American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'

by Julian Street

The Poe tradition is kept vigorously alive at the university. Not long ago a member of the Raven Society, one of the rather too numerous student organizations, discovered the burial place of Poe's mother, who was an actress, and who died penniless in Richmond at the age of twenty-four and was buried with the destitute. By a happy inspiration a fund was raised among the students for the erection of a monument to her—an example of fine and chivalrous sentiment on the part of these young men, which, one feels, is somehow delicately intertwined with the traditions of the honor system.

The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English at the United States Naval Academy. By a coincidence which has proved a happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O. Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith's own gifts as a writer and an analyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the result of which has recently been given to us in the form "The O. Henry Biography."

Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions. While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.

"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess Victoria Luise being present.

"The Kaiser is, of course, a very magnetic man. His eyes are his most remarkable feature. They are very large, brilliant, and sparkling, and he rolls them in a manner most unusual. While he is always the king and the soldier, he can be genial and charming. One might expect a man in his position to be blasé, but that, most of all, is what he is not. He is like a boy in his vitality and vividness, and he has a great and persistent intellectual curiosity. It is this, I think, which used to cause him to be compared with Colonel Roosevelt. Both would like to know all things, and both have had, and have exercised more, perhaps, than any other two living men, the power to bring to themselves the central figures in all manner of world events, and thus learn at first hand, from acknowledged authorities, about the subjects that interest them—which is to say, everything.

"He frankly admired America. I don't mean that he said so for the sake of courtesy to me, but that he has—or did have, then—an immense and rather romantic interest in this country. A great many Germans used to resent this trait in him. America held in his mind the same romantic position that the idea of monarchy did in the minds of some of us. I mean that the average American went for romance to stories of monarchy, but that the Kaiser, being used to the monarchial idea, found his romance over here. (I am, of course, speaking of him as he was five or six years ago.) He wished to come to America, but was never able to do so, since German law forbids it. And, perhaps because he could not come, America was the more a sort of dream to him.

"He asked me about some of the things in Berlin which I had noticed as being different from things at home, and when I mentioned the way that history was kept alive in the very streets of Berlin, his eyes danced, and he said that was one of the things he had tried to accomplish by the erection of the numerous monuments which have been placed in Berlin during his reign. He told me of other means by which history was kept alive in Germany: among them that every officer has to know in detail the history of his regiment, and that German regiments always celebrate the anniversaries of their great days.

"He speaks English without an accent, though we might say that he spoke it with an English accent. He told me that he had learned English before he learned German, and had also caused his children to learn it first. He reads Mark Twain, or had read him, and he enjoyed him, but he said that when he met Mark Twain the latter had little or nothing to say, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he got him to talk at all. He subscribed, he told me, to 'Harper's Magazine,' and he was in the habit of reading short stories aloud to his family, in English. He admired the American short story, and I remember that he declared: 'The Americans know how to plunge into a short story. We Germans are too long-winded.'"

When Professor Smith talks about the Kaiser, you say to yourself: "I know that it is growing late, but I cannot bear to leave until I have heard the rest of this"; when he drifts presently to O. Henry, you say the same; and so it is always, no matter what his subject. At last, however, the grandfather's clock in the hall below his study sends up a stern message which is not to be mistaken, whereupon you arise reluctantly from your comfortable chair, spill the cigar ashes out of your lap onto the rug, dust off your clothing, and take your leave. Nor is your regret at departing lessened by the fact that you must go to your bilious-colored bedroom in the New Gleason, and that you will not see the university, or Professor C. Alphonso Smith, or Mrs. Smith again, because you are leaving upon the morrow.

So it must always be with the itinerant illustrator and writer. They are forever finding new and lovely scenes only to leave them; forever making new and charming friends only to part with them, faring forth again into the unknown.