These animals were not so conscious as lions at the approach of princes;

they tossed and stamped impatiently in the long interval before the

Regent and his daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests. All the

human beings, both those who were in charge and those who were under

charge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their parts well, as if

there were some heavy penalty for failure in the least point. The

policemen keeping the people, in line behind the ropes which restrained

them trembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the troopers

twitched. An involuntary sigh went up from the crowd as the Regent's

carriage appeared, heralded by outriders, and followed by other plain

carriages of Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver. Then the

whistle of the Kaiser's train sounded; a trumpeter advanced and began to

blow his trumpet as they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointed

moment the Emperor and Empress came out of the station through the

brilliant human alley leading from it, mounted their carriages, with

the stage trumpeter always blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the

square and flashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight.

The same hollow groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the

spectators as had welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his

fellow-townsmen, with the same effect of being the conventional cries of

a stage mob behind the scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy

face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored

if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply

fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in

acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March

that sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a

scantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly working

toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference

between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic

and dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be

European, it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate

conviction of equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity

transcending all social and civic pretences, was what gave their

theatrical effect to the shows of deference from low to high, and of

condescension from high to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and

subjects, the prince did not play his part so well as the people, it

might be that he had a harder part to play, and that to support

his dignity at all, to keep from being found out the sham that he

essentially was, he had to hurry across the stage amidst the distracting

thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid to be scrutinized by the

soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor supernumeraries and

scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an

hour and a half for half a minute's glimpse of the imperial party, March

now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to

still greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come to

Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in

itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train,

and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a

multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? He

was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing

that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his

recreance to his wife. This did alloy the pleasure with which he began,

after an excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about

the streets, though he had them almost to himself, so many citizens had

followed the soldiers to the manoeuvres.

It was not till the soldiers began returning from the manoeuvres,

dusty-footed, and in white canvas overalls drawn over their trousers to

save them, that he went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the

Swan. He had given them time enough to imagine him at the review, and to

wonder whether he had seen General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and

they met him with such confident inquiries that he would not undeceive

them at once. He let them divine from his inventive answers that he

had not gone to the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with

themselves, and the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished

her father had not gone, either. The general appeared just before dinner

and frankly avowed the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the

dust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too

angry with the company he had been in to have any comments on the

manoeuvres. He referred to the military chiefly in relation to the

Miss Stollers' ineffectual flirtations, which he declared had been

outrageous. Their father had apparently no control over them whatever,

or else was too ignorant to know that they were misbehaving. They were

without respect or reverence for any one; they had talked to General

Triscoe as if he were a boy of their own age, or a dotard whom nobody

need mind; they had not only kept up their foolish babble before him,

they had laughed and giggled, they had broken into snatches of American

song, they had all but whistled and danced. They made loud comments in

Illinois English--on the cuteness of the officers whom they admired, and

they had at one time actually got out their handkerchiefs. He supposed

they meant to wave them at the officers, but at the look he gave them

they merely put their hats together and snickered in derision of

him. They were American girls of the worst type; they conformed to no

standard of behavior; their conduct was personal. They ought to be taken

home.

Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreed with him that

they were altogether unformed, and were the effect of their own ignorant

caprices. Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by taking

them away.

“It would hide them, at any rate,” he answered. “They would sink back

into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed. We behave like

a parcel of peasants with our women. We think that if no harm is meant

or thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that

are scandalously improper simply because they are innocent. That may

be all very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing

had better stay there, where our peasant manners won't make them

conspicuous.”

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March

recurred to the general's closing words. “That was a slap at Mrs. Adding

for letting Kenby go off with her.”

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time

March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and

the Addings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no chance to bring

up these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by

making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any

point where she thought she had scanted it. After all, it consisted

mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered

questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy's

clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that

he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the

acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

“Probably,” Mrs. March said, “as long as he had any hopes of Mrs.

Adding, he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about

Burnamy.”

“Then you think he was really serious about her?”

“Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so

completely taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and

saw how she received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight.”

“The fight?”

“Yes--that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his

offering himself.”

“Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?”

“How do I? Didn't you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tell

him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?”

“I had no chance. I don't know that I should have done it, anyway. It

wasn't my affair.”

“Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for that

poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes.”

“Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose.”

“Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it. She had a right to know it.”

“Did she think Stoller's willingness to overlook Burnamy's performance

had anything to do with its moral quality?”

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, “I told her you

thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it

away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a

person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they

had expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned. And hasn't poor

Burnamy done both?”

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but

as a husband he was not going to come down at once. “I thought probably

you had told her that. You had it pat from having just been over it with

me. When has she heard from him?”

“Why, that's the strangest thing about it. She hasn't heard at all. She

doesn't know where he is. She thought we must know. She was terribly

broken up.”

“How did she show it?”

“She didn't show it. Either you want to tease, or you've forgotten how

such things are with young people--or at least girls.”

“Yes, it's all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides,

the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very

obliterating to my early impressions of love-making.”

“It certainly hasn't been ideal,” said Mrs. March with a sigh.

“Why hasn't it been ideal?” he asked. “Kenby is tremendously in love

with her; and I believe she's had a fancy for him from the beginning.

If it hadn't been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now

he's essential to them both in their helplessness. As for Papa Triscoe

and his Europeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they're

the residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding have

nothing to do with their unreality. His being in love with her is no

reason why he shouldn't be helpful to her when she needs him, and every

reason why he should. I call it a poem, such as very few people have the

luck to live out together.”

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she cried

out, “Well, my dear, I do believe you are right! It is ideal, as you

say; it's a perfect poem. And I shall always say--”

She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, and

perceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasm

for all sorts of love-affairs. But she averred that she did not care;

what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it.

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had left

Carlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escape

from the pressure of others' interests. The tide of travel was towards

Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later.

They were going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way

that they simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary

capital they were alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger,

much less a friend to molest them. The flying landscape without was of

their own early autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased

to purple it, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women,

and children were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows

everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change. It was always the

German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor;

often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops

in ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within

their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent

life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her

as she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh

pasturage.

As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplands they were aware of

a finer, cooler air through their open window. The torrents foamed white

out of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along the valleys,

where the hamlets roused themselves in momentary curiosity as the train

roared into them from the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshine had

the glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and the travellers had a

pleasant bewilderment in which their memories of Switzerland and

the White Mountains mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack

sojourns. They chose this place and that in the lovely region where they

lamented that they had not come at once for the after-cure, and they

appointed enough returns to it in future years to consume all the

summers they had left to live.

LIX.

It was falling night when they reached Weimar, where they found at the

station a provision of omnibuses far beyond the hotel accommodations.

They drove first to the Crown-Prince, which was in a promising state

of reparation, but which for the present could only welcome them to an

apartment where a canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plastered

wall. The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably out to try and

place them at the Elephant. But the Elephant was full, and the Russian

Court was full too. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethought

himself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but very nice,

where they might get rooms, and after the delay of an hour, they got

a carriage and drove away from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord

continued to the last as benevolent as if they had been a profit instead

of a loss to him.

The streets of the town at nine o'clock were empty and quiet, and they

instantly felt the academic quality of the place. Through the pale night

they could see that the architecture was of the classic sentiment which

they were destined to feel more and more; at one point they caught a

fleeting glimpse of two figures with clasped hands and half embraced,

which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller; and when they

mounted to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they passed

under a fresco representing Goethe and four other world-famous poets,

Shakspere, Milton, Tasso, and Schiller. The poets all looked like

Germans, as was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them; he

marshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller brought up the rear

and kept them from going astray in an Elysium where they did not speak

the language. For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite American

freshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, and

provided with steam-radiators. In the sense of its homelikeness the

Marches boasted that they were never going away from it.

In the morning they discovered that their windows looked out on

the grand-ducal museum, with a gardened space before and below its

classicistic bulk, where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers

were full of sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares, March

strolled up through the town; but Weimar was as much awake at that hour

as at any of the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets, where

he encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual

mood. He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have

shunned: a 'denkmal' of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad

as most German monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all

patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from

this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for

some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their

distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in

Hamburg, Leipsic, and Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach,

and Wurzburg, to reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as

characteristic of all Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over

France.

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night before

was characteristic too, but less offensively so. German statues at the

best are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them,

have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands,

and of being only partially rapt from the spectators. But they were more

unconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and he

quelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller's

shoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typical

equipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But

upon reflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personally

responsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team. He felt that he

might more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic

profiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace. This could be

a sympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet

brought back with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the

people, especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antique

had: begun in their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in

any case they were charming children, and as a test of their culture, he

had a mind to ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue

of Herder was, which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble,

and so be done with as many statues as he could. She answered with a

pretty regret in her tender voice, “That I truly cannot,” and he was

more satisfied than if she could, for he thought it better to be a child

and honest, than to know where any German statue was.

He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the Herder

Platz after it. He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; where

Herder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the

nobility and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was

shielded from the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart

from other sinners in a glazed gallery. Herder is buried in the church,

and when you ask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-door in the

pavement, and you think you are going down into the crypt, but you are

only to see Herder's monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save

it from passing feet. Here also is the greatest picture of that great

soul Luke Kranach, who had sincerity enough in his paining to atone for

all the swelling German sculptures in the world. It is a crucifixion,

and the cross is of a white birch log, such as might have been cut out

of the Weimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides, with the bark showing

at the edges. Kranach has put himself among the spectators, and a stream

of blood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon the painter's

head. He is in the company of John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther

stands with his Bible open, and his finger on the line, “The blood of

Jesus cleanseth us.”

Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things without his

wife, and partly because he was now very hungry, March turned from them

and got back to his hotel, where she was looking out for him from their

open window. She had the air of being long domesticated there, as she

laughed down at seeing him come; and the continued brilliancy of the

weather added to the illusion of home.

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America; the sun in that

gardened hollow before the museum was already hot enough to make him

glad of the shelter of the hotel. The summer seemed to have come back

to oblige them, and when they learned that they were to see Weimar in a

festive mood because this was Sedan Day, their curiosity, if not their

sympathy, accepted the chance gratefully. But they were almost moved

to wish that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that all the

public carriages were engaged, and they must have one from a stable if

they wished to drive after breakfast. Still it was offered them for

such a modest number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly and

conversable, that they assented to the course of history, and were more

and more reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducal park

beside the waters of the classic Ilm.

The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and in

places clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color. They

flow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows,

where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport

joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is

in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the

earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure

if not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noble

finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not

for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from

it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set

apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the

Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some

state-sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to

the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace

windows upon the leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst

beauty vainly created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty

had graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the

companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying

first to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it

second to the cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever

the prince in Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name

fills the city; the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest

hospitality. The travellers remembered, above all other facts of the

grand-ducal park, that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius,

beautiful and young, when he too was beautiful and young, and took her

home to be his love, to the just and lasting displeasure of Fran von

Stein, who was even less reconciled when, after eighteen years of due

reflection, the love of Goethe and Christiane became their marriage.

They, wondered just where it was he saw the young girl coming to meet

him as the Grand-Duke's minister with an office-seeking petition from

her brother, Goethe's brother author, long famed and long forgotten for

his romantic tale of “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for

that rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as their

sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau von

Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottage to suppose

that there his love-life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resented

the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all,

she removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost

indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers

of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going

to marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is

almost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances

the Grand-Duke's godfatherhood, or Goethe's open constancy to

Christiane, or the tardy consecration of their union after the French

sack of, Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him from the

rudeness of the marauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were

no degrees in such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as

people have tried to think, in their deference to Goethe's greatness.

But certainly the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of

world-wide renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for

he could not have been proof against the censorious public opinion of

Weimar, or the yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead

embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. The

trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it,

and about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the

sweet lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered

a parting nosegay for her visitors. The few small livingrooms were above

the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion;

in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with

him on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the front

stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which he

might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the

proud little palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and

memorials of him. His library, his study, his study table, with

everything on it just as he left it when

“Cadde la stanca mana”

are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which he

gasped for “more light” at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms are

full of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which

he did so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waning

leaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly,

faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more

and more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints,

drawings, gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the

many-mindedness, the universal taste, for which he found room in little

Weimar, but not in his contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less

keenly personal, less intimate than the simple garden-house, or else,

with the great troop of people going through it, and the custodians

lecturing in various voices and languages to the attendant groups, the

Marches had it less to themselves, and so imagined him less in it.

LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is

common to them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their

proprietors in them one would as little remember them apart afterwards

as the palaces themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men

far out of the average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease

to have charm, to have character, which belong to the levels of life,

where alone there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself,

with all the little delightful differences repressed in those who

represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at

Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was

Goethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at

least in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his

mother had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland

and of Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels

bringing Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story

of that great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately

as a palace can.

There are certain Poets' Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe,

Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke

used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from

it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and

sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes

they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian

things. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very

nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever

was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and

then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country;

they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of

the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At best

it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority,

the make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful

and ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue

each other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show

of equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a free

republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he

was one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the

impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no

sign, and the poet's friendship with the prince has passed smoothly

into history as one of the things that might really be. They worked and

played together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized,

each on his own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not

being there which probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much

as posterity.

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery

beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table

where they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by the

consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was

charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted

before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the

custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the

German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were

children. The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered

wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which

are still mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking

Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where

the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe,

although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. It

seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole

connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew

whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but

they enabled her to verify with the custodian's help certain royal

intermarriages which she had been in doubt about before.

Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a

portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them

over, scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the

open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays.

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines

and clipped trees which formed the coulisses. There was a grassy space

for the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicircular

gradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honored

spectators sat. Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts of

Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and if

ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, it

must have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the

drama is native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air

of modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact. It would be difficult

to be Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining,

but March held that with Goethe's help it might have been done at

Weimar, and his wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for

the Natur-Theater that the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put

together a sheaf of the flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to

Mrs. March for a souvenir.

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from another

eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below.

In a moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spirits

sank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had

not asked for coffee. Most of the people about them were taking beer,

including the pretty girls of a young ladies' school, who were there

with their books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers,

apparently for the afternoon.

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their

books or their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she

followed the glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a

table somewhat obliquely to the left. These were apparently a mother and

daughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back

to Mrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them. They were

both smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself

from the waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if

to make sure that every one saw her smiling.

Mrs. March felt her husband's gaze following her own, and she had

just time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of

astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, “Good gracious!

It's the pivotal girl!”

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young

man, who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way

out of the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near

that Mrs. March could almost have touched him.

She had just strength to say, “Well, my dear! That was the cut direct.”

She said this in order to have her husband reassure her. “Nonsense! He

never saw us. Why didn't you speak to him?”

“Speak to him? I never shall speak to him again. No! This is the last of

Mr. Burnamy for me. I shouldn't have minded his not recognizing us, for,

as you say, I don't believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a

girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that's all I wish

to know of him. Don't you try to look him up, Basil! I'm glad-yes, I'm

glad he doesn't know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves

to suffer, and I hope he'll keep on suffering: You were quite right,

my dear--and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don't

call it more than instinct)--not to tell him what Stoller said, and I

don't want you ever should.”

She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that

she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him

impatiently to their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, “I don't think I can quite promise that;

my mind's been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall

tell him.”

“What! After you've seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then,

you won't, my dear; that's all! He's behaving very basely to Agatha.”

“What's his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my

duty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to his

behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as you

know, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused him

outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible

conditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don't

blame him.”

“Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!” cried Mrs. March.

“Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy,

or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning

and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say

it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with

the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge

with one pretty girl from another. It's what men have been doing from

the beginning of time.”

“Oh, I dare say!”

“Men,” he went on, “are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.

They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any

girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made

them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely

amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I

think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had

him first; and I'm all for her.”

LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the

train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg,

and strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with

himself. While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the

attraction by which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere

maid has for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at

heart and ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne

for the pain which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to

forget it in her folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had

been reckless of her rights came with it. He had done his best to make

her think him in love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how

he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise

to write to him from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he

wished still less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that

she had not promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to

such fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted

with Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the

resentment with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the

pivotal girl unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the

holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres,

with all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary

excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a

paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the

night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing

over the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the

multitude of Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere

carrying at the ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages,

and the effect of the floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill

streets was charming even to Burnamy's lack-lustre eyes. He went by

his hotel and on to a cafe with a garden, where there was a patriotic,

concert promised; he supped there, and then sat dreamily behind his

beer, while the music banged and brayed round him unheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, “May

I sit at your table?” and he saw an ironical face looking down on him.

“There doesn't seem any other place.”

“Why, Mr. March!” Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him,

but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this

faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last,

just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced

round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament

of lanterns. “This is pretty,” he said, “mighty pretty. I shall make

Mrs. March sorry for not coming, when I go back.”

“Is Mrs. March--she is--with you--in Weimar?” Burnamy asked stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him. “Oh, yes. We saw you out at

Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant

not to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little

flights.”

“I never dreamed of your being there--I never saw--” Burnamy began.

“Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was

looking very pretty. Have you been here some time?”

“Not long. A week or so. I've been at the parade at Wurzburg.”

“At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is!

We were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was

a great crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?” A

waiter had come up, and was standing at March's elbow. “I suppose I

mustn't sit here without ordering something?”

“White wine and selters,” said Burnamy vaguely.

“The very thing! Why didn't I think of it? It's a divine drink: it

satisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home,

in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen 'Every Other Week'

lately?”

“No,” said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.

“We've just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in

it that I rather like.” March laughed to see the young fellow's face

light up with joyful consciousness. “Come round to my hotel, after

you're tired here, and I'll let you see it. There's no hurry. Did you

notice the little children with their lanterns, as you came along?

It's the gentlest effect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French

themselves couldn't have minded those innocents carrying those soft

lights on the day of their disaster. You ought to get something out of

that, and I've got a subject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He

and his mother were at Wurzburg; I'm sorry to say the poor little chap

didn't seem very well. They've gone to Holland for the sea air.” March

had been talking for quantity in compassion of the embarrassment in

which Burnamy seemed bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring

comfort to the young fellow merely because he liked him. So far as

he could make out, Burnamy had been doing rather less than nothing to

retrieve himself since they had met; and it was by an impulse that he

could not have logically defended to Mrs. March that he resumed. “We

found another friend of yours in Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller.”

“Mr. Stoller?” Burnamy faintly echoed.

“Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the

manoeuvres; and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the

parade with his family but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the

death of General Triscoe.”

Again Burnamy echoed him. “General Triscoe?”

“Ah, yes: I didn't tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had

come on with Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby--you remember Kenby, On the

Norumbia?--Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family

party; and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with

him and his girls.”

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He

did not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess

having told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed

on recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in

morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “I have a

message for you from Mr. Stoller.”

“For me?” Burnamy gasped.

“I've been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn't expected to see

you. But it's simply this: he wants you to know--and he seemed to want

me to know--that he doesn't hold you accountable in the way he did. He's

thought it all over, and he's decided that he had no right to expect

you to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of

knowledge. As he said, he doesn't choose to plead the baby act. He says

that you're all right, and your place on the paper is open to you.”

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for

instant response. “I think he's wrong,” he said, so harshly that the

people at the next table looked round. “His feeling as he does has

nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn't let me out.”

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, “I think

you're quite right, as to that. But there's such a thing as forgiveness,

you know. It doesn't change the nature of what you've done; but as far

as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it.”

“Yes, I understand that. But I can't accept his forgiveness if I hate

him.”

“But perhaps you won't always hate him. Some day you may have a chance

to do him a good turn. It's rather banale; but there doesn't seem any

other way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to

get that poem?”

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had

put it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some

coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had

stood talking.

“No, thank you,” said the elder, “I don't propose sitting up all night,

and you'll excuse me if I go to bed now. It's a little informal to leave

a guest--”

“You're not leaving a guest! I'm at home here. I'm staying in this hotel

too.”

March said, “Oh!” and then he added abruptly, “Good-night,” and went up

stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

“Whom were you talking with below?” asked Mrs. March through the door

opening into his room from hers.

“Burnamy,” he answered from within. “He's staying in this house. He let

me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It's one of

those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in

great things.”

“Oh! Then you've been telling him,” she said, with a mental bound high

above and far beyond the point.

“Everything.”

“About Stoller, too?”

“About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and

General Triscoe--and Agatha.”

“Very well. That's what I call shabby. Don't ever talk to me again

about the inconsistencies of women. But now there's something perfectly

fearful.”

“What is it?”

“A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find

rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn't well, and

they're coming. And I've telegraphed them to come here. Now what do you

say?”

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not

resign herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider

it providential. This touched the lingering superstition in which she

had been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very

tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government

of the universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered

that they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that

they could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an

inferior degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see

him in the evening and tell him everything, so that she should know

just how to act when she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly

account for the renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he

seemed generally worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered

smile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence. While

they talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with

Miss Triscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait

over for her and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for

Berlin, as they had made all their plans. It was not easy, even in drama

where one has everything one's own way, to prove that she could not

without impiety so far interfere with the course of Providence as to

prevent Miss Triscoe's coming with her father to the same hotel where

Burnamy was staying. She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had

not known he was staying there when she telegraphed them where to come,

and that in the absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was

not obliged to suppose that his presence would be embarrassing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the town

and interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and

as soon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogether

from the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy.

They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with the

Triscoes in Wurzburg, and she said: “Did Mr. March tell you they

were coming here? Or, no! We hadn't heard then. Yes, they are coming

to-morrow. They may be going to stay some time. She talked of Weimar

when we first spoke of Germany on the ship.” Burnamy said nothing, and

she suddenly added, with a sharp glance, “They wanted us to get them

rooms, and we advised their coming to this house.” He started very

satisfactorily, and “Do you think they would be comfortable, here?” she

pursued.

“Oh, yes, very. They can have my room; it's southeast; I shall be going

into other quarters.” She did not say anything; and “Mrs. March,” he

began again, “what is the use of my beating about the bush? You must

know what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night--”

“No one ever told--”

“Well, you must have made a pretty good guess. But it was a failure. I

ought to have failed, and I did. She said that unless her father liked

it--And apparently he hasn't liked it.” Burnamy smiled ruefully.

“How do you know? She didn't know where you were!”

“She could have got word to me if she had had good news for me. They've

forwarded other letters from Pupp's. But it's all right; I had no

business to go back to Carlsbad. Of course you didn't know I was in this

house when you told them to come; and I must clear out. I had better

clear out of Weimar, too.”

“No, I don't think so; I have no right to pry into your affairs, but--”

“Oh, they're wide enough open!”

“And you may have changed your mind. I thought you might, when I saw you

yesterday at Belvedere--”

“I was only trying to make bad worse.”

“Then I think the situation has changed entirely through what Mr.

Stoller said to Mr. March.”

“I can't see how it has. I committed an act of shabby treachery, and I'm

as much to blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it.”

“Did Mr. March say that to you?”

“No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn't answer it, and you can't.

You're very good, and very kind, but you can't answer it.”

“I can answer it very well,” she boasted, but she could find nothing

better to say than, “It's your duty to her to see her and let her know.”

“Doesn't she know already?”

“She has a right to know it from you. I think you are morbid, Mr.

Burnamy. You know very well I didn't like your doing that to Mr.

Stoller. I didn't say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it

enough yourself. But I did like your owning up to it,” and here Mrs.

March thought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again. “My

husband always says that if a person owns up to an error, fully

and faithfully, as you've always done, they make it the same in its

consequences to them as if it had never been done.”

“Does Mr. March say that?” asked Burnamy with a relenting smile.

“Indeed he does!”

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

“And what about the consequences to the other fellow?”

“A woman,” said Mrs. March, “has no concern with them. And besides,

I think you've done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the

consequences.”

“I haven't done anything.”

“No matter. You would if you could. I wonder,” she broke off, to prevent

his persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way,

“what can be keeping Mr. March?”

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure of

sauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, and

looking at the pretty children going to school, with books under their

arms. It was the day for the schools to open after the long summer

vacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faces

which, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at least

touch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not

the Schiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one

flight up, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet.

The whole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room

fronting the street stands Schiller's writing-table, with his chair

before it; with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another

corner, the narrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the

pillow frame a picture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like

his dead face lying there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather

touching, and the place with its meagre appointments, as compared with

the rich Goethe house, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in

which Schiller is always falling into the second place. Whether it will

be finally so with him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and

upon other points eternity will not be interrogated. “The great, Goethe

and the good Schiller,” they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was

something good in Goethe and something great, in Schiller.

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality before the world that

he did not heed the warning on the door of the pastry-shop near the

Schiller house, and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh

paint on it. He was then in such a state, that he could not bring his

mind to bear upon the question of which cakes his wife would probably

prefer, and he stood helplessly holding up his hand till the good woman

behind the counter discovered his plight, and uttered a loud cry of

compassion. She ran and got a wet napkin, which she rubbed with soap,

and then she instructed him by word and gesture to rub his hand upon

it, and she did not leave him till his rescue was complete. He let her

choose a variety of the cakes for him, and came away with a gay paper

bag full of them, and with the feeling that he had been in more intimate

relations with the life of Weimar than travellers are often privileged

to be. He argued from the instant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry

woman a high grade of culture in all classes; and he conceived the

notion of pretending to Mrs. March that he had got these cakes from, a

descendant of Schiller.

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment in which she always,

after so many years' experience of his duplicity, believed anything he

told her. They dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Burnamy

came down to the station with them and was very comfortable to March in

helping him to get their tickets and their baggage registered. The train

which was to take them to Halle, where they were to change for Berlin,

was rather late, and they had but ten minutes after it came in before it

would start again. Mrs. March was watching impatiently at the window of

the waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear the platform

and allow the doors to be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned

and ran into the passage by which the new arrivals were pouring out

toward the superabundant omnibuses. March and Burnamy, who had been

talking apart, mechanically rushed after her and found her kissing Miss

Triscoe and shaking hands with the general amidst a tempest of questions

and answers, from which it appeared that the Triscoes had got tired of

staying in Wurzburg, and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner than

they had intended.

The general was rather much bundled up for a day which was mild for a

German summer day, and he coughed out an explanation that he had taken

an abominable cold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shaken it

off yet. He had a notion that change of air would be better for him; it

could not be worse.

He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather than inimical. While the

ladies were still talking eagerly together in proffer and acceptance

of Mrs. March's lamentations that she should be going away just as Miss

Triscoe was coming, he asked if the omnibus for their hotel was there.

He by no means resented Burnamy's assurance that it was, and he did not

refuse to let him order their baggage, little and large, loaded upon

it. By the time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had so far

detached themselves from each other that they could separate after one

more formal expression of regret and forgiveness. With a lament into

which she poured a world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenched

herself from the place, and suffered herself, to be pushed toward her

train. But with the last long look which she cast over her shoulder,

before she vanished into the waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe and

Burnamy transacting the elaborate politenesses of amiable strangers

with regard to the very small bag which the girl had in her hand. He

succeeded in relieving her of it; and then he led the way out of the

station on the left of the general, while Miss Triscoe brought up the

rear.

LXIII.

From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. March tried for a

glimpse of the omnibus in which her proteges were now rolling away

together. As they were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which was

itself out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her seat

she treated the recent incident with a complexity and simultaneity

of which no report can give an idea. At the end one fatal conviction

remained: that in everything she had said she had failed to explain to

Miss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimar and how he happened to

be there with them in the station. She required March to say how she had

overlooked the very things which she ought to have mentioned first, and

which she had on the point of her tongue the whole time. She went over

the entire ground again to see if she could discover the reason why she

had made such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that she was led

to it by his rushing after her with Burnamy before she had had a chance

to say a word about him; of course she could not say anything in his

presence. This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation in the

fact that she had left them together without the least intention or

connivance, and now, no matter what happened, she could not accuse

herself, and he could not accuse her of match-making.

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great that he should not

dream of accusing her of anything except of regret that now she

could never claim the credit of bringing the lovers together under

circumstances so favorable. As soon as they were engaged they could join

in renouncing her with a good conscience, and they would probably make

this the basis of their efforts to propitiate the general.

She said she did not care, and with the mere removal of the lovers in

space, her interest in them began to abate. They began to be of a minor

importance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle, and in

the excitement of settling into the express from Frankfort there were

moments when they were altogether forgotten. The car was of almost

American length, and it ran with almost American smoothness; when the

conductor came and collected an extra fare for their seats, the Marches

felt that if the charge had been two dollars instead of two marks they

would have had every advantage of American travel.

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and now

sterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost

to its gates. The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of

suburbs, and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations

which put our outdated depots to shame. The good 'traeger' who

took possession of them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a

baggage-bearing drosky, and then got them another drosky for their

personal transportation. This was a drosky of the first-class, but they

would not have thought it so, either from the vehicle itself, or from

the appearance of the driver and his horses. The public carriages of

Germany are the shabbiest in the world; at Berlin the horses look like

old hair trunks and the drivers like their moth-eaten contents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and their

approach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as

the ignoble avenue itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean,

tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees,

to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines

of shops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the

grandiosity of New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

“Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,

Under the Lindens?”

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be

imagined with its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the

architecture of Sixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union

Square, that would be the famous Unter den Linden, where she had so

resolutely decided that they would stay while in Berlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other

because it proved second-rate in everything but its charges. They ate a

poorish table d'hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart

to get a rise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which

fed upon the crumbs about their feet while they dined. Their

English-speaking waiter said that it was a very warm evening, and they

never knew whether this was because he was a humorist, or because he was

lonely and wished to talk, or because it really was a warm evening,

for Berlin. When they had finished, they went out and drove about the

greater part of the evening looking for another hotel, whose first

requisite should be that it was not on Unter den Linden. What mainly

determined Mrs. March in favor of the large, handsome, impersonal place

they fixed upon was the fact that it was equipped for steam-heating;

what determined March was the fact that it had a passenger-office where

when he wished to leave, he could buy his railroad tickets and have

his baggage checked without the maddening anxiety, of doing it at the

station. But it was precisely in these points that the hotel which

admirably fulfilled its other functions fell short. The weather made a

succession of efforts throughout their stay to clear up cold; it merely

grew colder without clearing up, but this seemed to offer no suggestion

of steam for heating their bleak apartment and the chilly corridors to

the management. With the help of a large lamp which they kept burning

night and day they got the temperature of their rooms up to sixty; there

was neither stove nor fireplace, the cold electric bulbs diffused a

frosty glare; and in the vast, stately dining-room with its vaulted

roof, there was nothing to warm them but their plates, and the handles

of their knives and forks, which, by a mysterious inspiration, were

always hot. When they were ready to go, March experienced from the

apathy of the baggage clerk and the reluctance of the porters a more

piercing distress than any he had known at the railroad stations; and

one luckless valise which he ordered sent after him by express reached

his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with an accumulation of

charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits,

and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English

railroad hotels. They looked from their windows down into a gardened

square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of

Berlin and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind

the cold any more than the stone kings and generals. The aspect of this

square, like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of

the imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris. Even

the rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French

taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin. The suggestion of

Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic

which the city wears in its native air. The crowd lacks this as much as

the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the

men except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no

style such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets. The

Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the

little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is

ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there

is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight

in New York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty

passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many

streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick

archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side

you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made

to serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the

celebration of the German triumph over France. Berlin has never

the presence of a great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual

monumental insistence. There is no streaming movement in broad vistas;

the dull looking population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine

equipages. The prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but

under the cloudy heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the

architecture. There are hints of the older German cities in some of the

remote and observe streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which

in fact the actual Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the

world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.

They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they

poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in

niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street

corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort

which fails of any impression. If they were only furiously baroque they

would be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is

a self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic,

more noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass. This

offensive art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic

spirit, and bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in

literature bears to romance. It finds its apotheosis in the monument to

Kaiser Wilhelm I., a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering

bronze, commemorating the victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the

war with the last French Emperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the

victors by its ugliness. The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men

and animals backs away from the imperial palace, and saves itself too

soon from plunging over the border of a canal behind it, not far from

Rauch's great statue of the great Frederic. To come to it from the

simplicity and quiet of that noble work is like passing from some

exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic acting to the rant and uproar

of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned and bewildered by its wild

explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to the

imperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the

obligation to visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them. They

entered the court without opposition from the sentinel, and joined other

strangers straggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner

of the building, where after they had increased to some thirty, a

custodian took charge of them, and led them up a series of inclined

plains of brick to the state apartments. In the antechamber they found a

provision of immense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put

on for their passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy

slippers were designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and

upon the mixed company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree

humiliating. The women's skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the

men were openly put to shame, and they shuffled forward with their

bodies at a convenient incline like a company of snow-shoers. In the

depths of his own abasement March heard a female voice behind him

sighing in American accents, “To think I should be polishing up these

imperial floors with my republican feet!”

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his

own heart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in the

historical order of the family portraits recording the rise of the

Prussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors. He began to realize here

the fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is not

the effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity. There is

nothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodies

and proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of French

art it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pride

in the German triumph over the French in war. March found it tiresome

beyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense

of it with his felt shoes. “Well,” he confided to his wife when they

were fairly out-of-doors, “if Prussia rose in the strength of silence,

as Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and

tall talk.”

“Yes, isn't she!” Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire for

excess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerly

about her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which

ought to have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly

because the troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were

hardly more in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington.

Again the German officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when

she met them on the side-walks. There were scarcely any of them,

and perhaps that might have been the reason why they were not more

aggressive; but a whole company of soldiers marching carelessly up to

the palace from the Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as

our own militia often puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far

as they looked at her. She declared that personally there was nothing

against the Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and

modest-looking men; it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or

marble, that they, began to bully and to brag.

LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Linden

almost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into with

them. It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to fact

and form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an English

dinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiter

who served it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligent

appreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectful

opinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held. After the manner

of strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting from

such of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and it

would really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with

the world at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and

car conductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers

and ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen;

for by these rather than by its society women and its statesmen and

divines, is it really judged in the books of travellers; some attention

also should be paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised. In

the railroad cafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches

that if they had not been people of great strength of character he

would have undone the favorable impression the soldiers and civilians

of Berlin generally had been at such pains to produce in them; and

throughout the week of early September which they passed there, it

rained so much and so bitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they

might have come away thinking it's the worst climate in the world, if

it had not been for a man whom they saw in one of the public gardens

pouring a heavy stream from his garden hose upon the shrubbery already

soaked and shuddering in the cold. But this convinced them that they

were suffering from weather and not from the climate, which must really

be hot and dry; and they went home to their hotel and sat contentedly

down in a temperature of sixty degrees. The weather, was not always

so bad; one day it was dry cold instead of wet cold, with rough, rusty

clouds breaking a blue sky; another day, up to eleven in the forenoon,

it was like Indian summer; then it changed to a harsh November air;

and then it relented and ended so mildly, that they hired chairs in

the place before the imperial palace for five pfennigs each, and sat

watching the life before them. Motherly women-folk were there knitting;

two American girls in chairs near them chatted together; some fine

equipages, the only ones they saw in Berlin, went by; a dog and a man

(the wife who ought to have been in harness was probably sick, and the

poor fellow was forced to take her place) passed dragging a cart; some

schoolboys who had hung their satchels upon the low railing were playing

about the base of the statue of King William III. in the joyous freedom

of German childhood.

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine, but to the

Americans, who were Southern by virtue of their sky, the brightness had

a sense of lurking winter in it, such as they remembered feeling on a

sunny day in Quebec. The blue heaven looked sad; but they agreed that it

fitly roofed the bit of old feudal Berlin which forms the most ancient

wing of the Schloss. This was time-blackened and rude, but at least it

did not try to be French, and it overhung the Spree which winds through

the city and gives it the greatest charm it has. In fact Berlin,

which is otherwise so grandiose without grandeur and so severe without

impressiveness, is sympathetic wherever the Spree opens it to the

sky. The stream is spanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well be

unpicturesque, especially if they have statues to help them out. The

Spree abounds in bridges, and it has a charming habit of slow hay-laden

barges; at the landings of the little passenger-steamers which ply upon

it there are cafes and summer-gardens, and these even in the inclement

air of September suggested a friendly gayety.

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevated road in Berlin which

they made in an impassioned memory of the elevated road in New York. The

brick viaducts which carry this arch the Spree again and again in

their course through and around the city, but with never quite such

spectacular effects as our spidery tressels, achieve. The stations are

pleasant, sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, but have not

the comic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours, and are not so frequent. The

road is not so smooth, the cars not so smooth-running or so swift.

On the other hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are never

overcrowded. The line is at times above, at times below the houses, and

at times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs. The train

whirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old

houses, into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up

without order or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and

along the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided

the vacant lots. Everywhere the city was growing out over the country,

in blocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellow

brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburban

dwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went two

successive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has some

admirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but

on both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them.

The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him and

asked, “Wie gestern?” and from this he argued an affectionate constancy

in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of

strangers. At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized

his signature and remarked that it did not look like the signature in

his letter of credit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the

moneyed classes of Prussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind

doubt by Hebrew bankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews

were politer than the Christians in Germany. In starting for Potsdam he

asked a traeger where the Potsdam train was and the man said, “Dat train

dare,” and in coming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and

she thanked him in English. From these incidents, both occurring the

same day in the same place, the inference of a widespread knowledge of

our language in all classes of the population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization in

the capital. He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainy

afternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of the

Thiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifference

to the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather. One evening at a

summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the 'Puppenfee' and the

operetta of 'Hansel and Gretel', he observed that the greater part of

the audience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and he

noted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number of

Americans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where they

mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of

them in the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came

out, confidently addressed him in English. But he took stock of his

impressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all,

that he could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of

the environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in the

Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they

had a great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds of

horsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near

to the popular life. They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society by

driving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautiful

houses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green park

from the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated and

delightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing but

their unsupported conjecture.

LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin.

They chose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the

flat sandy plains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills

surrounding Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick's

sake, and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they

waited with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade

before they were led through Voltaire's room and Frederick's death

chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Souci

even in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of the

great Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes of

their owners. The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as the

Germans conceived it. The gardened terrace from which the low, one-story

building, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into a

many-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally French

the colonnaded front opening to a perspective of artificial ruins, with

broken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against the

sky. Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and

the furnishing. At that time there, was in fact no other taste, and

Frederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved upon

French taste even in his intimate companionship. The droll story of his

coquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be

his guest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the

very air in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which

they parted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one

side, and with merciless mockery on the other. Voltaire was long ago

revenged upon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in

their comedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick's fame the trace of

those lacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is

the singular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one

feels there the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important

to mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of the

lovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wander

among the statues and the roses heavy with the shower. Then they walked

back to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses in

differing architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal

of beauty. It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococco

statues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials

of royalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh and

spirit of their visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and

before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they

dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick

built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved

in the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came

to his kingdom. It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on

its terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroque

allegories of all sorts: Everywhere the statues outnumbered the

visitors, who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally

did not mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in a

mildewed restaurant, where a compatriotic accent caught their ear in a

voice saying to the waiter, “We are in a hurry.” They looked round and

saw that it proceeded from the pretty nose of a young American girl, who

sat with a party of young American girls at a neighboring table. Then

they perceived that all the people in that restaurant were Americans,

mostly young girls, who all looked as if they were in a hurry. But

neither their beauty nor their impatience had the least effect with

the waiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, and alarmed the

Marches with the misgiving that they should not have time for the final

palace on their list.

This was the palace where the father of Frederick, the mad old Frederick

William, brought up his children with that severity which Solomon urged

but probably did not practise. It is a vast place, but they had time for

it all, though the custodian made the most of them as the latest comers

of the day, and led them through it with a prolixity as great as their

waiter's. He was a most friendly custodian, and when he found that they

had some little notion of what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with

his patronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests. They saw

everything but the doorway where the faithful royal father used to lie

in wait for his children and beat them, princes and princesses alike,

with his knobby cane as they came through. They might have seen

this doorway without knowing it; but from the window overlooking the

parade-ground where his family watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic

grenadiers, they made sure of just such puddles as Frederick William

forced his family to sit with their feet in, while they dined alfresco

on pork and cabbage; and they visited the room of the Smoking Parliament

where he ruled his convives with a rod of iron, and made them the

victims of his bad jokes. The measuring-board against which he took

the stature of his tall grenadiers is there, and one room is devoted to

those masterpieces which he used to paint in the agonies of gout. His

chef d'oeuvre contains a figure with two left feet, and there seemed

no reason why it might not have had three. In another room is a small

statue of Carlyle, who did so much to rehabilitate the house which the

daughter of it, Wilhelmina, did so much to demolish in the regard of

men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there is a chamber where

Napoleon slept, which is not likely to be occupied soon by any other

self-invited guest of his nation. It is perhaps to keep the princes

of Europe humble that hardly a palace on the Continent is without the

chamber of this adventurer, who, till he stooped to be like them, was

easily their master. Another democracy had here recorded its invasion in

the American stoves which the custodian pointed out in the corridor

when Mrs. March, with as little delay as possible, had proclaimed their

country. The custodian professed an added respect for them from the

fact, and if he did not feel it, no doubt he merited the drink money

which they lavished on him at parting.

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when he let them out of

his carriage at the station, he excused the rainy day to them. He was

a merry fellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughed at the bad

weather, as if it had been a good joke on them.

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shone on the stems of the

pines on the way back to Berlin, contributed to the content in which

they reviewed their visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the place was

perfectly charming, and that it was incomparably expressive of kingly

will and pride. These had done there on the grand scale what all

the German princes and princelings had tried to do in imitation and

emulation of French splendor. In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a

historical growth as at Versailles, but was the effect of family genius,

in which there was often the curious fascination of insanity.

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of the

Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies,

personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are

gathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty line

who stand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate.

father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure,

terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears something of the

madness which showed in the life of the sire.

They went through many rooms in which the memorials of the kings and

queens, the emperors and empresses were carefully ordered, and felt no

kindness except before the relics relating to the Emperor Frederick

and his mother. In the presence of the greatest of the dynasty they

experienced a kind of terror which March expressed, when they were

safely away, in the confession of his joy that those people were dead.

LXVI.

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. March

had such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the orders

of an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went

to bed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and his

convalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not always

keep his temper. In the absence of actual offence, either from his

daughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form;

it centred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward Rose

Adding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in

the same measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part,

directly or indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold.

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he was

constantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that he

did not over-value Burnamy's sacrifice and devotion, and that it was not

an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about.

In giving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotel

altogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as great

vexation as he had accepted the room. He besought him not to go, but so

ungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for his

manner by the kindness of her own.

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were

not eager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she

had hitherto shared only with him. He was old, and certain luxuries had

become habits if not necessaries with him. Of course he did not say this

to himself; and still less did he say it to her. But he let her see that

he did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such close

relations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches

were somehow to blame for it. This made it impossible for her to write

at once to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that

it should not make her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoid him; she

would not let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she

felt his kindness and was glad of his help.

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as

a fellow-countryman would have been precious. He got them a doctor,

against General Triscoe's will; he went for his medicines; he lent him

books and papers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him. But with

the girl he attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is

nothing like the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego

unfair advantage in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep

he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room

of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: “I suppose

you must have been all over Weimar by this time.”

“Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interesting

place. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left.”

“And you enjoy that! I saw”--she added this with a little unnecessary

flush--“your poem in the paper you lent papa.”

“I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't.” He laughed,

and she said:

“You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place.”

“It isn't lying about loose, exactly.” Even in the serious and

perplexing situation in which he found himself he could not help being

amused with her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and

commonplace conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of

a more fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a

greater world. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing

them between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any

return to the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her

ladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the

same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd

that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there

had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must

leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt

bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if

she never did so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing

enough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg

with the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose's collapse,

and of his mother's flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who

was so fortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of

going to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very

strange they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic

character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself

was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his

hopes. With a lover's indefinite power of blinding himself to what is

before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him,

more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for

her to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in

the little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always

the only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this

world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness

of their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. The

Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been

the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at

the station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on

his arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the

irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a

zeal that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in fact

preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August

knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable

English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general

gave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt to

encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in

the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of

the wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one day

suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened

hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a

bench in the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other

frequenters of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young

strangers, so that they would silently rise and leave it to them when

they saw them coming. Apparently they yielded not only to their right,

but to a certain authority which resides in lovers, and which all other

men, and especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is

difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which

Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.

But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that

of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled

to say what it was. It was known that the gracious young lady's father,

who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact

that they were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever was

phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other's society.

If their free American association was indistinguishably like the

peasant informality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of

Kenby and Mrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not

be fully cognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing

to prevent it. His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he

believed himself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have

had some other physician if he had not found consolation in their

difference of opinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled

to cherish for the doctor in view of the man's complete ignorance of the

case. In proof of his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed

some time after the doctor said he might get up.

Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not till

then that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter

and Burnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipated

theirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which had

brought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothing

more of it. The divine patience and confidence of their youth might

sometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who

had seen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their

reunion in Weimar. To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an

understanding which had been made without reference to his wishes, and

had not been directly brought to his knowledge.

“Agatha,” he said, after due note of a gay contest between her and

Burnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent to

his room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the

open air, “how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?”

“Why, I don't know!” she answered, startled from her work of beating the

sofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand. “I

never asked him.” She looked down candidly into his face where he sat in

an easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa. “What makes you

ask?”

He answered with another question. “Does he know that we had thought of

staying here?”

“Why, we've always talked of that, haven't we? Yes, he knows it. Didn't

you want him to know it, papa? You ought to have begun on the ship,

then. Of course I've asked him what sort of place it was. I'm sorry if

you didn't want me to.”

“Have I said that? It's perfectly easy to push on to Paris. Unless--”

“Unless what?” Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully.

But in spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and

strength and courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man.

He said querulously, “I don't see why you take that tone with me. You

certainly know what I mean. But if you don't care to deal openly with

me, I won't ask you.” He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same

time a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her

forehead. “You must know--you're not a child,” he continued, still

with averted eyes, “that this sort of thing can't go on... It must be

something else, or it mustn't be anything at all. I don't ask you for

your confidence, and you know that I've never sought to control you.”

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently or

provisionally, “No.”

“And I don't seek to do so now. If you have nothing that you wish to

tell me--”

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had

not heard him, “Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?”

“I will lie down when I feel like it,” he answered. “Send August with

the supper; he can look after me.”

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she

left him without apparent grievance, saying quietly, “I will send

August.”

LXVII.

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy. She asked August, when

she gave him her father's order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room,

where, when it came, she remained thinking so long that it was rather

tepid by the time she drank it.

Then she went to her window, and looked out, first above and next below.

Above, the moon was hanging over the gardened hollow before the Museum

with the airy lightness of an American moon. Below was Burnamy behind

the tubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair against the house

wall, with the spark of his cigar fainting and flashing like an American

firefly. Agatha went down to the door, after a little delay, and seemed

surprised to find him there; at least she said, “Oh!” in a tone of

surprise.

Burnamy stood up, and answered, “Nice night.”

“Beautiful!” she breathed. “I didn't suppose the sky in Germany could

ever be so clear.”

“It seems to be doing its best.”

“The flowers over there look like ghosts in the light,” she said

dreamily.

“They're not. Don't you want to get your hat and wrap, and go over and

expose the fraud?”

“Oh,” she answered, as if it were merely a question of the hat and wrap,

“I have them.”

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while, long enough to have

ascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, if

they had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat,

they sat down, and she said, “I don't know that I've seen the moon so

clear since we left Carlsbad.” At the last word his heart gave a jump

that seemed to lodge it in his throat and kept him from speaking, so

that she could resume without interruption, “I've got something of

yours, that you left at the Posthof. The girl that broke the dishes

found it, and Lili gave it to Mrs. March for you.” This did not account

for Agatha's having the thing, whatever it was; but when she took a

handkerchief from her belt, and put out her hand with it toward him, he

seemed to find that her having it had necessarily followed. He tried to

take it from her, but his own hand trembled so that it clung to hers,

and he gasped, “Can't you say now, what you wouldn't say then?”

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore; but she

apparently felt it in her turn as he had felt it in his. She whispered

back, “Yes,” and then she could not get out anything more till she

entreated in a half-stifled voice, “Oh, don't!”

“No, no!” he panted. “I won't--I oughtn't to have done it--I beg your

pardon--I oughtn't to have spoken,--even--I--”

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulous fashion, but still

between laughing and crying, “I meant to make you. And now, if you're

ever sorry, or I'm ever too topping about anything, you can be perfectly

free to say that you'd never have spoken if you hadn't seen that I

wanted you to.”

“But I didn't see any such thing,” he protested. “I spoke because I

couldn't help it any longer.”

She laughed triumphantly. “Of course you think so! And that shows that

you are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing. But I am going

to have the credit of it. I knew that you were holding back because you

were too proud, or thought you hadn't the right, or something. Weren't

you?” She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge: “If

you pretend, that you weren't I shall never forgive you!”

“But I was! Of course I was. I was afraid--”

“Isn't that what I said?” She triumphed over him with another laugh, and

cowered a little closer to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and

now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among

the garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched

every point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of

inexhaustible knowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear

delight of this encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with

a present distinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her

refusal to be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant

never to see her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to

her. Another point was that she had not resented his coming back that

last night, but had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love,

and had always meant somehow to let him know that she was torched by

his trusting her enough to come back while he was still under that cloud

with Mr. Stoller. With further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted

him altogether of wrong in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr.

Stoller had said of it to Mr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what

Stoller had said, but even in his present condition he could not accept

fully her reading of that obscure passage of his life. He preferred to

put the question by, and perhaps neither of them cared anything about

it except as it related to the fact that they were now each other's

forever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at

least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At her

mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which

expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from

his arm to the hands which she had clasped within it. “He has always

appreciated you,” she said courageously, “and I know he will see it in

the right light.”

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability

finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy

accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see

General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

“No, I will see him,” she said, “I wish to see him first; he will expect

it of me. We had better go in, now,” she added, but neither made any

motion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in the

other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in

the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time

in going to her father beyond that which must be given to a long

hand-pressure under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing,

where her ways and Burnamy's parted. She went into her own room, and

softly opened the door into her father's and listened.

“Well?” he said in a sort of challenging voice.

“Have you been asleep?” she asked.

“I've just blown out my light. What has kept you?”

She did not reply categorically. Standing there in the sheltering dark,

she said, “Papa, I wasn't very candid with you, this afternoon. I am

engaged to Mr. Burnamy.”

“Light the candle,” said her father. “Or no,” he added before she could

do so. “Is it quite settled?”

“Quite,” she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt. “That is, as

far as it can be, without you.”

“Don't be a hypocrite, Agatha,” said the general. “And let me try to get

to sleep. You know I don't like it, and you know I can't help it.”

“Yes,” the girl assented.

“Then go to bed,” said the general concisely.

Agatha did not obey her father. She thought she ought to kiss him, but

she decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him

a tender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself

into her own room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the

moonlight, with a smile that never left her lips.

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the coming

day, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not much

greater than some moths, moving before her window. She pulled the valves

open and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling from

above. She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the great

central truth of the universe:

“I love you. L. J. B.”

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

“So do I. Don't be silly. A. T.”

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch.

She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutter

down from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep.

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, at

breakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier. Of the three involved

in the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respited

from it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the young

people. They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, if

bringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formality

of asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through was

unpleasant, but after all it was a formality. Agatha told him everything

that had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not that

cordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly not

hopelessly discouraging.

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly

as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general's

tray before going up to his room. The young fellow did not feel more at

his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the

general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted

upon the weather between them.

“I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy,” said General

Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, “and I

suppose you know why you have come.” The words certainly opened the way

for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had

abundant time to add, “I don't pretend that this event is unexpected,

but I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should

wish you to marry my daughter. I take it for granted that you are

attached to each other, and we won't waste time on that point. Not to

beat about the bush, on the next point, let me ask at once what your

means of supporting her are. How much did you earn on that newspaper in

Chicago?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

“Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?”

“I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a

publisher.” The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy's mind.

“Eighteen hundred. What did you get for your poem in March's book?”

“That's a very trifling matter: fifteen dollars.”

“And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?”

“Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses. But I wouldn't take that,

General Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his 'lit de justice', passed this point in

silence. “Have you any one dependent on you?”

“My mother; I take care of my mother,” answered Burnamy, proudly.

“Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?”

“I have none.”

“Then you don't expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon

her means.”

“I expect to do nothing of the kind!” cried Burnamy. “I should be

ashamed--I should feel disgraced--I should--I don't ask you--I don't ask

her till I have the means to support her--”

“If you were very fortunate,” continued the general, unmoved by the

young fellow's pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself

lived upon his wife's means as long as she lived, and then upon his

daughter's, “if you went back to Stoller--”

“I wouldn't go back to him. I don't say he's knowingly a rascal, but

he's ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I

behaved badly to him, and I'd give anything to undo the wrong I let him

do himself; but I'll never go back to him.”

“If you went back, on your old salary,” the general persisted

pitilessly, “you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up

to twenty-five hundred a year.”

“Yes--”

“And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the

scale she is used to? I don't speak of your mother, who has the first

claim upon you.”

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the

question was of Stoller, began to sink.

The general went on. “You ask me to give you my daughter when you

haven't money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a

stranger--”

“Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe,” Burnamy protested. “You have

known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago

will tell you--”

“A stranger, and worse than a stranger,” the general continued, so

pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost

smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. “It isn't a question of

liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so

do the Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself.

You've done me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little

of you, in spite of our three months' acquaintance; and that little

is--But you shall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential

employ of a man who trusted you, and you let him betray himself.”

“I did. I don't excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But

it wasn't done maliciously; it wasn't done falsely; it was done

inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But it

wasn't; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and I

didn't! I can never outlive that.”

“I know,” said the general relentlessly, “that you have never attempted

any defence. That has been to your credit with me. It inclined me to

overlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you

told her you would never see her again. What did you expect me to think,

after that, of your coming back to see her? Or didn't you expect me to

know it?”

“I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you. But I don't

excuse that, either. It was acting a lie to come back. All I can say is

that I had to see her again for one last time.”

“And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourself

to her.”

“I couldn't help doing that.”

“I don't say you could. I don't judge the facts at all. I leave them

altogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought to

say to such a man as you have shown yourself.”

“No, I will say.” The door into the adjoining room was flung open, and

Agatha flashed in from it.

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face. “Have you been

listening?” he asked.

“I have been hearing--”

“Oh!” As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged.

“I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room. I couldn't help hearing;

and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on,

after all you've said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than he

deserved.”

“That doesn't justify me,” Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost

as severely as she--had dealt with her father.

“Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly! And his wanting you to

falsify the whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you.”

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they

both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went

on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to the

other.

“And besides, if it didn't justify you, what you have done yourself

would; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the

same as if you hadn't done it, as far as you are concerned; and that is

all I care for.” Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heard

something like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and she

flushed a little as she added tremulously, “And I should never, never

blame you for it, after that; it's only trying to wriggle out of things

which I despise, and you've never done that. And he simply had to come

back,” she turned to her father, “and tell me himself just how it was.

And you said yourself, papa--or the same as said--that he had no right

to suppose I was interested in his affairs unless he--unless--And I

should never have forgiven him, if he hadn't told me then that he that

he had come back because he--felt the way he did. I consider that that

exonerated him for breaking his word, completely. If he hadn't broken

his word I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and--and

strangely. And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably,

so delicately, that I don't believe he would ever have said anything

again--if I hadn't fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!” she cried at a

movement of remonstrance from Burnamy. “And I shall always be proud of

you for it.” Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted

his eyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where

Burnamy stood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike

impetuosity. “And as for the rest,” she declared, “everything I have is

his; just as everything of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if

he wishes to take me without anything, then he can have me so, and I

sha'n't be afraid but we can get along somehow.” She added, “I have

managed without a maid, ever since I left home, and poverty has no

terrors for me!”

LXVIII.

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldiers

learn. He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character,

and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiable

that they supplied good-humor for all. They flaunted their rapture in

her father's face as little as they could, but he may have found their

serene satisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to

bear as a more boisterous happiness would have been.

It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America,

and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employment

in New York. She was much surer than he that this could be done with

perfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was

not to be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his

living; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be no

talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time. It

included complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocal

analyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes,

ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses,

eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some account

of their several friends.

In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of

what they had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at

every instant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the

persistent anxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of

their leaving Weimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should

spend a month before sailing for New York. Burnamy had a notion, which

Agatha approved, of trying for something there on the New York-Paris

Chronicle; and if he got it they might not go home at once. His gains

from that paper had eked out his copyright from his book, and had almost

paid his expenses in getting the material which he had contributed

to it. They were not so great, however, but that his gold reserve was

reduced to less than a hundred dollars, counting the silver coinages

which had remained to him in crossing and recrossing frontiers. He was

at times dimly conscious of his finances, but he buoyantly disregarded

the facts, as incompatible with his status as Agatha's betrothed, if not

unworthy of his character as a lover in the abstract.

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in the

garden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important that

when it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy's umbrella,

and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings even

to let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father's packing.

Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the whole

afternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain in

undisturbed possession of his room as long as possible.

What chiefly remained to be put into the general's trunk were his coats

and trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, and

carefully folded and packed them. Then, to make sure that nothing had

been forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, and

stood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks.

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to be

something in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved

to be a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue

satin ribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a

yard, was of entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it

had lain.

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examined

it near to, and then at arm's length. August stood by with a pair of the

general's trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agatha

absently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in

his eyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the withered

bouquet. Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers,

which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in

the closet. At August's smile it became something else. Still she asked

lightly enough, “Was ist loss, August?”

His smile deepened and broadened. “Fur die Andere,” he explained.

Agatha demanded in English, “What do you mean by feardy ondery?”

“Oddaw lehdy.”

“Other lady?” August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closed

the door into her own room, where the general had been put for the time

so as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down with

her hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands. “Now, August,”

she said very calmly, “I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mir

sagen--what other lady--wass andere Dame--these flowers belonged

to--diese Blumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?”

August nodded brightly, and with German carefully adjusted to Agatha's

capacity, and with now and then a word or phrase of English, he conveyed

that before she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had been in

Weimar another American Fraulein with her Frau Mother; they had not

indeed staid in that hotel, but had several times supped there with

the young Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room before her Herr

Father. The young Herr had been much about with these American Damen,

driving and walking with them, and sometimes dining or supping with them

at their hotel, The Elephant. August had sometimes carried notes to them

from the young Herr, and he had gone for the bouquet which the gracious

Fraulein was holding, on the morning of the day that the American Damen

left by the train for Hanover.

August was much helped and encouraged throughout by the friendly

intelligence of the gracious Fraulein, who smiled radiantly in clearing

up one dim point after another, and who now and then supplied the

English analogues which he sought in his effort to render his German

more luminous.

At the end she returned to the work of packing, in which she directed

him, and sometimes assisted him with her own hands, having put the

bouquet on the mantel to leave herself free. She took it up again and

carried it into her own room, when she went with August to summon her

father back to his. She bade August say to the young Herr, if he saw

him, that she was going to sup with her father, and August gave her

message to Burnamy, whom he met on the stairs coming down as he was

going up with their tray.

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that evening Burnamy was less

able than usual to bear her absence in the hotel dining-room, and he

went up to a cafe in the town for his supper. He did not stay long, and

when he returned his heart gave a joyful lift at sight of Agatha looking

out from her balcony, as if she were looking for him. He made her a gay

flourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she came down to meet him

at the hotel door. She had her hat on and jacket over one arm and she

joined him at once for the farewell walk he proposed in what they had

agreed to call their garden.

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reached the place where

they always sat, she shifted her jacket to the other arm and uncovered

the hand in which she had been carrying the withered bouquet. “Here is

something I found in your closet, when I was getting papa's things out.”

“Why, what is it?” he asked innocently, as he took it from her.

“A bouquet, apparently,” she answered, as he drew the long ribbons

through his fingers, and looked at the flowers curiously, with his head

aslant.

“Where did you get it?”

“On the shelf.”

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a long sigh, as of final

recollection, “Oh, yes,” and then he said nothing; and they did not sit

down, but stood looking at each other.

“Was it something you got for me, and forgot to give me?” she asked in

a voice which would not have misled a woman, but which did its work with

the young man.

He laughed and said, “Well, hardly! The general has been in the room

ever since you came.”

“Oh, yes. Then perhaps somebody left it there before you had the room?”

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, “No, I flung it up there

I had forgotten all about it.”

“And you wish me to forget about it, too?” Agatha asked in a gayety of

tone that still deceived him.

“It would only be fair. You made me,” he rejoined, and there was

something so charming in his words and way, that she would have been

glad to do it.

But she governed herself against the temptation and said, “Women are not

good at forgetting, at least till they know what.”