CHAPTER XLV
MY FATHER’S BIRTHPLACE
IT was quite dark when I finally came across a sort of tap-room “restaurant” whose quaint atmosphere charmed me. The usual pewter plates and tankards adorned the dull red and brown walls. A line of leather-covered seats followed the walls, in front of which were ranged long tables.
My arrival here with a quiet request for food put a sort of panic into the breast of my small but stout host, who, when I came in, was playing checkers with another middle-aged Mayener, but who, when I asked for food, gave over his pleasure for the time being and bustled out to find his wife. He looked not a little like a fat sparrow.
“Why, yes, yes,” he remarked briskly, “what will you have?”
“What can I have?”
On the instant he put his little fat hand to his semi-bald pate and rubbed it ruminatively. “A steak, perhaps. Some veal? Some sausage?”
“I will have a steak, if you don’t mind and a cup of black coffee.”
He bustled out and when he came back I threw a new bomb into camp. “May I wash my hands?”
“Certainly, certainly,” he replied, “in a minute.” And he bounded upstairs. “Katrina! Katrina! Katrina!” I heard him call, “have Anna make the washroom ready. He wishes to wash his hands. Where are the towels? Where is the soap?”
There was much clattering of feet overhead. I heard a door being opened and things being moved. Presently I heard him call, “Katrina, in God’s name, where is the soap!” More clattering of feet, and finally he came down, red and puffing. “Now, mein Herr, you can go up.”
I went, concealing a secret grin, and found that I had dislocated a store-room, once a bath perhaps; that a baby-carriage had been removed from a table and on it pitcher, bowl, towel, and soap had been placed—a small piece of soap and cold water. Finally, after seeing me served properly, he sat down at his table again and sighed. The neighbor returned. Several more citizens dropped in to read and chat. The two youngest boys in the family came downstairs with their books to study. It was quite a typical German family scene.
It was here that I made my first effort to learn something about the Dreiser family. “Do you know any one by the name of Dreiser, hereabouts?” I asked cautiously, afraid to talk too much for fear of incriminating myself.
“Dreiser, Dreiser?” he said. “Is he in the furniture business?”
“I don’t know. That is what I should like to find out. Do you know of any one by that name?”
“Is not that the man, Henry,”—he turned to one of his guests—“who failed here last year for fifty thousand marks?”
“The same,” said this other, solemnly (I fancied rather feelingly).
“Goodness, gracious!” I thought. “This is the end. If he failed for fifty thousand marks in Germany he is in disgrace. To think a Dreiser should ever have had fifty thousand marks! Would that I had known him in his palmy days.”
“There was a John Dreiser here,” my host said to me, “who failed for fifty thousand marks. He is gone though, now I think. I don’t know where he is.”
It was not an auspicious beginning, and under the circumstances I thought it as well not to identify myself with this Dreiser too closely. I finished my meal and went out, wondering how, if at all, I was to secure any additional information. The rain had ceased and the sky was already clearing. It promised to be fine on the morrow. After more idle rambling through a world that was quite as old as Canterbury I came back finally to my hotel. My host was up and waiting for me. All but one guest had gone.
“So you are from America,” he observed. “I would like very much to talk with you some more.”
“Let me ask you something,” I replied. “Do you know any one here in Mayen by the name of Dreiser?”
“Dreiser—Dreiser? It seems to me there was some one here. He failed for a lot of money. You could find out at the Mayener Zeitung. Mr. Schroeder ought to know.”
I decided that I would appeal to Mr. Schroeder and his paper in the morning; and pretending to be very tired, in order to escape my host, who by now was a little tipsy. I went to the room assigned me, carrying a candle. That night I slept soundly, under an immense, stuffy feather-bed.
The next morning at dawn I arose and was rewarded with the only truly satisfying medieval prospect I have ever seen in my life. It was strange, remote, Teutonic, Burgundian. The “grafs” and “burghers” of an older world might well have been enacting their life under my very eyes. Below me in a valley was Mayen,—its quaint towers and housetops spread out in the faint morning light. It was beautiful. Under my window tumbled the little stream that had served as a moat in earlier days—a good and natural defense. Opposite me was the massive Brückentor. Further on was a heavy circular sweep of wall and a handsome watch-tower. Over the wall, rising up a slope, could be seen the peak-roofed, gabled houses, of solid brick and stone with slate and tile roofs. Never before in my life had I looked on a truly medieval city of the castellated, Teutonic order. Nothing that I had seen in either France, England, or Italy had the peculiar quality of this remote spot. I escaped the opportunities of my talkative host by a ruse, putting the two marks charged for the room in an envelope and leaving it on the dresser. I went out and followed the stream in the pleasant morning light. I mailed post-cards at the local post-office to all and sundry of my relatives, stating the local condition of the Dreisers, as so far learned, and then sought out the office of the Mayener Zeitung, where I encountered one Herr Schroeder, but he could tell me nothing of any Dreisers save of that unfortunate one who had failed in the furniture business. He advised me to seek the curator of the local museum, a man who had the history of Mayen at his finger-tips. He was a cabinet-maker by trade. I could not find him at home and finally, after looking in the small local directory published by Mr. Schroeder and finding no Dreisers listed, I decided to give up and go back to Frankfort; but not without one last look at the private yard attached to the priest’s house and the cherry-tree which had been the cause of the trouncing, and lastly the local museum.
It is curious how the most innocent and idle of sentiments will lead a person on in this way. In the little Brückentor Museum, before leaving, I studied with the greatest interest—because it was my father’s town—the ancient Celtic, Teutonic, Roman and Merovingian antiquities. It was here that I saw for the first time the much-talked-of wheat discovered in a Celtic funeral urn, which, although thousands of years have elapsed since it was harvested, is still—thanks to dryness, so the local savant assured me—fertile, and if planted would grow! Talk of suspended animation!
Below the town I lingered in the little valley of the Moselle, now laid out as a park, and reëxamined the gate through which my father had been wont to ride. I think I sentimentalized a little over the long distance that had separated my father from his old home and how he must have longed to see it at times, and then finally, after walking about the church and school where he had been forced to go, I left Mayen with a sorrowful backward glance. For in spite of the fact that there was now no one there to whom I could count myself related, still it was from here that my ancestors had come. I had found at least the church that my father had attended, the priest’s house and garden where possibly the identical cherry-tree was still standing—there were several. I had seen the gate through which my father had ridden as a boy with the soldiers and from which he had walked finally, never to return any more. That was enough. I shall always be glad I went to Mayen.