Either the performance would
be poor or the provender would be highly expensive, or both. But
here the show is wonderful, and the victuals are good and not
extravagantly priced, and everybody has a bully time.
At eleven-thirty or thereabout the show at the ice palace is over
- concluding with a push-ball match between teams of husky maidens
who were apparently born on skates and raised on skates, and would
not feel natural unless they were curveting about on skates. Their
skates seem as much a part of them as tails to mermaids. It is
bedtime now for sane folks, but at this moment a certain madness
which does not at all fit in with the true German temperament
descends on the crowd. Some go upstairs to another part of the
building, where there is a dancehall called the Admiralskasino;
but, to the truly swagger, one should hasten to the Palais du Danse
on the second floor of the big Metropolpalast in the Behrenstrasse.
This place opens promptly at midnight and closes promptly at two
o'clock in the morning.
Inasmuch as the Palais du Danse is an institution borrowed outright
from the French they have adopted a typically French custom here.
As the visitor enters - if he be a stranger - a flunky in gorgeous
livery intercepts him and demands an entrance fee amounting to
about a dollar and a quarter in our money, as I recall. This
tariff the American or Englishman pays, but the practiced Berliner
merely suggests to the doorkeeper the expediency of his taking a
long running start and jumping off into space, and stalks defiantly
in without forking over a single pfennig to any person whatsoever.
The Palais du Danse is incomparably the most beautiful ballroom
in the world - so people who have been all over the world agree
- and it is spotlessly clean and free from brackish smells, which
is more than can be said of any French establishment of similar
character I have seen. At the Palais du Danse the patron sits at
a table - a table with something on it besides a cloth being an
essential adjunct to complete enjoyment of an evening of German
revelry; and as he sits and drinks he listens to the playing of a
splendid band and looks on at the dancing. Nothing is drunk except
wine - and by wine I mainly mean champagne of the most sweetish
and sickish brand obtainable. Elsewhere, for one-twentieth the
cost, the German could have the best and purest beer that is made;
but he is out now for the big night. Accordingly he saturates his
tissues with the sugary bubble-water of France. He does not join
in the dancing himself. The men dancers are nearly all paid
dancers, I think, and the beautifully clad women who dance are
either professionals, too, or else belong to a profession that is
older even than dancing is.
