He returned to the pleasant occupation of arraying himself, one in which he still took as much pleasure as any girl. Hines, his man, was ill, but he was too happy to resent the trifling exertion involved in a lonely toilet. It was a brilliant morning in late spring and he selected socks, necktie, and handkerchief of a delicate sage green, and a dull grey suit cut in a fashion that often tempted even the officers to turn and look at him. Much to his chagrin, no part of his morning was ever wasted at the barber’s. When he played tennis he exposed an arm with a proper filamentous surface, and on the top of his head his hair, a light burnished brown, grew as thickly as sprouting corn; but never a blade had appeared on his face. For this he should have been grateful, as his chief claim to regular beauty was the perfect oval of his face and the clean yet rounded outline of the long jaw; but he yearned for a beard to shave as a girl yearns for her first adorer to maltreat.
He finished his toilet in the course of time, sauntered out of the Legation, and, entering the cab that had awaited him forty minutes, concluded to drive for an hour, as it was too early to call. The kutscher, whose vast expanse looked as if about to burst through its rusty old livery, hunched down into himself after the fashion of his kind, and, with his high battered hat tilted on one side of his red face, his eyes half closed, and apparently in momentary danger of rolling from his perch, gave the Munich droschke that final touch of style which is the despair of Paris and Berlin.
But he drove his fare safely and slowly about a city, which after a week’s tormented seclusion seemed quite the most beautiful in the world. The stately Renaissance capital with its Gothic corners; its old palaces and modern public buildings, the former severe, the new ornate but dignified and magnificent: its churches representing the vagaries of all architectures; its oblongs and squares of green, set with statues of public men and gushing fountains—torrents of sparkling water as free and crystal as Alpine torrents; its classic Königplatz, as severe and beautiful as Rome in the days of the Cæsars; its superb statues to the Bavarian rulers that had transformed a mediæval stronghold into the most artistic city in Europe; its innumerable terraces for beer drinking and coffee; its winding river of many branches and massive bridges, poetical name, and strange colour like melted ice reflecting pale green jewels; and then the fields and woods, the stately drives and winding ways, of the Englischergarten, where naught of Munich save its irregular but fine and soaring sky-line can be seen,—all go to the making of a city whose like is to be found nowhere on earth, and in which one can linger longest alone.
The Ludwigstrasse, one of the most imposing streets in Europe, lined from end to end with the high flat façades of the Italian Renaissance, starts from the Feldherrnhalle, a copy of the famous Loggia in Florence, and terminates far down in the perspective with the Siegesthor, a triumphal arch in the fashion of Constantine’s, but surmounted by a colossal “Bavaria” driving her lions in the direction of Prussia!
As Ordham’s cab turned into this street to-day, he found it crowded with people, for it was one of those saints’ days, so numerous in the Bavarian calendar, when every Münchener closes his shop, and, if the weather be fine, walks the streets and fills the churches and cafés with his brood. The students too were celebrating, either the saint or some private deity of their own, for open fiakers were full of them: blue caps, green caps, red caps, according to their clubs, but all with the same slashed faces, the same supreme approval of themselves and the institution of universities, which gave so many of them their only chance in life to play. Here and there among the throng were the more impressive figures of officials in brass headgear and gala uniform, white or the dazzling light Bavarian blue. Royal blue carriages, with coachmen and footmen in blue and white livery, were leaving the Residenz gardens, evidently bound for a family reunion at another palace. Everywhere was life, movement, gayety, except, to be sure, in the figures of the sentries standing before the palaces. These were as wooden as only a German soldier on duty can be, but, although they looked as stupid as no doubt they were, their eyes followed the throng.
Overhead, in the rich blue sky (the royal shade!) hung those low soft foam-white masses of clouds composed by Nature for Bavaria alone; the air was warm and light; not a breeze brought down the chill of Alpine snows; although from highest windows the sharp tumbling crowded peaks might be seen glittering through the haze that promised fine weather.
Ordham, as happy as if care had never approached him, lounged in the corner of his uncomfortable droschke and wondered why people went to Italy: here there was so much of Italy, so much more besides. The old Saxon at the base of his centuplicated self always stirred amiably at the sight of the good-natured German crowd (unless it jostled him), and nowhere was that crowd so good-natured as in Bavaria. It was too accustomed to its liberal allowance of daily beer ever to overdrink or crave the excitement of spirits; and although the students occasionally took pride in spurring on their seasoned constitutions to a point which enabled them to sing in the streets all night, even they found it too much of an effort, and transgressed but seldom. It is only the American student in these German universities and art schools who, unfamiliar in his home with alcohol in any form, often becomes a sot; and is a despicable object to behold, where the European is merely absurd.
There was scarcely a factory in the neighbourhood of Munich, little business outside of its shops, which opened late and closed early, no poverty, a prevailing belief that life was made to enjoy, not to take with the fatiguing seriousness of northern climes. The Bavarian understands Italy far better than he will ever understand Prussia.
Ordham, driving slowly through this slowly moving, smiling throng, bent only upon innocent enjoyment, wondered a little that it should practically be the first to welcome all that was distempered in the arts of literature, music, painting, and the drama (those temporary but recurring aberrations, which, in the present instance, were ripening to produce the gifted but dislocated brains of Richard Strauss, Wedekind, and the ultra Secessionists). A people that were happy and simple by nature, yet capable of appreciating Wagner when encouraged by their King, might be expected to turn from this sufficient intoxication of their mental senses to the relief of plays and romances that were either serious in the good old style or merely frolicsome. But the plays presented in the theatres of Munich were enough to make Paris nervously try on her bays; and the greater and more accomplished city had never dreamed of exhibiting in the shop windows of her fashionable streets covers of books so ingenuously shameless. To shock a Münchener, the most domesticated, virtuous, bourgeois, must always have been as difficult as to persuade some Americans that human nature is made up of inconsistencies; but Ordham, at least, had never been more interested in watching the stolid children at a Spanish bull-fight, than these good, homely, soft-waisted people of Bavaria relishing the indecencies of their stage, their expression much the same as when they sat with their elbows on a table in a restaurant and devoured a dinner lasting two hours without raising their eyes. That the lower class of Bavaria was one of the most unmoral in the world, the percentage of illegitimacy being inordinately high, was beside the question, as this was not the class that filled the theatres and bought the paper-covered novels. It was not even the court society that kept the theatres open, for social diversions were many, even if no longer as brilliant as formerly: the theatres then as now were filled night after night with the phlegmatic exemplary bourgeoisie, all of whom ambled home at the end of a performance designed to spare what imaginations they possessed, supped on sausage, black bread, and beer, and snored in stuffy ugly rooms without a dream.
Perhaps this echo of domestic rhythm explains all.