CHAPTER XXII[ToC]
LIFE IN LODGINGS
As rents are high in Germany, it is usual for people of small means to let off one or two rooms, either furnished or unfurnished. But it is not usual to supply a lodger with any meal except his coffee and rolls in the morning. If you wish to take lodgings in a German town, and work through the long list of them in a local paper, you will probably find no one willing to provide for you in the English fashion.
"Cooking!" they say with horror,—"cooking! You want to eat in your room. No. That can we not undertake. Coffee in the morning, yes; and rolls with it and butter and even two eggs, but nothing further. Just round the corner in the Königstrasse are two very fine restaurants, where the Herrschaften can eat what they will at any hour of the day, and for moderate prices."
If you insist, the most they will promise, and that not willingly, is to provide you with a knife and fork and a tablecloth for a pyramid of courses sent hot from one of the very fine adjacent restaurants for 1 mark or 1 mark 20 pf. Supper in Germany is the easiest meal in the day to provide, as you buy the substantial part of it at a Delikatessenhandlung, and find that even a German landlady will condescend to get you rolls and butter and beer. This sounds like the Simple Life, to be sure; but if you are in German lodgings for any length of time you probably desire for one reason or the other to lead it. The plan of having your dinner sent piping hot from a restaurant in nice clean white dishes rather like monster soufflé dishes is not a bad one if the restaurant keeps faith with you. It is rather amusing to begin at the top with soup and work through the various surprises and temptations of the pyramid till you get to Biskuit-Pudding mit Vanille Sauce at the bottom. But in nine cases out of ten the restaurant fails you, sends uneatable food, is absurdly unpunctual or says plainly it can't be bothered. Then you have to wander about and out of doors for your food in all weathers and all states of health. This is amusing for a time, but not in the long run. It is astonishing how tired you can get of the "very fine" restaurants within reach, of their waitresses, their furniture, their menus, and their daily guests. At least, this is so in a small town where the best restaurant is not "very fine," although both food and service will be better than in an English town of the same size. If you are in Berlin and can go to the good restaurants, there you will be in danger of becoming a gourmet and losing your natural affection for cold mutton.
In a university or a big commercial town it is easy to get rooms for less than we pay in England; but in a small Residenz I have found it difficult. There were rooms to let, but no one wanted us, because we were not officers with soldier servants to wait on us; nor did we want to engage rooms as the officers did for at least six months. In fact, we found ourselves as unpopular as ladies are in a London suburb where all the lodging-house keepers want "gentlemen in the city" who are away all day and give no trouble. At last, after searching through every likely street in the town, we found a dentist with exuberant manners, who said he would overlook our shortcomings, and allow us to inhabit his rooms at a high price on condition we gave no trouble. We said we never gave trouble anywhere, and left both hotels and lodging-houses with an excellent character, so the bargain was concluded. I saw that his wife was not a party to it, but he overruled her, and as he was a big red-faced noisy man, and she was a small rat of a woman, I thought he would continue to do so. One is always making these stupid elementary mistakes about one's fellow-creatures. But a little later in the day I had occasion to call at the rooms to complete some arrangement about luggage, and then the wife received me alone. I asked her if she could put a small table into a room that only had a big one. I forget why I wanted it.
"Table!" she said rudely. "What can you want another table for? Isn't that one enough?"
"I should like another," I said,—"any little one would do."