“La Clou” was radically different. In a way it was an amazing place, catering to the moderately prosperous middle class. It seated, I should say, easily fifteen hundred people, if not more, on the ground floor; and every table, in the evening at least, was full. At either end of the great center aisle bisecting it was stationed a stringed orchestra and when one ceased the other immediately began, so that there was music without interruption. Father and mother and young Lena, the little Heine, and the two oldest girls or boys were all here. During the evening, up one aisle and down another, there walked a constant procession of boys and girls and young men and young women, making shy, conservative eyes at one another.
In Berlin every one drinks beer or the lighter wines—the children being present—and no harm seems to come from it. I presume drunkenness is not on the increase in Germany. And in Paris they sit at tables in front of cafés—men and women—and sip their liqueurs. It is a very pleasant way to enjoy your leisure. Outside of trade or the desire to be president, vice-president, or secretary of something, we in America have so often no real diversions.
In no sense could either of these restaurants be said to be smart. But Berlin, outside of one or two selected spots, does not run to smartness. The “Cabaret Linden” and the “Cabaret Arcadia” were, once more, of a different character. There was one woman at the Cabaret Linden who struck me as having real artistic talent of a strongly Teutonic variety. Claire Waldoff was her name, a hard, shock-headed tomboy of a girl, who sang in a harsh, guttural voice of soldiers, merchants, janitors, and policemen—a really brilliant presentation of local German characteristics. It is curious how these little touches of character drawn from everyday life invariably win thunders of applause. How the world loves the homely, the simple, the odd, the silly, the essentially true! Unlike the others at this place, there was not a suggestive thing about anything which this woman said or did; yet this noisy, driveling audience could not get enough of her. She was truly an artist.
One night we went to the Palais de Danse, admittedly Berlin’s greatest night-life achievement. For several days Herr A. had been saying: “Now to-morrow we must go to the Palais de Danse, then you will see something,” but every evening when we started out, something else had intervened. I was a little skeptical of his enthusiastic praise of this institution as being better than anything else of its kind in Europe. You had to take Herr A.’s vigorous Teutonic estimate of Berlin with a grain of salt, though I did think that a city that had put itself together in this wonderful way in not much more than a half-century had certainly considerable reason to boast.
“But what about the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo?” I suggested, remembering vividly the beauty and glitter of the place.
“No, no, no!” he exclaimed, with great emphasis—he had a habit of unconsciously making a fist when he was emphatic—“not in Monte Carlo, not in Paris, not anywhere.”
“Very good,” I replied, “this must be very fine. Lead on.”
So we went.
I think Herr A. was pleased to note how much of my skepticism melted after passing the sedate exterior of this astounding place.
“I want to tell you something,” said Herr A. as we climbed out of our taxi—a good, solid, reasonably priced, Berlin taxi—“if you come with your wife, your daughter, or your sister you buy a ticket for yourself—four marks—and walk in. Nothing is charged for your female companions and no notice is taken of them. If you come here with a demi-mondaine, you pay four marks for yourself and four for her, and you cannot get in without. They know. They have men at the door who are experts in this matter. They want you to bring such women, but you have to pay. If such a woman comes alone, she goes in free. How’s that?”