Europe After 8:15 Part 2

"Yes, these foreigners know the game. They have made millions out of it in Paris. Every time you go to see a musical comedy at home, the second act is laid in Paris, and you see a whole stageful of girls doing the hesitation, and a lot of old sports having the time of their lives. All your life you hear that Paris is something rich and racy, something that makes New York look like Roanoke, Virginia. Well, you fall for the ballyhoo and come over to have your fling--and then you find that Paris is largely bunk. I spent a whole week in Paris, trying to find something really awful. I hired one of those Jew guides at five dollars a day and told him to go the limit. I said to him: 'Don't mind _me_. I am twenty-one years old. Let me have the genuine goods.' But the worst he could show me wasn't half as bad as what I have seen in Chicago. Every night I would say to that Jew: 'Come on, now Mr. Cohen; let's get away from these tinhorn shows. Lead me to the real stuff.' Well, I believe the fellow did his darndest, but he always fell down. I almost felt sorry for him. In the end, when I paid him off, I said to him: 'Save up your money, my boy, and come over to the States. Let me know when you land. I'll show you the sights for nothing. You need a little relaxation. This Baracca Cla.s.s atmosphere is killing you.'

"And yet Paris is famous all over the world. No American ever came to Europe without dropping off there to have a look. I once saw the Bal Tabarin crowded with Sunday school superintendents returning from Jerusalem. And when the sucker gets home he goes around winking and hinting, and so the fake grows. I often think the government ought to take a hand. If the beer is inspected and guaranteed in Germany, why shouldn't the shows be inspected and guaranteed in Paris?"

"I guess the trouble is that the Frenchmen themselves never go to their own shows. They don't know what is going on. They see thousands of Americans starting out every night from the Place de l'Opera and coming back in the morning all boozed up, and so they a.s.sume that everything is up to the mark. You'll find the same thing in Washington. No Washingtonian has ever been up to the top of the Washington monument.

Once the elevator in the monument was out of commission for two weeks, and yet Washington knew nothing about it. When the news got into the local papers at last, it came from Macon, Georgia. Some honeymooner from down there had written home about it, roasting the government."

"Well, me for the good old U.S.A. These Alps are all right, I guess--but I can't say I like the coffee."

"And it takes too long to get a letter from Jersey City."

"Yes, that reminds me. Just before I started up here this afternoon my wife got the _Ladies' Home Journal_ of month before last. It had been following us around for six weeks, from London to Paris, to Berlin, to Munich, to Vienna, to a dozen other places. Now she's fixed for the night. She won't let up until she's read every word--the advertis.e.m.e.nts first. And she'll spend all day to-morrow sending off for things--new collar hooks, breakfast foods, complexion soaps and all that sort of junk. Are you married yourself?"

"No; not yet."

"Well, then, you don't know how it is. But I guess you play poker."

"Oh, to be sure."

"Well, let's go down into the town and hunt up some quiet barroom and have a civilised evening. This scenery gives me the creeps."

"I'm with you. But where are we going to get any chips?"

"Don't worry. I carry a set with me. I made my wife put it in the bottom of my trunk, along with a bottle of real whiskey and a couple of porous plasters. A man can't be too careful when he's away from home."

They start along the terrace toward the station of the funicular railway. The sun has now disappeared behind the great barrier of ice and the colours of the scene are fast softening. All the scarlets and vermilions are gone; a luminous pink bathes the whole scene in its fairy light. The night train for Venice, leaving the town, appears as a long string of blinking lights. A chill breeze comes from the Alpine vastness to westward. The deep silence of an Alpine night settles down. The two Americans continue their talk until they are out of hearing. The breeze interrupts and obfuscates their words, but now and then half a sentence comes clearly.

"Have you seen any American papers lately?"

"Nothing but the Paris _Herald_--if you call _that_ a paper."

"How are the Giants making out?"

"... badly as usual ... rotten ... slump ... shake up...."

"... John McGraw ... Connie Mack ... gla.s.s arm...."

"... homesick ... give five dollars for...."

"... whole continent without a single baseball cl...."

"... glad to get back ... d.a.m.n tired...."

"... d.a.m.n...."

"... _d.a.m.n_...."

VIENNA

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIENNA]

VIENNA

The casual Sunday School superintendent, bursting with visions of luxurious gaieties, his brain incited by references to _Wiener blut_, his corpuscles tripping to the strains of some Viennese _schlagermusik_, will suffer only disappointment as he sallies forth on his first night in Vienna. He is gorgeously caparisoned with clean linen, talc.u.med, exuding Jockey Club, prepared for surgical and psychic shock, his legs drilled hollow to admit of precious fluids, his pockets bulging with kronen. He is a lovely, mellow creature, a virtuoso of the domestic virtues when home, but now, at large in Europe, he craves excitement.

His timid soul is bent on partic.i.p.ating in the deviltries for which Vienna is famous. His blood is thumping through his arteries in three-four time. His mind is inflamed by such strophes as "_Es giebt nur a Kaiserstadt; es giebt nur a Wien_" and "_Immer l.u.s.te, fesch und munter, und der Wiener geht nit unter_." But he is brought gradually to the realisation that something is amiss. Can it be that the vice crusaders have been at work? Have the militant moralists and the professional women hunters, in their heated yearnings to flay the transgressor, fallen foul of Vienna?

He expected to find a city which would be one roseate and romantic revel, given over to joys of the flesh, to wine-drinking and confetti-throwing, overrun with hussies, gone mad with lascivious waltzes, reeking with Babylonish amours. He dreamed of Vienna as one continual debauch, one never-ceasing saturnalia, an eternal tournament of perfumed hilarities. His lewd dreams of the "gayest city in Europe"

have produced in him a marked hallucinosis with visions of Neronic orgies, magnificently prodigal--deliriums of chromatic disorder.

But as he walks down the Karntnerstra.s.se, encircles the Ring and stands with bulging inquisitive eyes on the corner of the Wiedner Hauptstra.s.se and Karlsplatz, he wonders what can be the matter. Where, indeed, is that prodigality of flowers and spangled satin he has heard so much about? Where are those super-orchestras sweating over the scores of seductive waltzes? Where the silken ankles and the glittering eyes, the kisses and the flutes, the beery laughter and the delirious leg shaking?

The excesses of merrymaking are nowhere discoverable. Des Moines, Iowa, or Camden, New Jersey, would present quite as festive a spectacle, he thinks, as he gazes up at the sepulchral shadows on the gigantic Opernhaus before him. He cannot understand the nocturnal solitude of the streets. There is actual desolation about him. A chlorotic girl, her cheeks unskilfully painted, brushes up to him with a careless "_Geh Rudl, gib ma a Spreitzn._" But that might happen in Cleveland, Ohio--and Cleveland is not framed as a modern Tyre. He is puzzled and distressed.

He feels like a Heliogabalus on a desert isle. He consults his watch. It is past midnight. He has searched for hours. No famous thoroughfare has escaped him. He has reconnoitred diligently and thoroughly, as only a pious tourist bent on forbidden pleasures knows how. He is the arch-type of American traveller; the G.o.d-fearing deacon on the loose; the vestryman returning from Jerusalem. Hopefully, yet fearfully, he has pushed his search. He has traversed the Karntnerring, the Kolowratring, peered into Stadt Park, hit the Stubenring, scouted Franz Josefs Kai, searched the Rotenturmstra.s.se, zigzagged over to the Schottenring, followed the Franz, Burg and Opern-Rings, and is back on the Karlsplatz, still virtuous, still sober!

Not a houri. Nary a carnival. No strain of the "Blaue Donau" has wooed his ear. No one has nailed him with sachet eggs. He has not been choked by quarts of confetti. His conscience is as pure as the brews of Munich.

He is still in a beneficent state of primeval and exquisite prophylaxis, of benign chemical purity, of protean moral asepsis. He came prepared for deluges of wine and concerted onslaughts from ineffable _freimaderln_. But he might as well have attended a drama by Charles Klein for all the rakish romance he has unearthed. His evening has gone.

His legs are weary. And nothing has happened to astound or flabbergast him, to send him sprawling with Cheyne-Stokes breathing. In all his promenading he has seen nothing to affect his vasomotor centres or to produce Argyll-Robertson pupils.

Can it be true, he wonders, that, after all, Viennese gaiety is an illusion, a base fabrication? Is the _Wiener blut_, like Iowan blood, calm and sluggish? Is Vienna's reputation bogus, a snare for tourists, a delusion for the unsophisticated? Where is that far-renowned _gemuthlichkeit_? Has an American press agent had his foul hand in the advertising of Austria's capital? Perhaps--perhaps!... But what of those Viennese operas? What of those sensuous waltzes, those lubric bits of _schramm-musik_ which have come from Vienna? And has he not seen pictures of Viennese women--angels _a la mode_, miracles of beauty, Loreleis _de luxe_? Even Baedeker, the papa of the travelling schoolmarms, has admitted Vienna to be a bit frivolous.

A puzzle, to be sure. A problem for Copernicus--a paradox, a theorem with many decimal points. So thinks the tourist, retiring to his hotel.

And figuring thus, he falls to sleep, enveloped in a caressing miasma of almost unearthly respectability.

But is it true that Vienna is the home of purity, of early retirers, of phlegmatic and virtuous souls? Are its gaieties mere febrile imaginings of liquorish dreamers? Is it, after all, the Los Angeles of Europe? Or, despite its appearances, is it truly the gayest city in the world, redolent of romance, bristling with intrigue, polluted with perfume? It is. And, furthermore, it is far gayer than its reputation; for all has never been told. Gaiety in Vienna is an end, not a means. It is born in the blood of the people. The carnival spirit reigns. There are almost no restrictions, no engines of repression. Alongside the real Viennese night life, the blatant and spectacular caprices of Paris are so much tinsel. The life on the Friedrichstra.s.se, the brightest and most active street in Europe, becomes tawdry when compared with the secret glories of the Karntnerring. In the one instance we have gaiety on parade, in strumpet garb--the simulacrum of sin--gaiety dramatised. In the other instance, it is an ineradicable factor of the city's life.

To appreciate these differences, one must understand the temperamental appeals of the Viennese. With them gaiety comes under the same physiological category as chilblains, hunger and fatigue. It is accepted as one of the natural and necessary adjuncts of life like eating and sleeping and lovemaking. It is an item in their pharmacopoeia. They do not make a business of pleasure any more than the Englishman makes a business of walking, or the American of drinking Peruna or the German of beerbibbing. For this reason, pleasure in Vienna is not elaborate and external. It is a private, intimate thing in which every citizen partic.i.p.ates according to his standing and his pocketbook. The Austrians do not commercialize their pleasure in the hope of wheedling dollars from American pockets. Such is not their nature. And so the slumming traveller, l.u.s.ting for obscure and fascinating debaucheries, finds little in Vienna to attract him.

Vienna is perhaps the one city in the world which maintains a consistent att.i.tude of genuine indifference toward the outsider, which resents the intrusion of snoopers from these pallid States, which deliberately makes it difficult for foreign Florizels to find diversion.

The liveliest places in Vienna present the gloomiest exteriors. The official guides maintain a cloistered silence regarding those addresses at which Viennese society disports itself when the ledgers are closed and the courts have adjourned. The Viennese, resenting the intrusion of outsiders upon his midnight romances, holds out no encouragement for globe-trotting Don Juans. He refuses to be inspected and criticised by the inquisitive sensation hunters of other nations. Money will not tempt him to commercialize his gaiety and regulate it to meet the morbid demands of the interloper. Hence the external aspect of sobriety. Hence the veneer of piety. Hence the sepulchral silence of the midnight thoroughfares. Hence the silence and the desolation which meet the roaming tourist.

In this respect Vienna is different from any other large city in Europe. The joys of Parisian night life are as artificial as cosmetics.

They are organised and executed by technicians subtly schooled in the psychology of the Puritan mind. To the American, all forms of pleasure are excesses, to be indulged in only at rare intervals; and Paris supplies him with the opportunities. Berlin, and even Munich, makes a business of gaiety. St. Petersburg, patterning after Paris, excites the visitor with visions of gaudy glory; and London, outwardly chaste, maintains a series of supper clubs which in the dishonesty of their subterranean pleasures surpa.s.s in downright immorality any city in Europe. Budapest is a miniature Babylon burning incense by night which a.s.sails the visitor's nostrils and sends him into delirious ecstasies.

San Francisco and New York are both equipped with opportunities for all-night indulgences. In not one of these cities does the sight seeker or the joy hunter find difficulty in sampling the syrups of sin.

Mysterious guides a.s.sail him on the street corners, pouring libidinous tales into his furry ears, tempting him with descriptions like Suetonius's account of the Roman circuses. Automobiles with megaphones and placards summon him from the street corners. Electric signs--debauches of writhing colour--intoxicate his mind and point the way to haunts of Caracalla.

But Vienna! He will search in vain for a key to the night life. By bribery he may wring an admission or obtain an address from the hotel clerk; but the menage to which he is directed is, alas, not what he seeks. He may plead with cabmen or buy the honour of taxicab drivers, but little information will he obtain. For these gentlemen, strange as it may seem, are almost as ignorant of the gaiety of Vienna as he himself. And at last, in the early morning, after ineffectual searching, after hours of a.s.siduous nosing, he ends up at some _kaffeehaus_ near the Schillerplatz, partakes of a chaste ice with _Wiener geback_ and goes dolorously home--a virgin of circ.u.mstance, an unwilling and despondent Parsifal, a lofty and exquisite creature through lack of opportunity, the chaste victim of a killjoy conspiracy. He is that most tragic figure--an enforced pietist, a thwarted voluptuary. _Eheu! Eheu!

Dies faustus!_

In order to come into intimate touch with the night life of Vienna one must live there and become a part of it. It is not for spectators and it is not public. It involves every family in the city. It is inextricably woven into the home life. It is elaborate because it is genuine, because it is not looked upon as a mere outlet for the repressions of puritanism. From an Anglo-Saxon point of view Vienna is perhaps the most degenerate city in the world. But degeneracy is geographical; morals are temperamental. This is why the Viennese resents intrusion and spying.

His night life involves the national spirit. His gaiety is not a prerogative of the _demi-monde_, but the usufruct of all cla.s.ses. Joy is not exclusive or solitary with the Viennese. He is not ashamed of his frolics and hilarities. He does not take his pleasures hypocritically after the manner of the Occidental moralist. He is a gay bird, a sybarite, a modern Lucullus, a Baron Chevrial--and admits it.

To be sure, there is in Vienna a miniature night life not unlike that of the other European capitals, but it requires constant attention and a.s.siduous coddling to keep it alive. The better cla.s.s Viennese will have none of it. It is a by-product of the underworld and is no more characteristic of Vienna than the gilded _cafes chantants_ which cl.u.s.ter round the Place Pigalle on Montmartre are characteristic of Paris. These places correspond to the Palais de Danse and the Admirals Palast in Berlin; to the Villa Villa and the Astor Club in London; to Reisenweber's in New York; to L'Abbaye and the Rat Mort in Paris--allowing of course for the temperamental influences (and legal restrictions) of the different nations.

Let us arouse a snoring cabman and make the rounds. Why not? All merrymaking is shot through with youth, no matter how dolorous the joy or how expensive the indulgence. So let us partake of the feast before us. Our first encounter is with the Tabarin, in the Annaga.s.se, an establishment not unlike the Bal Tabarin in Paris. We hesitate at the entrance, but being a.s.sured by the doorkeeper, garbed like Louis Seize, that it is "_ein ausserst feines und modernes nacht etabliss.e.m.e.nt_" we enter, partake of a bottle of champagne (thirty kronen--New York prices) and pa.s.s out and on to Le Chapeau Rouge, where we buy more champagne.