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Chapter 42The Second World JourneyDIE ZWEITE WELTREISE

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I was already going about again with great travel plans, which now, as I write them down, seem to me far bolder than then, when I formed them.

I wanted to undertake a world journey again, the second. For towards the world and its wonders I was now like a lion that had licked blood. There was so much I did not yet know, for instance Japan and China, Java and Siam!

So, swiftly resolved, I applied to the Lloyd for a second honorary cabin ticket. But — now came the sad part — only once in a life is such a thing granted to an artist. So — pay for it myself! After a short struggle I resolved to do it.

The children had been with me for eight days, after long negotiations and difficulties. Of the stipulated six weeks a year1 there was no longer any talk. From the three days at first conceded I had laboriously brought it up to eight. But their stay was no pleasure. They mocked at everything, at the many casts in the “park”, most of all at the fountain, which was just then being laid out.

I fought constantly with tears. When I tried to kiss them, they shrank back or ostentatiously wiped their cheeks.

Johanna, who had moved back in once everything was arranged, could not quite manage the house. The children found her “slow and dithery” and laid it all at my door. In short, it was good that I was going out into the wide world again, to numb my grief. By mid-September2 I was already making for the open, plunging myself anew into the whirlpool of the cosmos.

I sailed from Antwerp, with a Dutch steamer this time; the sea, with the exception of a few days, was smooth. I had meant to disembark first in Java, but my fellow passengers told me so many wonder-tales of Sumatra, where we called first, that I resolved on the spot to halt there and go on to Batavia by a later steamer. I have not regretted it. A wholly new world came to meet me in Dutch India, first of all, then, in Padang. The tropical well-being of the Europeans came home to me here almost more than in India.

The very house-dress of the good Dutch delighted me: the gaily flowered trousers, the sarongs and the cappaya, the white night-jacket. In Padang I met with the curiosity that, when I made to appear at the “Reistafel” in my kimono, because all the other ladies came bare-legged, in sarong and cappaya, the landlady rushed at me in horror: “For God's sake, you cannot appear like that, in a bathing costume!”

With two German scholars I went out coral-fishing, saw at Consul Schild's the war dances of some South Sea islanders — and, from his villa in the jungle, took part, platonically as it were, in a tiger hunt.

Nothing but new sensations! Then I went by the recently opened mountain railway through the wild Annef gorge to the “Bovelande”, to Fort de Kock, Pajakombo, the Carbowengat, the Mar of Manigno and Fort van der Capellen. Through the kindness of the “controlors” there, Westenenk3 and Oldt van Barneveldt, everything was endlessly eased and embellished for me. I painted in native houses, was carried away by the silver haze of the landscape, by the sharp-beaked, gaily painted rice barns and the messighits (the mosques) with three or four roofs set one over another.

Deeply satisfied, I went on to Batavia. There I owed a great deal of stimulus to the German consul-general Anton and to Herr Merten, the owner of the Hotel Nederlande. They drove me about the whole surrounding country.

Then I went to Buitenzorg with its world-famous “Plantentuin”, the largest and most beautiful botanical garden in the world, Peradenya-Kandy notwithstanding. The chief ground of the unheard-of luxuriance of the Javanese flora is the daily downpour of some two hours. Here, in the famous “mountain chambers”, I enjoyed the most wonderful view of the volcanoes Merapi and Singgalang4. I was, besides, invited to table by the governor-general residing there, Herr van Heutsz5. By a pleasant chance he came to meet me with my novellas “Dunkelkammer” in his hand. He also said I absolutely must visit the tea king of Java, at Malabar above Bandeong, and gave me a recommendation to him. There I then spent very interesting days. — On a high plateau ringed by twenty-two extinct volcanoes Herr Boscha6 has created one of the largest “tea estates” (as they say in India) in the world. In four hours the automobile races up the serpentine roads of the mountain. Up there the most refined culture and absolute primal wildness reach each other a brotherly hand. When I went walking with Herr Boscha, all his workers threw themselves in the dust before him along the paths. And in the evening, when they receive their day's wage (about four pfennigs a day), they take it kneeling, kissing the coin.

But the philanthropic entrepreneur has built them a whole village with a town hall and misseghit (mosque) and wayang wayang (the puppet play no Javanese can do without). And there, in truth, live happy people — people without wants, in an eternal spring.

I saw much else on Java that was many-coloured and strange. In my novel “Erloschene Vulkane7”, which is set on Malabar, all my impressions are laid down. The Borobudur8, the oldest, decaying Buddha temple in the world, belongs among the few quite great, overwhelming impressions of a lifetime. It lies in a paradisal country. — And then the native states of Djokia and Soerakarta, or Solo. At the court of the Susuhunam of Solo9, Paknam (the navel of the world), I witnessed the marriage festivities of four of his many daughters. It was a great feast, to which all the farmers of the district were invited too, with their wives. The servants in red Nelson livery served French champagne, walking upright, and the princes of royal blood crawled on all fours around the Susuhunam the whole evening. So the etiquette of the court demands. I could tell volumes about it, but I fear my readers may say: this is no life-story at all, this is a book of travel descriptions. Therefore I make myself brief.

I visited several fire-spewing, still living volcanoes: the sulphur crater Papandayan near Garoet, the Cava manuk (the bird crater), the Tankoban-Prahoe. Above all, though, the Bromo with its fire-cone in the Sea of Sand. One of the strangest craters in the world! From Tossari I climbed it, the mountain health resort of South Java.

I must be brief, and can at most graze all the wonders of the vegetation and the cult. From Batavia I went to Singapore, where the secrets of the greatest “flesh market” in the world filled me with horror and shook me. On this too the relevant chapters can be read in my novel “Yoshiwara10”.

Now I went on by way of Hongkong to Shanghai. Before that I had been in the Portuguese beauty spot Macao and in that extract of old China, Canton, which so intoxicated me with its splendour of colour that for days I almost bought myself poor in old gold-embroidered mandarin robes. Canton is a Chinese fairy tale and a city of the dead, in which fresh tea and oranges are brought to them every day, and where provision is made for their every possible earthly need; one must experience it to believe it.

In Shanghai, in the house of the then consul-general Herr von Buri (the Opium Conference11 was just sitting), I spent highly interesting days. But in my innocence I was not warmly enough dressed, part of my luggage had been left behind too, and so I caught a serious cold. In a coat of Frau von Buri's I began the voyage up the Yangtsekiang to Hankau. On the way, in icy airs, my condition worsened to such a degree that in Hankau, with a doctor and nurse ordered by telegraph, I had to be carried into the German clinic of Dr. R. They were not pleasant weeks. The fever curve climbed and fell; a severe pleurisy had developed. As I mended I read a great deal, and on the last day drove in a ricksha to old Hankau and the wonderful temple, which have since, as we know, fallen prey to the flames in the last uprising12.

Shortly before my departure I had one more sharp passage of arms with Dr. R., who, despite his initial protestation that he would take only an artist's price from me, put the globetrotter-screw to my purse! He proceeded quite like most German compatriots abroad, applying their cupping glasses. To my objections he said, smiling: “Be glad that the Chinese tael stands so low at present. What do you suppose thirty taels a day would otherwise come to for you? Nobody is forcing you to go to Peking.” — Later he remarked: “You have taken second class to Peking — in this country that is impossible.” — “If you relieve me of the money for the first?” I asked. — Long live the German colony abroad!

So now I went to Peking! It was the middle of March, and around the trees in Legation Street towered ramparts of ice a metre high. Nowhere does one freeze as in China. But what undreamed-of splendours here took up mind and soul again. A sandstorm on the Chinese Wall, in which I had to throw myself flat on the ground so as not to be blown down from the battlements, is about the strongest of my impressions there. And the imperial tombs of the Ming dynasty. And the landscape around Peking. Above all, though, the glorious, genuinely gilded carvings before and in the shops, and the abundance of flowering bulbs in every shop, before every door. Since that time every hyacinth brings the image of China before my soul. Peking is the only Chinese city with broad streets, which appear doubly broad through the low houses.

And then, amid a thousand hardships (at Taku we lay three days and three terrible nights off the bar), I came at last through the famous Inland Sea to Japan.

From Kobe, which already struck me as so genuinely Japanese, I went for a fortnight to Kioto, and here — the cherry trees were in blossom — the waves of the Japan-intoxication closed over my head. It then mounted steadily, in Nara, in Yokohama with Enoshima, and Kamakura with its famous bronze Buddha, the Daibouts. To culminate at last, by way of Tokio and its Shogun tombs, in Nikko. “Call nothing magnificent until you have seen Nikko,” says a Japanese proverb. Truly, the old Japanese craftsmanship in the “Hondo”, the holy of holies of Nikko, opens new worlds of beauty to the artist. And the Japanese mountain world in Nikko's circuit, with all the indescribably picturesque teahouses. And its wonderful cryptomeria avenue to Imachi.

In Tokio I also witnessed the cherry blossom festival in the park of the imperial palace, and was presented to the imperial couple13, dressed, alas, like their whole court, in European clothes.

A geisha feast which distinguished Japanese, to whom I had been recommended, gave for me in the Maple Club of Tokio belongs among my most charming memories. Among my most colour-splendid, though, the evening walk to the famous women's market of Yoshiwara in Tokio. Words can scarcely picture the colour-magic of these “maiden palaces”. Street up, street down, in every house some twenty venal women in old Japanese dress, clothed all in the same colours, kneeling or crouching on red cushions before wonderfully gold-carved backgrounds, as if caged behind bars. No odium attaches14 to these women here. They enjoy the respect and love of the whole population. It is an unbelievably picturesque sight. Some lanes are even planted with cherry trees, and the blossom-snow drifts in behind the bars into the hair of the beauties. At the entrance to the women's quarter, above a kind of door, rises a female figure with a lamp — almost like a Madonna.

Again and again I was in Yoshiwara. The ground-idea of my novel “Yoshiwara” came into being there.

And then I had been told so much of Miajyma15, the holy island on which for centuries no human being may be born and none may die (where it can be avoided, that must mean), that I resolved not to depart before I had seen it, and went there from Kobe by coastal steamer. With me travelled one single other passenger, an American, Mr. Moore. At first he seemed to me quite uninteresting. But fate threw us together, and I found in him one of the most selfless friends of my life.

In Miajyma we put up at the same hotel, Mr. Moore in the main building, I in one of the little Japanese cottages; my room I painted the next day, and then expected Mr. Moore at my rooms for tea. It was all like a doll's dream. We stayed several days there and made the loveliest excursions together, among them to a lookout mountain with thousands of steps, on which alone I should hardly have reached the summit. Then we sought “the holy fire” — undiscoverable in the dense wood, but found instead a true pure flame of friendship. — We had crystalline airs, and everything was as if dipped in fragrance and radiance. Mr. Blanchard Moore departed, but I still could not tear myself away. It was my last impression of Japan.

At last I went by way of Hieroshima to Tsuruga, from where I took ship for Vladivostok. Glorious is its situation on the Amur Bay. The Koreans in their white garments beautify the whole city.

And then began the seventeen-day run, in the post train, second class, to Moscow. The Russian consul-general had advised me to it. It cost only a little over a hundred roubles, but one had to provision oneself, from the colourfully costumed peoples sitting at the stations, who scarcely understood Russian. The “tschai”, the tea, everyone prepared for himself in the teapot he carried with him, drawing the hot water from the samovar at the stations. That struck me as quite Japanese; I used my little Japanese teapot for it.

The worst was getting to the washroom. The train was overcrowded, and one had to “queue” for the washroom, the way one queues for butter and potatoes in the war. It was frightful. — So I reckoned out that at four in the morning the crush would be smaller. But all night I could hardly close an eye for fear of sleeping past the hour.

The most motley mixture of peoples inside the train and outside at the stations. One would have needed a hundred eyes. My opposite was a pretty young Livonian woman who dragged mountains of provisions along from Vladivostok, but every day declared something or other spoiled and fired it out of the train. The most splendid sausages and tinned goods thus flew daily into the Siberian countryside. The people there could truly maintain that it rained sausage, ham and delicacies.

“It must be chucked out”, her standing phrase, pursued me into my very dreams.

It would all have been so glorious without this dull, soulless vis-à-vis, into whose eye no happening, no experience, no sight, however interesting, could conjure a gleam of spirit. If only I had now, in the war16, all the glorious eatables this girl threw out of the window as “spoiled”! At night I made myself a folding screen with my sheet, so as at least for those hours not to have to see her as well.

The melancholy grey-green wave-hills of Mongolia, blood-red evening sun above them, flew past us. At Lake Baikal the winter ice was just beginning to thaw, but in the Siberian steppe in mid-June we had the most intoxicating spring! In no other land on earth did I ever see such fullness of blossom. Meadows past all surveying, deep sky-blue with forget-me-nots, red and yellow with primulas. And the lilies of the valley! Veritable orgies of lilies of the valley we celebrated in the endless train. There was no compartment, even in third class, that was not stuck all over with fresh bunches of them. At every station new ones were bought, for a trifle. — Like a cloud of fragrance it hovered about the giant train.

When I think of that overland journey of seventeen days, three things come to mind first: the queueing to wash, the “chucking out”, and the Siberian intoxication of blossom.

At the Chinese frontier the passport difficulties were just as dreadful as at the German one. The Livonian meant to smuggle a wealth of Japanese ivory carvings; her best hiding place, she thought, was her stockings. I too was foolish enough to stow some of it in mine. The customs officials were very strict. They unpicked the lining of my coat, for instance, to see whether Japanese silk was tucked inside. Hardly were they gone when the Livonian triumphantly produced from under her skirts two great porcelain vases she had hung about herself on cords. She almost laughed herself dead over the stupid customs men. Then — the door opens once more for inspection — an old customs trick — and the vases, the four-hundred-rouble vases, were simply taken from her. Yes — he laughs best who laughs last. In my provisions they found half a bottle of wutki, which they simply drank off.

So now I was in Moscow for the second time, where I stayed with acquaintances, Herr and Frau Löwenthal. And then it was back to Berlin by way of Warsaw. The Jews of Warsaw seemed to have conspired to drive me to despair, there and in the railway compartment, with their Yiddish. —

At the Tempio, again a few laboriously conquered visiting days from the children, very cheerless, under the sign of a biting mood of mockery. Johanna could no longer master all the work. Besides the charwoman I kept, and the gardener, she had introduced a friend from the hospital, Frau Podzuweit, whom I jokingly called Frau Head Gardener. She came from the country and was blissful at being able to work off her energies in garden work. Soon she came every week, and under her skilled fingers flowers grew in abundance. She edged all the beds with borders of violets and slaved from early morning into the sinking night. Johanna, by the way, had now acquired three sprinkler-boys, at her own expense (to relieve herself). These children bellowed through the garden for hours daily and used three times more water with the hose than was needed. — For a few months I looked on, then I put an end to the glory. —

The hall had already been founded the previous autumn17, and after old custom I had had a document buried beneath it in a bottle; now came the topping-out feast, which the workmen celebrated very noisily. — Then came Italian workers, to lay the floor mosaic and to clothe the columns in yellow stucco marble.

In this time the children came again for a few days. For my defenceless heart, I had dreaded this visit greatly. — But it went quite otherwise. An understanding seemed suddenly to dawn in the growing girls for the style and beauty of my Tempio creation, and they began to look at me with their own eyes. The little splinter of glass in those eyes of theirs, which as in Andersen's fairy tale18 had made a distorted image of me, my world and my life, had fallen out. They saw again the “thing in itself”. — So Helga said once: “You know, you must go about in your Japanese kimonos, nothing else suits you so well.” And Inge: “The white columns must stand at the Tempio, and everything must be just as it is, and it is very beautiful.”

All this made me very happy, and I began again quietly to hope for the love of my children. On the long summer evenings all four of us played “writing games”, and the strong poetic talent of these hereditarily doubly burdened children began to unfold to the full. In a few days — like flowers in a fairy tale.

It also made a strong impression on them when, on Inge's birthday19, a slim, black-haired Italian, a stucco worker with a blue flower behind his ear, to whom they brought a glass of punch, emptied it at one draught: “Alla salute delle Signorine!” Was that, to the Italian-born girls, like a greeting from home? I had the feeling that this time, for the first time, they had liked being with me. And that made me deeply happy.

Soon after their departure my Japan friend, the American Blanchard Moore, visited me and invited me for eight days to Norway. We were to meet in Kristiania. He had spent some time with Tolstoi and hoped now to be introduced by me to Björnson. But it was to come otherwise; Björnson had fallen gravely ill20 and could no longer see anyone. So we were only in Jotunheim, the wildest and least known inner mountain range of Norway, whose chain I had gazed at with longing from Nystuen and Tyn the year before. So now we travelled the wild “Jotuntindere”.

Sadly it was only a short joy. Mr. Moore then came for a few days more to the Tempio. Johanna promptly fell in love with him, although outwardly he was quite unprepossessing. He parted with the wish that he might soon greet me in America. “That has a good long way to go,” I said.

Shortly afterwards I was visited by a Herr H., whom I had once met in Athens with Katharina. In those days he was serving out his year on an Austrian warship. Now he had become the husband of a rich American woman from the city of Philadelphia and lived in its suburb of Cynwyd. He grew enthusiastic over my pictures and said that in the narrow room, so close together, they could not possibly tell; and he proposed to me an exhibition in Philadelphia, which he would manage. But I must then have the pictures packed at once, all of them unframed, of course, and the big ones rolled, and come over with them myself immediately.

That was only too illuminating to my adventurer's spirit. If Herr H. was the right man, it was a good thing.

After receiving his letter from Philadelphia, in which he made everything precise once more and offered to take me as a boarder, I accepted on short resolve, and had the laboriously boxed-in and hung pictures all taken down from the walls again, the big ones rolled up, and everything sent in two enormous tin cases to Hamburg.

There I took them onto the steamer as passenger's luggage, and now sailed for the first time to the New World.

In Hamburg I meant to spend the night in a Hotel H.; but the landlord proved a swindler, and that made a painful impression on me. Was it an evil omen, that in Philadelphia too I should have no luck with “H.”?

In New York he then received me himself and brought me to Philadelphia and Cynwyd. For three weeks the sword of Damocles hung over me: that the pictures, which I had declared as studio removal goods, were to cost a dizzyingly high import duty — a small fortune — at entry. This constant mortal dread over a downright unaffordable duty was no medicine for my nerves; on top of it I caught a severe cold in the madly overheated house. The senseless “radiator heating” in the houses and trains of America seems to me one of the greatest abuses awaiting newcomers. It drove me, who after all was accustomed to strong heat from the tropics, almost to despair. On the advice of the young couple I went, in the last days of the “Indian summer”, to the neighbouring giant seaside resort of Atlantic City. It brought me no improvement. Before that, furnished with recommendations, I had gone to Washington. Count and Countess Bernstorff21 were very kind to me; I was invited to dinner, and afterwards the Countess took me driving. The Count procured me an audience with the then President Taft22. That was the single time in America that I had my shoes polished, for ten cents (forty pfennigs)! — I spent two days, by the way, in the Capitol and in the pompous Congressional Library, and on a third went down the Potomac to Washington's homestead, Mount Vernon.

In Cynwyd it was cheerless. The black servant girl had been dismissed on the spot for drunkenness; the young wife had her hands full with an infant, understood not a trace of housekeeping, and everything went topsy-turvy. So I had to bite into the sour apple, help with the rooms and take over the kitchen. Frau H. reminded me in much of my Livonian: “it must be chucked out”. Every evening mountains of leftover white bread, meat, potatoes and vegetables were thrown to the refuse. My heart ached.

Frau H., by the way, was a very good coloratura singer, Paris-trained, and in every respect “a little rascal”. H. himself, who at first had been all fire and flame for my exhibition, had quite suddenly, in true American style, taken over a “vacuum-cleaner” business and was out all day after “customers”. But we had won a very beautiful exhibition room in Chestnut Street. When, though, would the picture-customs question be settled? I grew ever sicker, my cough was frightful, and my nerves grew ever weaker. Since it might now take weeks, even months, before the pictures came free (if that succeeded at all), the H.s besought me to entrust the whole affair to them and to seek recovery for my bronchial tubes in the South myself. The “takings” would then be sent to me weekly. For a long time I resisted, but I grew daily more wretched, the hopes daily darker, and the stay in the H. house daily more cheerless. — In the last good days of late autumn I had thoroughly seen the City of Brotherly Love and lost myself in its giant American measures; now, after heavy inner struggles, I finally turned my back on it, brought providently to the station by H. — I was not to see him or Philadelphia again.

From New York I went straight to Cuba-Havana, and its much-praised tropical splendour struck me, after India and Java, as pitiful enough. Despite manifold excursions into the “tropical” interior, for instance to the dripstone cave at Matanzas. After that I went by an American steamer to Verakruz. The unbearable customs terrors slowly began to give way. In Verakruz enervating airs breathed about me; the women all went with long, loosened hair, and the vultures cleaned the streets. Everywhere gaily glazed church-dome roofs towered into the deep-blue air.

So now I was in Mexico. Like a racehorse I lifted my head and scented morning air, my life's air! Mexico, up, into your secrets! — Already on the ship I regretted with my whole soul that at this season Yucatan and the fathoming of its temples would be quite impossible for me. In spring and summer there are connections, railways, for everything. Just now, though, it was a locked paradise to me. So at least Mitla should not escape me! For the present, however, I was still in Verakruz with its fat vultures, which brought Malabar Hill and the Towers of Silence back to my mind. I read, I studied Prescott's “Conquest of Mexico”23; the same road as the conquistadores, the same road as Fernan Cortez, I would take: from the fever zone by the sea ever higher up into midland and mountains. Somewhat more comfortably than Cortez, to be sure, I travelled in one day's journey by way of Jalapa (the home of the jalap bindweed), Fortin (the coffee region) to Orizaba, at the Pico d'Orizaba with its eternal snow!

In Fortin I acquired, for about twenty pfennigs, a whole little box full of heavily scented gardenias. In Orizaba I walked in the middle of winter under blossoming oleanders. Again the gloriously coloured church domes against the background of blossoming alamedas. And in the evening, strolling through the dark lanes, I saw many a dark figure of a man in a pointed sombrero, playing the mandoline or whispering before a closely barred window, behind which a female figure leaned towards him. The Spanish-Mexican fashion of “far amore”.

I was at the bullfight too, which here still had something strangely uncivilised and primal about it.

Yes, I was in Mexico. Quite suddenly, without long deliberation, I was now here in the very middle of its heart.

And then I went on to Mexico City and put up at a small Spanish casa dos huespedes. But the fare was frightful, and in the first night my boots were stolen from before my door. So I preferred after all the civilised Hotel de Genève in the quite modern foreigners' quarter.

Yes, Mexico City has quarters so modern that it seems impossible to be in Mexico at all. Here, then, I was to receive the first money from H., after finding word already at Verakruz that the customs question had at last been settled satisfactorily for me, that the pictures were even then being hung in the exhibition room and that he was working at it “night and day”. Naturally he sent no money, spoke only of the ever-growing expenses, and of how his vacuum-cleaner business unfortunately left him too little time, for which reason he had engaged a secretary. He also sent a few newspaper cuttings. But by now I knew enough: the affair would not turn out a success, for H., who had meant to throw his whole strength into it, was devoting that strength to a more profitable “business”, the vacuum-cleaner. The Hamburg omen was to be proved right. So I no longer counted on Philadelphia and its springs of gold. I simply switched it off — but I lived and wove in Mexico.

At first I stood towards it coolly enough — everything was so pale and dusty, compared with the dark Indian glows. But gradually its fine silver magic took me wholly captive. — I no longer know at all how long I was there — at the utmost it was three months. But to me it seemed three years, for the fullness of what was learned and beheld. Here too I could write volumes, and yet can only throw a few stray lights at random from my laterna magica onto these white leaves.

At the house of the German minister B. I became, through chance and knowledge of human nature, the confidante of an incipient tragic conflict. I came to know people before the turning of a life — before the decision towards death and ruin. How often I have thought of it since.

But perhaps it all ran smoothly off in a small adultery. Who can say? — What human types, too, in the Hotel de Genève! — And again great bullfights. And excursions into the unspeakably charming surroundings.

Around the great cathedral new drains were being laid. In these excavations they found once more hundreds of human skulls, from the great battle that had been fought here in “Tenochtitlan” between the warriors of Montezuma and the mercenaries of the conquistadores, from the bloodbath that is said to have splashed above the fighters' ankles. — All the terrible battles rushed away — rung out — everything transformed. — —

At the Mercado del Volador (the “thieves' market”, really a junk market) I found a button with the imperial crown, from a servant's livery of the Emperor Maximilian24! This tragedy too, that began so brilliantly, rushed away — rung out —!

In the museum, treasures reaching back into greyest antiquity, far beyond Aztec and Toltec times, doubly impressive here, at the cradle, so to speak, of those peoples. Christmas was celebrated very splendidly in the legation palace and in the Hotel de Genève, and among the whole Catholic population too, that splendid mixture of Indians and Spaniards. — Porfirio Diaz25 was still at the helm, he too a true child of his country. I had much told me about him; he was the idol of the people. Who would have thought that so soon he would be deposed and a fugitive! In Mexico one is never safe from surprises.

Cuernavaca! What singularly beautiful days I spent there in the darkly beautiful, melancholy Borda garden, the favourite seat of the Emperor Maximilian and Charlotte. And before the palace of Fernan Cortez, from which so strange a rock-vista offers itself. Yes, Mexico grew ever closer to my heart. As I drove back to Mexico City in the evening glow, and the volcanoes Popokatepetl and Iztaccihuatl stood out from the plain more beautifully than ever — how I could understand it then, the passion of the conquistadores for this glorious land.

I then went on over Puebla and Cholulla (what pictures out of Mexican history rose there before my eyes), through wide stretches of land grown only with organ cactus, for hours through “pulque fields” (agaves, from whose sap the country's customary agave wine, the intoxicating pulque, is prepared), to Oaxaca. Again, everywhere, finely silhouetted, richly adorned churches! — Then in four hours to Mitla26, the mysterious Toltec temples, still wholly well preserved with their ornament that works like Greek band-patterns. As if the partly subterranean temples had been abandoned only yesterday. Mitla too lies ringed by organ cactus. A very poetic inn took me in. Through a dark general store one came into a truly paradisal tropical patio with trees blossoming glowing red, palms, climbing roses. A fairy tale of a garden. Altogether the “fondas” of the smaller Mexican towns are often bathed in indescribable charm, like the whole land.

The newly excavated pyramids of Sun, Moon and Stars27, too, with their strange wall paintings, near Tezcuoco, I went to see, and Amecameca, the Mexican Oberammergau. At Popo Park I would gladly have bought myself in again. That is a modern villa settlement, three hours by express from Mexico City, in a wonderful wood of laurel and pine, immediately opposite Popocatepetl and its eternal snow. Landscapes more beautiful I have seldom seen. And up here was the purest and most luminous air, an eternal spring; the roses bloom the whole year round. And the prices were so seductive! A building plot of about two acres of most splendid wood, together with building stone of a silver-grey gleaming, marble-like quality — some eight thousand marks. But of course — I now had the Tempio! And the children I should never have got to come here. So it had to remain a dream, just like the Dalmatian monastery! Which shattered on the reality of the “plague”. How glad I am of it now!

In Mexico I saw further most magnificent bullfights. In the newspapers the dust-raising suicide of a young German woman, who had allegedly been raped by four bullfighters, filled long columns daily. Bullfighters stand in the foreground of interest in Mexico too. I treated all this in my novel “La Paloma28”.

Then I went to world-remote Cuautla, the future Karlsbad of Mexico. Dreamier gardens, sleepier poet-country than there I saw nowhere. How often the longing for Mexico seizes me now, for the Mexico I did not even, at the time, so specially value!

And then it was on over Queretaro (where I followed Maximilian's traces of blood and made purchases of opals) and Zacatecas (the old silver mines in a wildly romantic basin of the hills, ringed by bare mountain slopes), over Aguas Calientes (famous for its hot springs and its lace), in a few days' journeys via Albuquerque to the Grand Canyon of Arizona! Yes, the travel-devil had me again — skin and hair.

Everything else then sank from me for days in the gigantic vastness of the Grand Canyon, the “Chasm of horrors”, the cleft of terror.

In my later novel “Im Schatten der Mormonen” it is depicted as it presented itself to my intoxicated eyes: as the measure for all that is greatest among the nature-wonders this earth bears.

And then it was on to Los Angeles. — H. had of course sent no money. His news failed too; I had no notion how matters stood in Philadelphia. But I was not going to let myself be hindered in my “sightseeing” for lack of money. So the word was: economise, and pinch everything from the body, in order to feed it to eye and spirit.

I did happily find in the “Peoples hotel” a dark, cold room for twenty cents. And close by a breakfast for five and a dinner for fifteen cents, so that I could still treat myself to five cents for the evening and had always spent no more than forty-five cents on my living. Of three dollars a day that left me two dollars fifty-five over, and on this I now made the most glorious excursions. To Mount Wilson, Mount Lowe, to the various “beaches”, all the sea-bathing places of the neighbourhood. I enjoyed the beauty of nature in full draughts. Then I ferreted out a cheap coastal line to San Francisco. But it was nearly to cost me my life. And a great deal of time. Two days we waited in San Pedro for the departure, and then, in heavy seas, it became downright frightful in the nutshell. In San Francisco we had to crawl ashore on all fours, in streaming rain, over slippery planks.

But San Francisco offered me much that was new and stimulating. The traces of fire and earthquake were not yet quite effaced, and one could still get an inkling of the horrific devastation at the “golden gate”.

A sister of Mrs. Sutherland, an acquaintance from Atlantic City, had found me quarters, and here I found it quite snug for cheap money.

Naturally, winter or no winter, I had to go to Yosemite valley, the famous rock valley of the Sierra Nevada. And it surpassed, despite ice and snow, my boldest expectation. On Mount Tamalpais I had an overwhelming panorama. After a fortnight I left the city highly satisfied, to travel to Salt Lake in Utah and halt there. The ride through the Nevada desert, with its desolate slopes wrapped in evening haze, beneath which so many undiscovered Nibelung hoards29 will yet flood a later world with ruin, was improbably beautiful. In Salt Lake I got out, took a room and wandered through the genuinely American-looking city. I also went into the information bureau at the Temple. There, in an editor, Herr Schultheiß30, I came to know an honest Switzer, who took me home with him into his child-rich family. I had to pass the night there. He himself fetched my luggage from the hotel, and I now sat in a dyed-in-the-wool Mormon family. They showed me a few things more the next morning, and I had to promise them that if I ever came to America again I would put up with them for a few weeks. Then I travelled on, highly satisfied, to Chicago. I arrived at break of day, met by Mr. Blanchard Moore, who had already found me quarters. And I stayed a fortnight in the giant city and considered whether I should open a Preuschen exhibition here the next year. Mr. Moore advised me against it with all his strength; he himself stood far from all artistic circles and would, he said, not be able to help me.

And then I went on over Buffalo to New York. But the Niagara Falls in winter I did see, and they surpassed all my expectations. In New York Mrs. Sutherland took me as a boarder, and I stayed some weeks with her. It was an interesting setting. Fabulous genuine-American housewifely disorder confined to the tiniest space; with it a dying man (a former editor on the “Sun”) and a friend of the house, together with whom she had once discovered and owned a gold mine. I learned afterwards, by the way, that Mrs. Sutherland had been a celebrated dancer. (After her husband's death she again took an engagement as “Amor” in a great spectacle piece; at the time, though, he was still living.)

I had a recommendation to a German writer, Frau von Ende31. To this lady, who occupied a beautiful house on 59th street with her son, a good violinist who owned a respected music school, I told my Philadelphia misfortune. I had found word waiting that H. had packed the pictures and sent them to a New York forwarding agent. Nothing had been sold, but with a few of the pictures he had covered his expenses — he and his family were on their way to Europe.

Frau von Ende now said it was a pity that the pictures should lie in New York and not be exhibited, and offered me her house for a five-day exhibition, but not a day longer, as she assured me again and again. I went into it, but had better not have done so. For what use to me were five days? At the time, to be sure, I thought: it is better than nothing, and made comprehensive preparations. The big pictures, with broad black strips of cloth as frames, looked pompous in the music room. The other pictures were distributed over the whole house. The effect was endlessly original.

Now I asked Count Bernstorff to open the exhibition for me. And he really came, with his wife, and before a numerous invited public delivered an address in which he made America acquainted with Germany's “most famous lady painter32”.

All that would have been useful for an exhibition of five weeks. For five days it was powder quite needlessly shot away. For it profited me not the least.

Naturally, after the ambassador's brilliant introductory address, columns-long reports and illustrations appeared in the biggest newspapers. But by the time the great public set out to see the much-praised pictures, the five days had long run out and the pictures were packed up and stored away again.

This profited me not in the very, very least. — Now I sailed, comically enough, on the “Philadelphia”. On the day of departure I had received one more letter, which churned me up in all my depths. I had asked Helga to write me when she and Inge would come to visit me this year, so that I could prepare the nest in good time for my loved ones. To which, after a long, frightening pause, came a few short lines: “Dear Muz33” (so the children had called me from earliest youth), “you ask when we mean to come to you this year. Now hear me calmly and without agitation — what I write to you just as calmly, but firmly resolved: we do not want to come at all any more! We want never to see each other again! For there is not the slightest purpose in it. We have grown up in such different thoughts and interests from yours; such strangeness lies between your circles and ours. Why torment all three of us needlessly? So do not upset yourself, and do nothing unreasonable — it is our rock-firm resolve. Nevertheless with warm greetings Helga — Inge. You can always write to us, follow our life from afar. We shall also always be glad to answer you and report to you of our life.”

It struck me like a blow of a club! I had received the letter on the ship and read it in my cabin, which Herr von Ende had decked out, as an atmospheric farewell greeting, with red carnations. Like mockery these flowers of good fortune shone at me, the red carnations. Again and again I read the lines of misfortune!

And then I began to write and write. To the children, to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

Many of the epistles were torn up; many flew out, accusing, imploring, desperate, resolved on the utmost. No, I was not going to let this be done to me, not this!

At the Tempio, sure enough, I already found answers waiting!

My brother-in-law wrote: “The children are appalled at your impetuous demands, your threats — and turn away, full of estrangement, from a mother who can find so little inner harmony and beautiful measure in her soul. You have gravely damaged yourself by your impetuosity. Helga and Inge have only moved further from you because of it. It shows all too well the superficiality of your nature, which drags everything of the soul before the public, which pours out its feelings in advertisement. Why are you not happy in the thought that the children have been planted by us into the right soil, in which all their gifts can develop to the full. Rejoice from afar in their unfolding, and say with Goethe: ‘The stars, one does not covet them34!’”

But I did not quiet myself with this, and my letters sounded ever more desperate. I formed the most adventurous plans. I would go to the Kaiser himself; he should ask his admiral35 not to torture me to death by his cruelty.

He, however, had evidently noticed that the affair was not to be carried through as smoothly as he had thought. So he wrote me that he would come for a personal interview, and hoped to bring me back to “reasonable insight into the wisdom of his resolutions”.

He came. And I begged, I implored, I stammered, I sobbed. At last I threw myself at his feet and clasped his knees in desperation. Then he said: “I will see what can be done, whether I can bring the children to go back on their resolve. It will be a hard piece of work.”

Then he went quickly. But I was wonderfully comforted. For I knew now that he had seen I would on no account let this be done to me, and that he would have to reckon with some stroke of violence or despair on my part if he persisted in his refusal.

And then the children came — for fourteen days this time. Everything was made ready for a festive reception.

Johanna absolutely wanted three sprinkler-boys to help her. But in the end she contented herself with one, who admittedly suffered from epileptic convulsions and gave us many a fright.

The hall was now finished within and without, and awaited the pictures still stored in New York. On either side of the entrance throned the female sphinxes, in whose shaping I had helped. Rhododendron and roses stood before them. The long sides were bordered with firs — as I had loved it at the Japanese temples. A pair of peacocks strutted gravely about, Zeus and Here. Often Zeus spread his wheel before the sphinxes. That looked fantastic. At night he roosted on one of the white vases of the front villa, Tempio I, before which the Adorant36 raised his hands — here one sacrifices to Art. The crimson-rambler walks on both sides of the house stood in full bloom. Before the window of the “children's room” in the mezzanine, painted and furnished in white and pink, stood a bird cage with golden pheasants that shimmered in the sun. It was really beautiful, and in these days it became for us three like a fairy tale of happiness. In the evenings we sat writing-game-poetising on the front balcony under the white columns and watched the sun sink blood-red in the west, and at full moon the whole little white columned building shimmered as if of pure marble.

Never as in these days did I rejoice in my new possession, and it was almost as if the Tempio and its beauty had helped to win me back the hearts of my children. They no longer shrank from my shy tenderness; they pressed close to me, they wound their arms around my neck. Soon I noticed they were jealous, each of the other. Of the terrible interlude since their last visit we never spoke. —

And then these days too had run away. I had to think again of Storm's words37: “There are days that are like the roses.” These days had been, in the truest sense of the word, rose-time.

From America came letters. A Mr. Niven wanted to bring out a Preuschen portfolio with my symbolist pictures. And I had now, despite Mr. Moore's advice against it, resolved on the exhibition in Chicago.

It had turned cool early. In mid-September I was to depart. Before that, though, Johanna almost set the house on fire for me by laying her feather boa on the heating. I smell the scorching smell, come out and see the bright flames already flickering up the tow-wrapped pipes of the central heating. I quench them with a bucket of water. A minute later and it would have been too late.

So I sailed for the second time to America! This time Mrs. Sutherland and Mr. Niven were at the pier. In New York there was a killing heat. I had much trouble with the photographing of the pictures. — Now for the first time I looked at the city thoroughly, and then went by way of Niagara Falls in autumn (a counterpart to the winter picture) straight to Yellowstone Park. — I had little time; it was soon to close. But I spent golden days there. Then I went to Utah-Salt Lake to my dear Mormon friends, with whom I spent three impression-rich weeks. My book “Im Schatten der Mormonen” is drawn there from my own closest seeing. I was also in the house of a Mormon with several wives. Polygamy has now, after all, been forbidden for twenty years38. The landscape of Utah is inspiringly beautiful, and it really is the land where milk and honey flow. Old Brigham Young enjoyed his life there in every respect. And his beehive has cheerfully thriven on, and gives food for Mormons and Gentiles.

From Utah I went straight to Chicago. Mr. Moore had already sought out quarters for me, this time on Michigan Avenue. There, too, in the “fine arts building”, I found premises for my exhibition. But I stayed only a short time in Chicago, and went first to St. Louis, to visit distant American relatives. Cousin Henry fetched me from the train; we did not know each other, it was quite romantic. We drove by automobile to his suburban villa, where wife and secretary received us warmly. I spent beautiful days in St. Louis, we made many excursions, and Mr. Reichard promised me to come to Chicago and help me with the building-up of my exhibition. But first he helped me free my “Preuschen portfolio39” from the hands of Mr. Niven, which had made no trustworthy beginning with the pictures. I now brought it out on my own account, with German and English text — but not in America: with the Berlin Photographic Society, which executed it in a most artistic manner. I have recovered my costs on it. The title plate was the portrait of the Empress Frederick. Then came, in the order of their making: Mors Imperator, Lebenssphinx, Asrael, Kirke und die Schweine, Vampir Sehnsucht, Gloria, Lebenshunger, Leda und der Schwan, Moloch Liebe, in wonderful reproduction. The text gave a short explanation of the symbolist picture-chain.

Cousin Henry did come later, made friends with Mr. Moore, and both gentlemen helped me with touching self-sacrifice in my difficult work. The opening was very ceremonious; many papers spoke at length about the pictures; I was even — genuinely American — drummed out of bed at midnight to show a reporter my paintings. And when I had presented the big pictures to him, he said understandingly: “I see, this is ‘Kirke and swine’ and that other lady and swan.” Leda had been beyond him. But on the whole it was more a success of esteem than of the cash-box. I could have wished the five roaring New York days as a prelude to the five Chicago weeks. Then I should really have had lasting profit of it. As it was, despite all and everything, it was only a fight against windmills, for America can be conquered only with the help of a gold-strewing manager.

Christmas I spent with friend Blanchard40. It was quite idyllic. I had learned to value more and more the good sides of this genuine human being and friend. At the start he had been a wholesale dealer in “slides” (films), with a giant business. One of his partners was the Reverend Hubbell, the other the detective Captain Hall. Circumstances such as occur only in America. Moore had given Japanese lectures, with lantern slides he had taken himself, to much success. His Russian journey and his visit to Tolstoi gave him new material. He had “studied” the Siberian prisons fairly thoroughly, with the help of American tips. Now he gave his lectures, very substantial ones incidentally, in the suit of a Siberian convict, with a wig shorn over half the head and clanking chains. I smiled in private, but for the Americans it was exactly the right thing, and he had to repeat his lectures at some fifty schools, churches and institutions, with enormous success. Sometimes I went with him to such an occasion. It was the surest means of coming to know Chicago from all sides: today in a genteel pious congregation, tomorrow in the plainest elementary school of Englewood, another time in a Magdalen asylum.

Moore, by the way, was of childlike goodness. He had been married to a beautiful, temperamental singer; in his day he rented her a theatre of her own. There she fell in love with her partner and had herself divorced. But she became very unhappy and implored her former husband to forgive her. He gave her the money for the divorce from the second husband. He himself had now had enough of her, and was like a burnt child that shuns the fire. But he was an ideal friend — when he was near. Letters he almost never writes.

On Sundays we were mostly together. Then he cooked me his favourite dishes and mine. And we revelled in Japanese memories. Immediately after Christmas I departed, by the straightest road for Florida.

On the way I lived through a railway collision, in which several dead “coloured people” were to be recorded. The window beside me splintered; I myself got off with the fright.

Jacksonville, the Florida capital, touched me as wholly foreign — more Negroes than whites. And there I saw for the first time the landmark of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina: the life oak (evergreen oak) woods with their moss-beards hanging to the ground. It makes a completely primeval-world impression.

From here I went to St. Augustine, where I celebrated New Year. On “Independance day41”, the day of the freeing of the slaves, I witnessed an enormous procession of coloured people. St. Augustine has fairy-tale hotels. The greatest is the “Ponce-de-Leon house42”, with a dreamily beautiful park, in which I painted. Altogether, splendour and luxury in Florida seek their equal. — Once again I sank so deep into the world's beauty that everything else sank away from me over it.

From Daytona I went to Palm Beach, where I stayed several weeks and painted, and later to Miami. The luxuriance and blossom-fullness of those shores seek their equal. — Then I went to Key West, the largest of all the little coral islands, with the new, wonderfully strange Key railway43. It seemed to me roughly like the line from Mestre to Venice; one rides for hours from bridge to bridge through the sea. — In Key West, famous for turtles and sponges, I gathered myself a whole quantity of the latter on the beach, and was very proud of them. Inge later threw them away in her “great clean-out”.

Now it was back to Tampa on the west coast, the famous cigarette town with a world-renowned Moorish hotel. After that I went up the St. Johns river through the orange districts, and at the last to Silver Springs, the fountain of youth of Vasco de Gama44, which the Indians showed him. This fountain of youth I had to seek out, cost what it might!

And then, for a theatrical closing effect, I made the voyage on the Oklawaha45. That is the most fantastic of all my travel experiences. It comes from the fountain of youth, whose water lets one see to the bottom in the most improbable clarity; with the glass I could make out a shell-encrusted chair and sheets of newspaper down below. The Oklawaha pours itself into the St. Johns river, and soon after its outflow from Silver Springs grows darker and darker. “Black, crooked water,” say the Indians: Oklawaha. The pleasure steamer, which housed eight, I say eight, honeymoon couples, is tall and narrow, to fit itself to all the windings. As through a dreamland one rides. On both sides dense forest, vaulting together over the narrow water like arbours, mostly “lifeoaks” with long moss-beards. Then tall cypresses and cabbage palms. Everything overgrown through with blossoming tendrils. On mossy stones lie sluggish alligators, in giant size. And strange, gaudy birds circle us. But more magical still the mood becomes at night, with the searchlight from the ship's mast. So improbable does everything become then: the red maple buds glow like burning drops of blood. And over the grey moss-garlands runs a rosy sheen. The picture mirrors itself in the deep-black water. No sound is heard on the ship; everything holds still in silence — as through a dream-world we ride. Yes, from the fountain of youth I drew on through the water of dreams, out into life.

I then halted several times more, in Georgia and in South Carolina, in the old slave states, in Charlston, Savannah and others. In Richmond I saw the classical Capitol and the grey squirrels.

In Washington I stopped again for the Capitol and the Congressional Library, and was at table with the Bernstorffs.

Then I went back from New York to Berlin. My young alligator, which I carried with me from Jacksonville in a wooden box and which was to outlive me by a hundred years, was already dead when I threw him into the washing-water in my cabin. I set him in spirits, and possess him still. An alligator in spirits — the profit of three America exhibitions46!