“Oh, yes: Darwin,” said Miss Triscoe, vaguely. “Well, I'm glad he

doesn't give it up. I didn't know but I was holding out just because I

had argued so much, and was doing it out of--opposition. Goodnight!” She

called her salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched

her gliding out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight

roll of the ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and

wondered if Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were

a young man she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.

The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer

chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his

many bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came

toward her from the opposite direction. She nodded brightly to him, and

he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.

“Here is your chair!” Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out

of the chair next her own. “Mr. March is wandering about the ship

somewhere.”

“I'll keep it for him,” said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to

take the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into

his hand with an “Oh; thank you,” which seemed also a permission for him

to wrap it about her in the chair.

He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the

promenade. The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the

music-room, as she had done the day before. At first she revolved there

as if she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner;

then she moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously

alone. Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs.

March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too. She

waited for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept

chatting on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away.

Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him. Then

she heard him saying, “Would you like a turn or two?” and Miss Triscoe

answering, “Why, yes, thank you,” and promptly getting out of her chair

as if the pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all

nothing.

She had the composure to say, “You can leave your shawl with me, Miss

Triscoe,” and to receive her fervent, “Oh, thank you,” before they

sailed off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner

of the music-room. Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from

which she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her

when he happened along.

He chose to be perverse about her romance. “Well, now, you had better

let them alone. Remember Kendricks.” He meant one of their young friends

whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left them

in lasting doubt of what they had done. “My sympathies are all with the

pivotal girl. Hadn't she as much right to him, for the time being, or

for good and all, as Miss Triscoe?”

“That depends upon what you think of Burnamy.”

“Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from

her just when she's made sure of him. How do you suppose she is feeling

now?”

“She isn't feeling at all. She's letting her revolving light fall

upon half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or

consecutively. All that she wants to make sure of is that they're young

men--or old ones, even.”

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said. “I've been

having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room.”

“You smell like it,” said his wife, not to seem too eager: “Well?”

“Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout. He doesn't think things are

going as they should in America. He hasn't been consulted, or if he has,

his opinion hasn't been acted upon.”

“I think he's horrid,” said Mrs. March. “Who are they?”

“I couldn't make out, and I couldn't ask. But I'll tell you what I

think.”

“What?”

“That there's no chance for, Burnamy. He's taking his daughter out to

marry her to a crowned head.”

XV.

It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade.

Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three

or four deep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of

the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who

were wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their

steps. The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with

canvas, and was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was

hard to go wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under

Mrs. March's wing.

Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing in

the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained

talking and laughing till the music began again.

“Don't you want to try it?” he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.

“Isn't it rather--public?” she asked back.

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm

thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.

“Perhaps it is rather obvious,” he said, and he made a long glide over

the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man

who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment her

hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each

other within the circle.

“How well she dances!” said Miss Triscoe.

“Do you think so? She looks as if she had been wound up and set going.”

“She's very graceful,” the girl persisted.

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the

marine charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets

of passengers on all steamers. There were recitations in English and

German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever

more piano performance. Most of those who took part were of the race

gifted in art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its

fathers counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme,

with an audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned

by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment.

She hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening

ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the

saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people

who take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some

unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.

The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the

pretty harbor of Plymouth. In the cool early light the town lay distinct

along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with

come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat

of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another

the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were

lines of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone

walls dividing the green fields. The very iron-clads in the harbor close

at hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale

blue English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of

the sunrise had not quite faded. The breath of the land came freshly out

over the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls

wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices

on the tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the

ship's side. A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage

they formed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out

for the shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends

they left clustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. and Mrs.

Leffers bade March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his

having coffee with them before they left the ship; they said they hated

to leave.

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly

filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated;

these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed

at others. The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohio

friend and his wife. He tried to engage them in the tally which began to

be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held

aloof.

Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the

usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among

those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent

is apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some meagre New

York stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print

announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a

coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.

“I always have to get used to it over again,” said Kenby. “This is the

twentieth time I have been across, and I'm just as much astonished as I

was the first, to find out that they don't want to know anything about

us here.”

“Oh,” said March, “curiosity and the weather both come from the west.

San Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago

about New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels

the other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave.”

“Ah, but London doesn't care a rap about Vienna,” said Kenby.

“Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own

side. It isn't an infallible analogy.”

Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in

the discussion. He gulped it, and broke out. “Why should they care about

us, anyway?”

March lightly ventured, “Oh, men and brothers, you know.”

“That isn't sufficient ground. The Chinese are men and brothers; so are

the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're

not impatient for the latest news about them. It's civilization that

interests civilization.”

“I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?”

Burnamy put in, with a smile.

“Do you think we are civilized?” retorted the other.

“We have that superstition in Chicago,” said Burnamy. He added, still

smiling, “About the New-Yorkers, I mean.”

“You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed. New York is an

anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees.”

“Oh, I don't think you can say that,” Kenby cheerfully protested, “since

the Reformers came in. Look at our streets!”

“Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at

them we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals. But

how long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle

again?”

“Oh, never in the world!” said the optimistic head of the table.

“I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one

of the things that help to establish Tammanys with us. You will see

our Tammany in power after the next election.” Kenby laughed in a

large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other's

flame. “New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it's

morally a frontier mining-town. Socially it's--” He stopped as if he

could not say what.

“I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa,” said his

daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything

about it.

Her father went on as if he had not heard her. “It's as vulgar and crude

as money can make it. Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there's

enough, it counts for everything. In less than a year you'll have

Tammany in power; it won't be more than a year till you'll have it in

society.”

“Oh no! Oh no!” came from Kenby. He did not care much for society, but

he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the

amenities.

“Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?” asked March in the

pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh.

“There's no reason why it shouldn't be. Society is as bad as all the

rest of it. And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially,

the whole country wishes to be and tries to be.”

There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one

could find just the terms of refutation.

“Well,” said Kenby at last, “it's a good thing there are so many lines

to Europe. We've still got the right to emigrate.”

“Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous

newspapers for exercising a man's right to live where he chooses. And

there is no country in Europe--except Turkey, or Spain--that isn't a

better home for an honest man than the United States.”

The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to

speak. Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe's eye, and

said, slowly and distinctly: “I don't know just what reason you have

to feel as you do about the country. I feel differently about it

myself--perhaps because I fought for it.”

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an

answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubted

its validity.

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a

violent impulse upon it. He said, coldly, “I was speaking from that

stand-point.”

The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though

he had put himself in the wrong. His old hand trembled beside his plate,

and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife

was sharing his pain and shame.

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make

at Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in

Cuxhaven. Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line

before, and asked several questions. Her father did not speak again, and

after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move

from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Eltwin rose

at the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke

another defeat, in some way.

Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, “I

think I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon.”

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation

as distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe,

whose daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed

aside to let the two men come together.

“That is all right, Colonel--”

“Major,” Eltwin conscientiously interposed.

“Major,” Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand

which had been tremulously rising toward him. “There can't be any doubt

of what we did, no matter what we've got.”

“No, no!” said the other, eagerly. “That was what I meant, sir. I don't

think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the country

has a right to think what he pleases about it.”

Triscoe said, “That is all right, my dear sir. May I ask your regiment?”

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife

of the one and the daughter of the other. They saw the young girl making

some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.

“That was rather fine, my dear,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, I don't know. It was a little too dramatic, wasn't it? It wasn't

what I should have expected of real life.”

“Oh, you spoil everything! If that's the spirit you're going through

Europe in!”

“It isn't. As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform.”

XVI.

That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his

opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom

able to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his

belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew

that he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad

as secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union.

Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied

motives which impelled men at that time; but he was aware that he had

distinction, as a man of property and a man of family, in doing so. His

family had improved as time passed, and it was now so old that back of

his grandfather it was lost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired from

the sea and become a merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his

son established himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a

former slave-trader whose social position was the highest in the place;

Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a

listener to realize just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery

was; it heightened the effect of his pose.

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted

Brigadier-General at the close. With this honor, and with the wound

which caused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart

of a rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which

was not long in going to pieces in his hands. Then the young couple went

to live in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother

died when the child was ten years old. A little later his father-in-law

died, and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which

his daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had

a right to expect.

The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go

back to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under

the Republic as they had been under the Second Empire. He was still

willing to do something for his country, however, and he allowed

his name to be used on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his

provision-man was sent to Congress instead. Then he retired to

Rhode Island and attempted to convert his shore property into a

watering-place; but after being attractively plotted and laid out with

streets and sidewalks, it allured no one to build on it except the birds

and the chipmonks, and he came back to New York, where his daughter had

remained in school.

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left

school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre

parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring

through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had no duties,

but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd

tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious

books were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones,

and had romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian. Her

character was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that

her father might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad

several times for the summer.

The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had

ceased to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing

to serve his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels,

or even at Berne. Reasons of political geography prevented his

appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs

for going abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without

it. He was really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so

far as a man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved

it. His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go

very deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents

suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children. She did not

think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not

have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and

went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father. She

said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of

place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed

to have everything there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs.

Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one of

the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the

Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg,

where the Norumbia was to land again. The young people talked across

Mrs. March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in

their gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far

inward, like airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all the

nicer not to know just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to

Cherbourg, he suggested that they could see better by going round to the

other side of the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had

gone off with Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a

wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea. There had

been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come

aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they

shrank from forming others. Then the charm of the idle, eventless life

grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable

end.

Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration

were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles. Burnamy and Miss

Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated

to have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plymouth and being

at sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another

debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage

from the hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that

passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water.

At Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very

different in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady

self-control of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the

French fortifications much more on show than the English had been.

Nothing marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently

joined them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the

great battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. The elder

couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated

the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on

and, leave the young people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl,

whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her

waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the

young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship. Burnamy

was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was

leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she did

nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact.

Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he

showed an intolerable resignation to the girl's absence.

“Yes,” said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, “that terrible

patience of youth!”

“Patience? Folly! Stupidity! They ought to be together every instant! Do

they suppose that life is full of such chances? Do they think that fate

has nothing to do but--”

She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, “Hang round and wait on

them?”

“Yes! It's their one chance in a life-time, probably.”

“Then you've quite decided that they're in love?” He sank comfortably

back, and put up his weary legs on the chair's extension with the

conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.

“I've decided that they're intensely interested in each other.”

“Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do

or don't do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it's

that? Is marriage such a very certain good?”

“It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is. What would

our lives have been without it?” she retorted.

“Oh, we should have got on. It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought

to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a

nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don't mind

their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. I

doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he

hadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a young

lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her little

charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other

things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow

like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame

to climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You

wouldn't want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she

had money, and I doubt if she has much. It's all very pretty to have a

girl like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though

Burnamy isn't altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to

a place in the very world she belongs to. I don't think it's for us to

promote the affair.”

“Well, perhaps you're right,” she sighed. “I will let them alone from

this out. Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very

long.”

“Oh, I don't think there's any harm done yet,” said her husband, with a

laugh.

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she

suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through

the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table

first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;

she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their

chairs on deck.

There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but

the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night

after they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts

turned to their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past,

with a remorseful pang. “Well,” she said, “I wish we were going to be in

New York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” he protested. “Not so bad as that, my dear. This is

the last night, and it's hard to manage, as the last night always is. I

suppose the last night on earth--”

“Basil!” she implored.

“Well, I won't, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I've

never seen a Dutch lugger, and--”

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was

silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on

talking as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly

by. They were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and

looking up into his face while he talked.

“Now,” Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, “let

us go instantly. I wouldn't for worlds have them see us here when they

get found again. They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and

that would spoil everything. Come!”

XVII.

Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss

Triscoe's prompting. He had not to wait long.

“And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?”

“Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public.”

“How could you tell that they were-taking?”

“They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them.”

“And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?”

“I don't believe it was. The theory in the office was that he didn't

think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things

into shape.”

“What things?”

“Oh--ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics.

He owns shares in everything but the United States Senate--gas,

electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers--and now he would like some

Senate. That's what I think.”

She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this

cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercest

accusals of the country. “How fascinating it is!” she said, innocently.

“And I suppose they all envy your coming out?”

“In the office?”

“Yes. I should envy, them--staying.”

Burnamy laughed. “I don't believe they envy me. It won't be all roses

for me--they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if

it isn't.” He remembered something one of his friends in the office

had said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever

tried his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.

She abruptly left the mere personal question. “And which would you

rather write: poems or those kind of sketches?”

“I don't know,” said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms.

“I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there

are things you can't say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse

in college; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March took

this little piece for 'Every Other Week'.”

“Little? I thought it was a long poem!”

Burnamy laughed at the notion. “It's only eight lines.”

“Oh!” said the girl. “What is it about?”

He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible

in a person of his make. “I can repeat it if you won't give me away to

Mrs. March.”

“Oh, no indeed! He said the lines over to her very simply and well. They

are beautiful--beautiful!”

“Do you think so?” he gasped, in his joy at her praise.

“Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man--the only

literary man--I ever talked with. They must go out--somewhere! Papa must

meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I'm making the most of

you.”

“You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

She would not mind his mocking. “That day you spoke about 'The Maiden

Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that

way. I didn't know you were an author then.”

“Well, I'm not much of an author now,” he said, cynically, to retrieve

his folly in repeating his poem to her.

“Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks.”

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other

Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously

neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs.

March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know

just how much she thought of him as a writer? “Did she like the poem.”

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about

the poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs.

March's liking for Burnamy. “But it wouldn't do to tell you all she

said!” This was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she

returned to his personal history. “And you didn't know any one when, you

went up to Chicago from--”

“Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in the

office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing

to let me try my hand. That was all I could ask.”

“Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance.

A woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.

“But women do!” Burnamy retorted. “There is a girl writing on the paper

now--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came to

Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made

her way single-handed from interviewing up.”

“Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. “Is she

nice?”

“She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of

journalism that women do isn't the most dignified. And she's one of the

best girls I know, with lots of sense.”

“It must be very interesting,” said Miss Triscoe, with little interest

in the way she said it. “I suppose you're quite a little community by

yourselves.”

“On the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't.

There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you'd like to come

out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do.”

“What's that?”

“Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for

dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette.”

He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, “Do

women write it?”

He laughed reminiscently. “Well, not always. We had one man who used

to do it beautifully--when he was sober. The department hasn't had any

permanent head since.”

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no

doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. “Do

you know what time we really get in to-morrow?”

“About one, I believe--there's a consensus of stewards to that effect,

anyway.” After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?”

“We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to

Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet.”

“Are you going direct to Dresden?”

“I don't know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two.”

“I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that will

get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let

me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow.”

“You're very kind. You've been very good already--to papa.” He protested

that he had not been at all good. “But he's used to taking care of

himself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!”

“So it is! How strange that seems! It's actually Europe. But as long as

we're at sea, we can't realize it. Don't you hate to have experiences

slip through your fingers?”

“I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're

always other people's.”

This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.

He only suggested, “Well; sometimes they make other people have the

experiences.”

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left

the question. “Do you understand German?”

“A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of

beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things.”

“I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany, I

hear.”

“Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will

you?”

She did not answer. “It must be rather late, isn't it?” she asked. He

let her see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it's very late,” and led the

way within. “I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and

I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left

home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!”

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered

whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense

of novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the

first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss

Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.

XVIII.

The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and

disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the

shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went

and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no

longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a

moment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below

had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered

with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast

the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them

in the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive;

and people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were

going to give, anxiously conferred together. The question whether you

ought ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the

early lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he

always regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship. March made

the experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took

them quite as if he were not an officer of the ship. He also collected a

handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships

beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer

cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle

much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not

been for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied

themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream

where the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their

hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it

that people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and

pledge them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the

transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work

that every one sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were

all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the

gangways with the hand-baggage. “Is this Hoboken?” March murmured in his

wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the

reversed action of the kinematograph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among

the companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded

together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing

rain. Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss

Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from

Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins,

whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was

talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs.

Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.

Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and

after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh

count that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble;

their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes

expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have

been very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room at

the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last

fee with unexpected cordiality.

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the

customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they

were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also

the restaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors--the

shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous

German voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of

cigars. Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the

door with a letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals,

“Krahnay, Krahnay!” When March could bear it no longer he went up to him

and shouted, “Crane! Crane!” and the man bowed gratefully, and began to

cry, “Kren! Kren!” But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never

knew.

People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending

home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear

cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal

of talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls

behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then

served them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though

voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the

travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual

with these amiable people.

Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his

wife, and leaned over her son to ask, “Do you know what lese-majesty is?

Rose is afraid I've committed it!”

“No, I don't,” said March. “But it's the unpardonable sin. What have you

been doing?”

“I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and

when he said at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the

railroads belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with

the time-table, it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's

lese-majesty.” She gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's

face with an appealing smile.

“Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I

hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March. She's been complaining of the

coffee.”

“Indeed I shall say what I like,” said Mrs. March. “I'm an American.”

“Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anything

disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's

railroad station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months

on your account.”

Mrs. Adding asked: “Then they won't punish ladies? There, Rose! I'm

safe, you see; and you're still a minor, though you are so wise for your

years.”

She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.

“I don't know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,”,

said Mrs. March. “And you've joined with her in her joking. Go and

speak, to him!”

The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. March

overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his

shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face. March tried

to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: “Oh, yes.

I understood that. But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother to

take any risks.”

“I don't believe she will, really, Rose. But I'll speak to her, and tell

her she can't be too cautious.”

“Not now, please!” the boy entreated.

“Well, I'll find another chance,” March assented. He looked round and

caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the

Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her

father appeared not to see March. “It's all right, with Rose,” he said,

when he sat down again by his wife; “but I guess it's all over with

Burnamy,” and he told her what he had seen. “Do you think it came to any

displeasure between them last night? Do you suppose he offered himself,

and she--”

“What nonsense!” said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace. “It's her

father who's keeping her away from him.”

“I shouldn't mind that. He's keeping her away from us, too.” But at that

moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came

over to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to Dresden that

evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other

on the train or in Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with

her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.

“They're Goths,” he said of the Germans. “I could hardly get that stupid

brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch.”

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not

altogether surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow

asked if he could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look

him up in the train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with

Miss Triscoe he did not seem in a hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, “Yes, you

can see that as far as they're concerned.”

“It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these

affairs,” he said. “How simple it would be if there were no parties to

them but the lovers! But nature is always insisting upon fathers and

mothers, and families on both sides.”

XIX.

The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's people

alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.

Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange

corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing

from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes

rising half-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very

comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little

sea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.

Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering

vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and

there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where

it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us

a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein

cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails. The

gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for

the inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold. Flowers were

blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a

dogged energy; in the various distances were groups of trees

embowering cottages and even villages, and always along the ditches and

watercourses were double lines of low willows. At the first stop the

train made, the passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily

arranged beside the station, where the abundance of the cherries and

strawberries gave proof that vegetation was in other respects superior

to the elements. But it was not of the profusion of the sausages, and

the ham which openly in slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its

primacy in the German affections; every form of this was flanked by tall

glasses of beer.

A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train,

which had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window.

This boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves

laugh, if their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned

patriotism, was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia's

passengers, and they met no more in their sea-solidarity. Of their table

acquaintance the Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the

train looking for them. He said he was in one of the rear cars with the

Eltwins, and was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train

leaving Hamburg at seven. He owned to having seen the Triscoes since

they had left Cuxhaven; Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him

whether they were in the same carriage with the Eltwins. He had got a

letter from Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let

him engage rooms for them at the hotel where he was going to stay with

him.

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others

in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized

upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly

struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors. There was really

no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general

frenzy. With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win

the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector. The officer opened

one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there

ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go

to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which

were to go to the hotel overnight. At last the division was made; the

Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and

steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went

back into the station.

They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at

the door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a

metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands. They were not proud,

but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and

when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank,

they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have

been worse.

As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of

turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German

lands. It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart

which the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal

insult. March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they

had not been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman,

but his wife would not be amused. She said that no country which

suffered such a thing could be truly civilized, though he made her

observe that no city in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was

probably so thoroughly trolleyed as Hamburg. The hum of the electric car

was everywhere, and everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike

flights of connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through

which they drove to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.

XX.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where

stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus,

over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim

public garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat,

and children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer

of the fatherland. It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was

the novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans,

and their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain

immutably preposterous. They are apparently imagined for the stature

of sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are

triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the

bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over

the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned

into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.

The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier,

who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the

past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house. At

the dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no

means bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what

entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time

they had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which

seemed to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street

corner, stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street

until they were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or

pulling them up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them

move forward. He let them get fairly seated before he started the car,

and so lost the fun of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and

wildly clutch each other for support. The Germans have so little sense

of humor that probably no one in the car would have been amused to see

the strangers flung upon the floor. No one apparently found it droll

that the conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked for their

fare; no one smiled at their efforts to make him understand where they

wished to go, and he did not wink at the other passengers in trying

to find out. Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did not

remount till the dismounting passenger had taken time to get well away

from it. When the Marches got into the wrong car in coming home, and

were carried beyond their street, the conductor would not take their

fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the

inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the

shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to

the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did

not mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March's

self-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a

staff like a drum-major's, who left his place at the circus door to get

their tickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then

as visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as

a child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling

in their hearts. “One ought always to overpay them,” March sighed, “and

I will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for

it. That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when

we come out.” As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who

showed them to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought

every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by

his remorse.

“One ought to do it,” he said. “We are of the quality of good geniuses

to these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in

the road. It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than

we.” His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience

between them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus,

of all modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire. The house was full

from floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the

two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke

the universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into

either German or English. They had missed by an event or two the more

patriotic attraction of “Miss Darlings, the American Star,” as she was

billed in English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian

performances which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their

prolixity, and the pantomimic piece which closed the evening.

This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed

itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant

which purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over

Germany. When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down

in the right mood to enjoy the allegory of “The Enchanted Mountain's

Fantasy; the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on

the Steep Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four

Trains, which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the

over-40-feet-high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day's

Circus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy

Ballet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel,

Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen

Splendor of Costume.” The Marches were happy in this allegory, and

happier in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent, and

which here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces of

the 'coryphees' to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures.

They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment,

of good-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they

would have got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a

pang.

They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished,

and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too

poignant. In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release

from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as

the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them.

Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe

quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of

seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she

have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of

the Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in

Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the

truth, to know why she had not met any others. She had read much of the

prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push

her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman,

and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it. But she

had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kind

had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block

in the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very

few officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

XXI.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young

German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast. He said

Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large

imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact

there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities

chose to indulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyful

flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from

military service. He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man

reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the

ill health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest

blessing of heaven. He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should

be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to

take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them

to say if there were not something that he could do for them.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who

could think of nothing; “tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was

in Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants

to look him up everywhere.”

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man

had apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs.

March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but

she was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came

back gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in

Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know

the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter

shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and

joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into

their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should

see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it

rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the

unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade

their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that

he should by no means Miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in

front of a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to

revere it more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer

than the sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his

cruelest moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet

Klopstock, whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt,

when he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish

government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about

among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where

Heine might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat,

or any sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the

anxiety of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors

in Italy would have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the

little crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient

of question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay.

To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and

blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a

stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but

he had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard

where he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and

drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their

limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front

escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,

and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness

that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.

They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no

apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon

them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their

timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in

bands quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high

in successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than

anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted

themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely

minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows;

windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from

within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their

progress. They could not have said which delighted them more--the

houses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the

perspectives and the background; but all were like the painted scenes

of the stage, and they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they

were not persons in some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which

Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous

activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the

turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her

shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness

of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and

seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this

gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards

made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. In

the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of

the greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic

glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a

quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United

States seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval

streets through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial

solidarity, that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the

beautiful new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new

for that; but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function

of a public edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the

stranger. He could not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was

free to him, and when he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of

voices and of feet like the New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was

not so frantic; people were not shaking their fists or fingers in each

other's noses; but they were all wild in the tamer German way, and

he was glad to mount from the Bourse to the poor little art gallery

upstairs, and to shut out its clamor. He was not so glad when he looked

round on these, his first, examples of modern German art. The custodian

led him gently about and said which things were for sale, and it made

his heart ache to see how bad they were, and to think that, bad as they

were, he could not buy any of them.

XXII.

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of

people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge

of their baggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where

they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties

of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered

themselves for recognition. A porter vanished with their hand-baggage

before they could note any trait in him for identification; other

porters made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped

March buy his tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English,

had to help him find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged

in a mountain of alien boxes. One official weighed them; another obliged

him to pay as much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an

illegible scrap of paper which recorded their number and destination.

The interpreter and the porters took their fees with a professional

effect of dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the

smoking and eating and drinking in the restaurant. They burst through

with the rest when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a

glimpse of the porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform,

still bent upon escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car

where he had got very good seats for them, and sank into their places,

hot and humiliated by their needless tumult.

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a

youthful joy in some of the long-estranged facts. The road was rougher

than the roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort,

without the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class

carriage. Mrs. March had expected to be used with the severity on the

imperial railroads which she had failed to experience from the military

on the Hamburg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole

management toward her. Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their

rights, as Americans are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run

from Hamburg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no

German, however young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if

he has one, to a lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a

carriage too late to secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to

the end of that stage. But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers

for information about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that

they wished to make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of

error. At the point where they might have gone wrong the explanations

were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had

not been forgotten. She said she could not see how any people could be

both so selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of

saying something offensive:

“You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you

are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are.”

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

“Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us

how despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human

beings?”

This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and

at last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him. The

darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few

simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely

wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and

checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain

that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.

The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was

here and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an

English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain

as the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings,

and this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.

She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and

was going home to Potsdam for a visit. She seemed like a German girl

out of 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to

invest herself with some romantic interest as an American. She failed

to move the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense

bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them

just before they left their hotel. She failed, later, on the same ground

with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage

at Magdeburg, and talked over the 'London Illustrated News' with an

English-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the

fact of Mrs. March's nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it,

apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall

with fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and

could make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by

saying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come across

the sea.

“Yes,” March assented, “but that was a great while ago, and Americans

were much rarer than they are now in Europe. The Italians are so much

more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you

wanted to impress them. Heaven knows how little they cared! And then,

you were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought

so.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and now I'm a plain old woman.”

“Oh, not quite so bad as that.”

“Yes, I am! Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss

Triscoe?”

“Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl. They would have found

her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have

had to have been here thirty years ago.”

She laughed a little ruefully. “Well, at any rate, I should like to know

how Miss Triscoe would have affected them.”

“I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is

living here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I

could imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the

way she clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the

royalties to her friend. There is romance for you!”

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'

journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up

through the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and

silent except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their

feline purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense

of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier

and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to

the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms

in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found

themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick

succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.

The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of

his consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing.

This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent

the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions

tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that

since it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be

finally restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square

of aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture,

which afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so

characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself

Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale

yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly

associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather

more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but

a quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was

provided with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments

when the rain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be

in that sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was

sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others. It

had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere

disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France. These

monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as

records of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against

a foreign foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must

be. It is not for the victories of a people that any other people can

care. The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad

wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in

death and sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned

in them, till time has softened it to a memory

“Of old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.”

It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant

satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the

Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war

of 1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause

of the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the

field where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians

(it always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch)

fourscore years before. Yet even there Mrs. March was really more

concerned for the sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their

modern character of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their

loyal function; and March was more taken with the notion of the little

gardens which his guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs

of Leipsic and enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes.

He saw certain of these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious

fences, and sometimes furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant

could take his pleasure in the evening air, with his family. The guide

said he had such a garden himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year,

where he raised vegetables and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure;

and March fancied that on the simple domestic side of their life, which

this fact gave him a glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging

than in their character of victors over either the First or the Third

Napoleon. But probably they would not have agreed with him, and probably

nations will go on making themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at

last prevails over nationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide

was imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by

three years' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the

language, he might not have risen to this. He would have tried, for he

was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' by

profession. There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing

race (which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the

perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that

the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper

of a small restaurant. He gladly abandoned his business to the care of

his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with

strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal

to do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they

dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his

prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the

marble floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the

whole place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach,

who seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any

Dutch or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and

nature of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered

fragments of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and

the fumes, how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they

were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was

on them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their

ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared

themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt

falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties

to art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's

maker and one's neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old

Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in

passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic

is redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his

quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet

beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into

suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals,

which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure

boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent

bridges, even during the drizzle. There seemed to be no churches to do,

and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them

that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene

of Napoleon's first great defeat.

By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at

the little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with

relics from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to

it. Old muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums,

gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the

murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations,

autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of

all the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their

womenkind, filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his

way, with a loud pounding voice and a bad breath. When he wished them

to enjoy some gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte's

expense, and put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something

so terrible that March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned

regret that the French had not won the battle of Leipsic. He walked

away musing pensively upon the traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of

history when a breath could so sway him against his convictions; but

even after he had cleansed his lungs with some deep respirations he

found himself still a Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on

the rising ground where Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast

plain, and see his empire slipping through his blood-stained fingers.

It was with difficulty that he could keep from revering the hat and coat

which are sculptured on the stone, but it was well that he succeeded,

for he could not make out then or afterwards whether the habiliments

represented were really Napoleon's or not, and they might have turned

out to be Barclay de Tolly's.

While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled

by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite

quarter, and advancing toward them. He wore the imperial crossed by the

pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them,

and March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third

Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming

ruin in the face.

“Why, it's Miss Triscoe!” cried his wife, and before March had noticed

the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had

rushed upon each other, and encountered with a kiss. At the same time

the visage of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General

Triscoe, who gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.

The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting

two days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the

distant prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a

noble stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been

on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven. He might still have been in a pout

with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and

he said, “What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!

His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had

some chance of being civilized under the French. All this unification

of nationalities is the great humbug of the century. Every stupid race

thinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set

back a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions

about; and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up. What

a farce it is! What's become of the nationality of the Danes in

Schleswig-Holstein, or the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the

Italians in Savoy?”

March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put

by General Triscoe made it offensive. “I don't know. Isn't it rather

quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished

facts? The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before

them were. And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and

peace is civilization. Perhaps after a great many ages people will

come together through their real interests, the human interests; but at

present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism

can unite them. By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it.”

“Perhaps,” said the general, discontentedly. “I don't see much promise

of any kind in the future.”

“Well, I don't know. When you think of the solid militarism of Germany,

you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you

think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in

Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army

is the great field of the Socialist propaganda. The army itself may be

shaped into the means of democracy--even of peace.”

“You're very optimistic,” said Triscoe, curtly. “As I read the signs,

we are not far from universal war. In less than a year we shall make

the break ourselves in a war with Spain.” He looked very fierce as he

prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.

“Well, I'll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war

with Spain. You can't ask more than that, General Triscoe?”

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the 'battle of

Leipsic', or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the

men. For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer

chairs on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of

geological remoteness. The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by

her father's having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way

of Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without

stopping in Hamburg. They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained

the whole day before, and they had not gone out. She asked when Mrs.

March was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next

morning; her husband wished to begin his cure at once.

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any

good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms.

“Oh, he hasn't any. But I know he can't be well--with his gloomy

opinions.”

“They may come from his liver,” said Mrs. March. “Nearly everything of

that kind does. I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at

times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is

the great place for that, you know.”

“Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn't like

Dresden. It isn't very far, is it?”

They referred to Mrs. March's Baedeker together, and found that it was

five hours.

“Yes, that is what I thought,” said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness

which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.

“If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel.

We're going to Pupp's; most of the English and Americans go to the

hotels on the Hill, but Pupp's is in the thick of it in the lower town;

and it's very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he's been there often. Mr. Burnamy is

to get our rooms.”

“I don't suppose I can get papa to go,” said Miss Triscoe, so

insincerely that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different

routes; to Carlsbad with Burnamy--probably on the way from Cuxhaven.

She looked up from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground. “You

didn't meet him here this morning?”

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking,

“Has Mr. Burnamy been here?”

“He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided

to stop over a day. They left on the twelve-o'clock train to-day.”

Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts

betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.

“No, we didn't see him,” she said, carelessly.

The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe

said, “We're going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet

somewhere, Mrs. March.”

“Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can't; it's

so little!”

“Agatha,” said the girl's father, “Mr. March tells me that the museum

over there is worth seeing.”

“Well,” the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches,

and moved gracefully away with her father.

“I should have thought it was Agnes,” said Mrs. March, following them

with her eyes before she turned upon her husband. “Did he tell you

Burnamy had been here? Well, he has! He has just gone on to Carlsbad.

He made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with

her.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but of course he did.”

“Then it's all settled?”

“No, it isn't settled. It's at the most interesting point.”

“Well, don't read ahead. You always want to look at the last page.”

“You were trying to look at the last page yourself,” she retorted, and

she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the

affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made

him agree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father to Carlsbad was only a

question of time.

They parted heart's-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was

affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel

door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther

room when they went down to supper. The waiter, much distracted from

their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast

party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon. The

revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might

not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were

apparently set to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the

university town. They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their

fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps

caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue. They were not

easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the

dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were

sometimes both students and bicyclers. As bicyclers they kept about in

the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened,

they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and

waltz in the square before the hotel. At one moment of the holiday some

chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes

sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel

streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered

with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of

ribbons somewhere. It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was

as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at

home.

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their

different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband

find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest

in the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that

they were not content with its gratification in their immense army,

but indulged it in every pleasure and employment of civil life. He

estimated, perhaps not very accurately, that only one man out of ten in

Germany wore citizens' dress; and of all functionaries he found that the

dogs of the women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the

women had their peasant costume.

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the

city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an

hour's interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with

the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the

eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their

associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from

them. This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a

woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a

German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender

young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of

the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the

common hire, while the man took the common tip. They made haste to leave

the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to

the Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the

agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance. The idea of her colonial

progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping

imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages

from her Central-African possessions. They were getting their supper at

the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around

the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were

not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when

an old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand

and began to chase a boy round the camp. The boy was lighter-footed, and

easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket. None of the

other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting

for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled

away to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse

themselves with the image of Old Leipsic.

This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and

Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in

the old streets of Hamburg. A drama had just begun to be represented

on a platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century

beer-house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in

the costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in

the open air. Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst

of it a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them

any more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century. But it

drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play,

and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy

beyond the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a special

interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and

genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.

From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted

the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with

an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous

physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences

and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of

as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their

guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's

content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he

became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted

him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat

better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as

large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was

able to note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the

Germans were a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least

cause gave way to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was

violent while it lasted. Several times that day he had seen encounters

between the portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but

which ended peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was

solved. The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring,

as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned

himself after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which

he could take no exercise. “It is a life of excitements, but not of

movements,” he explained to March; and when he learned where he was

going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too. “For sugar?”

he asked, as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, “No; liver.”

“Ah!” said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground

with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning

in America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the

telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying

that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were

as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when

their train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming

landscape all the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly 'traeger' had done his

best to get them the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had

succeeded so poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions

but a mother and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together.

Their compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as

these were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after

March had got a window open it did not matter, really.

He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in

theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the

elder lady said in English, “Let me show you,” and came to his help.

The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to

different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear,

and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhaps

they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had

cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with

an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likes to

do these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a

family of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly

spoken, abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they

entered into a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from

which it seemed that the objects and interests of cultivated people in

Berlin were quite the same as those of cultivated people in New York.

Each of the parties to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for

their respective civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater

charm and virtue to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit

with one another that when the German ladies got out of the train

at Franzensbad, the mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding

footstool which she had admired. In fact, she left her with it clasped

to her breast, and bowing speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to

express her gratitude.

“That was very pretty of her, my dear,” said March. “You couldn't have

done that.”

“No,” she confessed; “I shouldn't have had the courage. The courage of

my emotions,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Ah, that's the difference! A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian

couldn't. Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your

convictions?”

“I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of

everything that I used to be sure of.”

He laughed, and then he said, “I was thinking how, on our wedding

journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered

you a rose.”

“Well?”

“That was to your pretty youth. Now the gracious stranger gives you a

folding stool.”

“To rest my poor old feet. Well, I would rather have it than a rose,

now.”

“You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower

that time; I noticed it. I didn't see that you looked so very different.

To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but

rosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;

they will keep in any climate.”

She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh. “Yes, our age

caricatures our youth, doesn't it?”

“I don't think it gets much fun out of it,” he assented.

“No; but it can't help it. I used to rebel against it when it first

began. I did enjoy being young.”

“You did, my dear,” he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it,

because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could

not bear its expression. “And so did I; and we were both young a long

time. Travelling brings the past back, don't you think? There at that

restaurant, where we stopped for dinner--”

“Yes, it was charming! Just as it used to be! With that white cloth, and

those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the

dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was so

nice! I'm never going home; you may, if you like.”

“You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that

our railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European.”

“I had to do that. But I knew better; they don't begin to be.”

“Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alike

everywhere. It's the expression of the common civilization of the world.

When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then

found that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether

I was at home or abroad. And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into

this train which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station,

I didn't know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot. To be

sure, Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder

at Eger, and so that came to the same thing. It's these confounded

fifty-odd years. I used to recollect everything.”

He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which

had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they

had crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morning and early

afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were

cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow

fields between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger, there was

something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the

low hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted

a mountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations were

shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the

scenery and the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of

the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting

water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Along

the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were

at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls

were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. At

an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to

the children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage

in Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question

whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him. He

sat down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had

tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and

tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal

expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,

which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and

now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself. She refused to share

in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the

placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take

away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with

that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one

who profits by travel.

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars

Calm of those who have logic on their side

Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance

Explained perhaps too fully

Futility of travel

Humanity may at last prevail over nationality

Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much

Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of

Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony

Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous

Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel

Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all

Our age caricatures our youth

Prices fixed by his remorse

Recipes for dishes and diseases

Reckless and culpable optimism

Repeated the nothings they had said already

She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that

She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression

Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism

They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart

Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine

Wilful sufferers

Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart

Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests

Work he was so fond of and so weary of

PART II.

XXVI.

They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she

scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she

kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a

day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to see

her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked

it better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and it

seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers

about his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how he

liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and

that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no

more, she contented herself with that.

The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound

down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay

stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and

the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road

which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain

of dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that

surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the

hill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty

bridges within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost

the only vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan

world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black

gabardines, with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their

black velvet derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests

in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and

Cossacks in Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of

western Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were

English, French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were

imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have

been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have

passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality

away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves

heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going

and coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the

bright walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables,

served by pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants

across the way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops

full of silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and

all the idle frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris,

and they suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no

place else in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of

other cities at certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its

habitual effect.

“Do you like it?” asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs.

March saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She

was ready to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his

interest had got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied

in her the passion for size which is at the bottom of every American

heart, and which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the

peoples. We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we

are not ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger

than ours, we are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether

different way, was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and

when Burnamy told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a

day in the height of the season, she was personally proud of it.

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led

March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably

turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where

the names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but there

were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern,

and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on

Broadway. A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little

that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not

at once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill

toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had a jealous blue eye, into

which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth

stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he

wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to

the crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being

uncovered.

At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: “Oh! Let me

introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March.”

Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to

remember, and took off his hat. “You see Jews enough, here to make you

feel at home?” he asked; and he added: “Well, we got some of 'em in

Chicago, too, I guess. This young man”--he twisted his head toward

Burnamy--“found you easy enough?”

“It was very good of him to meet us,” Mrs. March began. “We didn't

expect--”

“Oh, that's all right,” said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and

his hat on. “We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work

all I want to, here. Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell

me. Well, he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can't go and drink

these waters hit or miss. I found that out before I came.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been

advised; but he said to Burnamy:

“I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don't let me

interrupt you,” he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand up

toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.

Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the

silence, “Is Mr. Stoller an American?”

“Why, I suppose so,” he answered, with an uneasy laugh. “His people were

German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as much

American as any of us, doesn't it?”

Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had

come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March

answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. “Oh, for

the West, yes, perhaps,” and they neither of them said anything more

about Stoller.

In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their

arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's

patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of

the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. “Yes, yes; very nice, and I know

I shall enjoy it ever so much. But I don't know what you will think of

that poor young Burnamy!”

“Why, what's happened to him?”

“Happened? Stoller's happened.”

“Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?”

“Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd have

rejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat. He's like an actor

made up for a Western millionaire. Do you remember that American in

'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came? He,

looks exactly like that, and he has the worst manners. He stood talking

to me with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel

as if he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much. If

you don't give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you;

that's all. I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some

sort of hold upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't

imagine; but if ever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in

his!

“Now,” said March, “your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think

we'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller

myself by that time.”

She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she

entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at

Pupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down

with passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and

there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the

ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant

and stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the

largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she

should never have known if she had not seen it there.

The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped

amid rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by

vast windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling

up for the evening concert. Around them at the different tables there

were groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with

that distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of

European inequality.

“How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil,” she said, “beside all

these people! I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm

certain that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs. We

don't even look intellectual! I hope we look good.”

“I know I do,” said March. The waiter went for their supper, and they

joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room. A French

party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult,

though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two

elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and

were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;

some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a

large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language

which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter. They were

a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a

freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black

lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for

no reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended to

prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet

of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man

of learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr

Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him

till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair

and beard with it above the table.

The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together

at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentleman

had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums

when he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless

except for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly

he choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before

him, and--

“Noblesse oblige,” said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved

for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. “I think

I prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is.”

The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their

table, and were making for the door without having paid for their

supper. The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their

mistake he explained that though in most places the meals were charged

in the bill, it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table;

one could see that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to

them which they could laugh over together, and write home about without

a pang.

“And I,” said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the

aristocracy, “prefer the manners of the lower classes.”

“Oh, yes,” he admitted. “The only manners we have at home are black

ones. But you mustn't lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always

so baronial.”

“I don't know whether we have manners at home,” she said, “and I don't

believe I care. At least we have decencies.”

“Don't be a jingo,” said her husband.

XXVII.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day,

he was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an

acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make

up to him in the reading-room, that night. He laid down a New York paper

ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and

pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow,

as he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian,

Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

“I wonder,” he said, “how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on to

our way of having pictures?”

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism

was established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so

sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the

New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From

the politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's

preference. “I suppose it will be some time yet.”

“I wish,” said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences

and relevancies, “I could ha' got some pictures to send home with that

letter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and

be a kind of object-lesson.” This term had come up in a recent campaign

when some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their

employees what would happen if the employees voted their political

opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was

fond of using it. “I'd like 'em to see the woods around here, that the

city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and

everything, and give 'em some practical ideas.”

Burnamy made an uneasy movement.

“I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements,

and show how a town can be carried on when it's managed on business

principles.”

“Why didn't you think of it?”

“Really, I don't know,” said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience.

They had not met the evening before on the best of terms. Stoller

had expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his

displeasure with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have

spent at Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for

the delay. But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that

by working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had

got Stoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in

time for the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the

proprietor's name in his paper. It was a sort of rough but very full

study of the Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the

municipal ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public

control in everything. It condemned the aristocratic constitution of

the municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity,

beneficence, and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no

poverty and no idleness, and which was managed like any large business.

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and

Burnamy suffered it submissively until now. But now, at the change in

Burnamy's tone, he changed his manner a little.

“Seen your friends since supper?” he asked.

“Only a moment. They are rather tired, and they've gone to bed.”

“That the fellow that edits that book you write for?”

“Yes; he owns it, too.”

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he

asked more deferentially, “Makin' a good thing out of it?”