A MEDIEVAL TOWN
After Italy and Switzerland the scenery of the Rhine seemed very mild
and unpretentious to me, yet it was very beautiful. The Hudson from
Albany to New York is far more imposing. A score of American rivers
such as the Penobscot, the New in West Virginia, the James above
Lynchburg, the Rio Grande, and others would make the Rhine seem simple
by comparison; yet it has an individuality so distinct that it is
unforgetable. I always marvel over this thing--personality. Nothing
under the sun explains it. So, often you can say “this is finer,” “that
is more imposing,” “by comparison this is nothing,” but when you have
said all this, the thing with personality rises up and triumphs. So it
is with the Rhine. Like millions before me and millions yet to come, I
watched its slopes, its castles, its islands, its pretty little German
towns passing in review before the windows of this excellent train and
decided that in its way nothing could be finer. It had personality. A
snatch of old wall, with peach trees in blossom; a long thin side-wheel
steamer, one smokestack fore and another aft, labeled “William Egan
Gesellschaft”; a dismantled castle tower, with a flock of crows flying
about it and hills laid out in ordered squares of vines gave it all the
charm it needed.
When Coblenz was reached, I bustled out, ready to inspect Mayen at
once. Another disappointment. Mayen was not at Coblenz but fifteen or
eighteen miles away on a small branch road, the trains of which ran
just four times a day, but I did not learn this until, as usual, I had
done considerable investigating. According to my map Mayen appeared
to be exactly at the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle, which was
here, but when I asked a small boy dancing along a Coblenz street where
the Moselle was, he informed me, “If you walk fast you will get there
in half an hour!”
When I reached the actual juncture of the Rhine and the Moselle,
however, I found I was mistaken; I was entertained at first by a fine
view of the two rivers, darkly walled by hills and a very massive and,
in a way, impressive equestrian statue of Emperor William I, armed in
the most flamboyant and aggressive military manner and looking sternly
down on the fast-traveling and uniting waters of the two rivers. Idling
about the base of this monument, to catch sightseers, was a young
picture-post-card seller with a box of views of the Rhine, Coblenz,
Cologne and other cities, for sale. He was a very humble-looking
youth,--a bit doleful,--who kept following me about until I bought
some post-cards. “Where is Mayen?” I asked, as I began to select a few
pictures of things I had and had not seen, for future reference.
“Mayence?” he asked doubtfully. “Mayence? Oh, that is a great way from
here. Mayence is up the river near Frankfort.”
“No, no,” I replied irritably. (This matter was getting to be a sore
point with me.) “I have just come from Mayence. I am looking for Mayen.
Isn’t it over there somewhere?” I pointed to the fields over the river.
He shook his head. “Mayen!” he said. “I don’t think there is such a
place.”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, “what are you talking about? Here it is
on the map. What is that? Do you live here in Coblenz?”
“Gewiss!” he replied. “I live here.”
“Very good, then. Where is Mayen?”
“I have never heard of it,” he replied.
“My God!” I exclaimed to myself, “perhaps it was destroyed in the
Franco-Prussian War. Maybe there isn’t any Mayen.”
“You have lived here all your life,” I said, turning to my informant,
“and you have never heard of Mayen?”
“Mayen, no. Mayence, yes. It is up the river near Frankfort.”
“Don’t tell me that again!” I said peevishly, and walked off. The
elusiveness of my father’s birthplace was getting on my nerves. Finally
I found a car-line which ended at the river and a landing wharf and
hailed the conductor and motorman who were idling together for a moment.
“Where is Mayen?” I asked.
“Mayence?” they said, looking at me curiously.
“No, no. M-a-y-e-n, Mayen--not Mayence. It’s a small town around here
somewhere.”
“Mayen! Mayen!” they repeated. “Mayen!” And then frowned.
“Oh, God!” I sighed. I got out my map. “Mayen--see?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” one of them replied brightly, putting up a finger. “That is
so. There _is_ a place called Mayen! It is out that way. You must take
the train.”
“How many miles?” I asked.
“About fifteen. It will take you about an hour and a half.”
I went back to the station and found I must wait another two hours
before my train left. I had reached the point where I didn’t care a
picayune whether I ever got to my father’s town or not. Only a dogged
determination not to be beaten kept me at it.
It was at Coblenz, while waiting for my train, that I had my first real
taste of the German army. Around a corner a full regiment suddenly came
into view. They swung past me and crossed a bridge over the Rhine,
their brass helmets glittering. Their trousers were gray and their
jackets red, and they marched with a slap, slap, slap of their feet
that was positively ominous. Every man’s body was as erect as a poker;
every man’s gun was carried with almost loving grace over his shoulder.
They were all big men, stolid and broad-chested. As they filed over
the bridge, four abreast, they looked, at that distance, like a fine
scarlet ribbon with a streak of gold in it. They eventually disappeared
between the green hills on the other side.
In another part of the city I came upon a company of perhaps fifty,
marching in loose formation and talking cheerfully to one another.
Behind me, coming toward the soldiers, was an officer, one of those
band-box gentlemen in the long gray, military coat of the Germans,
the high-crowned, low-visored cap, and lacquered boots. I learned
before I was out of Germany to listen for the clank of their swords.
The moment the sergeant in charge of the men saw this officer in the
distance, he gave vent to a low command which brought the men four by
four instantly. In the next breath their guns, previously swinging
loosely in their hands, were over their shoulders and as the officer
drew alongside a sharp “_Vorwärts!_” produced that wonderful jack-knife
motion “the goose-step”--each leg brought rigidly to a level with the
abdomen as they went slap--slap--slapping by, until the officer was
gone. Then, at a word, they fell into their old easy formation again
and were human beings once more.
It was to me a most vivid glimpse of extreme military efficiency.
All the while I was in Germany I never saw a lounging soldier. The
officers, all men of fine stature, were so showily tailored as to
leave a sharp impression. They walked briskly, smartly, defiantly,
with a tremendous air of assurance but not of vain-glory. They were so
superior to anything else in Germany that for me they made it. But to
continue.
At half-past two my train departed and I entered a fourth-class
compartment--the only class one could book for on this branch road.
They were hard, wooden-seated little cars, as stiff and heavy as cars
could possibly be. My mind was full of my father’s ancestral heath
and the quaint type of life that must have been lived here a hundred
years before. This was a French border country. My father, when he
ran away, had escaped into Alsace, near by. He told me once of being
whipped for stealing cherries, because his father’s house adjoined the
priest’s yard and a cherry-tree belonging to that holy man had spread
its branches, cherry-laden, over the walls, and he had secretly feasted
upon the fruit at night. His stepmother, informed by the priest,
whipped him. I wondered if I could find that stone wall.
The train was now running through a very typical section of old-time
Germany. Solid, healthy men and buxom women got leisurely on and off at
the various small but well-built stations. You could feel distinctly
a strong note of commercial development here. Some small new factory
buildings were visible at one place and another. An occasional
real-estate sign, after the American fashion, was in evidence. The
fields looked well and fully tilled. Hills were always in the distance
somewhere.
As the train pulled into one small station, Metternich by name, I saw
a tall, raw-boned yokel, lounging on the platform. He was a mere boy,
nineteen or twenty, six feet tall, broad-shouldered, horny-handed, and
with as vacuous a face as it is possible for an individual to possess.
A cheap, wide-brimmed, soft hat, offensively new, and of a dusty mud
color, sat low over one ear; and around it, to my astonishment, was
twined a slim garland of flowers and leaves which, interwoven and
chained, hung ridiculously down his back. He was all alone, gazing
sheepishly about him and yet doing his best to wear his astounding
honors with an air of bravado. I was looking at his collarless shirt,
his big feet and hands and his bow legs, when I heard a German in the
next seat remark to his neighbor, “He won’t look like that long.”
“Three months--he’ll be fine.”
They went on reading their papers and I fell to wondering what they
could mean.
At the next station were five more yokels, all similarly crowned,
and around them a bevy of rosy, healthy village girls. These five,
constituting at once a crowd and a center of attention, were somewhat
more assured--more swaggering--than the lone youth we had seen.
“What is that?” I asked the man over the seat. “What are they doing?”
“They’ve been drawn for the army,” he replied. “All over Germany the
young men are being drawn like this.”
“Do they begin to serve at once?”
“At once.”
I paused in amazement at this trick of statecraft which could make of
the drawing for so difficult and compulsory a thing as service in the
army a gala occasion. For scarcely any compensation--a few cents a
day--these yokels and village men are seized upon and made to do almost
heroic duty for two years, whether they will or no. I did not know
then, quite, how intensely proud Germany is of her army, how perfectly
willing the vast majority are to serve, how certain the great majority
of Germans are that Germany is called of God to rule--_beherrschen_
is their vigorous word--the world. Before I was out of Frankfort and
Berlin, I could well realize how intensely proud the average boy is to
be drawn. He is really a man then; he is permitted to wear a uniform
and carry a gun; the citizens from then on, at least so long as he is
in service, respect him as a soldier. By good fortune or ability he
may become a petty officer. So they crown him with flowers, and the
girls gather round him in admiring groups. What a clever custom thus to
sugar-coat the compulsory pill. And, in a way, what a travesty.
The climax of my quest was reached when, after traveling all this
distance and finally reaching the “Mayen” on the railroad, I didn’t
really reach it after all! It proved to be “West Mayen”--a new section
of the old town--or rather a new rival of it--and from West Mayen I
had to walk to Mayen proper, or what might now be called East Mayen--a
distance of over a mile. I first shook my head in disgust, and then
laughed. For there, in the valley below me, after I had walked a little
way, I could actually see the town my father had described, a small
walled city of now perhaps seven or eight thousand population, with
an old Gothic church in the center containing a twisted spire, a true
castle or _Schloss_ of ancient date, on the high ground to the right, a
towered gate or two, of that medieval conical aspect so beloved of the
painters of romance, and a cluster or clutter of quaint, many-gabled,
sharp-roofed and sharp-pointed houses which speak invariably of days
and nations and emotions and tastes now almost entirely superseded.
West Mayen was being built in modern style. Some coal mines had been
discovered there and manufactories were coming in. At Mayen all was
quite as my father left it. I am sure, some seventy years before.
* * * * *
Those who think this world would be best if we could have peace and
quiet, should visit Mayen. Here is a town that has existed in a more or
less peaceful state for all of six hundred years. The single Catholic
church, the largest structure outside of the adjacent castle, was
begun in the twelfth century. Frankish princes and Teuton lords have
by turns occupied its site. But Mayen has remained quite peacefully
a small, German, walled city, doing--in part at least--many of the
things its ancestors did. Nowhere in Europe, not even in Italy, did I
feel more keenly the seeming out-of-placeness of the modern implements
of progress. When, after a pause at the local graveyard, in search of
ancestral Dreisers, I wandered down into the town proper, crossed over
the ancient stone bridge that gives into an easily defended, towered
gate, and saw the presence of such things as the Singer Sewing Machine
Company, a thoroughly up-to-date bookstore, an evening newspaper office
and a moving-picture show, I shook my head in real despair. “Nothing is
really old” I sighed, “nothing!”
Like all the places that were highly individual and different, Mayen
made a deep impression on me. It was like entering the shell of
some great mollusc that had long since died, to enter this walled
town and find it occupied by another type of life from that which
originally existed there. Because it was raining now and soon to grow
dark, I sauntered into the first shelter I saw--a four-story, rather
presentable brick inn, located outside the gate known as the Brückentor
(bridge-gate) and took a room here for the night. It was a dull
affair, run by as absurd a creature as I have ever encountered. He was
a little man, sandy-haired, wool-witted, inquisitive, idle, in a silly
way drunken, who was so astonished by the onslaught of a total stranger
in this unexpected manner that he scarcely knew how to conduct himself.
“I want a room for the night,” I suggested.
“A room?” he queried, in an astonished way, as if this were the most
unheard-of thing imaginable.
“Certainly,” I said. “A room. You rent rooms, don’t you?”
“Oh, certainly, certainly. To be sure. A room. Certainly. Wait. I will
call my wife.”
He went into a back chamber, leaving me to face several curious natives
who went over me from head to toe with their eyes.
“Mah-ree-ah!” I heard my landlord calling quite loudly in the rear
portion of the house. “There is one here who wants a room. Have we a
room ready?”
I heard no reply.
Presently he came back, however, and said in a high-flown, deliberate
way, “Be seated. Are you from Frankfort?”
“Yes, and no. I come from America.”
“O-o-oh! America. What part of America?”
“New York.”
“O-o-oh--New York. That is a great place. I have a brother in America.
Since six years now he is out there. I forget the place.” He put his
hand to his foolish, frizzled head and looked at the floor.
His wife now appeared, a stout, dull woman, one of the hard-working
potato specimens of the race. A whispered conference between them
followed, after which they announced my room would soon be ready.
“Let me leave my bag here,” I said, anxious to escape, “and then I
will come back later. I want to look around for awhile.”
He accepted this valid excuse and I departed, glad to get out into the
rain and the strange town, anxious to find a better-looking place to
eat and to see what I could see.
My search for dead or living Dreisers, which I have purposely skipped
in order to introduce the town, led me first, as I have said, to the
local graveyard--the old “Kirchhof.” It was lowering to a rain as I
entered, and the clouds hung in rich black masses over the valley
below. It was half-after four by my watch. I made up my mind that
I would examine the inscription of every tombstone as quickly as
possible, in order to locate all the dead Dreisers, and then get down
into the town before the night and the rain fell, and locate the live
ones--if any. With that idea in view I began at an upper row, near the
church, to work down. Time was when the mere wandering in a graveyard
after this fashion would have produced the profoundest melancholy in
me. It was so in Paris; it made me morbidly weary and ineffably sad.
I saw too many great names--Chopin, Balzac, Daudet, Rachel--solemnly
chiseled in stone. And I hurried out, finally, quite agonized and
unspeakably lonely.
Here in Mayen it was a simpler feeling that was gradually coming over
me--an amused sentimental interest in the simple lives that had had,
too often, their beginning and their end in this little village. It
was a lovely afternoon for such a search. Spring was already here in
South Germany, that faint, tentative suggestion of budding life; all
the wind-blown leaves of the preceding fall were on the ground, but in
between them new grass was springing and, one might readily suspect,
windflowers and crocuses, the first faint green points of lilies and
the pulsing tendrils of harebells. It was beginning to sprinkle, the
faintest suggestion of a light rain; and in the west, over the roofs
and towers of Mayen, a gleam of sunlight broke through the mass of
heavy clouds and touched the valley with one last lingering ray.
“_Hier ruht im Gott_” (Here rests in God), or “_Hier sanft ruht_” (Here
softly rests), was too often the beginning. I had made my way through
the sixth or seventh row from the top, pushing away grass at times from
in front of faded inscriptions, rubbing other lichen-covered letters
clean with a stick and standing interested before recent tombstones.
All smart with a very recently developed local idea of setting a black
piece of glass into the gray of the marble and on that lettering the
names of the departed in gold! It was to me a very thick-witted, truly
Teutonic idea, dull and heavy in its mistakes but certainly it was
no worse than the Italian idea of putting the photograph of the late
beloved in the head of the slab, behind glass in a stone-cut frame and
of further ornamenting the graves with ghastly iron-shafted lamps with
globes of yellow, pink and green glass. That was the worst of all.
As I was meditating how, oysterlike, little villages reproduce
themselves from generation to generation, a few coming and a few going
but the majority leading a narrow simple round of existence. I came
suddenly, so it seemed to me, upon one grave which gave me a real
shock. It was a comparatively recent slab of gray granite with the
modern plate of black glass set in it and a Gothic cross surmounting it
all at the top. On the glass plate was lettered:
Here Rests
Theodor Dreiser,
Born 16--Feb--1820.
Died 28--Feb--1882.
R. I. P.
I think as clear a notion as I ever had of how my grave will look after
I am gone and how utterly unimportant both life and death are, anyhow,
came to me then. Something about this old graveyard, the suggestion of
the new life of spring, a robin trilling its customary evening song
on a near-by twig, the smoke curling upward from the chimneys in the
old houses below, the spire of the medieval church and the walls of
the medieval castle standing out in the softening light--one or all of
them served to give me a sense of the long past that is back of every
individual in the race of life and the long future that the race has
before it, regardless of the individual. Religion offers no consolation
to me. Psychic research and metaphysics, however meditated upon, are
in vain. There is in my judgment no death; the universe is composed
of life; but, nevertheless, I cannot see any continuous life for any
individual. And it would be so unimportant if true. Imagine an eternity
of life for a leaf, a fish-worm, an oyster! The best that can be said
is that ideas of types survive somewhere in the creative consciousness.
That is all. The rest is silence.
Besides this, there were the graves of my father’s brother John, and
some other Dreisers; but none of them dated earlier than 1800.