MY FATHER’S BIRTHPLACE
It was quite dark when I finally came across a sort of tap-room
“restaurant” whose quaint atmosphere charmed me. The usual pewter
plates and tankards adorned the dull red and brown walls. A line of
leather-covered seats followed the walls, in front of which were ranged
long tables.
My arrival here with a quiet request for food put a sort of panic into
the breast of my small but stout host, who, when I came in, was playing
checkers with another middle-aged Mayener, but who, when I asked for
food, gave over his pleasure for the time being and bustled out to find
his wife. He looked not a little like a fat sparrow.
“Why, yes, yes,” he remarked briskly, “what will you have?”
“What _can_ I have?”
On the instant he put his little fat hand to his semi-bald pate and
rubbed it ruminatively. “A steak, perhaps. Some veal? Some sausage?”
“I will have a steak, if you don’t mind and a cup of black coffee.”
He bustled out and when he came back I threw a new bomb into camp. “May
I wash my hands?”
“Certainly, certainly,” he replied, “in a minute.” And he bounded
upstairs. “Katrina! Katrina! Katrina!” I heard him call, “have Anna
make the washroom ready. He wishes to wash his hands. Where are the
towels? Where is the soap?”
There was much clattering of feet overhead. I heard a door being opened
and things being moved. Presently I heard him call, “Katrina, in God’s
name, where is the soap!” More clattering of feet, and finally he came
down, red and puffing. “Now, mein Herr, you can go up.”
I went, concealing a secret grin, and found that I had dislocated
a store-room, once a bath perhaps; that a baby-carriage had been
removed from a table and on it pitcher, bowl, towel, and soap had been
placed--a small piece of soap and cold water. Finally, after seeing
me served properly, he sat down at his table again and sighed. The
neighbor returned. Several more citizens dropped in to read and chat.
The two youngest boys in the family came downstairs with their books to
study. It was quite a typical German family scene.
It was here that I made my first effort to learn something about
the Dreiser family. “Do you know any one by the name of Dreiser,
hereabouts?” I asked cautiously, afraid to talk too much for fear of
incriminating myself.
“Dreiser, Dreiser?” he said. “Is he in the furniture business?”
“I don’t know. That is what I should like to find out. Do you know of
any one by that name?”
“Is not that the man, Henry,”--he turned to one of his guests--“who
failed here last year for fifty thousand marks?”
“The same,” said this other, solemnly (I fancied rather feelingly).
“Goodness, gracious!” I thought. “This is the end. If he failed for
fifty thousand marks in Germany he is in disgrace. To think a Dreiser
should ever have had fifty thousand marks! Would that I had known him
in his palmy days.”
“There was a John Dreiser here,” my host said to me, “who failed for
fifty thousand marks. He is gone though, now I think. I don’t know
where he is.”
It was not an auspicious beginning, and under the circumstances I
thought it as well not to identify myself with this Dreiser too
closely. I finished my meal and went out, wondering how, if at all, I
was to secure any additional information. The rain had ceased and the
sky was already clearing. It promised to be fine on the morrow. After
more idle rambling through a world that was quite as old as Canterbury
I came back finally to my hotel. My host was up and waiting for me. All
but one guest had gone.
“So you are from America,” he observed. “I would like very much to talk
with you some more.”
“Let me ask _you_ something,” I replied. “Do you know any one here in
Mayen by the name of Dreiser?”
“Dreiser--Dreiser? It seems to me there was some one here. He failed
for a lot of money. You could find out at the _Mayener Zeitung_. Mr.
Schroeder ought to know.”
I decided that I would appeal to Mr. Schroeder and his paper in the
morning; and pretending to be very tired, in order to escape my
host, who by now was a little tipsy. I went to the room assigned me,
carrying a candle. That night I slept soundly, under an immense, stuffy
feather-bed.
The next morning at dawn I arose and was rewarded with the only truly
satisfying medieval prospect I have ever seen in my life. It was
strange, remote, Teutonic, Burgundian. The “grafs” and “burghers”
of an older world might well have been enacting their life under my
very eyes. Below me in a valley was Mayen,--its quaint towers and
housetops spread out in the faint morning light. It was beautiful.
Under my window tumbled the little stream that had served as a moat
in earlier days--a good and natural defense. Opposite me was the
massive Brückentor. Further on was a heavy circular sweep of wall
and a handsome watch-tower. Over the wall, rising up a slope, could
be seen the peak-roofed, gabled houses, of solid brick and stone with
slate and tile roofs. Never before in my life had I looked on a truly
medieval city of the castellated, Teutonic order. Nothing that I had
seen in either France, England, or Italy had the peculiar quality of
this remote spot. I escaped the opportunities of my talkative host by
a ruse, putting the two marks charged for the room in an envelope and
leaving it on the dresser. I went out and followed the stream in the
pleasant morning light. I mailed post-cards at the local post-office
to all and sundry of my relatives, stating the local condition of the
Dreisers, as so far learned, and then sought out the office of the
_Mayener Zeitung_, where I encountered one Herr Schroeder, but he
could tell me nothing of any Dreisers save of that unfortunate one
who had failed in the furniture business. He advised me to seek the
curator of the local museum, a man who had the history of Mayen at his
finger-tips. He was a cabinet-maker by trade. I could not find him at
home and finally, after looking in the small local directory published
by Mr. Schroeder and finding no Dreisers listed, I decided to give up
and go back to Frankfort; but not without one last look at the private
yard attached to the priest’s house and the cherry-tree which had been
the cause of the trouncing, and lastly the local museum.
It is curious how the most innocent and idle of sentiments will lead a
person on in this way. In the little Brückentor Museum, before leaving,
I studied with the greatest interest--because it was my father’s
town--the ancient Celtic, Teutonic, Roman and Merovingian antiquities.
It was here that I saw for the first time the much-talked-of wheat
discovered in a Celtic funeral urn, which, although thousands of years
have elapsed since it was harvested, is still--thanks to dryness, so
the local savant assured me--fertile, and if planted would grow! Talk
of suspended animation!
Below the town I lingered in the little valley of the Moselle, now laid
out as a park, and reëxamined the gate through which my father had been
wont to ride. I think I sentimentalized a little over the long distance
that had separated my father from his old home and how he must have
longed to see it at times, and then finally, after walking about the
church and school where he had been forced to go, I left Mayen with a
sorrowful backward glance. For in spite of the fact that there was now
no one there to whom I could count myself related, still it was from
here that my ancestors had come. I had found at least the church that
my father had attended, the priest’s house and garden where possibly
the identical cherry-tree was still standing--there were several. I
had seen the gate through which my father had ridden as a boy with the
soldiers and from which he had walked finally, never to return any
more. That was enough. I shall always be glad I went to Mayen.