“A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class weeklies feel the

competition of the ten-cent monthlies. But 'Every Other Week' is about

the best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holding

its own.”

“Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad,” Stoller said, with a

return to the sourness of his earlier mood. “I don't know as I care much

for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him.” He

clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and

started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and

physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking

at Burnamy, “You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest.”

Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to

the West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race

and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana

town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could

remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese

and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great

a price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and

tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in

mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to

fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and

mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time

till they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the

exhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,

rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;

and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed

upon him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his

native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with

his father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who

proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as “Nix come arouce in

de Dytchman's house.” He disused it so thoroughly that after his father

took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he

could not get back to it. He regarded his father's business as part of

his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away

from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith

and wagon-maker. When it came to his setting up for himself in the

business he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on

adding dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had

many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of

asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than

when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American

girl whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry

an American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who

had been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as

fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly,

fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no

visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,

with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would

gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she

could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she

lived; and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household

trying so hard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but

she kept silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest

granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of

the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his

financial importance in the community. He first commended himself to the

Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were

now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of

municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes

that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In the

reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was

talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some

day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in

politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin

sooner or later; they said, “You can't swing a bolt like you can a

strike.”

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live

in Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had

grown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years

he lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to

go wrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from

Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at

last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood

friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came

to understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the

best. His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the

direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near

Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives

still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and

about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was

ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his

younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,

for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, to

learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and

shame, and music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their

father with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did

not altogether blame them. He came away from Wurzburg raging at the

disrespect for his money and his standing in business which had brought

him a more galling humiliation there than anything he had suffered

in his boyhood at Des Vaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought

Americanism to the point of wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth

of some local dignitaries who had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy

putting our eagle to shame in his person; there was something like the

bird of his step-country in Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak.

XXVIII.

March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the

doctor, and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was

ashamed at being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The

doctor wrote out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a

certain number of glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain

number of baths, and a rule for the walks he was to take before and

after eating; then the doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed

him caressingly out of his inner office. It was too late to begin his

treatment that day, but he went with his wife to buy a cup, with a

strap for hanging it over his shoulder, and he put it on so as to be

an invalid with the others at once; he came near forgetting the small

napkin of Turkish towelling which they stuffed into their cups, but

happily the shopman called him back in time to sell it to him.

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged

with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy

'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be so

finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of

the popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March

heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined

the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the

silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and

poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade

of the Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its

steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of

iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There

is an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising

till bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already

playing; and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the

multitude shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips,

and then taking each his place in the interminable line moving on to

replenish them at the spring.

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate

is said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took

his eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats

of plush or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their

ears. They were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black,

but they seemed all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last

at Carlsbad is that its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich.

After the Polish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race were the most

striking figures. There were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were

striking in their way too; and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers

and soldiers brightened the picture. Here and there a southern face,

Italian or Spanish or Levantine, looked passionately out of the mass of

dull German visages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other

gentile nation, are to the fore. Their misfits, their absence of style,

imparted the prevalent effect; though now and then among the women a

Hungarian, or Pole, or Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which

seeks beauty and grace rather than the domestic virtues. There were

certain faces, types of discomfort and disease, which appealed from

the beginning to the end. A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid

South-American, were of a lasting fascination to March.

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty

of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his

years of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their

long disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves

fused with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his

fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them

away; he thought the women's voices the worst.

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action

dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally

up to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a

half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade

any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and

after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish

habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a

gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going

sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of

Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park

beyond the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close

sward the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight.

He liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it

climbed the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in

the skirts and folds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly,

absent-mindedly, and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a

pleasant illusion of Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream;

but there were sunny mornings when the mountains shone softly through a

lustrous mist, and the air was almost warm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,

whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his

turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained

that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he

chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you

had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he

did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not

eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk

much. He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt,

upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life

of a journalist. He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything

as a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say,

“He's smart.” He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg;

and upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic

loneliness without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on,

dangling his cup.

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she

gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its

return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-,

morning to them all in English. “Are you going to teach them United

States?” he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not

fail.

“Well,” the man admitted, “I try to teach them that much. They like it.

You are an American? I am glad of it. I have 'most lost the use of my

lungs, here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about

dead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German.”

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West. He must be that

sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was

afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should

prove the third or fourth. “Are you taking the cure?” he asked instead.

“Oh, no. My wife is. She'll be along directly; I come down here and

drink the waters to encourage her; doctor said to. That gets me in for

the diet, too. I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever

did in my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I'm full o' prunes! Well, it

does me good to see an American, to know him. I couldn't 'a' told you,

it you hadn't have spoken.”

“Well,” said March, “I shouldn't have been so sure of you, either, by

your looks.”

“Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch. But they know us,

and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money.

I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here. Soon's they got all

our money, or think they have, they say, 'Here, you Americans, this is

my country; you get off;' and we got to get. Ever been over before?”

“A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it.”

“It's my first time. My name's Otterson: I'm from out in Iowa.”

March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York.

“Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn't an Eastern man you was

just with?”

“No; he's from Chicago. He's a Mr. Stoller.”

“Not the buggy man?”

“I believe he makes buggies.”

“Well, you do meet everybody here.” The Iowan was silent for a moment,

as if, hushed by the weighty thought. “I wish my wife could have seen

him. I just want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don't know

what's keeping her, this morning,” he added, apologetically. “Look at

that fellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!” A young

officer was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be

mother and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung

to him with caressing words and looks. He was red in the face with his

polite struggles when he broke from them at last. “How they do hang on

to a man, over here!” the Iowa man continued. “And the Americans are as

bad as any. Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place,

and our girls just swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well,

it's so, Jenny,” he said to the lady who had joined them and whom March

turned round to see when he spoke to her. “If I wanted a foreigner I

should go in for a man. And these officers! Put their mustaches up at

night in curl-papers, they tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr.

March. Well, had your first glass, yet, Jenny? I'm just going for my

second tumbler.”

He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about

Stoller; she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated.

She relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said

he must be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he

breakfasted, and said, “Why, we go to the Posthof, too.” He answered

that then they should be sure some time to meet there; he did not

venture further; he reflected that Mrs. March had her reluctances too;

she distrusted people who had amused or interested him before she met

them.

XXIX.

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the

other agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge

one by one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be

cared for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father;

there was no tenderness like a young contributor's.

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp's just the time

and space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee

which are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow

from the beginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at

breakfast which it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the

evenings when the concert was there. Still it was amusing, and they were

patient of Burnamy's delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller

and go with them to the Posthof. He met Mrs. March in the reading-room,

where March was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag

of bread. The earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of

Westphalia ham, which form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at

a certain shop in the town, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is

no longer of such binding force as the custom of getting your bread at

the Swiss bakery. You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins

to be crowded by half past seven, and when you have collected the

prescribed loaves into the basket of metallic filigree given you by one

of the baker's maids, she puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red

color, and you join the other invalids streaming away from the bakery,

their paper bags making a festive rustling as they go.

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile

up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent,

where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and

rain impartially through upon its army of little tables. By this time

the slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley

beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past

half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal

them beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points

with wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is

bordered with shops and restaurants a great part of its length. In leafy

nooks between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains,

from the foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating

in German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of

high-well-borns of all those races and languages. Booths glittering

with the lapidary's work in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious

figures of the toy-makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on

the way to the Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging

cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in

garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings

as carrot-eating rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and

peacocks that strut about the feet of the passers and expand their

iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they

felt the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian

highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a

mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending

in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waited

politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any

laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs

on way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the

flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of

sweetpease from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful

joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of

speaking his German.

“You'll find,” he said, as they crossed the road again, “that it's well

to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be lagging

along in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well

on in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever.”

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and

a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the

trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take

refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the

trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that

morning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group of

pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon

her breast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful

note, but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing

down the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.

“Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some

American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of

the Marches; “I get you one.”

“You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one already.”

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the

gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier

than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found. She had

crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her

breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting

pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places.

Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls

ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of

them, and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls

were all from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home

in the winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less,

for sometimes they paid for their places.

“What a mass of information!” said March. “How did you come by it?”

“Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe.”

“It's not a bad habit, if one doesn't carry it too far. How did Lili

learn her English?”

“She takes lessons in the winter. She's a perfect little electric motor.

I don't believe any Yankee girl could equal her.”

“She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did. What astonishes one

over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own

level. And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting

to equal them in any other way. At Pupp's, if we go to one end of the

out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our

coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make

out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them. If we go to the other

end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less

than the least I give any three of the men waiters.”

“You ought to be ashamed of that,” said his wife.

“I'm not. I'm simply proud of your sex, my dear.”

“Women do nearly everything, here,” said Burnamy, impartially. “They

built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the

hods, and laid the stone.”

“That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy!

Isn't there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?”

“Well, I can't say,” Burnamy hesitated.

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries;

the tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on

their heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon

everywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty

serving-girls were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart

with shrill, sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken

through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and

dappled the figures of the men with harlequin patches of light and

shade. A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial

permanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trailing

herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the

publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind

her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black

poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had

already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the

old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on

one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order,

as she would not have had in ours. She was where she was by a toleration

of certain social facts which corresponds in Europe to our reverence

for the vested interests. In her history there, had been officers and

bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullen young

fellow.... Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his poem to

March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he

had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.

“I don't believe,” he said, “that I recognize-any celebrities here.”

“I'm sorry,” said March. “Mrs. March would have been glad of some

Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere

well-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness.”

“I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness,” said his wife. “Don't worry

about me, Mr. Burnamy.”

“Why can't we have this sort of thing at home?”

“We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens,” said March. “We

couldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us.

At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the

life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At

nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this.

So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and

the mosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came

to Europe. I really miss them; it makes me homesick.”

“There are plenty in Italy,” his wife suggested.

“We must get down there before we go home.”

“But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany?

Why did no traveller ever put it in his book? When your stewardess

said so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff.”

He turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a

contributor: “Isn't Lili rather long? I mean for such a very prompt

person. Oh, no!”

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted “Fraulein!” to Lili; with her

hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the

tables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, “In a

minute!” and vanished in the crowd.

“Does that mean anything in particular? There's really no hurry.”

“Oh, I think she'll come now,” said Burnamy. March protested that he

had only been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his

impatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passed

between them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies

were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the

mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the

fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats

behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no

one so effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good

deal on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the

sun glinting from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their

sword-hilts, they moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced

women.

“They all wear corsets,” Burnamy explained.

“How much you know already!” said Mrs. March. “I can see that Europe

won't be lost on you in anything. Oh, who's that?” A lady whose costume

expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove

with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. “She must be an American. Do

you know who she is?”

“Yes.” He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once

filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies

inspire. “What grace! Is she beautiful?”

“Very.” Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March

did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked March

to look, but he refused.

“Those things are too squalid,” he said, and she liked him for saying

it; she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the

burden off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes

broke, and the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl's eyes and

rolled down her hot cheeks. “There! That is what I call tragedy,” said

March. “She'll have to pay for those things.”

“Oh, give her the money, dearest!”

“How can I?”

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling

behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial

breakfasts on two well-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy's reproaches

for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of

ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.

“I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American

princess.”

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble

international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of

their compatriots as make them.

“Oh, come now, Lili!” said Burnamy. “We have queens in America, but

nothing so low as princesses. This was a queen, wasn't it?”

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her. “All people

say it is princess,” she insisted.

“Well, if she's a princess we must look her up after breakfast,” said

Burnamy. “Where is she sitting?”

She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could

be distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her

shoulder, and her hireling trying to keep up with her.

“We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man,” said Burnamy. “We

think it reflects credit on her customers.”

March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an

early-rising invalid. “What coffee!”

He drew a long sigh after the first draught.

“It's said to be made of burnt figs,” said Burnamy, from the

inexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority in Carlsbad.

“Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible.

But why burnt figs? That seems one of those doubts which are much more

difficult than faith.”

“It's not only burnt figs,” said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, “if

it is burnt figs, but it's made after a formula invented by a consensus

of physicians, and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carlsbad

makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price.”

“You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves,” sighed

March.

“Oh, I know a lot more things. Are you fond of fishing?”

“Not very.”

“You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an

official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport,

the trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught

them.”

“I don't see why that isn't a good notion: the last thing I should

want to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was

personally acquainted with. Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad. I

don't wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back.”

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together

about the place, and had given him to put in shape. It was run in the

interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep

coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an

unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was 'kurgemass'. He won

such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to

March, “But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal

acquaintance, there's a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick

out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you,

and you know what you are eating.”

“Is it a municipal restaurant?”

“Semi-municipal,” said Burnamy, laughing.

“We'll take Mrs. March,” said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy

felt the limitations of a woman's sense of humor, which always define

themselves for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her

what he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the

breakfasters. The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set

together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was

lost in them. The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding

with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of “Fraulein! Fraulein!”

that followed them. The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one

paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of

knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an

hour before Burnamy caught Lili's eye, and three times she promised to

come and be paid before she came. Then she said, “It is so nice, when

you stay a little,” and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who

had broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with

tenderness; she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the

American princess was still in her place.

“Do go and see who it can be!” Mrs. March entreated. “We'll wait here,”

and he obeyed. “I am not sure that I like him,” she said, as soon as

he was out of hearing. “I don't know but he's coarse, after all. Do you

approve of his knowing so many people's 'taches' already?”

“Would it be any better later?” he asked in tern. “He seemed to find you

interested.”

“It's very different with us; we're not young,” she urged, only half

seriously.

Her husband laughed. “I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!” he

cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who

was nodding to them from as far as she could see them. “This is the easy

kind of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a

novel.”

XXX.

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. “Do you

know I felt it must be you, all the time! When did you come? Where is

your father? What hotel are you staying at?”

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it

was last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was

one of the hotels on the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared

that he wished to consult March's doctor; not that there was anything

the matter.

The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his

fellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but

he seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his

hand, to have drunk it all. Was March going off on his forenoon tramp?

He believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all

humbug, though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told

the walks were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising

them, and Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to

try a mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that

he thought Mrs. March would like it.

“I shall like your account of it,” she answered. “But I'll walk back on

a level, if you please.”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Triscoe pleaded, “come with us!”

She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so

gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where

the girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or

just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of

seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.

March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof

and up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain. At

first they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell

behind more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less

and less possible to include him in it. When it began to concern their

common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his

hearing.

“They're so young in their thoughts,” said Burnamy, “and they seem as

much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.

They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is

now; don't you think? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties.”

“Oh, yes, I can see that.”

“I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than

people were in the last. Perhaps we are,” he suggested.

“I don't know how you mean,” said the girl, keeping vigorously up with

him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have

his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.

“I don't believe I can quite make it out myself. But fancy a man that

began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past

experience of the whole race--”

“He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't he?”

“Rather monstrous, yes,” he owned, with a laugh. “But that's where the

psychological interest would come in.”

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. “I

suppose you've been writing all sorts of things since you came here.”

“Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had

Mr. Stoller's psychological interests to look after.”

“Oh, yes! Do you like him?”

“I don't know. He's a lump of honest selfishness. He isn't bad. You know

where to have him. He's simple, too.”

“You mean, like Mr. March?”

“I didn't mean that; but why not? They're not of the same generation,

but Stoller isn't modern.”

“I'm very curious to see him,” said the girl.

“Do you want me to introduce him?”

“You can introduce him to papa.”

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on

March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead. He

saw them, and called up: “Don't wait for me. I'll join you, gradually.”

“I don't want to lose you,” Burnamy called back, but he kept on with

Miss Triscoe. “I want to get the Hirschensprung in,” he explained. “It's

the cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get

away from an emperor who was after him.”

“Oh, yes. They have them everywhere.”

“Do they? Well, anyway, there's a noble view up there.”

There was no view on the way up. The Germans' notion of a woodland

is everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes

primevally herded in. It means the close-set stems of trees, with their

tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may

walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts. When the

sun shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here

and there with the gold that trickles through. There is nothing of the

accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched

and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries,

but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell of

their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about

their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his

country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in

cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and

dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of

exemption from care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;

no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him

good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and

was less intrusive than if he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing

the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has

played from the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted the

forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several

prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk

that prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the

forest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young

drama. He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had

met, however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their

brief separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously

operated their reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will

making itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless

telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to

imagine.

He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew

that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he

could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst,

he was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them. The

thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of

his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the

ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent

upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest

of the year in demolishing.

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss

Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from

the Hirschensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy

corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the

climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared

willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.

XXXI.

Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the

obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with

Miss Triscoe. He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty

English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the

support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking

at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful

lines which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery

hat to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist. One happy

morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to

walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment,

and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.

The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering

shops beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and

his daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors

in the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she

could get them. They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried

Mrs. March back to the shop. The man had already put up his shutters,

and was just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look

at the stork-scissors they had seen in the window. The gas was out, and

the shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.

“I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs.

March,” he laughed, nervously, “and you must let me lend you the money.”

“Why, of course!” she answered, joyfully humoring his feint. “Shall I

put my card in for the man to send home to her with them?”

“Well--no. No. Not your card--exactly. Or, yes! Yes, you must, I

suppose.”

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening

Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after

supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for

the scissors. Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss

Triscoe joined them, to her father's frowning mystification. He stared

round for a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the

interest Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it

in. He had to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard

the concert through beside Miss Triscoe.

“What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?” March

demanded, when his wife and he were alone.

“Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest,” she began, in a tone which he

felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.

“Look here, my dear! Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?”

“That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I should

like to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?” She

added, carelessly, “He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him.”

“Oh, does he!”

“Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we

will chaperon them. And I promised that you would.”

“That I would?”

“It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can

see something of Carlsbad society.”

“But I'm not going!” he declared. “It would interfere with my cure. The

sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and

I should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts

of unwholesome things.”

“Nonsense! The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course.”

“You can go yourself,” he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before

twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel

circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for

Mrs. March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal

authority in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with

safety and pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it

began to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she

could finally have made March go in her place, but she felt that she

ought really to go in his, and save him from the late hours and the late

supper.

“Very well, then,” she said at last, “I will go.”

It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose

to pay two florins and a half. There must have been some sort of

restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy's party went with a good deal of

amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none

unless it was the advantages which the military had. The long hall over

the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and

all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were

crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking. The military enjoyed

the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the

dining space. There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants

sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the

waltzes, and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious

Fraus and Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the

dancing-space. From the gallery above many civilian spectators looked

down upon the gayety, and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured

among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way

to the dancing-floor, and toward ten o'clock it became rather crowded. A

party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic

versions of the waltz. At first they danced with the young men who came

with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place,

and danced with any of the officers who asked them.

“I know it's the custom,” said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at

her side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to

be dancing all the time with Burnamy, “but I never can like it without

an introduction.”

“No,” said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away,

“I don't believe papa would, either.”

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her.

She glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused

herself with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good

fortune, Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he

did not know, came up at the moment. She rose and put her hand on his

arm, and they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away. The

officer looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned

to Mrs. March with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was

unmistakably asking her to dance. She liked his ironical daring, she

liked it so much that she forgot her objection to partners without

introductions; she forgot her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was

a mother of grown children and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only

the step of her out-dated waltz.

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and

they were suddenly revolving with the rest... A tide of long-forgotten

girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on

it past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy. She saw them

falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they

seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping

Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from

his knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously

apologizing and incessantly bowing.

“Oh, are you hurt?” Mrs. March implored. “I'm sure you must be killed;

and I did it! I don't know, what I was thinking of!”

The girl laughed. “I'm not hurt a bit!”

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and

congratulation. In the dressing-room she declared again that she was

all right. “How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!” she said, and

she laughed again, and would not agree with her that she had been

ridiculous. “But I'm glad those American girls didn't see me. And I

can't be too thankful papa didn't come!”

Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would

think of her. “You must tell him I did it. I can never lift up my head!”

“No, I shall not. No one did it,” said the girl, magnanimously. She

looked down sidelong at her draperies. “I was so afraid I had torn my

dress! I certainly heard something rip.”

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his

hand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room,

where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not

suspected by the ladies. He had banged his knee abominably too; but they

did not suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them,

first to Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel.

It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three

in the morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room. She

decided not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they

had at the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had

told him everything else about the ball, when the young officer with

whom she had danced passed between the tables near her. He caught her

eye and bowed with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, “Who's

your pretty young friend?”

“Oh, that!” she answered carelessly. “That was one of the officers at

the ball,” and she laughed.

“You seem to be in the joke, too,” he said. “What is it?”

“Oh, something. I'll tell you some time. Or perhaps you'll find out.”

“I'm afraid you won't let me wait.”

“No, I won't,” and now she told him. She had expected teasing, ridicule,

sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of

retrospective tenderness which he showed. “I wish I could have seen you;

I always thought you danced well.” He added: “It seems that you need a

chaperon too.”

The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon

one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a

walk up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the

grounds an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of

people who supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged

Mrs. March to sit for hers. It was so good that she insisted on Miss

Triscoe's sitting in turn, and then Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration

to propose that they should all three sit together, and it appeared that

such a group was within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed

them in his little bower, and while he was mounting the picture they

took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes

played by his Edison phonograph.

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she

tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group. “Why not?” he

pleaded.

“You oughtn't to ask,” she returned. “You've no business to have Miss

Triscoe's picture, if you must know.”

“But you're there to chaperon us!” he persisted.

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, “You need a

chaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette.” But it seemed

useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, “Shall we

let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?”

Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with

him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from the

gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted

with Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed at each other in an

astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to

talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding

had something to say. The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March

into her hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the

Triscoes, and she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad;

he promised to be back in an hour.

“Well, now what scrape are you in?” March asked when his wife came home,

and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could

not fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed

very comfortable.

His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him

about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of

their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at

the ball.

He said, lazily: “They seem to be working you for all you're worth. Is

that it?”

“No; there is something worse. Something's happened which throws all

that quite in the shade. Mrs. Adding is here.”

“Mrs. Adding?” he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not

allow was growing on him.

“Don't be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the

Norumbia. The mother of the nice boy.”

“Oh, yes! Well, that's good!”

“No, it isn't! Don't say such a thing--till you know!” she cried, with a

certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the

fact. He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. “I have been at

her hotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin,

and that Mr. Kenby's been there, and--Now I won't have you making a joke

of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked

for; though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame

for not thinking of it. But you can see yourself that she's young and

good-looking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not

for him, I don't believe she would hesitate--”

“For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?” March broke in, and she

answered him as vehemently:

“He's asked her to marry him!”

“Kenby? Mrs. Adding?”

“Yes!”

“Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed of

themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--”

“Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?” He arrested himself at

her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence

time to sink in, “She refused him, of course!”

“Oh, all right, then!”

“You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you

anything more about it.”

“I know you have,” he said, stretching himself out again; “but you'll

do it, all the same. You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been

calm and collected.”

“She refused him,” she began again, “although she respects him, because

she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she's

very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man

twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I don't think she ever

cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something

about him.”

“I never heard of him. I--”

Mrs. March made a “tchck!” that would have recalled the most consequent

of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true

intent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:

“Well, I won't do it. If she's refused him, that's the end of it; she

needn't know anything about him, and she has no right to.”

“Now I think differently,” said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. “Of

course she has to know about him, now.” She stopped, and March turned

his head and looked expectantly at her. “He said he would not consider

her answer final, but would hope to see her again and--She's afraid he

may follow her--What are you looking at me so for?”

“Is he coming here?”

“Am I to blame if he is? He said he was going to write to her.”

March burst into a laugh. “Well, they haven't been beating about the

bush! When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the

first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was

running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following

her, without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simple

directness of these elders.”

“And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?” she cut in

eagerly.

“I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in Carlsbad for? I came

for the cure, and I'm spending time and money on it. I might as well go

and take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to

Kenby.”

“I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,”

said Mrs. March. “I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--”

“Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I'm not going to have them round in my

bread-trough!”

“She isn't. She's at one of the hotels on the hill.”

“Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their love-affairs

in their own way. The only one I care the least for is the boy.”

“Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--No, it's

horrid, and you can't make it anything else!”

“Well, I'm not trying to.” He turned his face away. “I must get my nap,

now.” After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, “The first

thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us

that they're going to get divorced.” Then he really slept.

XXXII.

The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and

the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as

if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew

anything about them. The father by his dress must have been a Protestant

clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the

daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish

and ladylike. They commended themselves by always taking the table

d'hote dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and

the rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the

husband ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was

not good for him. A young girl of a different fascination remained as

much a mystery. She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became

more bewildering as she advanced through her meal, especially at supper,

which she made of a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice

the pickle's length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held

a shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly

maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein. A curious

contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin

swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and

cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper.

At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing

draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans,

and loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in

a picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background

lurked a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the

old man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance

of the family group.

Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses

of domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her

own plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her

two pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been

newly betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a

helpless fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it

in check; the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole

change of costume a difference from time to time in the color of their

sleeves. The Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance

which had eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which

did not in any wise eventuate. Carlsbad was evidently one of the great

marriage marts of middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters

to be admired, and everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the

hand of love. It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as

pretty as they could be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's

that it flourished. For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and

to be destined to be put by for another season to dream, bulblike, of

the coming summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but

for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less;

and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.

“We could have managed,” he said, at the close of their dinner, as he

looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, “we could

have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and

Kenby launched upon us is too much. Of course I like Kenby, and if the

widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or

a widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe;

but--” He stopped, and then he went on: “Men and women are well enough.

They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times

together. But why should they get in love?--It is sure to make them

uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others.” He broke off, and

stared about him. “My dear, this is really charming--almost as charming

as the Posthof.” The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel

and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in

the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth

where the musicians were giving the afternoon concert. Between its two

stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such

effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and

flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange,

and all the middle tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were the

agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and

far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long

curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall. “It would be

about as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew

about intruded here,” he said, “as to have a two-spanner carriage driven

through this crowd. It ought to be forbidden by the municipality.”

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and

she answered: “See that handsome young Greek priest! Isn't he an

archimandrite? The portier said he was.”

“Then let him pass for an archimandrite. Now,” he recurred to his

grievance again, dreamily, “I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and

poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops

of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose

Adding. Oh;” he broke out, “they will spoil everything. They'll be

with us morning, noon, and night,” and he went on to work the joke of

repining at his lot. The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers'

pretence of being interested in something besides themselves, which they

were no more capable of than so many lunatics. How could they care for

pretty girls playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon?

Or a cartful of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side

shrine? Or a whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some

wayside raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning? Or those

preposterous maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots

while the skies were full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop where Peter

the Great made a horseshoe. Or the monument of the young warrior-poet

Koerner, with a gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting

on a bench before it? These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what

could lovers really care for them? A peasant girl flung down on the

grassy road-side, fast asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog,

lay in his harness near her with one drowsy eye half open for her and

the other for the contents of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel

in the old upper town beyond the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all

the neighbors; the negro door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to

have spoken our Southern English, but who spoke bad German and was

from Cairo; the sweet afternoon stillness in the woods; the good German

mothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts. Burnamy as a young poet

might hate felt the precious quality of these things, if his senses had

not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she might have felt it if only he

had done so. But as it was it would be lost upon their preoccupation;

with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs. March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with

her husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had

discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the

Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and

looked, in the black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume,

like a colossal figure carved in ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout

way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad

but one is a pension if it is not a hotel; but these were of a sort of

sentimental prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower

with an iron table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he

said that they would be the very places for bridal couples who wished

to spend the honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit. She

denounced him for saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency

in complaining of lovers while he was willing to think of young married

people. He contended that there was a great difference in the sort of

demand that young married people made upon the interest of witnesses,

and that they were at least on their way to sanity; and before they

agreed, they had come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door.

While they lingered, sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure

in the spectacle he formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried

coachman and footman at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very

quiet and distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting

for the Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry

of Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty

bystanders. Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was

patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with

delicate delays. After repeated agitations at the door among portiers,

proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their

thrill to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained

sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and

let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps. The

hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by

rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties.

There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman

got down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened

himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even

wandered aside. There came a moment when at some signal the carriage

drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the

stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention.

Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off. At last an indescribable

significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man

in a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him;

they spoke inaudibly together. The footman mounted to his place; the

coachman gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard,

down the street, round the corner, out of sight. The man in the tall hat

and dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved;

the statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of

Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.

“My dear, this is humiliating.”

“Not at all! I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Think how near we

came to seeing them!”

“I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them. But to hang round here

in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at

last! I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?”

“What thing?”

“This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the

Ages.”

“I don't know what you mean. I'm sure it's very natural to want to see a

Prince.”

“Only too natural. It's so deeply founded in nature that after denying

royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier

for it than anybody else. Perhaps we may come back to it!”

“Nonsense!”

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly

curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a

thousand years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous

republics of the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of

later times had passed like fever dreams. That dull, inglorious empire

had antedated or outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the

England of Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France

of many revolutions, and all the fleeting democracies which sprang from

these.

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of

the Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached

themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.

It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious

recognition. “Hello! Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be

hanging round here for a sight of these kings. Well, we don't have a

great many of 'em, and it's natural we shouldn't want to miss any. But

now, you Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you

don't seem to get enough of 'em. Think it's human nature, or did it

get so ground into us in the old times that we can't get it out, no

difference what we say?”

“That's very much what I've been asking myself,” said March. “Perhaps

it's any kind of show. We'd wait nearly as long for the President to

come out, wouldn't we?”

“I reckon we would. But we wouldn't for his nephew, or his second

cousin.”

“Well, they wouldn't be in the way of the succession.”

“I guess you're right.” The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March's

philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:

“But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President because he's

a kind of king too. I don't know that we shall ever get over wanting to

see kings of some kind. Or at least my wife won't. May I present you to

Mrs. March?”

“Happy to meet you, Mrs. March,” said the Iowan. “Introduce you to Mrs.

Otterson. I'm the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about

a chance like this. I don't mean that you're--”

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of

her unexpected likings: “I understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would rather

be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the

sight of a king.”

“Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson,” said March.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the lady, “I'd like to see a king too, if it

didn't take all night. Good-evening,” she said, turning her husband

about with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs.

March, and was not going to have it.

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: “The trouble

with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there's such

a flow of language it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'm

landing.”

XXXIII.

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer. One

day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the

Duke on his bicycle. After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment

before mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young French

gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exacting

passion for an aristocratic air in their order. The Duke was fat and

fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so

fair, as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking

than their retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as

perfectly appointed as English tailors could imagine them.

“It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes,” March declared,

“to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like

everything else, to their inferiors.”

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now become

Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently

adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery

which it poured upon the feudal structure of society. They applied it

with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a

few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and of

such a little country. They watched for him from the windows of the

reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides

of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which

brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where

the proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him. His moderated

approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which

Americans are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight,

insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she

was ambuscading. Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from

peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the

King graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the

proprietor, and vanished into the elevator. She was destined to see

him so often afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her

dining and supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals

in one of the public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in

sack-coats like himself, after the informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning

abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera

one night with some of his faithful followers. Burnamy had offered Mrs.

March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with

him, places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he

wished her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her

father to join them.

“Why not?” she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.

“Why,” he said, “perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it.”

“Perhaps you had,” she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed

with a knot between his eyes.

“The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly. It's Mr.

Stoller's.” At the surprise in her face he hurried on. “He's got back

his first letter in the paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he

reads in print, that he wants to celebrate.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, non-committally.

Burnamy laughed again. “But he's bashful, and he isn't sure that you

would all take it in the right way. He wants you as friends of mine; and

he hasn't quite the courage to ask you himself.”

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: “That's very

nice of him. Then he's satisfied with--with your help? I'm glad of

that.”

“Thank you. He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant

to you if they went, too.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“He thought,” Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, “that

we might all go to the opera, and then--then go for a little supper

afterwards at Schwarzkopf's.”

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can sup so late as ten

o'clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight,

none but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.

“Oh!” said Mrs. March. “I don't know how a late supper would agree with

my husband's cure. I should have to ask him.”

“We could make it very hygienic,” Burnamy explained.

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much that

March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, “Oh, nonsense,”

and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General

Triscoe accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter. That made six

people, Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there

was not room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask

them.

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone

when they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy. The

comedy always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a

five-o'clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got

to sleep by nine o'clock; now they would be up till half past ten at

least, and that orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for him.

But still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best

seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside

the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to

see, as people do in the back of a box. Stoller was not much at ease in

evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps

so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and

required Miss Triscoe to admire him. As for Burnamy's beauty it was not

necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;

and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician

presence than this yet unprinted contributor to 'Every Other Week'. He

and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to

hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she

saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner

in Stoller's presence. Her husband always denied that it existed, or if

it did that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to get on common ground

with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the

range of the general conversation. He leaned over the ladies, from time

to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was

glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss

Triscoe. He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite,

and certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe,

to Mrs. March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress

was very simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly

girlish; her beauty was dazzling.

“Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the

orchestra?” asked Burnamy. “He's ninety-six years old, and he comes to

the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises,

and sleeps through till the end of the act.”

“How dear!” said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with

her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her. “Oh, wouldn't

you like to know him, Mr. March?”

“I should consider it a liberal education. They have brought these

things to a perfect system in Europe. There is nothing to make life

pass smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom.

My dear,” he added to his wife, “I wish we'd seen this sage before. He'd

have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy. I'm

always coming as Burnamy's guest, after this.”

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting

an eye about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other

potentate. He whispered joyfully, “Ah! We've got two kings here

to-night,” and he indicated in a box of their tier just across from that

where the King of Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New

York.

“He isn't bad-looking,” said March, handing his glass to General

Triscoe. “I've not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist

princes and ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once,

when I was staying a month in Venice; but I don't think they any of them

looked the part better. I suppose he has his dream of recurring power

like the rest.”

“Dream!” said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes. “He's dead

sure of it.”

“Oh, you don't really mean that!”

“I don't know why I should have changed my mind.”

“Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he

was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba.

It's better than that. The thing is almost unique; it's a new situation

in history. Here's a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal

status, no objective existence. He has no sort of public being, except

in the affection of his subjects. It took an upheaval little short of an

earthquake to unseat him. His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all

classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had

three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such

a hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of

oppression at the head of the oppressed. When he's in power again, he

will be as subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death,

and an idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his

will.”

“We've only begun,” said the general. “This kind of king is municipal,

now; but he's going to be national. And then, good-by, Republic!”

“The only thing like it,” March resumed, too incredulous of the evil

future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, “is

the rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere

manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some

sort of legislated tenure of it. The King of New York is sovereign by

force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of

the majority. Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and

quality?”

“It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn't it?”

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to

any sort of inquiry which is not personal. Stoller had scarcely spoken

yet; he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive

force, “Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're willing to let him?”

“Yes,” said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.

“That's what we must ask ourselves more and more.”

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at

Stoller. “Well, I don't know. Do you think it's quite right for a man to

use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?”

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point

of saying that he thought just this. He asked instead, “What's wrong

about it?”

“Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose.

But if a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain

consideration--say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't

too hard--should you feel it morally right to accept the offer? I don't

say think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it.”

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any

response, the curtain rose.

XXXIV.

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the

many bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town. If

it is a starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted

firmament in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the

houses on either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own. By

nine o'clock everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead

hour; the few feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper

a caution of silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the

opera; the little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute

as the restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day;

the whole place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight. People get

quickly home to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy,

they slip into the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them,

in an exemplary drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the

gently gaseous waters of Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badness which

delights in a supper at Schwarzkopf's, and even these are glad of the

drawn curtains which hide their orgy from the chance passer.

The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselves

in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not

strictly 'kurgemass'. Mrs. March played upon the interest which each

of them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of

their cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge,

by which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against

the parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be

alone together. The stream shone above and below, and found its way out

of and into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed

into the night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of

the hill-sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from

which some white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.

He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which

watches over it day and night from its piny cliff. He had a fancy for

a poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the

crucifix's vigil. He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till

the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him

keep the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling

over the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and

a voice calling, “Look here! Who's running this supper party, anyway?”

His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as

she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness. They answered

him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, “Why, it's Mr. Stoller's

treat, you know.”

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on

the threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set

for their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly.

He appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his

daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March's

having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said

she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening. But she did

not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out

of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the

table, dropped into it. He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose

instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him; he

could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs.

March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong,

selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled

grudge and greed that was very curious.

Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose

at the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour

of ten, he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy,

“What's the reason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you

was talking about?”

“To Engelhaus? I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned,”

answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller

was obliged to ask March:

“You heard about it?”

“Yes.” General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, “It was

the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and

it's very picturesque, I believe.”

“It sounds promising,” said the general. “Where is it?”

“Isn't to-morrow our mineral bath?” Mrs. March interposed between her

husband and temptation.

“No; the day after. Why, it's about ten or twelve miles out on the old

postroad that Napoleon took for Prague.”

“Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it,” said the general, and he

alone of the company lighted a cigar. He was decidedly in favor of the

excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect

of using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor. They were

six, and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and a

one-spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get

home in time for supper.

Stoller asserted himself to say: “That's all right, then. I want you to

be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages.” He turned to Burnamy:

“Will you order them?”

“Oh,” said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, “the portier will

get them.”

“I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept.

Surely, he can't like that man!” said Mrs. March to her husband in their

own room.

“Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The general seems to me,

capable of letting even an enemy serve his turn. Why didn't you speak,

if you didn't want to go?”

“Why didn't you?”

“I wanted to go.”

“And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see

that she wished to go.”

“Do you think Burnamy did?”

“He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that he

would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon.”

XXXV.

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the

others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness

on the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to

each of their elders in turn. It would have been grotesque for

either March or Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was

apparently no question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of

the seat in the one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March

on the back seat of the two-spanner without demur. He asked her leave to

smoke, and then he scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the two men

in front of him almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority

of our conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the

effect of bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could

have got on with Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our

working-classes, but did not know what to do with his scorn of the

vulgarity and venality of their employers. He accused some of Stoller's

most honored and envied capitalists of being the source of our worst

corruptions, and guiltier than the voting-cattle whom they bought and

sold.

“I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right

way,” Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished

to bring in. “I believe in having the government run on business

principles. They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right

sort of thing, and it works. I been lookin' into it, and I got this

young man, yonder”--he twisted his hand in the direction of the

one-spanner! “to help me put it in shape. I believe it's going to make

our folks think, the best ones among them. Here!” He drew a newspaper

out of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full length, and

handed it to Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to

run his eye over it. “You tell me what you think of that. I've put it

out for a kind of a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just

thought I'd let our people see how a city can be managed on business

principles.”

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while

he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so

entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the

breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields

of harvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the

serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew

straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened

under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye,

which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices

were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and

breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed

land. In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy

rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving

themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load. From the upturned

earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few

sombre ravens rose. But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it

smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of

the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains.

Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or

glimmered through the veils of the distant haze. Over all breathed the

keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which

charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his

wife's presence, and answered her vaguely. She talked contentedly on in

the monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign

themselves. They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of

General Triscoe. He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller,

and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, “I should like to

see what your contemporaries have to say to all that.”

“Well, sir,” Stoller returned, “maybe I'll have the chance to show you.

They got my instructions over there to send everything to me.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.

They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape,

after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who

were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the

two-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a

novel they had both read, and he was saying, “I suppose you think he was

justly punished.”

“Punished?” she repeated. “Why, they got married, after all!”

“Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy.”

“Then it seems to me that she was punished; too.”

“Well, yes; you might say that. The author couldn't help that.”

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

“I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl was

very exacting.”

“Why,” said Burnamy, “I supposed that women hated anything like

deception in men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this

case, he didn't deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that

worse?”

“Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him for deceiving her.”

“Oh!”

“He might have had to do that. She wouldn't have minded his fibbing

outright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from his

nature. But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say

a word to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak,

something cowardly in him.”

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. “I suppose it did. But don't you

think it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?”

“Yes, it is,” she assented. “That is why I say she was too exacting. But

a man oughn't to defend him.”

Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it, now. “Another woman might?”

“No. She might excuse him.”

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and

he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with

them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could

distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since they

had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the

open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. The

detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the

midst of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.

“I believe,” Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to

the ruin alone, “that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobility

from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He's a

robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying

tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair

and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike,

probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union

crossbowmen.”

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the

civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he

meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, “I don't see how you can

have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him.”

“Oh,” Burnamy replied in kind, “he buys my poverty and not my will. And

perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more.”

“Have you been doing something very wicked?”

“What should you have to say to me, if I had?” he bantered.

“Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you,” she mocked back.

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a

village street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A

church at its base looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a

darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind

him. He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's

claims upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their

wishes in respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it;

at the top, he said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would

admit them.

XXXVI.

The path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the

hill, to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted

more directly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,

bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean

bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads

no such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us

with in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all

her store, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to

find flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for

her. She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both

hands for her skirt, and so did him two favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate

for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon

them, for its maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended from

robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the

sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored

it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with

brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly

permanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were

they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a

cistern which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their

wine in time of siege.

From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every

direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from

a crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General

Triscoe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique

position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of

the present. It was more a difference in method than anything else that

distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now.

What was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers

passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by

steamer? They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be

proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.

“Then you believe in free trade,” said Stoller, severely.

“No. I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff

laws.”

“I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night,” said Miss Triscoe, “that

people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way

their things are tumbled over by the inspectors.”

“It's shocking,” said Mrs. March, magisterially.

“It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times,” her husband

resumed. “But I'm glad the travellers make no resistance. I'm opposed to

private war as much as I am to free trade.”

“It all comes round to the same thing at last,” said General Triscoe.

“Your precious humanity--”

“Oh, I don't claim it exclusively,” March protested.

“Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.

He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his

course, and coming back to where he started.”

Stoller said, “I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over

here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand the

duties.”

“Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,” March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed

with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated

themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the

ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin,

upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away

from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields

and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into

the distance. “I don't suppose,” Burnamy said, “that life ever does much

better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and

saying 'Unberufen.' I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood.”

“It would spoil the flowers,” she said, looking down at them in her

belt. She looked up and their eyes met.

“I wonder,” he said, presently, “what makes us always have a feeling of

dread when we are happy?”

“Do you have that, too?” she asked.

“Yes. Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must be

for the worse.”

“That must be it. I never thought of it before, though.”

“If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological

weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of

bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and

tears beforehand--it may come to that.”

“I hope it won't. I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it would

spoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was the

other way.”

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller

looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline

profile into relief. “Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?” he called gayly up

to him.

“I guess we've seen about all there is,” he answered. “Hadn't we better

be going?” He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

“All right,” said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again

without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the

weird sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and

to account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been

burnt, and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the

doors after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the

chapel of the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had

fortified themselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who

lived in the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where

all the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as

the dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the

place. March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she

stood and talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but

they wrought upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the

garden, and came back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held

up, with an arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the

spectators.

“Oh, give him something!” Mrs. March entreated. “He's such a dear.”

“No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat

outdone,” he refused; and then he was about to yield.

“Hold on!” said Stoller, assuming the host. “I got the change.”

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband

to reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel

that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself

in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss

Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who

designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy

in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details.

Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then

the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three

side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German

version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the

carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though

it is broken and obliterated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but

funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he

wished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were planted

with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space

fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with

weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to

March it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in

consecrated ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on

porcelain let into them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman,

who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed

to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of

irony, the magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house

of the village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest

the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent

hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the

figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much

celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to

his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and

March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew

that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great

favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of

grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile

of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from

the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a

curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the

party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not

shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not

borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place,

somewhere outside the gate. Was it the beginning, the promise of that

reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was

it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened

nerves?

“That is all?” he asked of the spectral sacristan.

“That is all,” the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin

commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something

handsome.

“No, no,” said Stoller, detecting his gesture. “Your money a'n't good.”

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded

them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so

patient. In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have

frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and

whispered a sad “Danke.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they

were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

“Oh, have I lost my glove in there?” said Mrs. March, looking at her

hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

“Let me go and find it for you,” Burnamy entreated.

“Well,” she consented, and she added, “If the sacristan has found it,

give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow.”

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and

her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some

men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. He

came back directly, saying, “No, he didn't find it.”

She laughed, and held both gloves up. “No wonder! I had it all the time.

Thank you ever so much.”

“How are we going to ride back?” asked Stoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one

else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, “Oh, I think the

way we came, is best.”

“Did that absurd creature,” she apostrophized her husband as soon as she

got him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, “think I was going to let

him drive back with Agatha?”

“I wonder,” said March, “if that's what Burnamy calls her now?”

“I shall despise him if it isn't.”

XXXVII.

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had

eaten in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic

together. He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in,

and the young man did not sit down after putting his letters before him.

He said, with an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, “I have

looked through the papers, and there is something that I think you ought

to see.”

“What do you mean?” said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain

articles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but

their editorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and

some were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical

bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They

all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as

the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him

gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the

Honorable Jacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and

gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited

on foot. He flung the papers all down at last. “Why, they're a pack

of fools! They don't know what they're talking about! I want city

government carried on on business principles, by the people, for the

people. I don't care what they say! I know I'm right, and I'm going

ahead on this line if it takes all--” The note of defiance died out of

his voice at the sight of Burnamy's pale face. “What's the matter with

you?”

“There's nothing the matter with me.”

“Do you mean to tell me it is”--he could not bring himself to use the

word--“what they say?”

“I suppose,” said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, “it's what you may call

municipal socialism.”

Stoller jumped from his seat. “And you knew it when you let me do it?”

“I supposed you knew what you were about.”

“It's a lie!” Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step

backward.

“Look out!” shouted Burnamy. “You never asked me anything about it. You

told me what you wanted done, and I did it. How could I believe you were

such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talking

about?” He added, in cynical contempt, “But you needn't worry. You can

make it right with the managers by spending a little more money than you

expected to spend.”

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. “I can

take care of myself, young man. How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing!” said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof,

he came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs.

March called, before he reached their table, “Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's

the matter?”

He smiled miserably. “Oh, I haven't slept very well. May I have my

coffee with you? I want to tell you something; I want you to make

me. But I can't speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!” he besought a

waitress going off with a tray near them. “Tell Lili, please, to bring

me some coffee--only coffee.”

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and

the Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the

interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee. “Ah, thank

you, Lili,” he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her

instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and

been rejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: “I want to

say good-by. I'm going away.”

“From Carlsbad?” asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.

The water came into his eyes. “Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March! I

can't stand it. But you won't, when you know.”