To begin with, there are no chairs. You cannot sit down. On a hot summer morning, when you have perhaps been to the market already, you go to the Leipziger Strasse for theatre tickets, a pair of gloves, and two or three small odds and ends. On the ground floor you see gloves, innumerable boxes of them besieged by a pushing, determined crowd of women. The shop ladies in any coloured blouses look hot and weary, but try to serve six customers at once. When you have chosen what you want, and know exactly how sharp the elbows to left and right of you are, you see your lady walk off with your most pushful neighbour and the pair of three-penny gloves she has after much argument agreed to buy; for at Wertheim's you cannot depart with so much as a halfpenny postcard till it has passed through three pairs of hands besides your own. First the shop lady must deposit it with a bill at the cashier's desk. Then, when the cashier can attend to you, you pay for it. Then you may wait any time until the third person concerned will do it up in paper and string. This last proceeding is often so interminably delayed that if you were not in Germany you would snatch at what you have paid for and make off. But the Polizei alone knows what would happen if you ran your head against the established pedantry of things in the city of the Spree. You would probably find yourself in prison for Beamtenbeleidigung or lese majeste. "The Emperor is a fool," said some disloyal subject in a public place. "To prison with him," screamed every horror-struck official. "Off with his head!" "But I meant the Emperor of China," protested the sinner. "That's impossible," said the officials in chorus. "Anyone who says the Emperor is a fool means our Emperor." And an official spirit seems to encroach on the business one, and drill its very customers while it anxiously serves them. For instance, the arrangements for sending what you buy are most tiresome and difficult to understand at Wertheim's. His carts patrol the streets, and your German friends assure you that he sends anything. You find that if you shop with a country card the things entered on it will arrive; but if you buy a bulky toy or some heavy books and pay for them in their departments, you meet with fuss and refusal when you ask as a matter of course to have them sent. It can be done if your goods have cost enough, but not if you have only spent two or three shillings. It is the fashion in England just now for every man who writes about Germans to say that they are immensely ahead of us in business matters. I cannot judge of them in their factories and warehouses, but I am sure they are behind us in their shops. A woman cannot live three hundred miles from Berlin and get everything she wants from Wertheim delivered by return and carriage free. Nor will he supply her with an immense illustrated catalogue and a book of order forms addressed to his firm, so that the trouble of shopping from a distance is reduced to a minimum. In England you can do your London shopping as easily, promptly, and cheaply from a Scotch or a Cornish village as you can from a Surrey suburb.

In most German towns you still find the shops classified on the old lines. You go to one for drapery, and to another for linen, and to another for small wares, and to yet another for ribbons. There are sausage shops and chocolate shops, and in Berlin there are shops for the celebrated Berlin Baumkuchen. There are a great many cellar shops all over Germany, and these are mostly restaurants, laundries, and greengrocers. The drinking scene in Faust when Mephisto made wine flow from the table takes place in Auerbach's Keller, a cellar restaurant still in existence in Leipzig. The lower class of cellar takes the place in Germany of our slums, and the worst of them are regular thieves' kitchens known to the police. There is an admirable description of life in a cellar shop in Klara Viebig's Das Taegliche Brot. The woman who keeps it has a greengrocery business and a registry office for servants, and as such people go is respectable; but I recommend the book to my countrymen who go to Berlin as officials or journalists for ten days, are taken over various highly polished public institutions, and come back to tell us that the Germans are every man jack of them clean, prosperous, well mannered, and healthy. It is true that German municipal government is striving rather splendidly to bring this state of things about, but they have plenty of work before them still. These cellar shops, for instance, are more fit for mushroom growing than for human nurseries, and yet the picture in the novel of the family struggling with darkness and disease there can still be verified in most of the old streets of Germany.

When our English journalists write column after column about the dangerous explosive energy and restlessness of modern Germany, I feel sure that they must be right, and yet I wish they could have come shopping with me a year or two ago in a small Black Forest town. One of us wanted a watch key and the other a piece of tape, and we set off light-heartedly to buy them, for we knew that there was a draper and a watchmaker in the main street. We knew, too, that in South Germany everyone is first dining and then asleep between twelve and two, so we waited till after two and then went to the watchmaker's. There was no shop window, and when, after ringing two or three times, we were let in we found there was no shop. We sat down in a big cool sitting-room, beautifully clean and tidy. The watchmaker's wife appeared in due course, looked at us with friendly interest, asked us where we came from, and how long we meant to stay, wondered if we knew her cousin Johannes Mueller, a hairdresser in Islington, discussed the relative merits of emigration to England and America, offered us some cherries from a basketful on the table, and at last admitted unwillingly that her husband was not at home, and that she herself knew not whether he had watch keys. So we set off to buy our tape, and again found a private room, an amiable family, but no one who felt able to sell anything. It seemed an odd way of doing business we said to our landlord, but he saw nothing odd in it. Most people were busy with their hay, he explained. Towards the end of a week we caught our watchmaker, and obtained a key, but he would not let us pay for it. He said it was one of an old collection, and of no use to him. The etiquette of shopping in Germany seems to us rather topsy-turvy at first. In a small shop the proprietor is as likely as not to conduct business with a cigar in his mouth, even if you are a lady, but if you are a man he will think you a boor if you omit to remove your hat as you cross his threshold. Whether you are a man, woman, or child, you will wish him good-morning or good-evening before you ask for what you want, and he will answer you before he asks what your commands are. If you are a woman, about as ignorant as most women, and with a humble mind, you will probably have no fixed opinion about the question of free or fair trade. You may even, if you are very humble, recognise that it is not quite the simple question Dick, Tom, and Harry think it is. But you will know for certain that when you want ribbons for a hat you had better buy them in Kensington and not in Frankfurt, and that though there are plenty of cheap materials in Germany, the same quality would be cheaper still in London. Everything to do with women's clothing is dearer there than here. So is stationery, so are groceries, so are the better class of fancy goods. But the Germans, say the Fair Traders, are a prosperous nation, and it is because their manufactures are protected. This may be so. I can only look at various quite small unimportant trifles, such as ribbons, for instance, or pewter vases or blotting-paper or peppermint drops. I know that a German woman either wears a common ribbon on her hat, or pays twice as much as I do for a good one; she is content with one pewter vase where your English suburban drawing-room packs twenty into one corner, with twenty silver frames and vases near them. A few years ago the one thing German blotting-paper refused to do was to absorb ink, and it was so dear that in all small country inns and in old-fashioned offices you were expected to use sand instead. The sand was kept beside the ink in a vessel that had a top like a pepper pot; and it was more amusing than blotting-paper, but not as efficacious. As for the peppermint drops, they used to be a regular export from families living in London to families living in Germany. They were probably needed after having goose and chestnuts for dinner, and ours were twice as large as the German ones and about six times as strong, so no doubt they were like our blotting-paper, and performed what they engaged to perform more thoroughly.

But shops of any kind are dull compared with an open market held in one of the many ancient market places of Germany. Photographs of Freiburg give a bird's-eye view of the town with the minster rising from the midst of its red roofs; but there is just a peep at the market which is being held at the foot of the minster. On the side hidden by the towering cathedral there are some of the oldest houses in Freiburg. It is a large crowded market on certain days of the week, and full of colour and movement. The peasants who come to it from the neighbouring valleys wear bright-coloured skirts and headgear, and in that part of Germany fruit is plentiful, so that all through the summer and autumn the market carts and barrows are heaped with cherries, wild strawberries, plums, apricots, peaches, and grapes in their season. The market place itself, and even the steps of the minster and of the surrounding houses, are crowded with the peasants and their produce, and with the leisurely servants and housewives bargaining for the day's supplies. From a view of the market place at Cottbus in Brandenburg you may get a better idea of the people at a German market; the servants with their umbrellas, their big baskets, their baggy blouses and no hats, the middle class housewife with a hat or a bonnet, and a huge basket on her arm, a nursemaid in peasant costume stooping over her perambulator, other peasants in costume at the stalls, and two of the farm carts that are in some districts yoked oftener with oxen than with horses. There is naturally great variety in the size and character of markets, according to the needs they supply. In Hamburg the old names show you that there were separate markets for separate trades, so that you went to the Schweinemarkt when you wanted pigs, and to some other part of the city when you wanted flowers and fruit. In Berlin there are twelve covered markets besides the open ones, and they are all as admirably clean, tidy, and unpoetical as everything else is in that spick and span, swept and garnished Philistine city. The green gooseberries there are marked "unripe fruit" by order of the police, so that no one should think they were ripe and eat them uncooked; and you can buy rhubarb nowadays, a vegetable the modern Berliner eats without shuddering. But in a Berlin market you buy what you need as quickly as you can and come away. There is nothing to tempt you, nothing picturesque, nothing German, if German brings to your mind a queer mixture of poetry and music, gabled, tumbledown houses, storks' nests, toys, marvellous cakes and sweets and the kindliest of people. If you are so modern that German means nothing to you but drill and hustle, the roar of factories and the pride of monster municipal ventures, then you may see the markets of Berlin and rest content with them. They will show you what you already know of this day's Germany. But my household treasures gathered here and there in German markets did not have one added to their number in Berlin.

"That!" said a German friend when I showed her a yellow pitcher dabbed with colour, and having a spout, a handle, and a lid,—"that! I would not have it in my kitchen."

It certainly only cost the third of a penny, but it lived with honour in my drawing-room till it shared the fate of all clay, and came in two in somebody's hands. The blue and grey bellied bottle, one of those in which the Thuringian peasants carry beer to the field, cost three halfpence, but the butter-dish with a lid of the same ware only cost a halfpenny. There is always an immense heap of this rough grey and blue pottery in a South German market, and it is much prettier than the more ornate Coblenz ware we import and sell at high prices. So is the deep red earthenware glazed inside and rough outside and splashed with colours. You find plenty of it at the Leipziger Messe, that historical fair that used to be as important to Western Europe as Nijni Novgorod is to Russia and the East. To judge from modern German trade circulars, it is still of considerable importance, and the buildings in which merchants of all countries display their wares have recently been renovated and enlarged. Out of doors the various market-places are covered with little stalls selling cheap clothing, cheap toys, jewellery, sweets, and gingerbread; all the heterogeneous rubbish you have seen a thousand times at German fairs, and never tire of seeing if a fair delights you.

But better than the Leipziger Messe, better even than a summer market at Freiburg or at Heidelburg, is a Christmas market in any one of the old German cities in the hill country, when the streets and the open places are covered with crisp clean snow, and the mountains are white with it, and the moon shines on the ancient houses, and the tinkle of sledge bells reaches you when you escape from the din of the market, and look down at the bustle of it from some silent place, a high window perhaps, or the high empty steps leading into the cathedral. The air is cold and still, and heavy with the scent of the Christmas trees brought from the forest for the pleasure of the children. Day by day you see the rows of them growing thinner, and if you go to the market on Christmas Eve itself you will find only a few trees left out in the cold. The market is empty, the peasants are harnessing their horses or their oxen, the women are packing up their unsold goods. In every home in the city one of the trees that scented the open air a week ago is shining now with lights and little gilded nuts and apples, and is helping to make that Christmas smell, all compact of the pine forest, wax candles, cakes, and painted toys, you must associate so long as you live with Christmas in Germany.



CHAPTER XVII

EXPENSES OF LIFE

A few years ago a German economist reckoned that there were only 250,000 families in the empire whose incomes exceeded L450, a year. There were nearly three million households living on incomes ranging from L135 to L450, and nearly four millions with more than L90 but less than L135. But there were upwards of five millions whose incomes fell below L45. Since that estimate was made, Germany has grown in wealth and prosperity; and in the big cities there is great expenditure and luxury amongst some classes, especially amongst the Jews who can afford it, and amongst the officers of the army who as a rule cannot. But the bulk of the nation is poor, and class for class lives on less than people do in England. For instance, the headmaster of a school gets about L100 a year in a small town, and from L200 to L300 in a big one. A lieutenant gets about L65 a year, and an additional L12 if he has no private means. His uniform and mess expenses are deducted from this. He is not allowed to marry on his official income, unless he or his wife has an income of L125 in addition to his pay, as even in Germany an army man can hardly keep up appearances and support a wife and family on less than L190 a year. It is quite common to hear of a clerk living on L40 or L50, or of a doctor who knows his work and yet can only make L150. The official posts so eagerly sought after are poorly paid; so are servants, agricultural labourers, and artisans. When you are in Germany, if you are interested in questions of income and expenditure, you are always trying to make up your mind why a German family can live as successfully on L400 as an English family on L700, for you know that rent and taxes are high and food and clothing dear. If you are a woman and think about it a great deal, and look at family life in as many places and classes as you can, you finally decide that there are three chief reasons for the great difference between the cost of life in England and Germany. In the first place, labour is cheaper there; in the second place, the standard of luxury and even of comfort is lower; in the third place, the women are thriftier and more industrious than Englishwomen. This, too, leaves out of account the most important fact, that the State educates a man's children for next to nothing; and drills the male ones into shape when they serve in the army.

Servants, we have seen, get lower wages than they do here, but the real economy is in the smaller number kept. Where we pay and maintain half a dozen a German family will be content with two, and the typical small English household that cannot face life without its plain cook in the kitchen and its parlour-maid in her black gown at the front door, will throughout the German Empire get along quite serenely with one young woman to cook and clean and do everything else required. If she is a "pearl" she probably makes the young ladies' frocks and irons the master's shirts to fill in her time. Germans do not trouble about the black frock and the white apron at the front door. They will even open the door to you themselves if the "girl" is washing or cooking. A female servant is always a "girl" in Germany. I once heard a young Englishwoman who had not been long in Germany ask an elderly acquaintance to recommend a dressmaker.

"The best one in —— is Fraeulein Mueller," said the elderly acquaintance.

"But she is too expensive," said the Englishwoman, and she glanced across the room at the lady's nieces, who were neatly and plainly dressed. "Do girls go to Fraeulein Mueller?"

"Girls! Certainly not," said the lady, with the expression Germans keep for the insane English it is their fate to encounter occasionally.

"But that is what I want to know, ... a dressmaker girls go to ... girls with a small allowance."

"I am afraid I cannot help you," said the lady stiffly. "I know nothing about the dressmakers girls employ."

"Perhaps Miss Brown means 'young girls,'" said one of the nieces, who was not as slow in the uptake as her aunt, and it turned out that this was what Miss Brown did mean; but she had not known that in everyday life Maedchen without an adjective usually means a servant. She had heard of Das Maedchen aus der Fremde and Der Tod und das Maedchen, and blundered.

I once made a German exceedingly angry by saying that the standard of comfort was higher in England than in Germany. She said it was lower. When you have lived in both countries and with both peoples you arrive in the end at having your opinions, and knowing that each one you hold will be disputed on one side or the other. "Find out what means Gemuetlichkeit, and do it without fail," says Hans Breitmann, but Gemuetlichkeit and comfort are not quite interchangeable words. Our word is more material. When we talk of English comfort we are thinking of our open fires, our solid food, our thick carpets, and our well-drilled smart-looking servants. The German is thinking of the spiritual atmosphere in his own house, the absence, as he says, of ceremony and the freedom of ideas. He talks of a man being gemuetlich in his disposition, kindly, that is, and easy going. We talk of a house being comfortable, and when we do use the word for a person usually mean that she is rather stout. When both you and the German have decided that "comfort" for the moment shall mean material comfort, you will disagree about what is necessary to yours. You must have your bathroom, your bacon for breakfast, your table laid precisely, your meals served to the moment, your young women in black or your staid men to give them to you, and your glowing fires in as many rooms as possible. The German cares for none of these things. He would rather have his half-pound of odds and ends from the provision shop than your boiled cod, roast mutton, and apple-tart; he wants his stove, his double windows, his good coffee, his kraeftige Kost, and freedom to smoke in every corner of his house. He is never tired of telling you that, though you have more political freedom in England, you are groaning under a degree of social tyranny that he could not endure for a day. The Idealist, quoted in a former chapter, is for ever talking of the "hypocrisy" of English life, and her burning anxiety is to save the children of certain Russian and German exiles from contact with it. Another German tells you that our system of collegiate life for women would not suit her countryfolk, because they are more "individual." Each one likes to choose her own rooms, and live as she pleases. The next German has suffered torments in London because he had to sit down to certain meals at certain hours instead of eating anything he fancied at any time he felt hungry, and I suppose it is only your British Heuchelei that leads you to smile politely instead of adding, "As the beasts of the field do." But I am always mazed, as the Cornish say, when Germans talk of their freedom from convention. In Hamburg I was once seriously rebuked by an old friend for carrying a book through the streets that was not wrapped up in paper. In Hamburg that is one of the things people don't do. In Mainz and in many other German towns there are certain streets where one side, for reasons no one can explain, is taboo at certain hours of the day; not of the night, but of the day. You may go to a music shop at midday to buy a sonata, and find, if you are a girl, that you have committed a crime. The intercourse between young people outside their homes is hedged round with convention. German titles of address are so absurdly formal that Germans laugh at them themselves. Their ceremonies in connection with anniversaries and family events bristle with convention, and offer pitfalls at every step to the stranger or the blunderer. It is true that men do not dress for dinner every day, and wax indignant over the necessity of doing so for the theatre in England; but there are various occasions when they wear evening dress in broad daylight, and an Englishman considers that an uncomfortable convention. The truth is, that these questions of comfort and ceremonial are not questions that should be discussed in the hostile dogmatic tone adopted in both countries by those who only know their own. The ceremonies that are foreign to you impress you, while those you have been used to all your life have become a second nature. An Englishwoman feels downright uncomfortable in her high stuff gown at night, and a German lady brought up at one of the great German Courts told me that when she stayed in an English country house and put on what she called a ball dress for dinner every night, she felt like a fool.

To come back to questions of expenditure so intimately related to questions of comfort, it must be remembered that in an English household there are two dinners a day: one early for the servants and children, and one late for the grown-ups; and solid dinners cost money even in England, where at present there is no meat famine. When Germans dine late they don't also dine early, even where there are children; while the kitchen dinner, that meal of supreme importance here, is eaten when the family has finished theirs, and is as informal as the meal a bird makes of berries. In a German household, living on a small income, nothing is wasted,—not fuel, not food, not cleaning materials, as far as possible not time. The tuechtige Hausfrau would be made miserable by having to pay and feed a woman who put on gala clothes at midday, and did no work to soil them after that.

"Two girls," I once heard a German say to an Englishwoman who had just described her own modest household which she ran, she said, with two maids. "Two girls ... for you and your husband. But what, I ask you, does the second one do?"

"She cleans the rooms and waits at table and opens the door," said the Englishwoman.

"All that can one girl do just as well. I assure you it is so. There cannot possibly be work in your household for two girls. You have told me how quietly you live, and I know what English cooking is, if you can call it cooking."

"You see, there must be someone to open the door."

"Why could one girl not answer the door, ... unless she was washing. Then you would naturally go yourself."

"But it wouldn't be natural in England," said the Englishwoman. "It would be odd. Besides, if you only have one servant, she can't dress for lunch."

"Why should she dress for lunch?" asked the German. "My Auguste is a pearl, but she only dresses when we have Gesellschaft. Then she wears a plaid blouse and a garnet brooch that I gave her last Christmas, and she looks very well in them. But every day ... and for lunch, when half the work of the day is still to be done.... What, then, does your second girl do in the afternoons?"

"She brings tea and answers the door."

"Always the door. But your husband is not a doctor or a dentist. Why do so many people come to your door that you need a whole girl to attend to them?"

"Oh! They don't," said the Englishwoman, getting rather worn. "There are very few, really. It's the custom."

"Ah!" said the German, with a long deep breath of satisfaction. "So are you English ... such slaves to custom. Gott sei Dank that I do not live in a country where I should have to keep a girl in idleness for the sake of the door. With us a door is a door. Anyone who happens to be near opens it."

"I know they do," said the Englishwoman, "and when a servant comes she expects you to say Guten Tag before you ask whether her mistress is at home?"

"Certainly. It is a politeness. We are a polite nation."

"And once, when I had just come back from Germany, I said Good-morning to an English butler before I asked if his mistress was at home, and he thought I was mad. We each have our own conventions. That's the truth of the matter."

"Not at all," said the German. "The truth of the matter is, that the English are extremely conventional, and follow each other as sheep do; but the German does what pleases him, without asking first whether his neighbour does likewise."

This is what the German really believes, and you agree or disagree with him according to the phase of life you look at when he is speaking. You find that when he comes to England he honestly feels checked at every turn by our unwritten laws, while when you go to Germany you wonder how he can submit so patiently to the pettiness and multiplicity of his written ones. He vaguely feels the pressure and criticism of your indefinite code of manners; you think his elaborate system of titles, introductions, and celebrations rather childish and extremely troublesome. If you have what the English call manners you will take the greatest care not to let him find this out, and in course of time, however much you like him on the whole, you will lose your patience a little with the individual you are bound to meet, the individual who has England on his nerves, and exhausts his energy and eloquence in informing you of your country's shortcomings. They are legion, and indeed leave no room for the smallest virtue, so that in the end you can only wonder solemnly why such a nation ever came to be a nation at all.

"That is easily answered," says your Anglophobe. "England has arrived where she is by seizing everything she can lay hands on. Now it is going to be our turn."

You express your interest in the future of Germany as seen by your friend, and he shows you a map of Europe which he has himself marked with red ink all round the empire as it will be a few years hence. There is not much Europe outside the red line.

"But you haven't taken Great Britain," you say, rather hurt at being left out in this way.

"We don't want it ... otherwise, ... but India ... possibly Australia." He waves his hands.

You look at him pensively, and suddenly see one of the great everyday distances between your countryfolk and his. You think of a French novel that has amused you lately, because the parents of the heroine objected to her marriage with the hero on grounds you were quite incapable of understanding. The young man's work was in Cochin-China, and the young lady's father and mother did not wish her to go so far. Never in your life have you heard anyone raise such a trivial difficulty. You live in a dull sober street mostly inhabited by dull sober people, but there is not one house in it that is not linked by interest or affection, often doubly linked, with some uttermost end of the earth. You can hardly find an English family that has not one member or more in far countries, and so the common talk of English people in all classes travels the width of the world in the wake of those dear to them. But in 1900 only 22,309 Germans out of a population of 60,400,000 emigrated from Germany, and these, says Mr. Eltzbacher, whose figures I am quoting, were more than counterbalanced by immigration into Germany from Austria, Russia, and Italy. It is true that the population of Germany is increasing with immense rapidity, and that the question of expansion is becoming a burning one; but it is a question quite outside the strictly home politics of this unpretending chronicle. We are only concerned with the obvious fact that Germans settle in far countries in much smaller numbers than we do, and that those who go abroad mostly choose the British flag and avoid their own. It does not occur as easily to a German as to an Englishman that he may better his fortunes in another part of the world, or if he is an official that he will apply for a post in Asia or Africa. He wants to stay near the Rhine or the Spree where he was born, and to bring up his children there; and with the help of the State and his wife he contrives to do this on an extraordinary small income. The State, as we have seen, almost takes his children off his hands from the time they are six years old. It brings them up for nothing, or next to nothing; in cases of need it partially feeds and clothes them, it even washes them. Some English humorist has said that a German need only give himself the trouble to be born; his government does the rest. But first his mother and then his wife do a good deal. They are like the woman in Proverbs who worked willingly with her hands, rose while it was night, saw well to the ways of her household, and ate not the bread of idleness.

I have before me the household accounts of several German families living on what we should call small incomes; and they show more exactly than any vague praise can do the prodigies of thrift accomplished by people obliged to economise, and at the same time to present a respectable appearance. The first one is the budget of a small official living with a wife and two children in a little town where a flat on the fourth or fifth floor can be had at a low rent:—

L s. d. Rent 20 0 0 Fuel 3 10 0 Light 1 10 0 Clothes for the man 3 0 0 Clothes for the wife 2 0 0 Clothes for the children 1 0 0 Boots for the man 1 0 0 Boots for the wife and children 1 5 0 Repairs to boots 0 17 6 Washing and house repairs 3 0 0 Doctor 2 0 0 Newspaper 0 12 0 Charwoman 3 0 0 Taxes 2 10 0 Postage 1 4 0 Insurances 2 10 0 Amusements 3 0 0 Housekeeping 45 0 0 Sundries 3 1 0 —————- L100 0 0 ===========

The fuel allowed in this budget consists of 30 cwt. of Steinkohlen at 1 mark 15 pf. the cwt., 30 cwt. of Braunkohlen at 70 pf. the cwt., and 4 cwt. of kindling at 1 mark 10 pf. the cwt. This quantity, 3 tons without the kindling, would have to be used most sparingly to last through a long rigorous German winter, as well as for cooking and washing in summer. The amount set apart for lights allows for one lamp in the living room and two small ones in the passage and kitchen. The man may have a new suit every year, one year in winter and the next year in summer, and his suit may cost L2, 10s. His great-coat also is to cost L2, 10s., but he can't have a new suit the year he buys one, and it should last him at least four years. The ten shillings left is for all his other clothes except boots, and presumably for all his personal expenses, including tobacco, so he had better not spend it all at once. His wife performs greater miracles still, for she has to buy a winter gown and a summer gown, a hat and gloves, for her L2. These are not fancy figures. The miracle is performed by tens of thousands of German women every year. They buy a few yards of cheap stuff and get in a sewing-woman to make it up, for as a rule they are not nearly as clever and capable as Englishwomen about making things for themselves. Your English maid-servant will buy a blouse length at a sale for a few pence, make it up smartly, and wear it out in a month of Sundays. Your German she-official will have a blouse made for her, and it will probably be hideous; but she will wear it so carefully that it lasts her two years. Under-raiment she will never want to buy, as she will have brought a life-long supply to her home at marriage. You easily figure the children who are dressed on twenty marks a year, the girl in a shoddy tartan made in a fashion of fifty years ago with the "waist" hooked behind, and the boy in some snuff-coloured mixture floridly braided. But the interesting revelation of this small official budget is in its carefully planned fare made out for a fortnight in summer and a fortnight in winter. In winter the Hausfrau may spend about 17s. a week on her food and in summer 19s. That leaves only 2s. a month for the extra days of the month, and for small expenses, such as soda, matches, blacking, and condiments. Breakfast may cost sixpence a day, and for this there is to be 3/4 litre of milk, 4 small white rolls, 1/2 lb. rye bread, 2 oz. of butter, 1 oz. of coffee. Nothing is set down for sugar, and I think that most German families of this class would not use sugar, and would eat their bread without butter. On Sunday they have a goose for dinner, and pay 4s. 6d. for it, and though 4s. 6d. is not much to pay for a goose, it seems an extravagant dish for this family, until you discover that they are still dining on it on Wednesday. Not only has the Hausfrau brought home this costly bird, but she has laid in a whole pound of lard to roast with it, white bread for stuffing, and cabbage for a vegetable. Pudding is not considered necessary after goose, and for supper there is bread and milk for the children, and bread, butter, cheese, and beer for the parents. On Monday they have a rest from goose, and dine on gehacktes Schweinefleisch. German butchers sell raw minced meat very cheaply, and the Hausfrau would probably get as much as she wanted for three-halfpence. On Tuesday they get back to the goose, and have a hash of the wings, neck, and liver with potatoes. For supper, rice cooked with milk and cinnamon. Germans use cinnamon rather as the Spaniards use garlic. They seem to think it improves everything, and they eat quantities of milky rice strewn with it. On Wednesday my family has soup for dinner, a solid soup made of goose, rice, and a pennyworth of carrots. For supper there is sausage, bread, and beer. By the way, this official is not really representative, for he spends nothing on tobacco, and only a penny every other day on beer. He cannot have been a Bavarian. His wife gives him cod with mustard sauce on Thursday, Sauerkraut and shin of beef on Friday, and on Saturday lentil soup with sausages, an excellent dish when properly cooked for those who want solid nourishing food. On the following Sunday 3 pounds of beef appears, and potato dumplings with stewed fruit, another good German mixture if the dumplings are as light as they should be. The husband has them warmed up for supper next day. One day he has bacon and vegetables for dinner, and another day only apple sauce and pancakes, but at every midday meal throughout the fortnight he has carefully planned food on which his wife spends considerable time and trouble. He never comes home from his work on a winter's day to have a mutton bone and watery potatoes set before him. In summer the bill of fare provides soups made with wine, milk, or cider; sometimes there are curds for supper, and if they have a chicken, rice and stewed fruit are eaten with it. But a chicken only costs this Hausfrau 1 mark 20 pf., so it must have been a small one. I have often bought pigeons for 25 pf. apiece in Germany, and stuffed in the Bavarian way with egg and bread crumbs they are good eating. Fruit is extremely cheap and plentiful in many parts of Germany, but not everywhere. We have Heine's word for it that the plums grown by the wayside between Jena and Weimar are good, for most of us know his story of his first interview with Goethe; how he had looked forward to the meeting with ecstasy and reflection, and how when he was face to face with the great man all he found to say was a word in praise of the plums he had eaten as he walked. In the fruit-growing districts most of the roads are set with an avenue of fruit trees, and so law-abiding are the boys of Germany, and so plentiful is fruit in its season, that no one seems to steal from them. I have talked with elderly Germans, who remembered buying 3 pounds of cherries for 6 kreuzers, a little more than a penny, when they were boys. But those days are over. The small sweet-water grapes from the vineyards of South Germany are to be had for the asking where they are grown, and apricots are plentiful in some districts, and the little golden plums called Mirabellen that are dried in quantities and make the best winter compote there is. When I see English grocers' shops loaded up with dried American apples and apricots that are not worth eating, however carefully they are cooked, I always wonder why we do not import Mirabellen instead.

Sweetbreads in the Berlin markets were about 1 mark 10 pf. each last year, small tongues were 1 mark 10 pf. Morscheln, a poor kind of fungus much used in Germany, were 65 pf. a pound, real mushrooms were 1 mark 50 pf., and the dried ones used for flavouring sauces were the same price. Butter and milk are usually about the same price as with us, but eggs are cheaper. You get twenty for a mark still in spring, and I remember making an English plumcake once in a Bavarian village and being charged 6 pf. for the three eggs I used. A rye loaf weighing 4 pounds costs 50 pf., the little white rolls cost 3 pf. each. In Berlin last year vegetables were nearly as dear as in London, but in many parts of Germany they are much cheaper. I know of one housewife who fed her family largely on vegetables, and would not spend more than 10 pf. a day on them, but she lived in a small country town where green stuff was a drug in the market. Asparagus is cheaper than here, for it costs 35 pf. to 40 pf. a pound, and is eaten in such quantities that even an asparagus lover gets tired of it. Meat has risen terribly in price of late years. In the open market you can get fillet of beef for 1 mark 60 pf., sirloin for 90 pf., good cuts of mutton for 90 pf. to 1 mark, and veal for 1 mark, but all these prices are higher at a butcher's shop. Fillet of beef, for instance, is 2 marks 40 pf. a pound there.

The budget of a family living on L250 a year does not call for so much comment as the smaller one, because L250 is a fairly comfortable income in Germany. Either a schoolmaster or a soldier must have risen in his profession before he gets it; but the following estimate is made out for a business man who does not get a house free or any other aid from outside:—

L s. d. Rent 50 0 0 Fuel 7 10 0 Light 5 0 0 Clothes—husband 6 0 0 " wife 4 0 0 " children 2 10 0 Shoes 4 0 0 School fees 5 0 0 Washing 5 0 0 Repairs to linen 2 10 0 Doctor and dentist 5 0 0 Newspapers and magazines 2 0 0 Servant's wages 9 0 0 Servant's insurance and Christmas present 2 0 0 Taxes 6 0 0 Postage 1 10 0 Insurances 5 0 0 Housekeeping 90 0 0 Amusements and travelling 25 0 0 Christmas and presents 10 0 0 Sundries 3 0 0 —————- L250 0 0 ===========

On examining this budget it will occur to most people that the poor Hausfrau might spend a little more on her clothes and a little less on her presents, and as a matter of fact even in Germany, where Christmas is a burden as well as a pleasure, this would be done. The next budget is the most interesting, because it is not an ideal one drawn up for anyone's guidance, but is taken without the alteration of one penny from the beautifully kept account book of a friend. There were no children in the family, so nothing appears for school fees or children's clothes. The household consisted of husband and wife and one maid. They lived in one of the largest and dearest of German cities, and the husband's work as well as their social position forced certain expenses on them. For instance, they had to live in a good street and on the ground floor; and they had to entertain a good deal.

M. Pf. Bread 180 — Meat 310 95 Fish and poultry 98 55 Aufschnitt 67 25 Potatoes 19 10 Vegetables 110 50 Fruit 87 95 Eggs 83 90 Milk 121 85 Butter 195 — Lard 36 55 Flour, Gries, etc. 25 60 Sugar and treacle 66 20 Groceries 22 50 Coffee 67 — Tea and chocolate 17 95 Drinks 159 10 Lights 30 55 Washing 126 80 Laundress 32 25 Ice 10 20 Coal and wood 170 10 Turf and other fuel 159 25 Matches 3 — Cleaning 60 — Furniture 4 55 Repairs 19 50 Crockery and kitchenware 38 — Repairs 49 — China and glass 30 5 Clothes—husband 181 20 " wife 452 85 Boots—husband 24 10 " wife 60 35 Linen 17 5 Charities 232 20 Rent 2150 — Rent of husband's share of professional rooms 318 70 —— — Carry forward 5839 45

M. Pf. Brought forward 5839 45 Fares 46 10 Books 64 25 Writing materials 30 50 Charwoman and tips 85 95 Wages and servants' presents 335 50 Papers 35 25 Carpenter 125 — Tobacco and cigars 165 90 Sundries 39 35 Photography and fishing tackle 141 10 Music lessons 15 10 Medicine 13 80 Hairdresser 2 40 Presents—family 291 75 " friends 119 — Amusements 137 25 Travelling 736 40 Stamps 99 65 Entertaining (at Home) 232 — Charities[2] 24 — Subscriptions 119 80 Fire insurance 12 30 Old age insurance 10 40 —— — 8722 20 ==== ==

There are some interesting points about this budget as compared with an English one of L436. It will be seen that although meat is so dear in Germany the weekly butcher's bill for three people was only 6s., fish and poultry together only 2s., and the ham sausage, etc. from the provision shop under 1s. 6d. a week. The washing bill for the year is low, because nearly everything was washed at home, and dear as fuel is in Germany this household spent about L16, where an English one presenting the same front would spend L20 to L25. Observe, too, the amount spent on servants' wages by people who lived in a large charmingly furnished flat, and had a long visiting list. The wife, too, a very pretty woman and always well dressed, spent much less on her toilet than anyone would have guessed from its finish and variety, for she came from one of the German cities where women do dress well. There is nearly as much difference amongst German cities in this respect as there is amongst nations. Berlin is far behind either Hamburg or Frankfurt, for instance. The middle-class women of Berlin have an extraordinary affection all through the summer season for collarless blouses, bastard tartans, and white cotton gloves with thumbs but no fingers. In England the force of custom drives women to uncover their necks in the evening, whether it becomes them or not, and it is not a custom for which sensible elderly women can have much to say. But pneumonia blouses have never been universal wear in any country, and it is impossible to explain their apparently irresistible attraction for all ages and sizes of women in the Berlin electric cars. Those who were not wearing pneumonia blouses a year ago were wearing Reform-Kleider, shapeless ill-cut garments usually of grey tweed. The oddest combination, and quite a common one, was a sack-like Reform-Kleid, with a saucy little coloured bolero worn over it, fingerless gloves, and a madly tilted beflowered hat perched on a dowdy coiffure. These are rude remarks to make about the looks of foreign ladies, but the Reform-Kleid is just as hideous and absurd in Germany now as our bilious green draperies were on the wrong people twenty-five years ago, and I am sure every foreigner who came to England must have laughed at them. On the whole, I would say of German women in general what a Frenchwoman once said to me in the most matter-of-fact tone of Englishwomen, Elles s'habillent si mal.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Probably private charities.



CHAPTER XVIII

HOSPITALITY

If a German cannot afford to ask you to dinner he asks you to supper, and makes his supper inviting. At least, he does if he is sensible, and if he lives where an inexpensive form of entertainment is in vogue. But even in Germany people are not sensible everywhere. The headmaster of a school in a small East Prussian town told me that his colleagues, the higher officials and other persons of local importance, felt bound to entertain their friends at least once a year, and that their way was to invite everyone together to a dinner given at the chief hotel in the town; and that to do this a family would stint itself for months beforehand. He spoke with knowledge, so I record what he said; but I have never been amongst Germans who were hospitable in this painful way. Hotels are used for large entertainments, just as they are in England, but most people receive their friends in their homes, and only hire servants for some special function, like a wedding or a public dinner.

The form of hospitality most popular in England now, the visit of two or three days' duration, is hardly known in Germany, and I believe that they have not begun yet to supply their guests with small cakes of soap labelled "Visitors," and meant to last for a week-end but not longer. In towns no one dreams of having a constant succession of staying guests, and either in town or country when a German family expects a guest at all it is more often than not for the whole summer or winter. You do not find a German girl arranging, as her English cousin will, for a round of visits, fitting in dates, writing here and there to know if people can take her in, and by the same post answering those who are planning a pilgrimage for themselves and wish to be taken. A visit in Germany is not the flighty affair it is with us.

"This winter," says your friend, "my niece from Posen will be with us," and presently the niece arrives and stays about three months. There is rarely more than one spare room on a flat, and that is often a room not easily spared. In country houses there are rows of rooms, but they are not filled by an everlasting procession of guests in the English way. When you stay in a country house at home you wonder how your hosts ever get anything done, and whether they don't sometimes wish they had a few days to themselves. To be sure, English hosts go about their business and leave you to yours, more than Germans think polite. I once spent six weeks, quite an ordinary visit as to length, with some friends who had several grown-up children. It was a most cheerful friendly household, but one day I got into a corner near the stove, rather glad for a change to be myself for a while with a novel for company. When I had been there a little time the second daughter looked in and at once apologised.

"Mamma sent me to see," she explained,—"she feared you were by yourself."

It is not easy to tell your German hosts that you like and wish to be by yourself sometimes; and if you say that you are used to it in England you won't impress them. The English are so inhospitable and unfriendly, they will say, for that is one of the many popular myths that are believed about us. I have been told of a German lady who has lived here most of her life, and complains to her German friends that she has never spent a night under an English roof; but then, she chooses to associate exclusively with Germans, whose roofs she refuses to regard as English ones, even when they are in Kensington; and she cherishes such an invincible prejudice against the born English that she lives amongst them year after year without making a friend. It would be quite simple to perform the same feat in Paris, or even in Berlin, although there you would not have such a large foreign colony to stand between you and the detestable natives.

The real difficulty in writing about German hospitality is to find and express the ways in which it differs from our own; and certainly these lie little in qualities of kindness and generosity. Amongst both nations, if you have a friendly disposition you will find friends easily, and receive kindness on all sides. Perhaps, as one concrete instance is worth many assertions, I may describe a visit I paid many years ago to a family who invited me because a marriage had recently connected us. I had seen some of the family at the wedding, and had been surprised to receive a warm invitation, not for a week-end and a cake of visitors' soap, but for the rest of the winter; six weeks or two months at least. The family living at home consisted of the parents, a grown-up son and two grown-up daughters. Some of them met me at the station, for the German does not breathe who would let a guest arrive or depart alone. Your friends often give you flowers when you arrive, and invariably when you go away. I cannot remember about the flowers on this occasion, but I remember vividly that the day after my arrival the two married daughters living in the same town both called on me and brought me flowers. Week after week, too, they made it their pleasure to entertain me just as kindly as my immediate hosts, taking me to concerts or the opera, asking me to dinner or supper, including me on every occasion in the family festivities, which were numerous and lively. In some ways my hosts found me a disappointing guest, and said so. The trouble was that I liked plain rolls and butter for breakfast, while the daughters for days before I came had baked every size and variety of rich cake for me to eat first thing in the morning with my coffee. I never could eat enough to please anyone either. You never can in Germany, try as you may. Yet it was hungry weather, for the Rhine was frozen hard all the time I was there, and we used to skate every day in the harbour when the daughters of the house had finished their morning's work. Two maids were kept on the flat, but, like most German servants, they were supposed to require constant supervision, and when a room was turned out the young ladies in their morning wrappers helped to do it. They helped with the ironing too and the cooking, and did all the mending of linen and clothes. "A child's time belongs to her parents," said the father one day when the elder daughter wanted to skate, but was told that she could not be spared. "I've had a heavenly time," said a girl friend who had been laid up for some weeks with a sprained ankle; "I've had nothing to do but read and amuse myself." The household work, however, was usually done before the one o'clock dinner, and the afternoon was given up to skating, walks, and visits. There were not so many formal calls paid as in England, but there was a constant interchange of hospitality amongst the members of the family, the kind of intimate unceremonious entertaining described in Miss Austen's novels. Every time one of the many small children had a birthday there was a feast of chocolate and cakes, a gathering of the whole clan. The birthday cake had a sugared Spruch on it, and a little lighted candle for each year of the child's age, and the birthday table had a present on it from everyone who came to the party, and many who did not. Once a week the married daughters and their husbands came to supper with my hosts, and every day when they were not coming to supper they called on their mother, and if she could coax them to stay drank their afternoon coffee with her. Sometimes one or two strangers were asked to coffee, for this household was an old-fashioned one, and gave you good coffee rather than wishy-washy tea. It made a point of honour of a Meringuetorte when strangers came, and of the little chocolate cream cakes Germans call Othellos. But it must not be supposed that one or two strangers constitute a Kaffee-Klatsch, that celebrated form of entertainment where at every sip a reputation dies. A genuine Klatsch was, however, given during my stay by a young married woman who wished to entertain her friends and display her furniture. About twenty ladies were invited, and when they had assembled they were solemnly conducted through every room of the flat from the drawing-room to the spick-and-span kitchen, where every pan was of shining copper and every cloth embroidered with the bride's monogram. The procession as it filed through the rooms chattered like magpies, for except myself every member of it had been to school with the bride, and had helped to adorn her home with embroidered chair backs, cushions, cloths, newspaper stands, foot-stools, duster bags, and suchlike, all of which they now had the pleasure of seeing in the places suitable to them. By the time we sat down in the dining-room to a table loaded with cakes, the slight frost of arrival had melted away. The strange Englishwoman no longer acted as a wet blanket, and when she tried to converse with her neighbours she found, as she still finds at German entertainments, that she could only do so by screaming at the top of her voice as you do in England in a high wind or in the sound of loud machinery. Everyone was in the highest spirits, and the collective noise they made was amazing. In Germany, when actors play English parts or when people in private life put on English manners, the first thing they do is to lower their voices as if they had met to bury a friend. This is the way our natural manner strikes them, while their natural manner strikes us as easy and jolly, but tiring to the voice and after a time to the spirit. There are quiet Germans, but when they sit at a good man's table they must certainly either shout or be left out of all that goes on. At a Kaffee-Klatsch you either shout or whisper, you eat every sort of rich cake presented to you if you can, you drink chocolate or coffee with whipped cream. Nowadays you would often find tea provided instead. When the hostess finds she cannot persuade anyone to eat another cake, she leads her guests back to the drawing-room, and the Klatsch goes on. There is often music as well as gossip, and before you are allowed to depart there are more refreshments, ices, sweetmeats, fruit, little glasses of lemonade or Bowle. When you get home you do not want any supper, and you are quite hoarse, though you have only been to a simple Kaffee-Klatsch without Schleppe. Your friends tell you that when they were young a Kaffee-Klatsch mit Schleppe was the favourite form of entertaining, and lasted the whole afternoon and evening. Men were asked to come in when the Klatsch was over and a supper was provided. Those must have been proud and bustling days for a Hausfrau with one "girl."

To be asked to dinner or supper in Germany may mean anything. Either form of invitation varies both in hour and kind more than it does in England; but unless you are asked to a dinner that precedes a dance you hardly ever need evening dress. Some years ago you would have written that people never dressed for dinner in Germany except when the dinner celebrated a betrothal, a wedding, or some equally important and unusual event. But it has become the fashion in Berlin lately to dress for large dinners and evening entertainments. No rule can be laid down for the guidance of English visitors to Germany, because what you wear must depend partly on the dinner hour and partly on the ways of your hosts and their friends. Last year when I was in Berlin I accepted a formal invitation sent a fortnight beforehand to a dinner given on a Sunday at five o'clock. As the host was a distinguished scientific man who had just returned from a journey round the world, it promised to be an interesting entertainment; and there were, in fact, some of the most celebrated members of the University present. They were all in morning dress, and their womenfolk wore what we should call Sunday frocks. The dinner was beautifully cooked and served, and was not oppressively long. Soup began it of course, roast veal with various vegetables followed, fish came next, lovely little grey-blue fish better to look at than to eat, then chicken, ice pudding, and dessert. There were flowers on the table, but not as many as we should have with the same opportunities, for the house was set in an immense garden; and all down the long narrow table there were bottles of wine and mineral water. When the champagne came, and that is served at a later stage in Germany than it is with us, speeches of congratulation were made to the host on his safe return, and every guest in reach clinked their glasses with his. After dinner men and women rose together in the German way, and drank coffee in the drawing-room. The men lighted cigars. A little later in the evening slender glasses of beer and lemonade were brought round, and just before everyone left at nine o'clock there was tea and a variety of little cakes and sandwiches, not our double sandwiches, but tiny single slices of buttered roll, each with its scrap of caviare or smoked salmon.

A ball supper or a Christmas supper in Germany consists of three or four courses served separately, and all hot except the sweet, which is usually Gefrorenes. Salmon, roast beef or veal, venison or chicken, and then ice would be an ordinary menu, and every course would be divided into portions and handed round on long narrow dishes. In most German towns you are often asked to supper, and very seldom to dinner. You never know beforehand what sort of meal to expect unless you have been to the house before. In some houses it will be hot, in others cold. In Berlin, supper usually offers you a dish made with eggs and mushrooms, eggs and asparagus, or some combination of the kind, and after this the usual variety of ham and sausages fetched from the provision shop. Tea and beer are drunk at this meal in most houses. Sometimes Rhine wine is on the table too. The sweets are often small fruit tartlets served with whipped cream. One menu I remember distinctly, because it was so quaint and full of surprises. We began with huge quantities of asparagus and poached eggs eaten together. Then we had Pumpernickel, Gruyere cheese and radishes, and for a third course vanilla ice. That was the end of the supper, but later in the evening, just before we left, in came an enormous dish covered with gooseberry tartlets, and we had to eat them, for somehow in Germany it seems ungrateful and unfriendly not to eat and drink what is provided.

After dinner or supper everyone wishes everyone else Mahlzeit which is to say, "I wish you a good digestion." Sometimes people only bow as they say it, but more often they shake hands. I know an Englishman who was much puzzled by this ceremony at his first German dinner-party. He saw everyone shaking hands as if they were about to disperse the instant the feast was over, and when his host came to him with a smiling face, took his hand and murmured Mahlzeit, he summoned what German he had at his command and answered Gute Nacht.



CHAPTER XIX

GERMAN SUNDAYS

There was to be singing in the forest on Sunday afternoon, we were told, when we arrived at our little Black Forest town; and we were on no account to miss it. We did not want to miss anything, for whenever we looked out of our windows or strolled through the streets we were entertained and enchanted. From the hotel we could see women and girls pass to and fro all day with the great wooden buckets they carried on their backs and filled at the well close by. As dusk fell the oldest woman in the community hobbled out, let down the iron chains slung across the street, and lighted the oil lamps swinging from them. All the gossips of the place gathered at the well of evenings, and throughout the day barefooted children played there. Behind the main street there were gabled houses with ancient wooden balconies and gardens crammed with pinks. The population mostly sat out of doors after dark, and as it was hot weather no one went to bed early. Even in the dead of night the timber waggons drawn by oxen passed through the town, and the driver did his best to wake us by cracking his long whip. For though a Black Forest town is mediaeval in its ways, it is not restful. It may soothe you by suggestion, the people seem so leisurely and the life so easy going; but there is not an hour in the twenty-four when you are secure from noise. The Sunday in question began with the bustle occasioned in a country inn by an unusual strain on its resources. There must be an extra good dinner for the expected influx of guests, said the landlord's niece, who kept house for him, while the wife and daughters ran a second hotel higher up the valley. We escaped to the forest, where the morning hours of a hot June day were fresh and scented, and we were sorry we had to return to the hotel for a long hot midday dinner. When it was over, we sat in the garden and wondered why people held a festival on the top of a hill on such a sleepy afternoon. However, when the time came we joined the leisurely procession making the ascent. An hour's stroll took us to the concert hall, a forest glade where people sat about in groups waiting for the music to begin. Barrels of beer had been rolled up here, and children were selling Kringel, crisp twists of bread sprinkled with salt. There were more children present than adults, and we observed, as you nearly always will in Germany, that though they belonged to the poorer classes they wore neat clothes and had quiet, modest manners. The older people often let them drink out of their glasses, for it was a thirsty afternoon, and when the singing began the children joined in some of the songs. The occasion of the festival was the friendly meeting of several choirs, and they sang fine anthems as well as Volkslieder. The effect of the music in the heart of the forest was enchanting, and we stayed till the end. These choral competitions or reunions often take place on a Sunday in Germany, and in summer are often held in an inn garden. They bring some custom to the innkeeper, but drunkenness and disorder are almost unknown. In fact, all the cases of drunkenness I have seen in Germany have been in the Munich comic papers. You never by any chance hear of it as you do in England amongst people you know, and you may spend hours at the Berlin Zoo on a Whit-Monday and see no one who is not sober. University students get drunk and have fights with innkeepers and policemen, but that is etiquette rather than vice. Next day they suffer from Katzenjammer, but feel that they are upholding ancient tradition. Real intemperance is found almost entirely amongst the dregs of the big cities and the lowest class of peasants.

In Berlin the better class of artisans and small tradespeople escape from their flats on Sundays to their allotment gardens. You see whole tracts of these gardens on the outskirts of the city, and many of them have some kind of summer house or rough shelter. Here the family spends the whole day in fresher air, and presumably finds out how to grow the simpler kinds of flowers and vegetables. Those who have no garden and can afford a few pence for fares go farther afield. They carry food for the day in tin satchels, or rolls that look as if they ought to accompany butterfly nets and contain entomological specimens. But they are usually in the hands of a stout alpaca-clad middle-class mater-familias, who looks rather anxious and flustered while she herds her flock and hunts for a garden with the announcement, "Hier koennen Familien Kaffee kochen." There for a trifling indemnity she can be accommodated with seats, cups and saucers, and hot water; just as people can in an English tea-garden. Provisions she has with her in her Pickenick Rolle. If fate takes you to Potsdam on a fine summer Sunday, you will think that the whole bourgeoisie of Berlin has elected to come by the same train and steamer, and that everyone but you has brought food for the day in a green tin. You need not expect to find a seat either in the train or the steamer at certain hours of the day, and as you stand wedged in the crowd on the dangerously overladen boat, and look about you as best you can at the chain of wooded lakes, you wonder how it is that such overcrowding is permitted in a police-governed land. At home we take such things for granted as part of our system or want of system. But in Germany the moment you cross the frontier a thousand trifles make you feel that you are a unit in an army, drilled and kept under by the bureaucracy and the police. It surprises you to see an unmanageable crowd in a train or on a steamer, much as it would surprise you to see soldiers swarm at will into a troopship. You expect them to march precisely, each man to his place. And in Germany this nearly always happens in civil life; while even on a Sunday or a public holiday the mob behaves itself. At the Berlin Zoo, for instance, there are such masses of people every Sunday that you see nothing but people. It is impossible, or rather would not be agreeable, to force your way through the crowd surrounding the cages. But the people are interesting, and it is to see them that you have ventured here. You soon find, however, that it is not a venture at all. No one will offend you, no one is drunken or riotous. The gardens are packed with decent folk, mostly of the lower middle classes, and the only unseemly thing you see them do is to eat small hot sausages with their fingers in the open-air restaurants.

Sunday is the great day of the week at German theatres. In all the large towns there are afternoon performances at popular prices, and this means that people who can pay a few pence for a seat can see all the great classical plays and most of the successful modern ones; and they can hear many of the great operas as well as a variety of charming light ones never heard in this country. On one Sunday afternoon in Berlin, Hoffmann's Erzaehlungen was played at one theatre, and at others Gorky's Nachtasyl, Tolstoy's Power of Darkness, Hauptmann's Versunkene Glocke, the well known military play Zapfenstreich, and Lortzing's light opera Der Waffenschmied. The star players and singers do not usually appear at these popular performances, and the Wagnerian Ring has, as far as I know, never yet been given. But on Sunday afternoons all through the winter the playhouses are crowded with people who cannot pay week-day prices, and yet are intelligent enough to enjoy a fairly good performance of Hamlet or Egmont; who are musical and choose a Mozart opera; or who are interested in the problems of life presented by Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoy, or their own great fellow-countryman Gerhardt Hauptmann. When summer comes, as long as the theatres are open the whole audience streams out between the acts to have coffee or beer in the garden, or when there is no garden, in the nearest restaurant; and then comes your chance of appraising the people who take their pleasure in this way. They look for the most part as if they belonged to the small official and shop-keeper class. If the play is a suitable one, there are sure to be a great many young people present, and at the State-supported theatres these Sunday performances are such as young people are allowed to see.

In the evening the Sunday play or opera is always one of the most important of the week; the play everyone wishes to see or the opera that is most attractive. A Wagner opera is often played on a Sunday evening in the theatre that undertakes Wagner. The smaller stages will give some old favourite, Der Freischuetz, Don Juan, Oberon, or Die Zauberfloete. In fact, all through the winter the upper and middle classes make the play and the opera their favourite Sunday pastime. The lower classes depend a good deal on the public dancing saloons, which seem to do as much harm as our public-houses, and to be disliked and discouraged by all sensible Germans.

So far this account of a German Sunday suggests that Germans always go from home for their weekly holiday, and it is true that when Sunday comes the German likes to amuse himself. But he is not invariably at the play or in inn gardens. It is the day when scattered members of a family will meet most easily, and when the branch of the family that can best do so will entertain the others. Some years ago in a North German city I was often with friends who had a dining-room and narrow dinner table long enough for a hotel. The host and hostess, when they were by themselves, dined in a smaller room, sitting next to each other on the sofa; but on Sundays their children and grandchildren, some spinster cousins, some Stammgaeste (old friends who came every week) all met in the drawing-room at five o'clock, and sat down soon after to a dinner of four or five courses in a long dining-room. It was a company of all ages and some variety of station, and the patriarchal arrangement placed the venerable and beloved host and hostess side by side at the top of the room, with their friends in order of importance to right and left of them, until you came, below the salt as it were, to the Mamsells and the little children at the foot of the table. But the Mamsells did not leave the room when the sweets arrived. Everyone ate everything, including the preserved fruits that came round with the roast meat, and the pudding that arrived after the cheese. In those days it was not considered proper in Germany for ladies to eat cheese, and no young lady would dream of taking one of the little glasses of Madeira offered on a tray. They were exclusively for die Herren, and always gave a fillip to the conversation, which was also more or less a masculine monopoly. Just before the end of the dinner it was the business of the Mamsell belonging to the house to light a little army of Vienna coffee machines standing ready on the sideboard, so that coffee could be served when everyone went back to the drawing-room. The men smoked their cigars there too, and someone would play the piano, and when no music was going on there was harmless, rather dull, family conversation. The spinster cousins got out their embroidery, the Mamsells disappeared with the children, die Herren either talked to each other or had a quiet game of Skat. The women and some of the men had been to church in the morning, but this did not prevent them from spending the rest of the day as it pleased them.

It will be seen that from the English point of view Sunday is not observed at all in Germany; yet this does not mean, as is often announced from English pulpits, that the whole nation is without religion. Un-belief is more widely professed than here, and many people who call themselves Christians openly reject certain vital doctrines of Evangelical faith,—are Unitarians, in fact, but will not say so. But the whole question of religious belief in Germany is a difficult and contentious one, for according to the people you meet you will be told that the nation lacks faith or possesses it. If you use your own judgment you must conclude that there is immensely more scepticism there than here, and that there is also a good deal of vague belief, a belief, that is, in a personal God and a life after death. But you must admit that except in an "evangelical" set belief sits lightly on both men and women. Certainly it has nothing to do with the way they spend Sunday, and if they go to church in the morning they are as likely as not to go to the theatre in the afternoon. They sew, they dance, they fiddle, they act, they travel on the day of rest, more on that day than on any other, and when they come to England there is nothing in our national life they find so tedious and unprofitable as our Sundays. They cannot understand why a people with so strong a tendency to drink should make the public-house the only counter attraction to the church on the working man's day of leisure; and when they are in a country place, and see our groups of idle, aimless young louts standing about not knowing what to do, they ask why in the name of common sense they should not play an outdoor game. The Idealist expresses the German point of view very well in her Memoirs, and in so far as she misunderstands our English point of view she is only on a line with those amongst us who denounce the continental Sunday as an orgy of noisy and godless pleasures. She says: "I had a thousand opportunities of noticing that the religious life did not mean a deep life-sanctifying belief, but simply one of those formulas that are a part of 'respectability,' as they understand it both in the family and in society." Nothing proves this better than their truly shocking way of keeping holy the Sabbath day, which is the very reverse of holy, inasmuch as it paves the way to the heaviest boredom and slackness of spirit. I have been in English houses on Sundays where the gentlemen threw themselves from one easy chair to the other, and proclaimed their empty state of mind by their awful yawns; where the children wandered about hopelessly depressed, because they might neither play nor read an amusing book, not even Grimm's Fairy Tales; where all the mental enjoyment of the household consisted of so-called 'sacred music,' which some young miss strummed on the piano or, worse still, sang. A young girl once spoke to me in severe terms about the Germans who visit theatres and concerts on Sundays. I asked her whether, if she put it to her conscience, she could honestly say that she had holier feelings and higher thoughts, whether, in fact, she felt herself a better human being on her quiet Sunday, than when she heard a Beethoven Symphony, saw a Shakespeare play, or any other noble work of art. She confessed with embarrassment that she could not say so, but nevertheless arrived at the logical conclusion that, for all that, it was very wicked of the Germans not to keep Sunday more holy. Another lady, a cultured liberal-minded person, invited me once to go with her to the Temple Church, one of the oldest and most beautiful London churches in the city, belonging to the great labyrinth of Temple Bar where English justice has its seat. The music of the Temple Church is famous, and I had expressed a wish to hear it. So I went with my house-mate and the lady in question, and sat between them. During the sermon I had great trouble not to fall asleep, but fought against it for the sake of decorum. To my surprise, when I glanced at my right-hand neighbour I saw that she was fast asleep, and when I glanced at the one on my left I saw that she was asleep too. I looked about at other people, and saw more than one sunk in a pious Nirvana. As we left the church I asked the Englishwoman, who had a strong sense of humour, whether she had slept well. 'Yes,' she said, laughing, 'it did me a lot of good.' 'But why do you go?' I said. 'Oh, my dear,' said she, 'what can one do? It has to be on Sundays.'

"But this narrow Sunday observance is worse for the lower than for the upper classes. At that time the great dispute was just beginning as to whether the people should be admitted to the Crystal Palace, to museums, and suchlike institutions. The question was discussed in Parliament, and decided in the negative. It was feared that the churches would remain empty, and that morals would suffer if the people began to like heathen gods, works of art and natural curiosities, better than going to church. At least, this is the only explanation one can give of such a decision. The churches and the public-houses remained the only public places open on Sundays. The churches were all very well for a few hours in the morning, but what about the afternoon and evening? Then the beer-house was the only refuge for the artisan or proletarian bowed down by the weight of hard work, unused and untaught to wile away the idle hours of Sunday in any intellectual occupation, and having no friendly attractive home to make the peace of his own hearth the best refreshment after the exhausting week. And so it turned out: the public-houses were full to overflowing, and the holiness of Sunday was only too often desecrated by the unholy sight of drunken men and, more horrible still, drunken women; but this was not all, for so strong was the temptation thrust upon them, that the workman's hardly earned week's wages went in drink, and the children were left without bread and not a penny was saved to lighten future distress. The coarse animal natures of the only half-human beings became coarser and more animal through the degrading passion for drink that only too often has murder in its train, and murder in its most terrible and brutal guise!"

There is not one idea or argument in this passage that I have not heard over and over again from the lips of every German who has anything to say about our English Sunday, and every German who has been in England or heard much of English life invariably attacks what he considers this weak joint in our armour.

"What is the use?" he asks, "of going to church in the morning if you get drunk and beat your wife at night?"

"But the same man does not usually do both things in one day," you represent to him. "One set of people goes to church and keeps Sunday strictly, and another set goes to public-houses and is drunk and disorderly. You should try to get out of your head your idea that we are all exactly alike."

"But you are—exactly alike. Everyone of you goes to church with a solemn face, sings psalms, and comes back to his roast beef and apple-pie. All the afternoon you are asleep; and at night the streets and parks are not fit for respectable people."

"At night," you explain, "all the respectable people are at home eating cold beef and cold pie. The others...."

"The others you drive to drink and fight and kill by your pharisaical methods. You shut the doors of your theatres and your art galleries, and you set wide the doors of your drinking hells. How you can call yourself a religious people—it is Satanic...."

"But, my dear man," you say, taking a long breath, "the people who go to public-houses don't want theatres and art galleries. They are on too low a level."

"It is the business of the State to raise them—not to push them down. Besides, there is drinking—much drinking—in England on the higher levels too, as you well know...."

"Of course I know," you say impatiently. "All I am saying is that we do not bring it about by shutting the British Museum on Sundays."

But next time the subject comes up for discussion your German will say again, as he has said ever since he could speak, that the English Sunday is anathema, and a standing witness to British Heuchelei, because people sing psalms in the morning and get drunk and beat their wives at night. You can easily imagine the Hypocrite's Progress painted by a German Hogarth, and it would begin with a gentleman in a black coat and tall hat on his way to church, and would end with the same gentleman in the last stage of delirium tremens surrounded by his slaughtered family. For in Germany one of the curious deep rooted notions about us, who as people go are surely indifferent honest, is that we are ein falsches Volk. With the want of logic that makes human nature everywhere so entertaining, a German will nearly always cash a cheque offered by an English stranger when he would refuse to do so for a countryman. As far as one can get at it, what Germans really mean by our Heuchelei when they speak without malice is our regard for the unwritten social law. This is so strong in us from old habit and tradition that most of us do not feel the shackles; but the stranger within our gates feels it at every step.



CHAPTER XX

SPORT AND GAMES

The word Sport has been taken into the German language lately, but Germans use it when we should use "hobby." "It is my sport," says an artist when he shows you furniture of his own design. He means that his business in life is to paint pictures, but his pleasure is to invent beautiful chairs and tables. When the talk turns on the absurd extreme to which the Marthas of Germany carry their housekeeping zeal, a German friend will turn to you in defence of his countrywomen. "It is their 'sport,'" says he, and you understand his point of view. Yet another will tell you that the English have only become sportsmen in modern times, and that the Germans are rapidly catching them up; but this is the kind of information you receive politely, disagree with profoundly, and do not discuss because you have not all the facts at your fingers' ends. But you know that the British love of sport, be it vice or virtue, is as ingrained in Britons as their common sense, and as old as their history.

In Germany the country gentleman is a sportsman. He rides, he shoots, he hunts the wild boar which he preserves in his great forests. "You have no country (Land)," said a German to me, using the word as opposed to town. "In Germany we have country still." He meant that England is thickly populated, and that we have no vast tracts of heath and forest where wild animals live undisturbed. I told him there were a few such places still in Scotland, but that they all belonged to American and Jewish millionaires; however, he would not believe it. He said he had spent a fortnight in England and had not heard of them.

It is not such a matter of course with Germans of a certain class to ride as it is with us. You see a few men, women, and children on horseback in Berlin, but not many; and in most German towns you see no one riding except cavalry officers. I am told that the present Emperor tried to institute a fashionable hour for riding in the Tiergarten, but that it fell through partly because there were not enough people to bring decent carriages and horses. On the great estates in East Prussia the women as well as the men of the family ride, and go great distances in this way to see their friends; but in cities you cannot fail to observe the miserable quality and condition of the horses and the scarcity of private carriages. In fact, the German does not make as much of animals as the Englishman does. If he lives in the country, or if he means to be a man of fashion, he will have dogs and horses, but he will not have one or both, by hook or by crook, whether he is rich or poor, as the Briton does. You see dogs in any German city that remind you of a paragraph that once appeared in an Italian paper, a paragraph about a case of dog stealing. The dog was produced in court, said the paper, and was either a fox terrier or a Newfoundland. But you often see a fine Dachs; in Heidelberg the students are proud of their great boar-hounds, and in the Black Forest there are numbers of little black Pomeranians.

In German towns where there is water, the traffic on it both for business and amusement is as busy as with us, and in some respects better managed. Hamburg life, for instance, is largely on the basin of the Alster; either in the little steamers that carry you from city to suburb, or in the small craft that crowd its waters on a summer night. It is as usual in Hamburg as on the Thames to own boats and understand their management, and there are the same varieties to be seen there: the pleasure boats with people of all ages, the racing outrigger full of strenuous, lightly clad young men, and the little sail boats scurrying across the water before the breeze. On the Rhine the big steamers do a roaring traffic all the summer, and catch the public that likes a good dinner with their scenery; and on the Rhine, as well as on most of the other rivers of Germany, there are a great many swimming baths; for every German who has a chance learns to swim. In Hamburg on a summer evening you meet troops of little boys and girls going to the baths, many of them belonging to the poorer classes; for where there are no swimming baths attached to the school they get tickets free or at a very low rate. About fishing I can only speak from hearsay, for I have never caught a minnow myself, but I have met Germans who are keen anglers, and I have found that they knew every London shop beloved of anglers, and the English name of every fly.

Germans get more amusement out of their water-ways in winter than we do, for the winters there are long and hard, so that there is always skating. I have seen the Alster frozen for weeks, and the whole city of Hamburg playing on the ice. It was not what we call good ice, and not what we call good skating. For the most part people were content to get over the ground, to mix with their friends, to have hot drinks at the booths that sprang up in long lines by the chief track, and even to stroll about without skates and watch the fun. All classes, all ages, and both sexes skate nowadays, but some fifty or sixty years ago German ladies were not seen on the ice at all. Skating, like most exercises that are healthy and agreeable, was considered unfeminine, and men had the fun to themselves. In the mountain districts of Germany winter sports are growing in favour every year, and people go to the Riesengebirge or to the Black Forest for tobogganing and ski-ing. The German illustrated papers constantly have articles about these winter pastimes, and portraits of the distinguished men and women who took part in them. The history of cycling in Germany is not unlike its history here. The boom subsided some years ago, but a steady industry survives. In Berlin you see officers in uniform on bicycles, but you see hardly any ladies. That is because the Emperor and Empress disapprove of cycling for women, and their disapproval has made it unfashionable. Ten years ago, two years, that is, after the English boom, no woman on a bicycle had ever been seen in the remoter valleys of the Black Forest. One who ventured there used to be followed by swarms of wondering children, who wished her All Heil at the top of their voices. They did not heave bricks at her.