The conductors were officials of disciplined courtesy and informed minds. They appeared at the door of your compartment, erect, requesting your ticket in an established formula. If you asked them something they told you correctly and with a Teutonic adequacy that was grave, but not gruff. Once only in a score of journeys did I encounter bad manners. Now I should never choose these admirable conductors for companions, but as conductors they were superior to the engaging fellow citizen who took my ticket down in Georgia and, when I asked did his train usually make its scheduled connection at Yemassee Junction, cried out with contagious mirth:
"My Lawd, suh, 'most nevah!"
In these German trains another little discord jarred with some regularity: the German passengers they brought from Berlin, or were taking back to Berlin, were of a heavy impenetrable rudeness—quite another breed than the kindly Hessians of Frankfurt.
We know the saying of a floor—that it is so clean "you could eat your dinner off it." All the streets of Frankfurt, that I saw, were clean like this. The system of street cars was lucid—and blessedly noiseless!—and their conductors informed with the same adequate gravity I have already noted.
I found that I developed a special affection for Route 19, because this took me from the station to the opera house. But all routes took one to and through aspects of municipal perfection at which one stared with envy as one thought of home.
Oh, yes! Frankfurt is a name to me compact with memories—memories of clean streets; of streets full of by-passers who could direct you when you asked your way; of streets empty of beggars, empty of all signs of desolate, drunken or idle poverty; of streets bordered by substantial stone dwellings, with fragrant gardens; of excellent shops; the streets full of prosperous movement and bustle; an absence of rags, a presence of good stout clothes; a people of contented faces, whether they talked or were silent—the same firm and broad contentment, like a tree deep-rooted, in the city face that was in the country face.
These burghers, these Frankfurters, seemed to be going about their business with a sort of solid yet placid energy, well and deliberately aimed, that would hit the mark at once without wasting powder. It was very different and very superior to the ill-arranged and hectic haste of New York and Chicago; here nobody seemed driven as though by invisible furies—the German business mind was not out of breath.
Such are my memories of Frankfurt at work. Frankfurt at leisure was to be seen in its Palm Garden. This was the town's place of general recreation; large, various, beautifully and intelligently planned; with space for babies to roll in safety, and there were the babies rolling, and their nurses; with courts for tennis, and thither I saw adolescent Frankfurt strolling in flannels and short skirts after business hours; with benches where sat the more elderly, taking the air and gazing at the games or the flowers or the pleasant trees; with paths more sequestered that wound among bowers, convenient for sweethearts—but I did not see any, because I forbore to look. A central building held tropic plants and basins, and large rooms for bad weather, I suppose, with a restaurant; but on this fine day the music played and we dined outside.
An entrance fee, very small, served to make you respect the Palm Garden, since humanity seldom respects what it pays nothing for. Most unexpected show of all in this Palm Garden were the flowers under glass. I had erroneously supposed that any German scheme of color would be heavy, and possibly garish. Never had I beheld more exquisite subtlety on so extended a scale of arrangement. One walked through aisle after aisle of roses and other blooms in these greenhouses—everywhere was the same delicate sense and feeling; the same, in fact, in these flower schemes that one finds in German lyric verse, and in the songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz.
It was in the opera house—Frankfurt has a fine and commodious one—that my whole impression of Germany's glory culminated. The performances drew their light from no Melbas or Carusos, or other meteors, but from a fixed constellation, now and then enriched by some visitor; it was teamwork of drilled and even excellence, singers, chorus, orchestra and scenery unitedly equal to the occasion, in operas old and new, an immense sweep of repertory, with an audience to match—an accustomed audience, to whom music was traditional food, music having always grown hereabout plenteously, indigenously, so that they took it as naturally as they took their Rhine wine, paying for it as moderately, going to hear it in rather plain clothes, as a rule—men in day dress, women in high-neck; not an audience that had to put on its diamonds in order to listen conspicuously to a costly and not comprehended exotic.