Home Life In Germany Part 6

"They look jolly self-conscious while they're doing it, ... as if they didn't half like it. You bet, they take it out of their womenfolk when they get home. Look at that chap Muller!"

"Where is he?"

"In Dresden, where I lived last winter. He stormed the house down because his wife took up his gla.s.s of beer and drank before he did.

Nearly had a fit. Said his dignity as a husband was damaged. Then he turned to me and asked whether even in England a wife would be so bold and bad?"

"What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything. I looked sick."

"That's no use. You should say a great deal, and wave your arms about and hammer on the table. You don't know how to show emotion."

"I should hope not," says the Englishman. "But German women are always telling me they envy the women in our country."

"That's their politeness," I a.s.sure him. "They don't mean it. They're as happy as the day is long. Besides, Germans don't get drunk and beat their wives with pokers. You know perfectly well that most Englishmen----"

But, of course, whatever you say about German women of the present day can be contradicted by anybody who chooses to describe one at either end of the scale, for the contrasts there are violent. You will find in the same street a woman who exercises a profession, lives more or less at her club, and is as independent as her brother; and women who are household drudges, with neither leisure nor spirit for any occupation that would enrich their minds.

CHAPTER XIII

HOUSEWIVES (_Continued_)

In Germany the home is furnished by the bride's parents, and the household linen forms part of her trousseau and is marked by her monogram. In describing the furniture of a German flat, you must first decide whether you are going to choose one furnished to-day by a fashionable young woman in Berlin or Hamburg; or one furnished by her parents twenty to twenty-five years ago. Modern German furniture is quite easily suggested to the English imagination, because some of it looks as if the artist had visited our Arts and Crafts Exhibitions and then made his own designs in a nightmare; while some has accepted English inspiration and adapted itself wisely and cleverly to German needs. To-day a German bride will have in her bedroom a wardrobe with a big mirror, a toilet table or chest, a marble-topped washstand and two narrow bedsteads, all of fumed wood. If she has money and understanding the things have probably come from England, not from an emporium, but from one of our artists in furniture whom the Germans know better and value more highly than we do ourselves. But if she has money only she can buy florid pretentious stuff that outdoes in ugliness the worst productions of our "suite" sellers. Her mother, however, probably did without any kind of toilet table or gla.s.s in her wardrobe. Twenty years ago you occasionally saw such things in the houses of rich people, but they were quite unusual. A small hanging gla.s.s behind the washstand was considered enough for any _ordentliche Frau_. Nowadays in rare cases the _ordentliche Frau_ actually has silver brushes and powder pots and trinket boxes. But as a rule she still does without such things; she brushes her beautiful hair with an ivory or a wooden brush, and leaves paint and powder to ladies who are presumably not _ordentlich_. At one time narrow bra.s.s or iron bedsteads were introduced from England, and were used a great deal in Germany. I remember seeing one all forlorn in a vast magnificent palace bedroom where a fourposter hung with brocade or tapestry would have looked more at home. But the real old-fashioned bedstead, still much liked and formerly seen everywhere was always of wood, single and with deep sides to hold the heavy box mattress. In Mariana Starcke's _Travels in Europe_, published in 1833, she says of an inn in Villach, "tall people cannot sleep comfortably here or in any part of Germany; the beds, which are very narrow, being placed in wooden frames or boxes, so short that any person who happened to be above five feet high must absolutely sit up all night supported by pillows; and this, in fact, is the way in which the Germans sleep."

I think this is a statement that will be as surprising to any German who reads it as the statements made by Germans about England have often been to me. It is true, however, that tall people do find the old-fashioned German bedsteads short; and it is true that the big square downy pillows are supported by a wedge-shaped bolster called a _Keilkissen_. But the _Plumeau_ is what the German loves, and the Briton hates above all things: the mountain of down or feathers that tumbles off on cold nights and stays on on hot ones. You hate it all the year round, because in winter it is too short and in summer it is an oppression. Sometimes the sheet is b.u.t.toned to it, and then though you are a traveller you are less than ever content. At the best you never succ.u.mb to its attractions. Every spring the good German housewife takes her maid and her _Plumeaux_ to a cleaner and sits there while the feathers are purified by machinery and returned to their bags. In this way she makes sure of getting back her own feathers both in quality and quant.i.ty. Except for the _Plumeaux_ and the want of a dressing-table and proper mirror, an ordinary German bedroom is very comfortable and always very clean. However plain it is you can use it partly as a sitting-room, because a sofa and a good sized table in front of it are considered an indispensable part of its furniture. When Germans come to England and have to live in lodgings or poorly furnished inns, the bedrooms seem to them most comfortless and ill provided. The poor Idealist who lived as an exile in London in the early Victorian age describes her forlorn room with nothing in it but a "colossal" bed, a washstand, and a chest of drawers, and though she does not describe them, you who know London from that side can see the half-dirty honey-combed counterpane, the untempting cotton sheets, the worn uncleanly carpet, the grained or painted furniture with doors and drawers that will not shut; and if you know Germany too you must in honesty compare with it the pleasant rooms you have inhabited there for less rent than she paid her Mrs. Quickly,--rooms with cool clean painted floors, solid old dark elm cupboards, and bedsteads that when you had pitched the _Plumeau_ on the floor or the sofa were inviting because they were made with spotless home-spun linen.

What we call the drawing-room used to be extremely chill and formal in Germany, but it has never been as hideously overloaded as English drawing-rooms belonging to people who do not know better. The "suite"

of furniture covered with rep or brocade was everywhere, and the rep was frequently gra.s.s-green or magenta. There was invariably a sofa and a table in front of the sofa, and a rug or a small carpet under the table. Even in these days this arrangement prevails and must continue to do so while the sofa is considered the place of honour to which the hostess invites her leading guest. If you go to Germany in ignorance of the social importance attached to the sofa, you may blunder quite absurdly and sit down uninvited or when your age or your s.e.x does not ent.i.tle you to a seat there. I was once present when an English girl innocently chose a corner of the sofa instead of a chair, though there were older women in the room. The hostess promptly and audibly told her to get up, for she knew it was not an affair to pa.s.s off as a joke. In England the question of precedence comes up chiefly at the dinner-table. The host and hostess must send the right people together and place them correctly too. In Germany you have to know as hostess who is to sit on the sofa; and your decision may be complicated by the absurd t.i.tles of your guests. For instance, one Frau Direktor may be the wife of a post office official who had a university education, and in Germany a university education counts; while another Frau Direktor, though she can afford better clothes, is merely the wife of the man who manages the factory in the next village. I have heard a story of a Frau Kreisrichter and a Frau Actuar that ended in a life-long feud, and it all turned on a _Kaffee Klatsch_ and the wrong woman on the sofa. It is not easy to know what to do about these ridiculous t.i.tles in Germany, because some people insist on them and some laugh at them as much as we do. I once asked a lady who had the best right to know, about using military t.i.tles instead of names: Herr Lieutenant, Herr Major, and so on. She was quite explicit. "_Mir ist es ein Greuel_,"

she said, and went on to tell me that it was only done as one might expect by people who did not know better, and of course by servants.

All the same, it is well to be careful and study the individual case.

I know of an American who addressed his professor as Professor Lachs.

"Where are your manners, mein Herr?" said the professor in a fury, "I am Herr Professor Dr. Lachs to every student in this laboratory."

But when it comes to Mrs. Tax-Collector and Mrs. Organist and Mrs.

Head Master, and it does come to this quite seriously, it is difficult for the foreigner to appraise values. The length of the t.i.tles, too, is a stumbling-block. You may marry a harmless Herr Braun, and in course of time become Frau Wirklichergeheimerober regierungsrath. In this case I don't think your friends would use the whole of your t.i.tle every time they addressed you; but you would undoubtedly have a seat on the sofa before all the small fry.

On the table in front of the sofa there used always to be a heavy coloured cloth, and then put diamond-wise a light embroidered or lace one. A vase of artificial or real flowers, according to taste, stood exactly in the middle, and a few books in ornamental bindings on either side. There would be very few ornaments, but these few would be good of their kind, though probably hideous. Luckily the family did not a.s.semble here on State occasions. For every-day use there was a _Wohnzimmer_ soberly furnished with solid well made chairs and cupboards. Here the mistress of the house kept her palms, her work-table, and her pet birds. Here her husband smoked his after-dinner cigar and drank his coffee before going to his work again. Here the elder children did their lessons for next day's school, and here at night the family sat round one lamp,--the father smoking, the mother probably mending, the children playing games. For German fathers do not live at the _Kneipe_. They are occasionally to be found with their families. When the flat was not large enough to furnish a third sitting-room, the dining-room was used in this way. A modern German family still lives in any room rather than the drawing-room, but it has learned how to make a drawing-room attractive. The odious "suite" has been abolished or dispersed, and a lighter, less formal scheme of decoration is making its way. You see charming rooms in Germany nowadays, but they are never quite like English ones, even when your friends point to a wicker chair or an Eastern carpet and tell you that they love everything English and have furnished in the English fashion. In the first place, you do not see piles of magazines and papers or of library books in a German drawing-room. They would be considered scandalously untidy, and put away in a cupboard at once. If there are cut flowers they are not arranged as they are here. On ceremonial occasions and anniversaries great quant.i.ties of flowers are presented, but they are mostly wired and probably arranged in a fanciful shape. The favourite shape changes with the season and the fashion of the moment. One year those who wish to honour you and have plenty of money, will send you lyres and harps made of violets, pansies, pinks, cornflowers, any flower that will lend itself meekly to popular design. The favourite design in Berlin one spring was a large flat sofa cushion of Guelder roses with tall sprays of roses or carnations dancing from it. On ordinary occasions market bunches are put into water as an English cottager puts in his flowers, level and tightly packed. But on a festive occasion in a rich man's house you hear of a long dinner table strewn with branches of pink hawthorn and peonies. In fact, a riot of flowers is now considered correct by wealthy people, but you do not find them here and there and everywhere, whether people are wealthy or not, as you do in England. That is partly because there are so few private gardens.

The extreme tidiness of German rooms is a constant source of surprise.

They are as guiltless of "litter" as the showrooms of a furniture emporium. You would think that the people who live in them were never employed if you did not know that Germans were never idle. Every bit of embroidery has its use and its own corner. The article now being embroidered is neatly folded inside the work-basket or work-table when it is not in the lady's hands. The one book she is reading will be near. Any other books she possesses will be on shelves, and probably behind gla.s.s doors. Each chair has its place, each cushion, each ornament. Even where there are children German rooms never look disarranged. I can truly say I have only once seen a German room untidy and dusty, and that was in a house with no one but a "Mamsell"

in charge; and she apologised and explained that it was to be spring cleaned next day. There is, by the way, a curious litter of things kept on a German sideboard in many houses,--coffee machines, silver, useful and ornamental gla.s.s, great blue beer jugs, and suchlike; but they are kept there with intention and not by neglectful accident.

Then the narrow corridor of a German flat is often uncomfortably choked with articles of household use: lamps, for instance, and a refrigerator, and the safe in which the mistress locks her food; spare cupboards too, and neat piles of papers and magazines. It will be inelegant, but it will be orderly and clean.

It is the way in this country to laugh at the German _Hausfrau_, and pity her for a drudge; and it is the way with many Germans to talk as if all Englishwomen were pleasure loving and incompetent. The less people know of a foreign nation the greater nonsense they talk in general, and the more c.o.c.ksure they are about their own opinions. A year ago, when I was in Germany, I asked a friend I could trust if there really was much Anglophobia abroad except in the newspapers. She reflected a little before she answered, for she was honest and intelligent.

"There is none amongst people like ourselves," she said,--"people who know the world a little. But you come across it?" She turned to her husband.

"There are others like G.," she said. "He turns green if anyone speaks of England, and he says Shakespeare is _dumm_. You see, he has never been out of Germany, and has never met any English people."

So I told her about my English cook, who snorted with scorn when I a.s.sured her Germans considered rabbits vermin and would not eat them.

"H ... ph!" she said, "I shouldn't have thought foreigners were so particular."

The average German housewife has to keep the house going on exceedingly small means and with inefficient help. It is her pride and pleasure to make a little go a long way, and she can only achieve this by working with her hands. Probably her servant cannot cook, but she can, and it would never occur to her to let her husband and children eat ill-prepared food because servants do not like ladies in the kitchen. A German lady, like a princess of ancient Greece, considers that it becomes her to do anything she chooses in her own house, and that the most convenient household workshop is the kitchen.

The Idealist from whom I have quoted before was the daughter of a well-known German diplomatist, and she had been used since childhood to the atmosphere of Courts. She was an accomplished well-born woman of the world, but she had not been a week in her sordid London lodgings with the woman she calls Mrs. Quickly, before she blundered in her innocent German way--into the lodging-house kitchen. Figure to yourself the stupefaction and the indignation of Mrs. Quickly, probably engaged, though the Idealist does not say so, in dining off the foreign woman's beef. "I went down to the kitchen," says Fraulein von Meysenbug, "with a muslin gown on my arm to ask for an iron so that I could iron my gown there. The kitchen was Mrs. Quickly's true kingdom; here she alone reigned at the hearth, for the servant was not allowed to approach the saucepans. Mrs. Quickly looked at me with unconcealed astonishment as I came in, but when I proffered my request her astonishment turned to wrath. 'What!' she shrieked, 'a lady ironing in the kitchen? That is impossible.' And with the mien of offended majesty she s.n.a.t.c.hed the gown from me, and ordered the little maid servant to put an iron in the fire and to iron the gown; then she turned to me and said with tragic emphasis, 'You are a foreigner. You don't understand our English ways: we consider it extremely unladylike for a lady to enter the kitchen, and worse still if she wants to iron her own gown. No, ma'am, please to ring the bell when you require anything; otherwise you will ruin my servants.' Much ashamed of my ignorance on this higher plane of English custom,"

continues the Idealist, "I crept back to my parlour and laughed heartily as I looked round the dirty, wretchedly furnished room, and reflected on the abyss set by prejudice between the ground-floor and the bas.e.m.e.nt."

"How do you like your new German governess?" I once asked an English friend who lived in the country and had just engaged a German lady for her only daughter.

"Oh! I like her," said my friend without enthusiasm. "She is a brilliant musician and a fine linguist and all that. But she has such odd ideas about what a girl ought to know. The other day I actually caught her teaching Patricia to _dust_."

"If you don't watch her," I said, "she'll probably teach Patricia to cook."

My friend looked anxious first, and then relieved.

"I don't see how she could do that," she said. "The cook would never have them in the kitchen for five minutes. But now you mention it, I believe she can cook. When things go wrong she seems to know what has been done or not done."

"That might be useful," I suggested.

"I don't see it. I expect my cook to know her work, and to do it and not to rely on me. I've other fish to fry."

But the German housewife expects to have her fingers literally in every pie even when by rights they should be employed elsewhere. You hear, for instance, of a great Court functionary whose wife is so devoted to cooking that though she has a large staff of servants she cannot be persuaded to spend the day anywhere but in her kitchen.

Mistresses of this kind breed incapable servants, and you find, in fact, that German maids cannot compare with our English ones in qualities of self-reliance, method, and initiative. They mostly expect to be told from hour to hour what to do, and very often to lend a hand to the ladies of the household rather than to do the thing themselves.

Indeed, though the servants are on duty from morning till night more than English servants are, in some ways they have an easier time of it than ours, because they are used so much to run errands and go to market. Everyone who has been in German towns can remember the hordes of servants with baskets and big umbrellas strolling in twos and threes along the streets in the early morning. They are never in any hurry to get home to work again, and a good many doubtless know that what they leave undone will be done by their mistress. The German kitchen with its beautiful cleanliness and brightly polished copper pans I have described, but I have not said anything yet about the fidgety housewife who carries her _Tuchtigkeit_ to such a pitch that she ties every wooden spoon and twirler with a coloured ribbon to hang by against the wall. In England you hear of ladies who tie every bottle of scent on the toilet table with a different ribbon, and that really has more sense in it, because it must be trying to a cook's nerves to use spoons tied with delicate ribbons that must not be spoiled. Every housewife has dainty little holders for the handles of saucepans when they are hot. You see them, all different shapes and sizes, on view with the piles of kitchen cloths and the various ap.r.o.ns that form part of every lady's trousseau, and if you have German friends they probably present you with a few from time to time. I have never noticed any pictures in a German kitchen, but there are nearly always _Spruche_ both in the kitchen, and the dining-room and sometimes in the hall: rhyming maxims that are done in poker work or painted on wood and hung in conspicuous positions--

"Wie die Kuche so das Haus, Reinlich drinnen, reinlich draus"

is a nice one; and so is

"Trautes Heim Gluck allein."

There was one in the _Lette-Haus_ or some other big inst.i.tution about an hour in the morning being worth several hours later in the day, which would p.r.i.c.k our English consciences more sharply than it can most German ones, for they are a nation of early risers. Schools and offices all open so early that a household must of necessity be up betimes to feed its menfolk and children with bread and coffee before their day's work. In most German towns the tradespeople do not call for orders, but they do in Hamburg; and a friend born there told me in a whisper, so that her husband should not hear the awful confession, that she would never be a good "provider" in consequence. She went to market regularly, for many housewives will not delegate this most important business to a cook, but she had not the same eye for a tough goose or a poor fish, perhaps not the same backbone for a bargain, as a housewife used from childhood to these sorties. In some towns the butcher calls over night for orders. The baker's boy brings rolls before anyone is up, and hangs them outside the flat in one of two bags every household possesses. After the early breakfast either the mistress or the cook fetches what is required for the day.

When the good German housewife is not in her kitchen, English tradition believes her to be at her linen cupboard.

"I am going to write a humble little gossiping book about German Home Life," I said to a learned but kindly professor last spring.

"German Home Life," he said, rather aghast at my daring, for we had only just made each other's acquaintance, and I believe he thought that this was my first visit to Germany and that I had been there a week. "It is a wide field," he went on. "However ... if you want to understand our Home Life ... just look at that...."

We were having tea together in the dining-room in his wife's absence, and he suddenly got up from table and threw back both doors of an immense cupboard occupying the longest wall in the room. I gazed at the sight before me, and my thoughts were too deep for words. It was a small household, I knew. It comprised, in fact, the professor, his beautiful young wife, and one small maid-servant; and for their happiness they possessed all this linen: shelf upon shelf, pile upon pile of linen, exactly ordered, tied with lemon coloured ribbons, embroidered beyond doubt with the initials of the lady who brought it here as a bride. The lady, it may as well be said, is a celebrated musician who pa.s.ses a great part of each winter fulfilling engagements away from home. "But what happens to the linen cupboard when you are away?" I asked her, later, for it was grievous to think of any servant, even a "pearl," making hay of those ordered shelves. "I come home for a few days in between and set things to rights again," she explained; and then, seeing that I was interested, she admitted that she had put up and made every blind and curtain, and had even carpentered and upholstered an empire sofa in her drawing-room. She showed me each cupboard and corner of the flat, and I saw everywhere the exquisite order and spotlessness the notable German housewife knows how to maintain. We even peeped into the professor's dressing-room.

"He must be a very tidy man," I said, sighing and reflecting that he could not be as other men are. "Do you never have to set things to rights here?"