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Europe Revised, a non-fiction book by Irvin S. Cobb |
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Chapter 12. Night Life--With The Life Part Missing |
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_ Chapter XII. Night Life--with the Life Part Missing In our consideration of this topic we come first to the night life of the English. They have none. Passing along to the next subject under the same heading, which is the night life of Paris, we find here so much night life, of such a delightfully transparent and counterfeit character; so much made-to-measure deviltry; so many members of the Madcaps' Union engaged on piece-work; so much delicious, hoydenish derring-do, all carefully stage-managed and expertly timed for the benefit of North and South American spenders, to the end that the deliriousness shall abate automatically in exact proportion as the spenders quit spending--in short, so much of what is typically Parisian that, really Paris, on its merits, is entitled to a couple of chapters of its own. All of which naturally brings us to the two remaining great cities of Mid-Europe--Berlin and Vienna--and leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the Europeans, in common with all other peoples on the earth, only succeed--when they try to be desperately wicked --in being desperately dull; whereas when they seek their pleasures in a natural manner they present racial slants and angles that are very interesting to observe and very pleasant to have a hand in. Take the Germans now: No less astute a world traveler than Samuel G. Blythe is sponsor for the assertion that the Berliners follow the night-life route because the Kaiser found his capital did not attract the tourist types to the extent he had hoped, and so decreed that his faithful and devoted subjects, leaving their cozy hearths and inglenooks, should go forth at the hour when graveyards yawn --and who could blame them?--to spend the dragging time until dawn in being merry and bright. So saying His Majesty went to bed, leaving them to work while he slept. After viewing the situation at first hand the present writer is of the opinion that Mr. Blythe was quite right in his statements. Certainly nothing is more soothing to the eye of the onlooker, nothing more restful to his soul, than to behold a group of Germans enjoying themselves in a normal manner. And absolutely nothing is quite so ghastly sad as the sight of those same well-flushed, well-fleshed Germans cavorting about between the hours of two and four-thirty A.M., trying, with all the pachydermic ponderosity of Barnum's Elephant Quadrille, to be professionally gay and cutuppish. The Prussians must love their Kaiser dearly. We sit up with our friends when they are dead; they stay up for him until they are ready to die themselves. As is well known Berlin abounds in pleasure palaces, so called. Enormous places these are, where under one widespreading roof are three or four separate restaurants of augmented size, not to mention winecellars and beer-caves below-stairs, and a dancehall or so and a Turkish bath, and a bar, and a skating rink, and a concert hall --and any number of private dining rooms. The German mind invariably associates size with enjoyment. To these establishments, after his regular dinner, the Berliner repairs with his family, his friend or his guest. There is one especially popular resort, a combination of restaurant and vaudeville theater, at which one eats an excellent dinner excellently served, and between courses witnesses the turns of a first-rate variety bill, always with the inevitable team of American coon shouters, either in fast colors or of the burnt-cork variety, sandwiched into the program somewhere. In the Friedrichstrasse there is another place, called the Admiralspalast, which is even more attractive. Here, inclosing a big, oval-shaped ice arena, balcony after balcony rises circling to the roof. On one of these balconies you sit, and while you dine and after you have dined you look down on a most marvelous series of skating stunts. In rapid and bewildering succession there are ballets on skates, solo skating numbers, skating carnivals and skating races. Finally scenery is slid in on runners and the whole company, in costumes grotesque and beautiful, go through a burlesque that keeps you laughing when you are not applauding, and admiring when you are doing neither; while alternating lightwaves from overhead electric devices flood the picture with shifting, shimmering tides of color. It is like seeing a Christmas pantomime under an aurora borealis. In America we could not do these things --at least we never have done them. Either the performance would be poor or the provender would be highly expensive, or both. But here the show is wonderful, and the victuals are good and not extravagantly priced, and everybody has a bully time. At eleven-thirty or thereabout the show at the ice palace is over --concluding with a push-ball match between teams of husky maidens who were apparently born on skates and raised on skates, and would not feel natural unless they were curveting about on skates. Their skates seem as much a part of them as tails to mermaids. It is bedtime now for sane folks, but at this moment a certain madness which does not at all fit in with the true German temperament descends on the crowd. Some go upstairs to another part of the building, where there is a dancehall called the Admiralskasino; but, to the truly swagger, one should hasten to the Palais du Danse on the second floor of the big Metropolpalast in the Behrenstrasse. This place opens promptly at midnight and closes promptly at two o'clock in the morning. Inasmuch as the Palais du Danse is an institution borrowed outright from the French they have adopted a typically French custom here. As the visitor enters--if he be a stranger--a flunky in gorgeous livery intercepts him and demands an entrance fee amounting to about a dollar and a quarter in our money, as I recall. This tariff the American or Englishman pays, but the practiced Berliner merely suggests to the doorkeeper the expediency of his taking a long running start and jumping off into space, and stalks defiantly in without forking over a single pfennig to any person whatsoever. The Palais du Danse is incomparably the most beautiful ballroom in the world--so people who have been all over the world agree --and it is spotlessly clean and free from brackish smells, which is more than can be said of any French establishment of similar character I have seen. At the Palais du Danse the patron sits at a table--a table with something on it besides a cloth being an essential adjunct to complete enjoyment of an evening of German revelry; and as he sits and drinks he listens to the playing of a splendid band and looks on at the dancing. Nothing is drunk except wine--and by wine I mainly mean champagne of the most sweetish and sickish brand obtainable. Elsewhere, for one-twentieth the cost, the German could have the best and purest beer that is made; but he is out now for the big night. Accordingly he saturates his tissues with the sugary bubble-water of France. He does not join in the dancing himself. The men dancers are nearly all paid dancers, I think, and the beautifully clad women who dance are either professionals, too, or else belong to a profession that is older even than dancing is. They all dance with a profound German gravity and precision. Here is music to set a wooden leg a-jigging; but these couples circle and glide and dip with an incomprehensible decorum and slowness. When we were there, they were dancing the tango or one of its manifold variations. All Europe, like all America, was, for the moment, tango mad. While we were in Paris, M. Jean Richepin lectured before the Forty Immortals of the Five Academies assembled in solemn conclave at the Institute of France. They are called the Forty Immortals because nobody can remember the names of more than five of them. He took for his subject the tango--his motto, in short, being one borrowed from the conductors in the New York subway--"Mind your step!" While he spoke, which was for an hour or more, the bebadged and beribboned bosoms of his illustrious compatriots heaved with emotion; their faces--or such parts of their faces as were visible above the whiskerline--flushed with enthusiasm, and most vociferously they applauded his masterly phrasing and his tracing-out of the evolution of the tango, all the way from its Genesis, as it were, to its Revelation. I judge the revelation particularly appealed to them--that part of it appeals to so many. After that the tango seemed literally to trail us. We could not escape it. While we were in Berlin the emperor saw fit officially to forbid the dancing of the tango by officers of his navy and army. We reached England just after the vogue for tango teas started. Naturally we went to one of these affairs. It took place at a theater. Such is the English way of interpreting the poetry of motion--to hire some one else to do it for you, and--in order to get the worth of your money--sit and swizzle tea while the paid performer is doing it. At the tango tea we patronized the tea was up to standard, but the dancing of the box-ankled professionals was a disappointment. Beforehand I had been told that the scene on the stage would be a veritable picture. And so it was--Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair. As a matter of fact the best dancer I saw in Europe was a performing trick pony in a winter circus in Berlin. I also remember with distinctness of detail a chorusman who took part in a new Lehar opera, there in Berlin. I do not remember him for his dancing, because he was no clumsier of foot than his compatriots in the chorus rank and file; or for his singing, since I could not pick his voice out from the combined voices of the others. I remember him because be wore spectacles--not a monocle nor yet a pair of nose-glasses, but heavy-rimmed, double-lensed German spectacles with gold bows extending up behind his ears like the roots of an old-fashioned wisdom tooth. Come to think about it, I know of no reason why a chorusman should not wear spectacles if he needs them in his business or if he thinks they will add to his native beauty; but the spectacle of that bolster-built youth, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier and now as a Venetian gondolier, prancing about, with his spectacles goggling owlishly out at the audience, and once in a while, when a gleam from the footlights caught on them, turning to two red-hot disks set in the middle of his face, was a thing that is going to linger in my memory when a lot of more important matters are entirely forgotten. Not even in Paris did the tango experts compare with the tango experts one sees in America. At this juncture I pause a moment, giving opportunity for some carping critic to rise and call my attention to the fact that perhaps the most distinguished of the early school of turkey-trotters bears a French name and came to us from Paris. To which I reply that so he does and so he did; but I add then the counter-argument that he came to us by way of Paris, at the conclusion of a round trip that started in the old Fourth Ward of the Borough of Manhattan, city of Greater New York; for he was born and bred on the East Side--and, moreover, was born bearing the name of a race of kings famous in the south of Ireland and along the Bowery. And he learned his art--not only the rudiments of it but the final finished polish of it--in the dancehalls of Third Avenue, where the best slow-time dancers on earth come from. It was after he had acquired a French accent and had Gallicized his name, thereby causing a general turning-over of old settlers in the graveyards of the County Clare, that he returned to us, a conspicuous figure in the world of art and fashion, and was able to get twenty-five dollars an hour for teaching the sons and daughters of our richest families to trip the light tanfastic go. At the same time, be it understood, I am not here to muckrake the past of one so prominent and affluent in the most honored and lucrative of modern professions; but facts are facts, and these particular facts are quoted here to bind and buttress my claim that the best dancers are the American dancers. After this digression let us hurry right back to that loyal Berliner whom we left seated in the Palais du Danse on the Behrenstrasse, waiting for the hour of two in the morning to come. The hour of two in the morning does come; the lights die down; the dancers pick up their heavy feet--it takes an effort to pick up those Continental feet--and quit the waxen floor; the Oberkellner comes round with his gold chain of office dangling on his breast and collects for the wine, and our German friend, politely inhaling his yawns, gets up and goes elsewhere to finish his good time. And, goldarn it, how he does dread it! Yet he goes, faithful soul that he is. He goes, let us say, to the Pavilion Mascotte--no dancing, but plenty of drinking and music and food--which opens at two and stays open until four, when it shuts up shop in order that another place in the nature of a cabaret may open. And so, between five and six o'clock in the morning of the new day, when the lady garbagemen and the gentlemen chambermaids of the German capital are abroad on their several duties, he journeys homeward, and so, as Mr. Pepys says, to bed, with nothing disagreeable to look forward to except repeating the same dose all over again the coming night. This sort of thing would kill anybody except a Prussian--for, mark you, between intervals of drinking he has been eating all night; but then a Prussian has no digestion. He merely has gross tonnage in the place where his digestive apparatus ought to be. The time to see a German enjoying himself is when he is following his own bent and not obeying the imperial edict of his gracious sovereign. I had a most excellent opportunity of observing him while engaged in his own private pursuits of pleasure when by chance one evening, in the course of a solitary prowl, I bumped into a sort of Berlinesque version of Coney Island, with the island part missing. It was not out in the suburbs where one would naturally expect to find such a resort. It was in the very middle of the city, just round the corner from the cafe district, not more than half a mile, as the Blutwurst flies, from Unter den Linden. Even at this distance and after a considerable lapse of time I can still appreciate that place, though I cannot pronounce it; for it had a name consisting of one of those long German compound words that run all the way round a fellow's face and lap over at the back, like a clergyman's collar, and it had also a subname that no living person could hope to utter unless he had a thorough German education and throat trouble. You meet such nouns frequently in Germany. They are not meant to be spoken; you gargle them. To speak the full name of this park would require two able-bodied persons--one to start it off and carry it along until his larynx gave out, and the other to take it up at that point and finish it. But for all the nine-jointed impressiveness of its title this park was a live, brisk little park full of sideshow tents sheltering mildly amusing, faked-up attractions, with painted banners flapping in the air and barkers spieling before the entrances and all the ballyhoos going at full blast--altogether a creditable imitation of a street fair as witnessed in any American town that has a good live Elks' Lodge in it. Plainly the place was popular. Germans of all conditions and all ages and all sizes--but mainly the broader lasts--were winding about in thick streams in the narrow, crooked alleys formed by the various tents. They packed themselves in front of each booth where a free exhibition was going on, and when the free part was over and the regular performance began they struggled good-naturedly to pay the admission fee and enter in at the door. And, for a price, there were freaks to be seen who properly belonged on our side of the water, it seemed to me. I had always supposed them to be exclusively domestic articles until I encountered them here. There was a regular Bosco--a genuine Herr He Alive Them Eats--sitting in his canvas den entirely surrounded by a choice and tasty selection of eating snakes. The orthodox tattooed man was there, too, first standing up to display the text and accompanying illustrations on his front cover, and then turning round so the crowd might read what he said on the other side. And there was many another familiar freak introduced to our fathers by Old Dan Rice and to us, their children, through the good offices of Daniel's long and noble line of successors. A seasonable Sunday is a fine time; and the big Zoological Garden, which is a favorite place for studying the Berlin populace at the diversions they prefer when left to their own devices. At one table will be a cluster of students, with their queer little pill-box caps of all colors, their close-cropped heads and well-shaved necks, and their saber-scarred faces. At the next table half a dozen spectacled, long-coated men, who look as though they might be university professors, are confabbing earnestly. And at the next table and the next and the next--and so on, until the aggregate runs into big figures--are family groups--grandsires, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and children, on down to the babies in arms. By the uncountable thousands they spend the afternoon here, munching sausages and sipping lager, and enjoying the excellent music that is invariably provided. At each plate there is a beer mug, for everybody is forever drinking and nobody is ever drunk. You see a lot of this sort of thing, not only in the parks and gardens so numerous in and near any German city but anywhere on the Continent. Seeing it helps an American to understand a main difference between the American Sabbath and the European Sunday. We keep it and they spend it. I am given to understand that Vienna night life is the most alluring, the most abandoned, the most wicked and the wildest of all night life. Probably this is so--certainly it is the most cloistered and the most inaccessible. The Viennese does not deliberately exploit his night life to prove to all the world that he is a gay dog and will not go home until morning though it kill him--as the German does. Neither does he maintain it for the sake of the coin to be extracted from the pockets of the tourist, as do the Parisians. With him his night life is a thing he has created and which he supports for his own enjoyment. And so it goes on--not out in the open; not press-agented; not advertised; but behind closed doors. He does not care for the stranger's presence, nor does he suffer it either--unless the stranger is properly vouched for. The best theaters in Vienna are small, exclusive affairs, privately supported, and with seating capacity for a few chosen patrons. Once he has quit the public cafe with its fine music and its bad waiters the uninitiated traveler has a pretty lonesome time of it in Vienna. Until all hours he may roam the principal streets seeking that fillip of wickedness which will give zest to life and provide him with something to brag about when he gets back among the home folks again. He does not find it. Charades would provide a much more exciting means of spending the evening; and, in comparison with the sights he witnesses, anagrams and acrostics are positively thrilling. He is tantalized by the knowledge that all about him there are big doings, but, so far as he is concerned, he might just as well be attending a Sunday-school cantata. Unless he be suitably introduced he will have never a chance to shake a foot with anybody or buy a drink for somebody in the inner circles of Viennese night life. He is emphatically on the outside, denied even the poor satisfaction of looking in. At that I have a suspicion, born of casual observation among other races, that the Viennese really has a better time when he is not trying than when he is trying. _ |
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