sure and of clean, honest, fearless night skies
comes--and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from the
dunghill. I must believe it. For they--_we_--may kill the laughter of
Berlin's streets--as we have killed it in Paris--but we can never kill
the heart, the spirit and the living, quivering corpuscles of German
blood. The French may drink stronger stuffs, eat richer foods and love
oftener than the Germans, and may be better fighters--but they cannot
laugh, they cannot sing as the Germans laugh and sing. And Berlin is the
new Germany, the Germany of to-day and to-morrow ... the Germany whose
laughter will grow louder as the decades pass and whose song will echo
clearer from the distant hills. While Paris (to go to Conrad)--is not
Paris and her land already at Bankok, and far, far beyond? Her children
spent before their day, listening to the too-soon lecture of Time? And
all hopelessly nodding at him: "the man of finance, the man of accounts,
the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a
still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our
faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes
looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of
life, that while it is expected is already gone--has passed unseen, in a
sigh, in a flash--together with the youth, with the strength, with the
romance of illusions...."

But again a truce to philosophisings. It grows late apace. (Ah, Hulda,
how like opals in the lyric April rain are your eyes in this first faint
purple-pink of the tremulous dawn.... Were I a Heine!) In my far-away
America, Hulda, in far-away New York, it is now onto midnight. I see
Broadway, strumpet of the highways, sweltering collarless under the loud
electricity of Times Square. I see a fetid blonde, dangling a patent
leather handbag, hurrying to an assignation in Forty-fifth Street. I see
two actors, pointing their boasts with yellow bamboo canes. A chop suey
restaurant flashes its sign. And I can hear the racking ragtime out of
Shanley's. A big sightseeing bus is howling the fictitious lure of the
Bowery, Chinatown and the Ghetto to gaping groups from the hinterlands.
A streetwalker. Another. Another. In the subway entrance across the
street, a blind man is selling papers. A "dip" calls a friendly "Hello,
Dan" to the policeman in front of the drugstore and works his steps over
the car tracks toward the drunk teetering ag