CHAPTER VI
MUNICH TO THE ACHENSEE
If there were a country where the crowned heads of Europe in ball costume sat in a magnificent hall, drinking nothing less than champagne, while the court band discoursed bewitching music, and the electric lights flashed on myriads of jewels, Bee and Mrs. Jimmie would declare that sort of Bohemia to be quite in their line. And because that kind of refined stupidity would bore Jimmie and me to the verge of extinction, and because we really prefer an open-air concert-garden with beer, where the people are likely to be any sort of cattle whom nobody would want to know, yet who are interesting to speculate about, I really believe that Bee and Mrs. Jimmie think we are a little low.
However, their impossible tastes being happily for us unattainable, three hours after our arrival in Munich found Jimmie proudly marching three sailor-hat and shirt-waist women into the Lowenbraukeller.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived, and we took our seats at a little table in the terraced garden. A rosy-cheeked maid, who evidently had violent objections to soap, brought us our beer, and then we looked around. There was music, not very good, only a few people smoking china pipes and not even drinking beer, a few idly reading the paper, and a general air over everybody of Mr. Micawber waiting for something to turn up.
Jimmie glanced around anxiously. The length of our stay depended upon our ability to please Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, who were easily fatigued by the populistic element of society.
"Nothin' doin'," growled Jimmie in my ear. "Wake 'em up, can't you? Create a riot. Let's smash our beer-mugs, and shout 'Down with the Kaiser!'"
"You'd find you would stay longer than you wanted to if you did that," I said. "What do you suppose they are all waiting for?"
Jimmie called the redolent maiden, and in German which made her quiver put the question.
"At five o'clock they will open a fresh hogshead of beer—the Lowenbrau," she answered him.
"Fresh beer?" cried Jimmie. "How long has this been opened?"
"Since three."
"Great Scott!" whispered Jimmie. "Think of me brought up on a bottle, coming to a land where men will sit for an hour to get beer the first five minutes it is opened."
"See, they are opening it now," said the maid.
Sure enough, every man in the garden slowly rose and ambled leisurely to a horse-trough in the centre of the garden in which lay perhaps a score of mugs in running water. Each took a stein or two or three, depending on his party, and formed in line in front of the counter across which the beer was passed.
"Come, Jimmie," I said. "I'm going to get my own stein."
"Why do they do that?" asked Mrs. Jimmie, after we had got in line.
"It saves the half-cent charged for service," answered the maid.
"Now isn't she funny!" complained Bee of me as I returned beaming with content. "She likes to go and do a queer thing like that instead of sitting still to be waited on, like a lady."
"Been waited on a million times like a lady," I ventured to respond. "It isn't every day one can get a cool mug and see the beer drawn fresh and foaming like that. I felt like a Holbein painting."
Bee, as at Baden-Baden, plaintively gave the attendant a double fee to show that meanness had not caused my apparently thrifty act. Then for the first time in our lives we found what fresh beer really meant.
Even Bee and Mrs. Jimmie admitted that it was worth while coming, and let me record in advance that when we got to Vienna, and they served us an equally delicious beer in long thin glasses as delicate as an eggshell, Bee grew so enthusiastic in the process of beer drinking that Jimmie grew absurdly proud of his pupil, and professed to think that she was "coming round after all." But Bee declared that it was the thinness of the glasses which attracted her, and insisted that beer out of a German stein was like trying to drink over a stone wall.
We went many times after that, generally in the evening, when the concert was held in a hall which must have contained two thousand people, even when all seated at little tables, and where the band would have deafened you if the hall had not been so large. Here Jimmie and the waitress prevailed upon us to taste the most inhuman dishes with names a yard long, which the maid declared we would find to be "wunderschön."
We began in a spirit of adventure, but Jimmie's taste in food is so depraved that if he followed the precedent all through his life, Lombroso would class him as a degenerate. As it was, he soon had us distanced. But we let him eat pickles and cherries and herring and cream and tripe and garlic and pig's feet all stewed up together, while we listened to the music, and planned what we would bury him in.
The pictures in Munich we loved. I must say that I enjoy the atmosphere of the Munich school better than any other. There is a healthiness about German realism that one is not afraid nor ashamed to admire. French realism is like a suggestive story, expunged of all but the surface fun for girls' hearing. You are afraid of the laugh it raises for fear there is something beneath it all that you don't understand. But the modern Munich galleries were not the task that picture galleries often are. They were a sincere delight, and let me pause to say that Munich art was one thing that we four were unanimous in praising and enjoying as a happy and united family.
It was here that Jimmie proceeded to go mad over Verboeckhoven's sheep pictures, and Mrs. Jimmie and Bee over the crown jewels in the Treasury of the Alte Residenz. To be sure they are fine. For example, there is the famous "Pearl of the Palatinate," which is half black, and a glorious blue diamond about twice as fine as the one owned by Lord Francis Hope, which his family went to law to prevent his selling not long ago, and a superb group of St. George and the dragon, the knight being in chased gold, the dragon made entirely of jasper, and the whole thing studded thickly with precious stones of every description. But, except that these things are historic and kept in royal vaults, they are no more wonderful than jewellers' exhibits at the expositions.
But if you want to be thoroughly mixed up on the Nibelungenlied, after you think you have got those depraved old parties with their iniquitous marriages and loose morals pretty well adjusted by a faithful attendance at Walter Damrosch's lectures and Wagner operas, just go through the Königsbau, and let one of those automatic conductors in uniform take you through the Schnorr Nibelungen Frescoes, and from personal experience I will guarantee that, when you have completed the rounds, you won't even know who Siegfried is.
There is one thing particularly worth mentioning about Munich, and that is that also in Alte Residenz, in the Festsaalbau, which faces on the Hofgarten, and is 256 yards, not feet, long, are two small card rooms, with what they call a "gallery of beauties."
Now everybody knows how disappointing professional beauties are. Think over the names of actresses heralded as "beauties;" of belles, who have been said to turn men's heads by the score; of Venuses, and Psyches, and Madonnas of the galleries of Europe, and tell me your honest opinion. Aren't most of them really—well, trying, to say the least?
Titian's beauties all need an obesity remedy, and Jimmie criticises most "beauties" so severely that we have got to searching them out, when we are tired and cross, just to vent our spleen upon.
Jimmie's favourite story is the old, old one of the old woman who saw a hippopotamus for the first time. She looked at him a moment in silence and then said: "My! ain't he plain!"
It is pre-historic, that story, but it has saved our lives many a time in Europe. It fits so many cases, and I mention it here just to prove my point. Go, then, to the "Gallery of Beauties" in the Palace, and you will find thirty-six portraits by Steiler, of thirty-six of the most exquisite women conceivable to the mind of man. Some of these are women, like the Empress of Austria, who were justly famed for a beauty which is not often the gift of royalty. Others are women of whom you have never heard, but so lovely that it would be impossible not to remember their loveliness for ever and a day.
We all enthusiastically bought photographs of the painting of the Empress Elizabeth at the age of eighteen, which to my mind is one of the most exquisite faces ever put upon canvas, and then, highly elated with our presentation of Munich to Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, we gaily wended our way southward, following the river Isar for a time, until we reached Innsbruck, on our way to the Achensee.
At Innsbruck we halted for a sentimental reason which I am not ashamed to divulge, as the ridicule of the public would be sweet approval compared to the way Jimmie wore himself to a shadow in the violence of his jeers. But the fact is that the King Arthur of Tennyson has always been one of my heroes, and in the Franciscan Church or the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, there were twenty-eight heroic bronze statues, the finest of these being of Arthur, König von England, by the famous Peter Vischer of Nuremberg.
So in Innsbruck we paused for a few days, finding it delightful beyond our ideas of it, and exquisitely picturesque, situated on both banks of a dear little foaming, yellow river, with foot-bridges upon which you may stand and watch it rage and churn, and around it on all sides rising the mountains of the Bavarian Alps, which are not so near as to crowd you. Mountains smother me as a rule.
Jimmie obligingly took us at once to the Hofkirche, to get to which we passed under the Triumphal Gate, erected by the citizens on the occasion of the entry of the Emperor Francis I. and the Empress Maria Theresa, to commemorate the marriage of Prince Leopold, who afterward became the Emperor Leopold II., with the Infanta Maria Ludovica. This magnificent arch is of granite and will last thousands of years. It reminded me of the Dewey Arch in New York—it was so different.
The Emperor Maximilian I. directed in his will that the Hofkirche should be built, and in the centre of the nave he is represented kneeling by a sumptuous bronze statue, surrounded by the statues I had come to see. Jimmie declared that the marble sarcophagus upon which the statue of Maximilian is placed was "worth the price of admission," but Jimmie's opinion is of no value except when he is accidentally right, as in this instance. He studied this and the monument of Andreas Hofer, whose remains are buried here, under a magnificent sarcophagus of Tyrolese marble, leaving us to our bronze statues.
I found my King Arthur perfectly satisfactory, much to my surprise, for I am always prepared to be disappointed. Some of the statues are ridiculous in the extreme, but these monstrosities served the better to emphasise the dignity of King Arthur's pose and the nobility of his countenance.
Just after you leave the Hofkirche, you find yourself just opposite to the "Golden Dachl," which the natives tell you is a roof built of pure gold, but which the skeptical declare to be copper gilded. This roof covers a handsome Gothic balcony and blazes as splendidly as if it were gold, as Bee and Mrs. Jimmie preferred to believe. It is said to have cost seventy thousand dollars, and was built by Count Frederick of Tyrol, who was called "The Count of the Empty Pockets," to refute his nickname.
While we were taking infinite satisfaction in this little history, we lost Jimmie. He emerged presently from a handsome shop near by followed by a man bearing a large box.
"What have you been buying, Jimmie?" we demanded, suspiciously.
"Only a replica of Maximilian's statue," he answered, blandly.
"You mean a 'copy,' my darling," I corrected him, sweetly.
Now Jimmie loves a fight and so do I, so we immediately offered battle to each other, Jimmie insisting on his replica, and I declaring that a replica meant that the same artist must have made both the original and the second article, which when made by another craftsman became a "copy."
Jimmie got red in the face and abusive, while I remained cool and exasperating. I was getting even with Jimmie for everything since Paris.
But conceive, if you can, my utter humiliation when, upon arriving at the hotel, I discovered that the box contained, not Maximilian, but my dear King Arthur, and that Jimmie had bought it for me!
I really cried.
"Jimmie," I said in a meek and lowly voice, "you are an angel—a bright, beautiful, golden angel, and from now on, I'll call this a replica,—when I'm talking to a wayfaring man. And I'll never, never fight with you again!"
"Then gimme back that bronze man!" declared Jimmie. "If you give up the battlefield I'll start home to-morrow!" Which shows you where I got encouragement to be "ungentlemanly," as Jimmie calls me.
Innsbruck is the capital of Tyrol, and the whole country of Tyrol is like a picture-book. Its history is so stirring, its country so beautiful, its people are so picturesque. There are any number of dainty little lakes lying in among its mountains, which are accessible to the tourist, and therefore semi-public, by which I mean not as public as the Swiss or Italian lakes. But up the Inn River a few miles, and completely hidden from the tourist, being out of the way and little known to Americans, there lies the most lovely lake of all, the Achensee, and all around it the Tyrolese peasants, as they ought to be allowed to remain, simple, primitive, natural. We wanted to see them dance. So regardless of whether an iron bound itinerary would take us there next, we folded away our maps, put our trust in our little yellow coupon ticket book, and started for the Achensee. From the moment we began to see less of tourists and more of the natives, Jimmie's and my spirits rose. Chiffon and patent leather might belong to Bee and Mrs. Jimmie, but here in the Austrian Tyrol, Jimmie and I were getting our innings.
We got off the train at Jenbach and left our trunks there. Then on the same platform, but behind it, and a few yards beyond the station, there is a curious little hunchbacked engine and an open car. Into this car we climbed with our handbags, and beheld on the same seat with Mrs. Jimmie a beautiful woman in a gown unmistakably from Paris, who looked so familiar that we could scarcely keep from staring her out of countenance. Finally Bee leaned across and whispered:
"Don't look, but isn't that Madame Carreño?"
Without heeding Bee's polite warning, I turned and pounced upon my idol.
"Madame Carreño!"
"My dear child!"
"What in the world are you doing here?"
"Why I live here! And you? How came you to find your way to this inaccessible spot?"
"We are going to the Achensee—to the Hotel Rhiner, to hear Fräulein Therese—"
"You have heard of my little friend Therese, and you have come—how many thousand miles?—to hear her sing and play on her zither?"
"To do all that, but mostly to see if she will tell me her love story."
"How do you know she had one?" inquired Madame Carreño, quickly.
"I heard of it in England. Some one who knew the duke told me."
"It was a lucky escape for her, and I think she will tell you all about it. You see it happened, ah, so many years ago."
To my mind, Madame Carreño is the most wonderful genius of modern times at the piano. I have heard all the others scores of times, so don't argue with me. You may all worship whom you will, but the whole musical part of my heart is at Madame Carreño's feet, with a small corner saved for Vladimir de Pachmann, when he plays Chopin. She claims to be an American, but she plays with a heart of a Slav, and as one whose untamed spirit can never be held in leash even by her music. Her playing is so intoxicating that it goes through my veins like wine. The last time I heard her play was in an enormous hall in the West, when her audience was composed of music lovers of every class and description. Just back of me was a woman whose whole soul seemed to respond to Carreño's hypnotic genius. Carreño had just finished Liszt's "Rhapsodic Hongroise" No. 2, and had followed it up with a mad Tschaikowsky fragment. I was so excited I was on the verge of tears when I heard the woman behind me catch her breath with a sob and exclaim:
"My Lord! Ain't she got vinegar!"
I repeated this to Madame Carreño at Jenbach, and she seized my hands and shouted with laughter. Such a grip as she has! Her hands are filled with steel wires instead of muscles, and her arms have the strength of an athlete in training.
The car propelled by the hunchbacked engine grated and bumped its way over its cog-wheel road, pushing its delighted quota of passengers higher and higher into the mountains. The Inn valley fell away from our view, and wooded slopes, fir-trees, patches of snow on far hillsides, and tiny hamlets took its place.
"Here and there among these little villages live my summer pupils," said Madame Carreño. "I have six. One from San Francisco, one from Australia, one from Paris, one from Geneva, and two from Russia—all young girls, and with such talent! They live all the way from Jenbach to the Achensee, and come to see me once a week."
The train stopped with a final squeal of the chain, and a lurch which loosened our joints.
Before us spread a sheet of water of such a blueness, such a limpid, clear, deep sapphire blue as I never saw in water before.
Around it rose the hills of Tyrol, guarding it like sentinels.
It was the Achensee!