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 he 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 fantastic 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.