Europe After 8:15 | Page 6

colours of the scene are fast softening. All the scarlets and vermilions are gone; a luminous pink bathes the whole scene in its fairy light. The night train for Venice, leaving the town, appears as a long string of blinking lights. A chill breeze comes from the Alpine vastness to westward. The deep silence of an Alpine night settles down. The two Americans continue their talk until they are out of hearing. The breeze interrupts and obfuscates their words, but now and then half a sentence comes clearly.
"Have you seen any American papers lately?"
"Nothing but the Paris Herald--if you call that a paper."
"How are the Giants making out?"
"... badly as usual ... rotten ... slump ... shake up...."
"... John McGraw ... Connie Mack ... glass arm...."
"... homesick ... give five dollars for...."
"... whole continent without a single baseball cl...."
"... glad to get back ... damn tired...."
"... damn...."
"... damn...."

VIENNA
[Illustration: VIENNA]

VIENNA
The casual Sunday School superintendent, bursting with visions of luxurious gaieties, his brain incited by references to Wiener blut, his corpuscles tripping to the strains of some Viennese schlagermusik, will suffer only disappointment as he sallies forth on his first night in Vienna. He is gorgeously caparisoned with clean linen, talcumed, exuding Jockey Club, prepared for surgical and psychic shock, his legs drilled hollow to admit of precious fluids, his pockets bulging with kronen. He is a lovely, mellow creature, a virtuoso of the domestic virtues when home, but now, at large in Europe, he craves excitement. His timid soul is bent on participating in the deviltries for which Vienna is famous. His blood is thumping through his arteries in three-four time. His mind is inflamed by such strophes as "Es giebt nur a Kaiserstadt; es giebt nur a Wien" and "Immer luste, fesch und munter, und der Wiener geht nit unter." But he is brought gradually to the realisation that something is amiss. Can it be that the vice crusaders have been at work? Have the militant moralists and the professional women hunters, in their heated yearnings to flay the transgressor, fallen foul of Vienna?
He expected to find a city which would be one roseate and romantic revel, given over to joys of the flesh, to wine-drinking and confetti-throwing, overrun with hussies, gone mad with lascivious waltzes, reeking with Babylonish amours. He dreamed of Vienna as one continual debauch, one never-ceasing saturnalia, an eternal tournament of perfumed hilarities. His lewd dreams of the "gayest city in Europe" have produced in him a marked hallucinosis with visions of Neronic orgies, magnificently prodigal--deliriums of chromatic disorder.
But as he walks down the K?rntnerstrasse, encircles the Ring and stands with bulging inquisitive eyes on the corner of the Wiedner Hauptstrasse and Karlsplatz, he wonders what can be the matter. Where, indeed, is that prodigality of flowers and spangled satin he has heard so much about? Where are those super-orchestras sweating over the scores of seductive waltzes? Where the silken ankles and the glittering eyes, the kisses and the flutes, the beery laughter and the delirious leg shaking? The excesses of merrymaking are nowhere discoverable. Des Moines, Iowa, or Camden, New Jersey, would present quite as festive a spectacle, he thinks, as he gazes up at the sepulchral shadows on the gigantic Opernhaus before him. He cannot understand the nocturnal solitude of the streets. There is actual desolation about him. A chlorotic girl, her cheeks unskilfully painted, brushes up to him with a careless "Geh Rudl, gib ma a Spreitzn." But that might happen in Cleveland, Ohio--and Cleveland is not framed as a modern Tyre. He is puzzled and distressed. He feels like a Heliogabalus on a desert isle. He consults his watch. It is past midnight. He has searched for hours. No famous thoroughfare has escaped him. He has reconnoitred diligently and thoroughly, as only a pious tourist bent on forbidden pleasures knows how. He is the arch-type of American traveller; the God-fearing deacon on the loose; the vestryman returning from Jerusalem. Hopefully, yet fearfully, he has pushed his search. He has traversed the K?rntnerring, the Kolowratring, peered into Stadt Park, hit the Stubenring, scouted Franz Josefs Kai, searched the Rotenturmstrasse, zigzagged over to the Schottenring, followed the Franz, Burg and Opern-Rings, and is back on the Karlsplatz, still virtuous, still sober!
Not a houri. Nary a carnival. No strain of the "Blaue Donau" has wooed his ear. No one has nailed him with sachet eggs. He has not been choked by quarts of confetti. His conscience is as pure as the brews of Munich. He is still in a beneficent state of primeval and exquisite prophylaxis, of benign chemical purity, of protean moral asepsis. He came prepared for deluges of wine and concerted onslaughts from ineffable freimaderln. But he might as well have attended a drama by Charles Klein for all the rakish romance he