“In New York.”
“Now, between us: he is one of the few men in the world I deeply care for—but I don’t think he cares for me.”
“Good Lord!” I said to myself wearily, “why is it that all the charming ladies I meet either are or have been in love with Barfleur. It’s getting monotonous!” But I had to smile.
“You will visit me in Berlin?” she was saying. “I will be back by the twenty-sixth. Can’t you wait that long? Berlin is so interesting. When I come, we shall have such nice talks!”
“Yes—about Barfleur!” I thought to myself. Aloud I said vaguely, “It is charming of you; I will stop over to see you, if I possibly can.” Then I said good night and left.
CHAPTER XLVII
BERLIN
Berlin, when I reached it, first manifested itself in a driving rain. If I laugh at it forever and ever as a blunder-headed, vainglorious, self-appreciative city I shall always love it too. Paris has had its day, and will no doubt have others; London is content with an endless, conservative day; Berlin’s is still to come and come brilliantly. The blood is there, and the hope, and the moody, lustful, Wagnerian temperament.
But first, before I reached it, I suffered a strange mental revolt at being in Germany at all. Why? I can scarcely say. Perhaps I was beginning to be depressed with what in my prejudice I called the dullness of Germany. A little while later I recognized that while there is an extreme conflict of temperament between the average German and myself, I could yet admire them without wishing to be anything like them. Of all the peoples I saw I should place the Germans first for sobriety, industry, thoroughness, a hearty intolerance of sham, a desire and a willingness to make the best of a very difficult earthly condition. In many respects they are not artistically appetizing, being gross physically, heartily passionate, vain, and cocksure; but those things after all are unimportant. They have, in spite of all their defects, great emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities, and these things are important. I think it is unquestionable that in the main they take life far too seriously. The belief in a hell, for instance, took a tremendous grip on the Teutonic mind and the Lutheran interpretation of Protestantism, as it finally worked out, was as dreary as anything could be—almost as dreary as Presbyterianism in Scotland. That is the sad German temperament. A great nationality, business success, public distinction is probably tending to make over or at least modify the Teutonic cast of thought which is gray; but in parts of Germany, for instance at Mayence, you see the older spirit almost in full force.
In the next place I was out of Italy and that land had taken such a strange hold on me. What a far cry from Italy to Germany! I thought. Gone; once and for all, the wonderful clarity of atmosphere that pervades almost the whole of Italy from the Alps to Rome and I presume Sicily. Gone the obvious dolce far niente, the lovely cities set on hills, the castles, the fortresses, the strange stone bridges, the hot, white roads winding like snowy ribbons in the distance. No olive trees, no cypresses, no umbrella trees or ilexes, no white, yellow, blue, brown and sea-green houses, no wooden plows, white oxen and ambling, bare-footed friars. In its place (the Alps and Switzerland between) this low rich land, its railroads threading it like steel bands, its citizens standing up as though at command, its houses in the smaller towns almost uniformly red, its architecture a twentieth century modification of an older order of many-gabled roofs—the order of Albrecht Dürer—with its fanciful decorations, conical roofs and pinnacles and quaint windows and doors that suggest the bird-boxes of our childhood. Germany appears in a way to have attempted to abandon the medieval architectural ideal that still may be seen in Mayence, Mayen, the heart of Frankfort, Nuremberg, Heidelberg and other places and to adapt its mood to the modern theory of how buildings ought to be constructed, but it has not quite done so. The German scroll-loving mind of the Middle Ages is still the German scroll-loving mind of to-day. Look and you will see it quaintly cropping out everywhere. Not in those wonderful details of intricacy, Teutonic fussiness, naïve, jester-like grotesqueness which makes the older sections of so many old German cities so wonderful, but in a slight suggestion of them here and there—a quirk of roof, an over-elaborateness of decoration, a too protuberant frieze or grape-viney, Bacchus-mooded, sex-ornamented panel, until you say to yourself quite wisely, “Ah, Teutons will be Teutons still.” They are making a very different Germany from what the old Germany was—modern Germany dating from 1871—but it is not an entirely different Germany. Its citizens are still stocky, red-blooded, physically excited and excitable, emotional, mercurial, morbid, enthusiastic, women-loving and life-loving, and no doubt will be so, praise God, until German soil loses its inherent essentials, and German climate makes for some other variations not yet indicated in the race.