STUTTGART, NUREMBERG, AND BAYREUTH
STUTTGART, NUREMBERG, AND BAYREUTH
We had planned to go to Stuttgart next, but as we were nearing the town, Bee pushed up her veil and said:
"I don't see why we are going to Stuttgart. I never heard of it except in connection with men who 'studied' in Stuttgart. What's there, Jimmie? An Academy?"
"I should say," said Jimmie, waking up. "The Academy where Schiller studied."
"That's very interesting," I broke in, "but it's hardly enough to keepmethere very long. Are there any queer little places—"
"Any concert-gardens?" asked Bee.
"Are the hotels good?" asked his wife.
"There is one hotel called Hotel Billfinger, which I'd like to try, because Mark Twain's guide in 'Innocents Abroad' was named Billfinger. Remember?"
"He afterwards called him Ferguson, which I think is against the name and against the hotel," I said. "Why do we stop except to break the journey?"
"Well, the real reason," said Jimmie, with that timid air of his, "is because Baedeker says that in the Royal Library there are 7,200 Bibles in more than one hundred languages, and I thought if you stayed by them long enough you might get enough religion so that you would be less wearing on my nerves as a travelling companion. It wouldn't take you long to master them. While you are studying, the rest of us will refresh ourselves in the Stadt-Garten, where Bee will find a band, where I shall find a restaurant, and where my wife can ponder over Baedeker's choice information of the places where it is not proper to take a lady."
Nobody pays any attention to Jimmie, so we all stared out of the windows to see that the town was beautifully situated, almost upon the Neckar, and surrounded by such vine-clad hills and green wooded heights as to make it seem like a painting.
But Bee was still unconvinced.
"It is the capital of Nuremberg and used to be the favourite residence of the Dukes of Nuremberg," said Mrs. Jimmie, as we drove up to the hotel, not the Billfinger, let me remark in passing.
We found a band for Bee, and in the course of our stay in Stuttgart we heard any number of men's choruses, students' singing and the like. There was, too, the Museum of Art, and a fine one. There was also a lovely view, from the Eugen-Platz, of the city which lies below it. But after all, the Schloss-Garten and concerts to the contrary notwithstanding, there is an atmosphere about the law schools, museums, and collections of Stuttgart, which led frivolous pleasure-seekers like us to depart on the second day, for Nuremberg.
Jimmie has a curious way of selecting hotels. As the train neared that quaintest of old cities, toward which my heart warms anew as I think of it, he broke the silence as though we had held a long and heated argument on the matter.
"You might as well cease this useless discussion. I have decided to go to the Wittelsbacher Hof, Pfannenschmiedsgasse 22."
"Good heavens!" I murmured.
"There you go,arguing!" cried Jimmie. "But can't you see the advantages of all those extra letters on your note-paper when you write home?"
"Besides, it's a very good hotel, I've been told," said his wife, affably.
Itwasa very good hotel, and there was a lunch-room half-way up the main flight of stairs at the right as you enter, which I remember with peculiar pleasure. Travellers like us may well be excused for remembering a first luncheon such as that which we had at the Wittelsbacher Hof.
Then we all strolled out in the early summer twilight and took our first look at Nuremberg. Tell me if you can why we went into such ecstasies over Nuremberg and stayed there two weeks, when we could barely persuade ourselves to remain one day in Stuttgart. But the picturesqueness of Nuremberg is particularly enticing. The streets run "every which way," as the children say, and the architecture is so queer and ancient that the houses look as if they had stepped out of old prints.
It was so hot when we arrived that we were on terms of the most distant civility with each other. Indeed, it was dangerous to make the simplest observation, for the other three guns were trained upon the inoffensive speaker with such promptness and such an evident desire to fight that for the most part we maintained a dignified but safe silence.
Mrs. Jimmie bearded Jimmie in his den long enough to ask him to see about our opera tickets at once. Everybody said we could not get any, but trust Jimmie! The agent of whom he bought them had embroidered a generous romance of how he had got them of a lady who ordered them the January before, but whose husband having just died, her feelings would not permit her to use them, and so as a great accommodation, etc., etc.
Everybody knows these stories. Suffice it to say that Jimmie really had, at the last moment, secured admirable seats near the middle of the house, and everybody said it was a miracle. In looking back over the experiences of that one opera of "Parsifal," I cannot deny that there was something of a miracle about it. However, "Parsifal" was three days distant, and Nuremberg was at hand.
I love to think of Nuremberg. The recollection of it comes back to me again and again through a gentle haze of happy memories. The narrow streets were lined with houses which leaned toward each other after the gossipy manner of old friends whose confidence in each other is established. The windows jutted queerly, and odd balconies looped themselves on corners where no one expected them. They call these pretty old houses the best examples of domestic architecture, but warn you that the quaint peaked roofs are Gothic and the surprises are Renaissance—a mixture of which purists do not approve. But I am a pagan. I like mixtures. They give you little flutters of delight in your heart, and one of the most satisfactory of experiences is not to be able to analyse your emotions or to tell why you are pleased, but to feel at liberty to answer art questions with "Just because!"
So Nuremberg. Its fortifications are rugged and strong. Its towers imposing. It dates back to the Huns. Frederick Barbarossa frequently occupied the castle which frowns down on you from the heights. Hans Sachs, the poet, sang here. Albrecht Durer painted here. Peter Vischer perhaps dreamed out the noble original of my beautiful King Arthur here.
From the quaint and awkward statues of saints and heroes in church and state, to such delicate examples of sculpture as the figure of the Virgin in the Hirschelgasse, so delicate and graceful that it was once attributed to an Italian master, you realise how early the arts were established here and how sedulously they were pursued. Everywhere are works of art, from the cruder decorations over doorways and windows to the paintings of Durer in the Germanic Museum. It is a sad reflection to me that most of Durer's work, and all of his masterpieces, are in other cities—Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, and that, as it is in Greece, only their fame remains to glorify the city of his birth.
His statue, copied from a portrait painted by himself, stands in the Albrecht-Durer Platz, and in his little house are copies of his masterpieces and a collection of typical antique German furniture and utensils. The exquisite art of glass-staining is the suitable occupation of the custodian who shows you about the house.
Indeed, wood carving, glass staining, engraving of medals and medallions, copying ancient cabinets and quaint furniture are, if not the principal, at least the most interesting occupations pursued in Nuremberg to-day. In searching out the little shops I also found that table linen, superbly embroidered and decorated with drawn-work of intricate patterns was here in a bewildering display.
Dear Nuremberg! A stroll through your lovely streets is a feast for the eye and a whip to the imagination that no other city in the German Empire can duplicate or approach. You abound in quaint doorways, over which if I step, I find myself transplanted to the scenes of tapestries and old prints, and I can easily imagine myself framed and hanging on the wall quite comfortable and happy.
One of these tiny doorways led us, on a bright Sunday afternoon, into one of the oddest places we ever saw. It was the Bratwurst-Glocklein—such a restaurant as Doctor Johnson would have deserted the Cheshire Cheese for, and revelled in the change.
It appeared to be a thousand years old. Perhaps Melanchthon expounded the theories of the Reformation on the very benches on which we sat.
The door-sill was high, and we stepped over it on to a stone floor, the flagging of which was sunken in many places, causing pitfalls to the unwary. The room was small and only half lighted by infinitesimal windows. One end of the room was given up to what appeared to be a charcoal furnace built of bricks, over which in plain view buxom maids, whose red cheeks were purple from the heat, were frying delicious little sausages in strings. We squeezed ourselves into a narrow bench behind one of the tables whose rudeness was picturesque. I have seen schoolboy desks at Harrow and Eton worn to the smoothness of these tables here and carved as deeply with names. There was not a vestige of a cloth or napkins. The plates and knives and forks were rude enough to bear out the surroundings. In fact, the clumsiness and apparent age of everything almost transported us, in imagination, to the stone age, but the sensation was delightful.
One of the maids brought a string of sausages sizzling hot from the pan and deftly snipped off as many as were called for upon each of our plates. We drank our beer from steins so heavy that each one took both hands. A person with a mouth of the rosebud variety would have found it exceedingly difficult to obtain any of the beer, the stein presenting such unassailable fortifications.
It was too hot when we were there to appreciate to the full this delicious old spot, but on a winter evening, after the theatre, which closes about ten o'clock, think what a delightful thing it would be, O ye Bohemian Americans, with fashionable wives who insist upon the Waldorf or Sherry's after the theatre, to go instead to the Bratwurst-Glocklein! There you smoke at your ease, put your elbows on the table and dream dreams of your student days when the dinner coat vexed not your peaceful spirit.
Owing to our late arrival and the enormous crowd of people at Bayreuth, we found it expedient to remain in Nuremberg and go up to Bayreuth for the opera. The day of our performance of "Parsifal" was one of the hottest of the year. Not even Philadelphia can boast of heat more consolidated and unswerving than that of North Germany on this particular day.
We put on muslin dresses and carried fans and smelling salts, and Jimmie had to use force to make us carry wraps for the return. The journey, lovely in itself, was rendered hideous to us by the heat, but when we arrived at Bayreuth the babel of English voices was so delightfully homelike, American clothes on American women were so good to see, and Bayreuth itself was so picturesque, that we forgot the heat and drove to the opera-house full of delight.
I am sorry that it is fashionable to like Wagner, for I really should like to explain the feelings of perfect delight which tingled in my blood as I realised that I was in the home of German opera—in the city where the master musician lived and wrote, and where his widow and son still maintain their unswerving faithfulness toward his glorious music. I am a little sensitive, too, about admitting that I like Carlyle and Browning. I suppose this is because I have belonged to a Browning and Carlyle club, where I have heard some of the most idiotic women it was ever my privilege to encounter, express glib sentiments concerning these masters, which in me lay too deep for utterance. It is something like the occasional horror which overpowers me when I think that perhaps I am doomed to go to heaven. If certain people here on earth upon whom I have lavished my valuable hatred are going there, heaven is the last place I should want to inhabit. So with Wagner.
"Parsifal!" That sacred opera which has never been performed outside of this little hamlet. I was to see it at last!
I was prepared to be delighted with everything, and the childishness of the little maid who took charge of our hats before we went in to the opera charmed me. My hat was heavy and hot, and I particularly disliked it, owing to the weight of the seagull which composed one entire side of it, and always pulled it crooked on my head. The little maid took the hat in both her arms, laid her round red cheek against the soft feathers of the gull, kissed its glass bead eyes, and smilingly said in German:
"This is the finest hat that has been left in my charge to-day!"
Verily, the opera of "Parsifal" began auspiciously. Quite puffed up with vainglorious pride over the little maiden's admiration of one of my modest possessions, while Bee's and Mrs. Jimmie's ravishing masterpieces had received not even a look, we met Jimmie bustling up with programmes and opera-glasses, and went toward the main entrance. We showed our tickets, and were sent to the side door. We went to the side door, and were sent to the back door. At the back door, to our indignation, we were sent up-stairs. In vain Jimmie expostulated, and said that these seats were well in the middle of the house on the ground floor. The doorkeepers were inexorable. On the second floor, they sent us to the third, and on the third they would have sent us to the roof if there had been any way of getting up there. As it was, they permitted us to stop at the top gallery, and, to our unmitigated horror, the usher said that our seats were there. Jimmie was furious, but I, not knowing how much he had paid for them, endeavoured to soothe him by pointing out that all true musicians sat in the gallery, because music rises and blends in the rising.
"We are sure to get the best effect up here, Jimmie, and those front rows, especially, if our seats happen to be in the middle, won't be at all bad. Don't let's fuss any more about it, but come along like an angel."
I will admit, however, that even my ardour was dampened when we discovered that our seats were absolutely in the back and top row, so that we leaned against the wall of the building, and were not even furnished with chairs, but sat on a hard bench without relief of any description.
And the price Jimmie hurled at us that he had paid for those tickets! I am ashamed to tell it.
Now Jimmie hates German opera in the most picturesque fashion. He hates in every form, colour, and key, and in all my life I was never so sorry for any one as I was for Jimmie that day at Bayreuth. The heat was stifling, his rage choked him and effectually prevented his going to sleep, as otherwise he might have done in peace and quiet. He sat there in such a steam and fury that it was truly pitiable. He went out once to get a breath of air, and they turned the lights out before he could get back, so that he stumbled over people, and one man kicked him. With that Jimmie stepped on the German's other foot, and they swore at each other in two languages and got hissed by the people around them. When he finally got back to us, we found it expedient not to make any remarks at all, and I was glad it was too dark for him to see our faces.
Yet, in spite of Jimmie and the heat and the ache in our backs and the hard unyielding bench, that afternoon at "Parsifal" is one of the experiences of a lifetime.
People tell us now that we were there on an "Off day." By that they mean that no singers with great names took part. How like Americans to think of that! Germans go to the opera for the music. Americans go to hear and see the operatic stars.
Happily unvexed by my ignorance, I heard a perfect "Parsifal" without knowing that, from an American point of view, I ought not to have been so delighted. The orchestra was conducted by Siegfried Wagner, and Madame Wagner sat in full view from even our eyrie.
And then—the opera! Perfection in every detail! I believed then that not even the Passion Play could hold my spirit, so in leash with its symbolism, its deep devotion, and its enthralling charms.
The day on which I saw "Parsifal" at Bayreuth was a day to be marked with a white stone.
THE PASSION PLAY
THE PASSION PLAY
Jimmie came into the sitting-room this morning (for, by travelling with the Jimmies, Bee and I can be very grand, and share the luxury of a third room with them), but I suspected him from the moment I saw his face. It was too innocent to be natural.
"What you got, Jimmie?" I said. Jimmie's manner of life invites abbreviated conversation.
"Only the letter from the Burgomeister of Oberammergau, assigning our lodgings," he replied, carelessly. He yawned and put the letter in his pocket.
"Oh, Jimmie!" we all cried out. "Have they—"
"Have they what?" asked Jimmie, opening his eyes.
"Don't be an idiot," I said, savagely. "You know I have hardly been able to sleep, wondering if we'd have to go to ordinary lodgings or if they would assign us to some of the leading actors in the play. Tell us! Let me see the letter!"
"Now wait a minute," said Jimmie, and then I knew that he was going to be exasperating.
"Don't you let him fool you," said Bee, who always doubts everybody's good intentions and discounts their bad ones, which worthy plan of life permits her to count up at the end of the year only half as many mental bruises as I, let me pause to remark. "You know that not one in ten thousand has influence enough to obtain lodgings with the chief actors, and who arewe, I should like to know, except in our own estimation?"
"Well," said Jimmie, meekly, "in the estimation of the Burgomeister of Oberammergau, my wife is an American princess, travelling incognito as plain Mrs. Jimmie, to avoid being mobbed by entertainers. He promises in solemn German, which I had Franz translate, not to betray her disguise."
"That makes a prince ofyou, Jimmie," I said, sternly. "A pretty looking princeyouare."
"Not at all," said Jimmie modestly. "I felt that I could not do the princely act very long either as to looks or fees, so I said that the princess had made a morganatic marriage, and that I was it."
"Jimmie!" said his wife, blushing scarlet. "Howcouldyou? Why, a morganatic marriage isn't respectable. It's left-handed."
"My love! You are thinking of a broomstick marriage. Trust me. We are still legally married, and if I should try to sneak out of my obligations to you by this performance, I should still be liable in the eyes of the law for your debts. Let that console you."
"But—" said Mrs. Jimmie, still blushing, "by this plan they won't let us be together, will they?"
"They wouldn't anyway, as I discovered from their first letter. We are all to be lodged separately, and from the tone of that first letter, in which they addressed me as their prince, I hit on the morganatic marriage as more economical in letting him down easy, without telling him I had lied or having to pay for my lie," said Jimmie, with timid appeal in his innocent blue eyes.
"But where do I come in, Jimmie?" I said, impatiently.
"You come in with Judas Iscariot. Where you belong!" said Jimmie, severely.
Bee howled. Mrs. Jimmie looked startled.
"Nonsense!" I said, indignantly. "That is going a little too far. I won't be put there. I believe you asked 'em on purpose, just so that you could crow over me afterward."
"You are getting slightly mixed," said Jimmie, politely. "If you mention crowing, 'tis Peter you ought to have been lodged with."
"What a fool you are, Jimmie!"
Jimmie gave an ecstatic bounce. Whenever he has completely exasperated anybody he simply beams with joy.
"Where have they put me, Jimmie?" asked Bee.
"They have thoughtfully assigned you to Thomas,—last name not mentioned,—where you can sit down and hold regular doubting conventions with each other and both have the time of your lives."
"I don't believe you!"
"Look and see, O doubtful—doubting one, I mean!"
"My word! He is telling the truth!" cried Bee in astonishment.
"I tried to get—" began Jimmie to his wife, but she stopped him.
"Don't, dear," she said, gently. "You know I love your jokes, but don't be sacrilegious. Leave His name out of this nonsense. I—I couldn't quite bear that."
Jimmie got up and kissed her.
"They have lodged you with the Virgin Mary, sweetheart, and the two most lovely Marys in the world will be in the same house together," he said.
Mrs. Jimmie blushed and smoothed Jimmie's riotous hair tenderly.
"And have they separated you and me, dear? Where have they lodged you?"
"I have secured an apartment with Mary Magdalene—in her house, I mean!" said Jimmie, straightening up.
Bee and I shrieked. Jimmie edged toward the door.
"Jimmie!" said his wife in horror. "Pleasedon't—"
"Don't what?"
His wife rose from her chair and turned away.
"Don't what?" he repeated.
"I was only going to say," said Mrs. Jimmie, "don't make a joke of every—"
"Well, if you don't want me to go there, I'll trade places with the scribe and putherwith the lady who is generally represented reclining on the ground in a blue dress improving her mind by reading. Perhaps you would feel more comfortable if I lodged with Judas?"
"No, indeed! and putherwith Mary Magdalene?" said Mrs. Jimmie, whose serious turn of mind was as a well-spring in a thirsty land to Jimmie.
"My dear," he said, impressively, with his hand on the door-knob. "Two things seem to have escaped your mind. One is that this is only play-acting, and the other is that Mary Magdalene, when history let go of her, was a reformed character anyway."
The door slammed. We both looked expectantly at Mrs. Jimmie. Her apologies for Jimmie's most delicious impertinences are so sincere and her sense of humour so absolutely wanting that we love her almost as dearly as we love Jimmie.
Mrs. Jimmie, large, placid, fair and beautiful as a Madonna, rose and looked doubtfully at us after Jimmie had fled.
"You mustn't mind his—what he said or implied," she said, the colour again rising in her creamy cheeks. "Jimmie never realises how things will sound, or I think he wouldn't—or I don't know—" She hesitated between her desire to clear Jimmie and her absolute truthfulness. She changed the conversation by coming over to me and laying her hand tenderly on my hair.
"You aresure, dear, that you don't mind lodging with Judas Iscariot?"
Bee stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth and politely turned her back. I bit my lip. It hurts her feelings to be laughed at.
"Not a bit, Mrs. Jimmie. I shall love it."
"Because I was going to say that if you did, I would gladly exchange with you, and you could lodge with Mary."
"Mrs. Jimmie," I said, "you are an angel. That's what you are."
"And now," said Bee, cheerfully, who hates sentiment, "let's pack, for we leave at noon."
I don't apologise for Jimmie's ribald conversation, because many people, until they have seen the Passion Play, make frivolous remarks, which would be impossible after viewing it, except to the totally insensible or irreligious.
Jimmie is irreligious, but not insensible. He really had gone to no end of trouble to obtain these lodgings for us, and he had insisted so tenaciously that we must be lodged with the principals that we were obliged to wait for an extra performance, and live in Munich meanwhile.
We all four made the journey from Munich to Oberammergau, which lies in so picturesque a spot in the Bavarian Alps, from very different motives. Mrs. Jimmie, who is an ardent churchwoman, went in a spirit of deep devotion. Bee went because one agent told her that over twelve thousand Americans had been booked through their company alone. Bee goes to everything that everybody else goes to. Jimmie went in exactly the same spirit of boyish, alert curiosity with which, when he is in New York, he goes to each new attraction at Weber and Field's.
As we got off the train the little town looked like an exposition, except that there were no exhibits. English, German, and French spoken constantly, and not infrequently Russian, Spanish, and Italian assailed our ears the whole time we were there. Only one thing was characteristic. The native peasants looked different. The picturesque costume of the Tyrolese men, consisting of velveteen knee breeches, gay coloured stockings, embroidered white blouse, and short bolero jacket with gold braid or fringe, and the Alpine hat, with a pheasant or eagle feather in it, sat jauntily upon most of the young men, whose bold glances and sinewy movements suggested their alert, out-of-door life in their mountain homes. But the Oberammergau peasants walked with a slower step. Their eyes were meek instead of roving, their smiles tender instead of saucy, and they say it is all the influence of the Passion Play, which for over three hundred years has dominated their lives. No one who commits a crime, or who lives an impure life, can act in the great drama, nor can any except natives take part. And as the ambition of every man, woman, and child in Oberammergau is to form part of this glorious company, the reason for the purity of their aspect is at once to be seen. No murder, robbery, or crime of any description has been committed in Oberammergau for three hundred years.
The peasants of this little mountain village live their whole lives under the shadow of the cross.
Nor was it long before our little party came under this strange influence. My own sense of the eternal fitness of things is so highly developed that I was under the tense strain of nervous excitement which always wrecks me after reading a strong novel or witnessing a tragic play. I was afraid to see the Passion Play for two reasons. One that I could not bear to see the Saviour of mankind personified, and the other that I was afraid that the audience would misbehave. If I am going to have my emotions wrenched, I never want any one near me. To my mind the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria obtained the highest enjoyment possible from having performances of magnificent merit with himself as the sole auditor. This world is so mixed anyway, and audiences at any entertainment so hopelessly beyond my control. Nothing, for example, makes me feel so murderous as for an audience to go mad and stamp and kick and howl over a cornet solo with variations, no matter how ribald, and beg for more of it. And they alwaysdo!
The Passion Play, up to a comparatively few years ago, had comic characters and scenes, as for instance, there was once a scene in hell where the Devil, as chief comedian, ripped open the bowels of Judas and took therefrom a string of sausages. This vulgar and hideous buffoonery was in the habit of being received with delight by the peasants from neighbouring hamlets, which, up to fifty years ago, formed the principal part of the Passion Play audiences.
And as tradition, the handing down of legends from father to son, forms such a part of the mountaineer's education, I was not surprised to hear a party of Tyrolese giggle at moments when the deeper meaning of the play was holding the rest of us in a spell so tense that it hurt.
I remember in Modjeska's rendition of Frou-frou, when Frou-frou's lover is breaking her heart, and the strain becomes almost unbearable, Modjeska's nervous hands tear her valuable lace handkerchief into bits. It is a piece of inspired acting to make the discriminating weep, but my friend the audience always giggled irresistibly, as if the sound of rending lace, when a woman's agony was the most intense, were a bit of exquisite comedy.
I am constrained to believe, however, that in almost entirely remodelling the Passion Play, the village priest, Daisenberger, was not moved by any consideration of what an ignorant audience might do, but rather by the noble, Oberammergau spirit of a life of devotion, dedicated to the rewriting, rehearsing, and directing of the performance.
The history of this man illustrates what I mean by the Oberammergau spirit. In 1830 he was a young peasant who saw the possibilities of the Passion Play. He went to the head of the Monastery at Ettal, and vowed to consecrate his whole life to this work, if they would make him a priest and permit him to become the spiritual director of the people of the village. But he was obliged to study seven years before they gave him the position. He was seventy years old when he died, having so nobly fulfilled his vow that he is called "The Shakespeare of the Passion Play." For forty-five years he superintended every performance and every public rehearsal, and as these rehearsals take place in some form or other almost every night during the ten years which intervene between one performance and another, something of the depth of his devotion to his beloved task may be gathered.
Jimmie marvelled that he could leave his money and his valuables around, and his room door unlocked, until they told him that the street door was never locked either. At this information Jimmie grew suspicious, and locked his bedroom door, much to the affliction of the gentle family of Bertha Wolf, who plays Mary Magdalene. He explained to them that there were plenty of Italian, French, and English robbers, even if there were no Tyrolese. "And are there no American robbers?" they asked, simply, to which Jimmie replied with equal guilelessness that Americans in Europe had no time to rob other people, they were so busy in being robbed.
"People think we are so very rich, you see," he explained, when they gazed at him uncomprehendingly. Then he gave the little brown-eyed boy who clings to his mother's skirt in one of the tableaux five pfennigs to see him clap his hands twice and bob his yellow head, which is the way Tyrolese children express their thanks.
This living in the families of the actors was most interesting, except for the autograph fiends, who simply mobbed the Christus, Anton Lang, and Josef Maier, the Christus of the last three performances, who now takes the part of the speaker of the prologue. Those dear people were so obliging that no one was ever refused, consequently thousands of tourists must possess autographs of most of the principals. Not one of our party asked an autograph of anybody. I hope they are grateful to us. I should think they would remember us for that alone.
Mrs. Jimmie was not at all disturbed by the somewhat wooden and inadequate acting of Anna Flunger, who plays Mary, and loved, I believe almost worshipped, that young peasant girl, who walked bareheaded and with downcast eyes through the streets, or who waited upon the guests in her father's house with such sweet simplicity. To Mrs. Jimmie, Anna Flunger was the real Virgin Mary, so real, indeed, that I believe that Mrs. Jimmie could almost have prayed to her.
Even Bee was intensely touched by an act of Peter,—for her lodging was changed to the house of Thomas and Peter Rendl after we arrived. The father, Thomas Rendl, plays St. Peter, while his son is again John, the beloved disciple. He played John in 1890, at the age of seventeen, but they say that there is not a line in his beautiful, spiritual face to show the flight of time. His large liquid eyes follow the every movement of the Master's on the stage, and their expression is so hauntingly beautiful that even Bee admitted its influence. Bee said that one evening, as they were sitting around the table, resting for a moment after supper was finished, the village church bell began to ring for the Angelus. In an instant the two men and the two women politely made their excuses and rising, stood in the middle of the room facing eastward, crossing their hands upon their breasts in silent prayer. Bee said it was most beautiful to see how simply they performed this little act of devotion.
I wouldn't let Jimmie know of it for the world, but it has been quite a trial to me to live in the house with Judas. He plays with such tremendous power—he makes it seem so real, so close, so near. Once I asked him if he liked the part, and he broke down and wept. He said he hated it—that he loathed himself for playing it, and that his one ambition was to be allowed to play the Christus for just one time before he died, in order to wipe out the disgrace of his part as Judas and to cleanse his soul. I cried too, for I knew that his ambition could never be realised. I told him that perhaps they would allow him to act the part at a rehearsal, if he told them of his ambition, and the thought seemed to cheer him. He said he knew the part perfectly, and had often rehearsed it in private to comfort his own soul.
Such was his sincerity and grief, such his contrition and remorse after a performance, that it would not surprise me some day to know that the part had overpowered him, and that he had actually hanged himself.
As to the play itself—I wish I need say nothing about it. My mind, my heart, my soul, have all been wrenched and twisted with such emotion as is not pleasant to feel nor expedient to speak about. It was too real, too heart-rending, too awful. I hate, I abhor myself for feeling things so acutely. I wish I were a skeptic, a scoffer, an atheist. I wish I could put my mind on the mechanism of the play. I wish I could believe that it all took place two thousand years ago. I wish I didn't know that this suffering on the stage was all actual. I wish I thought these people were really Tyrolese peasants, wood-carvers and potters, and that all this agony was only a play. I hate the women who are weeping all around me. I hate the men who let the tears run down their cheeks, and whose shoulders heave with their sobs. It is so awful to see a man cry.
But no, it is all true. It is taking place now. I am one of the women at the foot of the cross. The anguish, the cries, the sobs are all actual. They pierce my heart. The cross with its piteous burden is outlined against the real sky. The green hill beyond is Calvary. Doves flutter in and out, and butterflies dart across the shafts of sunlight. The expression of Christ's face is one of anguish, forgiveness, and pity unspeakable. Then his head drops forward on his breast. It grows dark. The weeping becomes lamentation, and as they approach to thrust the spear into His side, from which I have been told the blood and water really may be seen to pour forth, I turn faint and sick and close my eyes. It has gone too far. I no longer am myself, but a disorganised heap of racked nerves and hysterical weeping, and not even the descent from the cross, the rising from the dead, nor the triumphant ascension can console me nor restore my balance.
The Passion Play but once in a lifetime!
MUNICH TO THE ACHENSEE
MUNICH TO THE ACHENSEE
If there were a country where the crowned heads of Europe in ball costume sat in a magnificent hall, drinking nothing less than champagne, while the court band discoursed bewitching music, and the electric lights flashed on myriads of jewels, Bee and Mrs. Jimmie would declare that sort of Bohemia to be quite in their line. And because that kind of refined stupidity would bore Jimmie and me to the verge of extinction, and because we really prefer an open-air concert-garden with beer, where the people are likely to be any sort of cattle whom nobody would want to know, yet who are interesting to speculate about, I really believe that Bee and Mrs. Jimmie think we are a little low.
However, their impossible tastes being happily for us unattainable, three hours after our arrival in Munich found Jimmie proudly marching three sailor-hat and shirt-waist women into the Lowenbraukeller.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when we arrived, and we took our seats at a little table in the terraced garden. A rosy-cheeked maid, who evidently had violent objections to soap, brought us our beer, and then we looked around. There was music, not very good, only a few people smoking china pipes and not even drinking beer, a few idly reading the paper, and a general air over everybody of Mr. Micawber waiting for something to turn up.
Jimmie glanced around anxiously. The length of our stay depended upon our ability to please Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, who were easily fatigued by the populistic element of society.
"Nothin' doin'," growled Jimmie in my ear. "Wake 'em up, can't you? Create a riot. Let's smash our beer-mugs, and shout 'Down with the Kaiser!'"
"You'd find you would stay longer than you wanted to if you did that," I said. "What do you suppose they are allwaitingfor?"
Jimmie called the redolent maiden, and in German which made her quiver put the question.
"At five o'clock they will open a fresh hogshead of beer—the Lowenbrau," she answered him.
"Freshbeer?" cried Jimmie. "How long has this been opened?"
"Since three."
"Great Scott!" whispered Jimmie. "Think of me brought up on a bottle, coming to a land where men will sit for an hour to get beer the first five minutes it is opened."
"See, they are opening it now," said the maid.
Sure enough, every man in the garden slowly rose and ambled leisurely to a horse-trough in the centre of the garden in which lay perhaps a score of mugs in running water. Each took a stein or two or three, depending on his party, and formed in line in front of the counter across which the beer was passed.
"Come, Jimmie," I said. "I'm going to get my own stein."
"Why do they do that?" asked Mrs. Jimmie, after we had got in line.
"It saves the half-cent charged for service," answered the maid.
"Now isn't she funny!" complained Bee of me as I returned beaming with content. "Shelikesto go and do a queer thing like that instead of sitting still to be waited on, like a lady."
"Been waited on a million times like a lady," I ventured to respond. "It isn't every day onecanget a cool mug and see the beer drawn fresh and foaming like that. I felt like a Holbein painting."
Bee, as at Baden-Baden, plaintively gave the attendant a double fee to show that meanness had not caused my apparently thrifty act. Then for the first time in our lives we found what fresh beer really meant.
Even Bee and Mrs. Jimmie admitted that it was worth while coming, and let me record in advance that when we got to Vienna, and they served us an equally delicious beer in long thin glasses as delicate as an eggshell, Bee grew so enthusiastic in the process of beer drinking that Jimmie grew absurdly proud of his pupil, and professed to think that she was "coming round after all." But Bee declared that it was the thinness of the glasses which attracted her, and insisted that beer out of a German stein was like trying to drink over a stone wall.
We went many times after that, generally in the evening, when the concert was held in a hall which must have contained two thousand people, even when all seated at little tables, and where the band would have deafened you if the hall had not been so large. Here Jimmie and the waitress prevailed upon us to taste the most inhuman dishes with names a yard long, which the maid declared we would find to be "wunderschön."
We began in a spirit of adventure, but Jimmie's taste in food is so depraved that if he followed the precedent all through his life, Lombroso would class him as a degenerate. As it was, he soon had us distanced. But we let him eat pickles and cherries and herring and cream and tripe and garlic and pig's feet all stewed up together, while we listened to the music, and planned what we would bury him in.
The pictures in Munich we loved. I must say that I enjoy the atmosphere of the Munich school better than any other. There is a healthiness about German realism that one is not afraid nor ashamed to admire. French realism is like a suggestive story, expunged of all but the surface fun for girls' hearing. You are afraid of the laugh it raises for fear there is something beneath it all that you don't understand. But the modern Munich galleries were not the task that picture galleries often are. They were a sincere delight, and let me pause to say that Munich art was one thing that we four were unanimous in praising and enjoying as a happy and united family.
It was here that Jimmie proceeded to go mad over Verboeckhoven's sheep pictures, and Mrs. Jimmie and Bee over the crown jewels in the Treasury of the Alte Residenz. To be sure theyarefine. For example, there is the famous "Pearl of the Palatinate," which is half black, and a glorious blue diamond about twice as fine as the one owned by Lord Francis Hope, which his family went to law to prevent his selling not long ago, and a superb group of St. George and the dragon, the knight being in chased gold, the dragon made entirely of jasper, and the whole thing studded thickly with precious stones of every description. But, except that these things are historic and kept in royal vaults, they are no more wonderful than jewellers' exhibits at the expositions.
But if you want to be thoroughly mixed up on the Nibelungenlied, after you think you have got those depraved old parties with their iniquitous marriages and loose morals pretty well adjusted by a faithful attendance at Walter Damrosch's lectures and Wagner operas, just go through the Königsbau, and let one of those automatic conductors in uniform take you through the Schnorr Nibelungen Frescoes, and from personal experience I will guarantee that, when you have completed the rounds, you won't even know who Siegfried is.
There is one thing particularly worth mentioning about Munich, and that is that also in Alte Residenz, in the Festsaalbau, which faces on the Hofgarten, and is 256 yards, not feet, long, are two small card rooms, with what they call a "gallery of beauties."
Now everybody knows how disappointing professional beauties are. Think over the names of actresses heralded as "beauties;" of belles, who have been said to turn men's heads by the score; of Venuses, and Psyches, and Madonnas of the galleries of Europe, and tell me your honest opinion. Aren't most of them really—well,trying,to say the least?
Titian's beauties all need an obesity remedy, and Jimmie criticises most "beauties" so severely that we have got to searching them out, when we are tired and cross, just to vent our spleen upon.
Jimmie's favourite story is the old, old one of the old woman who saw a hippopotamus for the first time. She looked at him a moment in silence and then said: "My! ain't he plain!"
It is pre-historic, that story, but it has saved our lives many a time in Europe. It fits so many cases, and I mention it here just to prove my point. Go, then, to the "Gallery of Beauties" in the Palace, and you will find thirty-six portraits by Steiler, of thirty-six of the most exquisite women conceivable to the mind of man. Some of these are women, like the Empress of Austria, who were justly famed for a beauty which is not often the gift of royalty. Others are women of whom you have never heard, but so lovely that it would be impossible not to remember their loveliness for ever and a day.
We all enthusiastically bought photographs of the painting of the Empress Elizabeth at the age of eighteen, which to my mind is one of the most exquisite faces ever put upon canvas, and then, highly elated with our presentation of Munich to Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, we gaily wended our way southward, following the river Isar for a time, until we reached Innsbruck, on our way to the Achensee.
At Innsbruck we halted for a sentimental reason which I am not ashamed to divulge, as the ridicule of the public would be sweet approval compared to the way Jimmie wore himself to a shadow in the violence of his jeers. But the fact is that the King Arthur of Tennyson has always been one of my heroes, and in the Franciscan Church or the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, there were twenty-eight heroic bronze statues, the finest of these being of Arthur, König von England, by the famous Peter Vischer of Nuremberg.
So in Innsbruck we paused for a few days, finding it delightful beyond our ideas of it, and exquisitely picturesque, situated on both banks of a dear little foaming, yellow river, with foot-bridges upon which you may stand and watch it rage and churn, and around it on all sides rising the mountains of the Bavarian Alps, which are not so near as to crowd you. Mountains smother me as a rule.
Jimmie obligingly took us at once to the Hofkirche, to get to which we passed under the Triumphal Gate, erected by the citizens on the occasion of the entry of the Emperor Francis I. and the Empress Maria Theresa, to commemorate the marriage of Prince Leopold, who afterward became the Emperor Leopold II., with the Infanta Maria Ludovica. This magnificent arch is of granite and will last thousands of years. It reminded me of the Dewey Arch in New York—it was so different.
The Emperor Maximilian I. directed in his will that the Hofkirche should be built, and in the centre of the nave he is represented kneeling by a sumptuous bronze statue, surrounded by the statues I had come to see. Jimmie declared that the marble sarcophagus upon which the statue of Maximilian is placed was "worth the price of admission," but Jimmie's opinion is of no value except when he is accidentally right, as in this instance. He studied this and the monument of Andreas Hofer, whose remains are buried here, under a magnificent sarcophagus of Tyrolese marble, leaving us to our bronze statues.
I found my King Arthur perfectly satisfactory, much to my surprise, for I am always prepared to be disappointed. Some of the statues are ridiculous in the extreme, but these monstrosities served the better to emphasise the dignity of King Arthur's pose and the nobility of his countenance.
Just after you leave the Hofkirche, you find yourself just opposite to the "Golden Dachl," which the natives tell you is a roof built of pure gold, but which the skeptical declare to be copper gilded. This roof covers a handsome Gothic balcony and blazes as splendidly as if it were gold, as Bee and Mrs. Jimmie preferred to believe. It is said to have cost seventy thousand dollars, and was built by Count Frederick of Tyrol, who was called "The Count of the Empty Pockets," to refute his nickname.
While we were taking infinite satisfaction in this little history, we lost Jimmie. He emerged presently from a handsome shop near by followed by a man bearing a large box.
"What have you been buying, Jimmie?" we demanded, suspiciously.
"Only a replica of Maximilian's statue," he answered, blandly.
"You mean a 'copy,' my darling," I corrected him, sweetly.
Now Jimmie loves a fight and so do I, so we immediately offered battle to each other, Jimmie insisting on his replica, and I declaring that a replica meant that the same artist must have made both the original and the second article, which when made by another craftsman became a "copy."
Jimmie got red in the face and abusive, while I remained cool and exasperating. I was getting even with Jimmie for everything since Paris.
But conceive, if you can, my utter humiliation when, upon arriving at the hotel, I discovered that the box contained, not Maximilian, but my dear King Arthur, and that Jimmie had bought it forme!
I really cried.
"Jimmie," I said in a meek and lowly voice, "you are an angel—a bright, beautiful, golden angel, and from now on, I'll call this a replica,—when I'm talking to a wayfaring man. And I'll never, never fight with you again!"
"Then gimme back that bronze man!" declared Jimmie. "If you give up the battlefield I'll start home to-morrow!" Which shows you where I got encouragement to be "ungentlemanly," as Jimmie calls me.
Innsbruck is the capital of Tyrol, and the whole country of Tyrol is like a picture-book. Its history is so stirring, its country so beautiful, its people are so picturesque. There are any number of dainty little lakes lying in among its mountains, which are accessible to the tourist, and therefore semi-public, by which I mean not as public as the Swiss or Italian lakes. But up the Inn River a few miles, and completely hidden from the tourist, being out of the way and little known to Americans, there lies the most lovely lake of all, the Achensee, and all around it the Tyrolese peasants, as they ought to be allowed to remain, simple, primitive, natural. We wanted to see them dance. So regardless of whether an iron bound itinerary would take us there next, we folded away our maps, put our trust in our little yellow coupon ticket book, and started for the Achensee. From the moment we began to see less of tourists and more of the natives, Jimmie's and my spirits rose. Chiffon and patent leather might belong to Bee and Mrs. Jimmie, but here in the Austrian Tyrol, Jimmie and I were getting our innings.
We got off the train at Jenbach and left our trunks there. Then on the same platform, but behind it, and a few yards beyond the station, there is a curious little hunchbacked engine and an open car. Into this car we climbed with our handbags, and beheld on the same seat with Mrs. Jimmie a beautiful woman in a gown unmistakably from Paris, who looked so familiar that we could scarcely keep from staring her out of countenance. Finally Bee leaned across and whispered:
"Don't look, but isn't that Madame Carreño?"
Without heeding Bee's polite warning, I turned and pounced upon my idol.
"Madame Carreño!"
"Mydearchild!"
"What in the world are you doing here?"
"Why Ilivehere! And you? How cameyouto find your way to this inaccessible spot?"
"We are going to the Achensee—to the Hotel Rhiner, to hear Fräulein Therese—"
"You have heard of my little friend Therese, and you have come—how many thousand miles?—to hear her sing and play on her zither?"
"To do all that, but mostly to see if she will tell me her love story."
"How do you know she had one?" inquired Madame Carreño, quickly.
"I heard of it in England. Some one who knew the duke told me."
"It was a lucky escape for her, and I think she will tell you all about it. You see it happened, ah, so many years ago."
To my mind, Madame Carreño is the most wonderful genius of modern times at the piano. I have heard all the others scores of times, so don't argue with me. You may all worship whom you will, but the whole musical part of my heart is at Madame Carreño's feet, with a small corner saved for Vladimir de Pachmann, when he plays Chopin. She claims to be an American, but she plays with a heart of a Slav, and as one whose untamed spirit can never be held in leash even by her music. Her playing is so intoxicating that it goes through my veins like wine. The last time I heard her play was in an enormous hall in the West, when her audience was composed of music lovers of every class and description. Just back of me was a woman whose whole soul seemed to respond to Carreño's hypnotic genius. Carreño had just finished Liszt's "Rhapsodic Hongroise" No. 2, and had followed it up with a mad Tschaikowsky fragment. I was so excited I was on the verge of tears when I heard the woman behind me catch her breath with a sob and exclaim:
"My Lord! Ain't she gotvinegar!"
I repeated this to Madame Carreño at Jenbach, and she seized my hands and shouted with laughter. Such a grip as she has! Her hands are filled with steel wires instead of muscles, and her arms have the strength of an athlete in training.
The car propelled by the hunchbacked engine grated and bumped its way over its cog-wheel road, pushing its delighted quota of passengers higher and higher into the mountains. The Inn valley fell away from our view, and wooded slopes, fir-trees, patches of snow on far hillsides, and tiny hamlets took its place.
"Here and there among these little villages live my summer pupils," said Madame Carreño. "I have six. One from San Francisco, one from Australia, one from Paris, one from Geneva, and two from Russia—all young girls, and withsuchtalent! They live all the way from Jenbach to the Achensee, and come to see me once a week."
The train stopped with a final squeal of the chain, and a lurch which loosened our joints.
Before us spread a sheet of water of such a blueness, such a limpid, clear, deep sapphire blue as I never saw in water before.
Around it rose the hills of Tyrol, guarding it like sentinels.
It was the Achensee!