Seven Seas Magazine - October 1932

Front Cover, October 1932 Issue of The Seven Seas, Published by the North German Lloyd. Cover Drawing "Pont Neuf" by Helen Hoffman. GGA Image ID # 128dbf88b1

The Seven Seas, Vol. 10, No. 2 for October 1932. Photographs include Byzantine, Istanbul; Holiday in Hungary with Dancing Girls in Costume; The Beach at Majorca; School girls in Brittany; Mme. Costes and Baronne de Beaufort; Bavarian Pastorale; VIP Passengers Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Lunt and Mr. Henry Miller found relaxing on the SS Bremen; Toscanini - The Bremen. Articles Include Frontispiece - Byzantine, Transatlantica, Majorca, Live Dangerously by Rack Ham Holt, The Bastile Column, The Country of "The Angelus" by Padraic Colum, England Is like This, by Fred C. Kelly, and Books for Bon Voyage by Donald Douglas.

Remembrance of Things Passed

From my window through the low early morning light I could watch the men at work behind the opera house, lifting the scenery from Fidelio out the doorway, placing it on little wagons and wheeling it away.

The scene was like an old engraving, the shadows long and sharp: the kind of composition that would have cried out to be cut meticulously on metal. For from these awkward artificial-looking figures in their blouses, pantaloons, and boots it grew outward until it included within the field of my window frame the four large buildings that comprised the Square.

These buildings, beginning at the left, were the baroque church, the palace, the museum, and the opera house; and the men who were performing their picturesque task in the foreground conveyed the really quite impressive scale of all this architecture.

I felt sure that for this very reason Piranesi would have put them in even if he hadn’t seen them there; and I remember wondering whether he would have put in the milk- wagon that rattled across the cobblestones, sweeping the Square with its long slender shadow like a scythe blade sliding over the grass.

But now the greys that had given this picture the appearance of an old print were beginning to gather pinks and yellows from the brightening sky, and as I turned to answer a knock at my door, the Square was becoming a subject for oils or watercolors.

And when I had finished my rolls and coffee, rolls baked in three little bulges, which would indicate that I was in Dresden, if my description of the Square has failed to make that clear, I returned to the window. In the course of my breakfast I remember wishing that I could have had as well a window which overlooked the Elbe, so that in the very early morning when I am so wide awake and restless, if the city I am visiting is one I love, I could have taken turns with the scene on the other side.

Once I had had a room on the riverside of the Bellevue, and I remembered how beautiful the bridge was, how rosy the rooftops were in the Neustadt, and how lovely and graceful the gulls were as they flew between the mist above the water and the pink horizontal sunlight.

But next to seeing it, it was nice to know that the river was there around the corner, and the picture of it was in my mind as I went back to the window which I was very fortunate to have even though it only looked in one direction.

For in this direction now the scene was hardly recognizable as the one that I had been witness to half-an-hour before. If I hadn’t been positive of its being the selfsame window, I would have said it was another Square. It was churning with taxis, trucks and trolley cars, but of course, that was only a related activity.

Indeed, the scene was no longer an old, or even a new, engraving, or a watercolor, or an oil painting. The church in the full bright light was much more beautifully baroque, the palace had come out from the shadow of the church, though it looked pathetically unoccupied, the museum glittered in a monumental way, and the opera house—well, I would have been surprised to see the men still trundling away the simple sets of a charming old-fashioned opera, for the centuries had advanced considerably since seven o’clock, but I was hardly braced for what was now approaching.

As a matter of fact, there was still a man in brown blouse, blue pantaloons and black boots (the colors having become visible), sweeping up the area by the back door with a broom made with a bundle of faggots, all of which gave accent to my surprise at the sudden intrusion of a tractor that drew up with quite a little clangor right to the rear of this temple of music.

And pulled up by the tractor was a scenery truck that was longer than any hook-and-ladder I had ever seen. It would have been impossible to maneuver if there had been any corners to come around. And it had to be that long, for the sets it carried were tremendous.

Then it occurred to me that this was Good Friday and that this was Parsifal... But by now, it was time to get up and go out and really see Dresden again.

R. P.

Two Women in Their Motorcar Display the Latest Fashions from Paris. GGA Image ID # 128dddcebe

VIP Passengers Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Lunt and Mr. Henry Miller Relax on Their Deck Chairs on the SS Bremen. GGA Image ID # 128deb436f

Italian Conductor Arturo Toscanini on the SS Bremen. GGA Image ID # 128e4d720a