Bianca? By now she has forgotten with whom she came to the dance. Next week my name will be but one of her innumerable memories--if, indeed, it does not altogether pass away. For Bianca is Vienna, lavish and joyous and buoyant--and forgetful. I danced with her three times, but my three roses, along with scores of others, have long since been lost in the swirl of the evening.
I wish I might think only of Bianca as the shadows dissolve from the streets and the grey morning light strikes the great steeple of Stefans-Dom. But another picture presents itself. I see a little French girl, out of touch with all the merriment around her, sipping her Dubonnet in solitude--a forlorn girl with pink cheeks, pale blue eyes and hair the colour of wet straw.
Let the most important facts come first. The best beer in Munich is Spatenbräu; the best place to get it is at the Hoftheatre Café in the Residenzstrasse; the best time to drink it is after 10 P.M., and the best of all girls to serve it is Fräulein Sophie, that tall and resilient creature, with her appetizing smile, her distinguished bearing and her superbly manicured hands.
I have, in my time, sat under many and many superior _kellnerinen_, some as regal as grand duchesses, some as demure as shoplifters, some as graceful as _prime ballerini_, but none reaching so high a general level of merit, none so thoroughly satisfying to eye and soul as Fräulein Sophie. She is a lady, every inch of her, a lady presenting to all gentlemanly clients the ideal blend of cordiality and dignity, and she serves the best beer in Christendom. Take away that beer, and it is possible, of course, that Sophie would lose some minute granule or globule of her charm; but take away Sophie and I fear the beer would lose even more.
In fact, I know it, for I have drunk that same beer in the Spatenbräukeller in the Bayerstrasse, at all hours of the day and night, and always the ultimate thrill was missing. Good beer, to be sure, and a hundred times better than the common brews, even in Munich, but not perfect beer, not beer _de luxe_, not super-beer. It is the human equation that counts, in the _bierhalle_ as on the battlefield. One resents, somehow a _kellnerin_ with the figure of a taxicab, no matter how good her intentions and fluent her technique, just as one resents a trained nurse with a double chin or a glass eye. When a personal office that a man might perform, or even an intelligent machine, is put into the hands of a woman, it is put there simply and solely because the woman can bring charm to it and irradiate it with romance. If, now, she fails to do so--if she brings, not charm, not beauty, not romance, but the gross curves of an aurochs and a voice of brass--if she offers bulk when the heart cries for grace and adenoids when the order is for music, then the whole thing becomes a hissing and a mocking, and a grey fog is on the world.