return tickets issued.

But you must not think that when you have bought a ticket from one place to another you can get to it by any train you please. "I want the 10.15 to Entepfuhl," you say to the nearest and biggest official you can see; and he looks at your ticket.

"Personenzug," he says in a withering way,—"the 10.15 is an express."

You say humbly that you like an express.

"Then you must get an extra ticket," he says, "This one only admits you to slow trains."

So you get your extra ticket, and then you wait with everyone else in a big room where most people are eating and drinking to wile away the time. Don't imagine that you can find your empty train, choose your corner, and settle yourself comfortably for your journey as you can in England. You are well looked after, but if you are used to England you never quite lose the impression in Germany that if you are not an official or a soldier you must be a criminal, and that if you move an inch to right or left of what is prescribed you will hear of it. Just before the train starts the warders open your prison doors and shout out the chief places the train travels to. So you hustle along with everyone else, and get the best place you can, and are hauled out by a watchful conductor when you arrive. If it is a small station there is sure to be a dearth of porters, but you get your luggage by going to the proper office and giving up the slip of paper you received when it was weighed. Never forget, as I have known English people do, that you cannot travel in Germany without having your luggage weighed and receiving the Schein for it. If you lose the Schein you are undone. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen, because it would be a tragedy without precedent, but it is impossible that German officials would surrender a trunk without receiving a Schein in exchange; at least, not without months of rigmarole and delay. Even when it is the official who blunders the public suffers for it. We were travelling some years ago from Leipzig to London when the guard examining our tickets let one blow away. Luckily some German gentlemen in the carriage with us saw what happened, gave us their addresses, and offered to help us in any way they could. But we had to buy a fresh ticket and trust to getting our money back by correspondence. Six months later we did get it back, and this is an exact translation of the letter accompanying it:—