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92 SOJOURN IN FRANCE AND GERMANY [CHAP. VI
August in Saxon Switzerland. All the time through, these
months were far more fruitful than those spent in France.
I fell fortuitously among excellent and hard-working
companions, the future Bishop Ryle, Ned Howson the
much-loved Harrow master, Alfred Cole, future Governor
of the Bank of England, and Herbert Bull, afterwards of
Westgate-on-Sea, the party' being joined for a time by
St. J. Brodrick (now Lord Midleton). We repaired to the
Pension Kretschmer in Ricknitz Strasse 8, gained a good
hold on the foundations of the language under the very
stimulating teacher Fraulein Gottschaid, explored the picture-gallery,
skated and got to know some classical music
at the Gewerbebaus, where, in spite of the foulest atmosphere
imaginable, we hardly missed a concert. Some
hundreq:,. of bourgeois were eating, drinking, and smoking;
every window was doubled, and the bare proposal that one
of them should be opened nearly led to our being ejected.•
I have sometimes thought that the historian of A.D. 8000
will trace the cause of the Great War of 19141 to the
increasing conflict in railway trains between Englishmen
and Germans on the question of open or shut windows.
About 1880, in the Dog·days up the Rhine Valley, Lionel
Tennyson and I got into a first-class for a night journey, to
avoid the crush in the second-class, the heat being really
appalling. But the most empty carriage contained two
Deutschers each in possession of a closed window and one
in a thick overcoat. I addressed a civil request to number
1 for a breath of fresh air, •• Quite impossible." Then to
number 2 ; he pleaded doctor's orders and turned up his
coat collar, shivering at the bare idea. I turned to my
companion and asked if he were prepared to fight, as at
twenty-five I could not contemplate being asphyxiated.
' It is an entire mistake to suppose that an ordinary German audience
is more patient of classical muSic than we are. At tha end oi our time
we wrc>te a civil note to tha conductor, asking him to give us all our old
favourites at onoe for tha last concert-nothlng at all stiff: Handel's
L""go; the Unfinished Symphony of' Schubert; the Abendstern from
TannhtiU8W, etc. The reply was : " Imposaible ! Far too classical for
the audience."