II
The first place we visited was Hellerau, in Germany, where the Dalcroze School was holding its annual spring festival. Hellerau means “bright meadow.” Rising from that meadow was a temple of art, and we witnessed a performance of Gluck’s Orpheus, represented in dance as well as in music. It was one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, and a quarter of a century later I used it for the opening scene of Worlds End—the world’s beginning of Lanny Budd. The young Lanny met on the bright meadow—as we ourselves had met—Bernard Shaw with his golden beard outshining any landscape. I had already had lunch at his home in London and at his country home; he welcomed us, and our joy in the Dalcroze festival was confirmed by Britain’s greatest stage critic. He was always so kind, and the letters he wrote me about the Lanny Budd books helped them to win translation into a score of foreign languages.
We traveled to David’s school and collected him. We had lunch in a restaurant in Dresden. I ordered an omelet in my most polished German, and very carefully specified that I did not want pancakes. “Kein Mehl,” I said several times, but they brought us pancakes; when we refused to accept them and tried to leave the restaurant, they would not let us out. Our train was due so we had to pay, and I bade an unloving farewell to Germany—just a year before World War I.
We went to Paris, and there rented an apartment for a couple of weeks. When we were ready to pay our bill, the proprietress pulled a rug from under the bed and accused us of having spilled grease on it. We had had no grease, and hadn’t even seen the rug; but when we refused to pay for the damage, the woman called in a policeman—I think he was the tallest man I ever saw in uniform. He told us we would have to pay or we could not leave. It was a “racket,” of course, but there was nothing we could do; so to France also we bade an unloving farewell. When World War I came, we weren’t quite sure which person we wanted most to have punished—the German restaurant proprietor or the French virago and tall policeman.