“Oh, I'll tell you, if you want to know,” he said with a laugh, and at

the words she--sank provisionally in their accustomed seat. He sat down

beside her, but not so near as usual, and he waited so long before he

began that it seemed as if he had forgotten again. “Why, it's nothing.

Miss Etkins and her mother were here before you came, and this is a

bouquet that I meant to give her at the train when she left. But I

decided I wouldn't, and I threw it onto the shelf in the closet.”

“May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquet to her at the train?”

“Well, she and her mother--I had been with them a good deal, and I

thought it would be civil.”

“And why did you decide not to be civil?”

“I didn't want it to look like more than civility.”

“Were they here long?”

“About a week. They left just after the Marches came.”

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted. She sat reclined

in the corner of the seat, with her head drooping. After an interval

which was long to Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the third

finger of her left hand, absently, as if she did not know what she was

doing; but when she had got it off she held it towards Burnamy and said

quietly, “I think you had better have this again,” and then she rose and

moved slowly and weakly away.

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and he stood a moment

bewildered; then he pressed after her.

“Agatha, do you--you don't mean--”

“Yes,” she said, without looking round at his face, which she knew was

close to her shoulder. “It's over. It isn't what you've done. It's what

you are. I believed in you, in spite of what you did to that man--and

your coming back when you said you wouldn't--and--But I see now that

what you did was you; it was your nature; and I can't believe in you any

more.”

“Agatha!” he implored. “You're not going to be so unjust! There was

nothing between you and me when that girl was here! I had a right to--”

“Not if you really cared for me! Do you think I would have flirted with

any one so soon, if I had cared for you as you pretended you did for

me that night in Carlsbad? Oh, I don't say you're false. But you're

fickle--”

“But I'm not fickle! From the first moment I saw you, I never cared for

any one but you!”

“You have strange ways of showing your devotion. Well, say you are not

fickle. Say, that I'm fickle. I am. I have changed my mind. I see

that it would never do. I leave you free to follow all the turning and

twisting of your fancy.” She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she

gave him no chance to get out the words that seemed to choke him. She

began to run, but at the door of the hotel she stopped and waited till

he came stupidly up. “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy. I beg you will

not see me again, if you can help it before we go to-morrow. My father

and I are indebted to you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn't take

any more trouble on our account. August can see us off in the morning.”

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while he was yet struggling

with his doubt of the reality of what had all so swiftly happened.

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change in the status to which

he had reconciled himself with so much difficulty, when he came down to

get into the omnibus for the train. Till then he had been too proud

to ask what had become of Burnamy, though he had wondered, but now he

looked about and said impatiently, “I hope that young man isn't going to

keep us waiting.”

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but she said firmly, “He

isn't going, papa. I will tell you in the train. August will see to the

tickets and the baggage.”

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-class compartment

to themselves. But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha's

confidences to her father were not full. She told her father that her

engagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very

wrong in Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy

together. As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty

in accepting them, and there was something in the situation which

appealed strongly to his contrary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly

from his sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to

new conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security

from an engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, “I hope

you're not making a mistake.”

“Oh, no,” she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of

sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the

Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and

the Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which

they remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at

Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who

kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling

that she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver

wedding journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think

that it would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do

in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of

the same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in

Europe as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape.

One gray little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its

mediaeval walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something

more. There was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in

places a pale fog began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose

without dispersing the cold, which was afterwards so severe in

their room at the Russischer Hof in Frankfort that in spite of

the steam-radiators they sat shivering in all their wraps till

breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored

the portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all

the electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest

degree. Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they

vowed each other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at

least while the summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and

electric-lighted. They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath,

and over their breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a

certain interest in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel.

They were fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before,

and they were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire.

Many of them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and

girls running before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus

processions have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with

cruel anxiety a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to

a milk-cart before the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his

voice, and called to the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost

shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the

morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not

wet. What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an

old town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new

town, handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets,

apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course

Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing

absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive

characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight.

Some sort of monument to the national victory over France there must

have been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no

record of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware

of gardened squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of

dignified civic edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station,

such as the state builds even in minor European cities, but such as our

paternal corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They

went to the Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks

at their public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from

the most plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they

must pay their devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal

banking-house they revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter

of credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius

of Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled

himself by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled

Mrs. March for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the

Rothschilds' birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe

was born. The public is apparently much more expected there, and in the

friendly place they were no doubt much more welcome than they would

have been in the Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy

moment of Weimar, which after the lapse of a week seemed already so

remote. They wondered, as they mounted the stairs from the basement

opening into a clean little court, how Burnamy was getting on, and

whether it had yet come to that understanding between him and Agatha,

which Mrs. March, at least, had meant to be inevitable. Then they became

part of some such sight-seeing retinue as followed the custodian about

in the Goethe horse in Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable from

that of their fellow sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of

a personal pleasure in a certain prescient classicism of the house.

It somehow recalled both the Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow

recalled Italy. It is a separate house of two floors above the entrance,

which opens to a little court or yard, and gives access by a decent

stairway to the living-rooms. The chief of these is a sufficiently

dignified parlor or salon, and the most important is the little chamber

in the third story where the poet first opened his eyes to the light

which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and which, dying, he implored

to be with him more. It is as large as his death-chamber in

Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down into the

Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for the first

time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet square. In

the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is fairly

suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look from the

parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt. So much

remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such things go,

it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and well-placed

citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family which Heine

says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial quality of the

ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic's breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer,

the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once

was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their

coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was

still so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a

broad blaze of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort

in the summer, the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill

interior, where the German emperors were elected for so many centuries.

As soon as an emperor was chosen, in the great hall effigied round

with the portraits of his predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony,

ostensibly to show himself to the people, but really, March contended,

to warm up a little in the sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that

day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of

the historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered

in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold. Then she

abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried

to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her. He

returned shivering, after a half-hour's absence, and pretended that she

had missed the greatest thing in the world, but as he could never be got

to say just what she had lost, and under the closest cross-examination

could not prove that this cathedral was memorably different from

hundreds of other fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a

lasting content with the easier part she had chosen. His only definite

impression at the cathedral seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of

gloomily correct type, whom he had seen doing it with his Baedeker,

and not letting an object of interest escape; and his account of her

fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the

breadth of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the

rest of the morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the

outside of many Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble

themselves to learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it,

because it was so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful

with its bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They

liked the market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was

full of fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but

because there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their

Baedeker that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to

enter the marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances

that the Jews had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since.

They were almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere

else in Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of

the race, prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a

mid-day dinner so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating

and electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence,

and ran Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder

climate. It grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their

compartment to whom March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the

window down when the guard came, without asking their leave. Then the

climate proved much colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls

the rest of the way, and would not be entreated to look at the pleasant

level landscape near, or the hills far off. He proposed to put up the

window as peremptorily as it had been put down, but she stayed him with

a hoarse whisper, “She may be another Baroness!” At first he did not

know what she meant, then he remembered the lady whose claims to rank

her presence had so poorly enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he

perceived that his wife was practising a wise forbearance with their

fellow-passengers, and giving her a chance to turn out any sort of

highhote she chose. She failed to profit by the opportunity; she

remained simply a selfish, disagreeable woman, of no more perceptible

distinction than their other fellow-passenger, a little commercial

traveller from Vienna (they resolved from his appearance and the

lettering on his valise that he was no other), who slept with a sort of

passionate intensity all the way to Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and

flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under

a wet sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove

interminably to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a

city handsomer and cleaner than any American city they could think of,

and great part of the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March

owned, than even Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like

that, with double rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at

times the sign of Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no

such restriction against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred.

Otherwise they had to confess once more that any inferior city of

Germany is of a more proper and dignified presence than the most

parse-proud metropolis in America. To be sure, they said, the German

towns had generally a thousand years' start; but all the same the fact

galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their

hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit

to Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something

tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with

its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the

spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the

river's brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold

braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to

his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain

have had them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very

slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower,

and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of

the serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All

these retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the

stove, without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately

rooms, and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant,

not because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great

arm-load of wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the

strange demand.

“What!” she cried. “A fire in September!”

“Yes,” March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by

the exigency, “yes, if September is cold.”

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or

liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a

word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and

in less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least

sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. March

made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said

she would have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a

supper of chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when

they supped in her aunt's parlor there all those years ago. He wished to

compute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and

he went down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he

found himself alone with a young English couple and their little boy.

They were friendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable,

apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said he

had contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he was going

to Holland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which March

expected to find there. He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of

faith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of the

dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the court

without, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till the

little English boy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March's spirits certainly did not rise

when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at

another table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he

had met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the

elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the

younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed

to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct

and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style

bragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeable

fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had

become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one

only the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in

his scorn of the German landscape, the German weather, the German

government, the German railway management, and then turned out an

American of German birth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort

when he went back to her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she

had discovered standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was

a French clock, of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the

first Empire, and it looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon

occupied Mayence early in the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely

on her conscience where, in its danger from the heat of the stove, it

rested with the weight of the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled.

She wondered that no one had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and

she required her husband to remove it at once from the top of the stove

to the mantel under the mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a

clock. He said nothing could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began

to fall all apart, like a clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble

base dropped-off; its pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side.

While Mrs. March lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it

together before any one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new

place. Then they both breathed freer, and returned to sit down before

the stove. But at the same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined

on the lacquered top, the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would

see it in the morning; she would notice the removal of the clock, and

would make a merit of reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord,

and in the end they would be mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer

this wrong they agreed to restore it to its place, and, let it go to

destruction upon its own terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had

found it, and they went to bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in

Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal

joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his

window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of

pathos in the line:

“Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!”

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of

youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places,

with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen

silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he

remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he

woke early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though

young, were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp

of hooves kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw

the street filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on

horseback, some in uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps,

loosely straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could

not make out. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he

said that these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late

manoeuvres, and who were now going home. He promised March a translation

of the song, but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful

home-going remained the more poetic with him because its utterance

remained inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering

about the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit

by the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to the

cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there

added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people

of Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it by

preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral,

an ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive

offerings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled

themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and

ragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red

guide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle

in a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own

ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar a

priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was

as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle's, or whether somewhere in it he

felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and

old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river,

which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough river

looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season,

both as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making.

The summer of life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better

return to his own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the

great ugly brutal town which, if it was not home to him, was as much

home to him as to any one. A longing for New York welled up his heart,

which was perhaps really a wish to be at work again. He said he must

keep this from his wife, who seemed not very well, and whom he must try

to cheer up when he returned to the hotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer.

They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf

they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March

would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, and

he was afterwards glad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up

behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition

which the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeated

agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much,

and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had

plundered them of.

“Now I see,” said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, “how

fortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe

we were the instruments of justice.”

“Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?” asked her husband.

“The landlord has his own arrangement with justice. When he overcharges

his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my

clock.”

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the

clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine

as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. The

smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not

so bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March

liked the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy

shores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that,

and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he

remembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began to

come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence,

assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid

from the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the

color of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not

gainsay the friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they

showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since

realized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held

silently apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who

kept the Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an

Englishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was

he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or

was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?

He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of

the boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed

to offer him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually

lifted a shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was

English and that he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial

glint in the young man's eye, or at some petrific expression of his

delicate face, he felt that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let

the shawl sink again. March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing

the Germans begin to eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards

either from the baskets they had brought with them, or from the boat's

provision. But he prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer,

through all the events of the voyage; and took March's mind off the

scenery with a sudden wrench when he came unexpectedly into view after a

momentary disappearance. At the table d'hote, which was served when the

landscape began to be less interesting, the guests were expected to hand

their plates across the table to the stewards but to keep their knives

and forks throughout the different courses, and at each of these partial

changes March felt the young man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him

for the semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that

he was a Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at

last cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their

former Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love

mantled the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled

steeps. The scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered;

there were certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander

than they remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows

the poem was more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory

chimneys, though there were no compensating castles near it; and the

castles seemed as good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of

them had been restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who

had gone into trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and

then such a mere gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put

his tongue to the broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the

first American dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more,

does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on

the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which

might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. “Still, still

you know,” March argued, “this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not

the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.

Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be

storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really

got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure.”

“Well, we have got no denkmal, either,” said his wife, meaning the

national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had

just passed, “and that is something in our favor.”

“It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was,” he returned.

“The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rode

aboard the boat.”

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that. He yielded, and

began to praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled

slopes of the upper river. He said they put him in mind of orchards that

he had known in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of

travel, after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in

finding something familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of getting ashore with their

baggage and driving from the steamboat landing to the railroad station,

where they were to get their train for Dusseldorf an hour later. The

station swarmed with travellers eating and drinking and smoking; but

they escaped from it for a precious half of their golden hour, and gave

the time to the great cathedral, which was built, a thousand years ago,

just round the corner from the station, and is therefore very handy

to it. Since they saw the cathedral last it had been finished, and now

under a cloudless evening sky, it soared and swept upward like a pale

flame. Within it was a bit over-clean, a bit bare, but without it was

one of the great memories of the race, the record of a faith which

wrought miracles of beauty, at least, if not piety.

The train gave the Marches another, and last, view of it as they slowly

drew out of the city, and began to run through a level country walled

with far-off hills; past fields of buckwheat showing their stems like

coral under their black tops; past peasant houses changing their wonted

shape to taller and narrower forms; past sluggish streams from which the

mist rose and hung over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassy clear

till the manifold factory chimneys of Dusseldorf stained it with their

dun smoke.

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the town where Heinrich Heine

was born; but when they had eaten their supper in the capital little

hotel they found there, and went out for a stroll, they found nothing to

remind them of the factories, and much to make them think of the poet.

The moon, beautiful and perfect as a stage moon, came up over the

shoulder of a church as they passed down a long street which they

had all to themselves. Everybody seemed to have gone to bed, but at a

certain corner a girl opened a window above them, and looked out at the

moon.

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalled garden facing

it, full of black depths of foliage. In the night March woke and saw the

moon standing over the garden, and silvering its leafy tops. This was

really as it should be in the town where the idolized poet of his youth

was born; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and who had once

seemed like a living friend; who had been witness of his first love,

and had helped him to speak it. His wife used to laugh at him for his

Heine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and

she, even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage. He thought

long thoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way,

with an ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his

youth, all ghosts together in the silvered shadow. The trees shuddered

in the night breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, sentimentalizing,” he answered boldly.

“Well, you will be sick,” she said, and he crept back into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement. But he woke early,

as an elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wife

still sleeping. He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the

town as he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity for

Heine's birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with

his waiter at breakfast. After all, was not it more important to know

something of the actual life of a simple common class of men than to

indulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount of

associations could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter said he

was a Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served

a year for nothing. Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he

got a pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as

the one mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he

paid the hotel two marks a day. March confided to him his secret trouble

as to tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a

just tip was.

He went to his banker's, and when he came back he found his wife

with her breakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine's

birthplace that she heard with indifference of his failure to get any

letters. It was too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed

him her plan, which she had been working out ever since she woke. It

contained every place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined

not one should escape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition,

accusing him of having taken cold when he got up in the night, and

acquitting him with difficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a

little fagged, and they must have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little

Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way

from his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the

outside before they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the

cleanest of the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty.

Below the houses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is

a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows;

above, where the Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a

frame-maker displayed their signs.

But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked so

fresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it

the poet's birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by the

people who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, so

anomalously interested in the place. They dismounted, and crossed to the

butcher shop where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but could

not understand their wish to go up stairs. He did not try to prevent

them, however, and they climbed to the first floor above, where a

placard on the door declared it private and implored them not to knock.

Was this the outcome of the inmate's despair from the intrusion of other

pilgrims who had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms? They durst not

knock and ask so much, and they sadly descended to the ground-floor,

where they found a butcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence

than the butcher himself, who told them that the building in front was

as new as it looked, and the house where Heine was really born was the

old house in the rear. He showed them this house, across a little court

patched with mangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wished to visit

it he led the way. The place was strewn both underfoot and overhead with

feathers; it had once been all a garden out to the street, the boy said,

but from these feathers, as well as the odor which prevailed, and the

anxious behavior of a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was

plain that what remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard.

There was one well-grown tree, and the boy said it was of the poet's

time; but when he let them into the house, he became vague as to the

room where Heine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhere

upstairs and that it could not be seen. The room where they stood was

the frame-maker's shop, and they bought of him a small frame for a

memorial. They bought of the butcher's boy, not so commercially, a

branch of lilac; and they came away, thinking how much amused Heine

himself would have been with their visit; how sadly, how merrily he

would have mocked at their effort to revere his birthplace.

They were too old if not too wise to be daunted by their defeat, and

they drove next to the old court garden beside the Rhine where the poet

says he used to play with the little Veronika, and probably did not. At

any rate, the garden is gone; the Schloss was burned down long ago;

and nothing remains but a detached tower in which the good Elector

Jan Wilhelm, of Heine's time, amused himself with his many mechanical

inventions. The tower seemed to be in process of demolition, but an

intelligent workman who came down out of it, was interested in the

strangers' curiosity, and directed them to a place behind the Historical

Museum where they could find a bit of the old garden. It consisted of

two or three low trees, and under them the statue of the Elector by

which Heine sat with the little Veronika, if he really did. Afresh gale

blowing through the trees stirred the bushes that backed the statue, but

not the laurel wreathing the Elector's head, and meeting in a neat point

over his forehead. The laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the

Elector, who stands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and

resting his baton on the nose of a very small lion, who, in the

exigencies of foreshortening, obligingly goes to nothing but a tail

under the Elector's robe.

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so much that he raised

an equestrian statue to his own renown in the market-place, though he

modestly refused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to the

affection of his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomed wig,

mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as big round as a barrel, and

heavy enough to keep him from coming down on his fore legs as long as he

likes to hold them up. It was to this horse's back that Heine

clambered when a small boy, to see the French take formal possession

of Dusseldorf; and he clung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who

had just abdicated, while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the

balcony of the Rathhaus, and the Electoral arms were taken down from its

doorway.

The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothic and French rococo as

to its architectural style, and is charming in its way, but the Marches

were in the market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine's boyhood.

They felt that he might have been the boy who stopped as he ran before

them, and smacked the stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an

old market-woman, and then dashed away before she could frame a protest

against the indignity. From this incident they philosophized that the

boys of Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century as

they were at the beginning; and they felt the fascination that such a

bounteous, unkempt old marketplace must have for the boys of any period.

There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the

fruits were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The

market-place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down

from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a

slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the

rapid current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over,

while a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw to

open.

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy to grow up in, and

how many privileges it offered, how many dangers, how many chances

for hairbreadth escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushed

shrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Rhine with other boys;

and they easily found a leaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in

the Public Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his

life and saved the kitten's. They were not so sure of the avenue through

which the poet saw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white

horse when he took possession of the Elector's dominions. But if it was

that where the statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. comes riding on a horse

led by two Victories, both poet and hero are avenged there on the

accomplished fact. Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the

badness of that foolish denkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden

Germany), and the memory of the singer whom the Hohenzollern family

pride forbids honor in his native place, is immortal in its presence.

On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflections upon the

open neglect, throughout Germany, of the greatest German lyrist, by

which the poet might have profited if he had been present. He contended

that it was not altogether an effect of Hohenzollern pride, which could

not suffer a joke or two from the arch-humorist; but that Heine had

said things of Germany herself which Germans might well have found

unpardonable. He concluded that it would not do to be perfectly frank

with one's own country. Though, to be sure, there would always be the

question whether the Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in the

Germany he loved so tenderly and mocked so pitilessly. He had to own

that if he were a negro poet he would not feel bound to measure terms

in speaking of America, and he would not feel that his fame was in her

keeping.

Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany and he accused her of

taking a shabby revenge, in trying to forget him; in the heat of his

resentment that there should be no record of Heine in the city where

he was born, March came near ignoring himself the fact that the poet

Freiligrath was also born there. As for the famous Dusseldorf school of

painting, which once filled the world with the worst art, he rejoiced

that it was now so dead, and he grudged the glance which the beauty of

the new Art Academy extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and

is so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that French

supremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates the

overthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on

horseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, which

the Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. It

is in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt

in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patriotic

monuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, which

these never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dying

warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts were

moved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, which

dropped into equivalent English verse in March's note-book:

Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous laurel;

Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone.

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of the

German soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war with

Austria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon

should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September

mist, which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest

reaches; for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks

are apt to be in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through

it, and sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and

said how much seemed to be done in Germany for the people's comfort and

pleasure. In what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly

theirs, they were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially

the children seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things.

The Marches met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly

back by the winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park,

and they found them everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed

subdued, and were silent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in

the streets of Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part

of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and

cackled at each other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps

they were indeed children of that sad second childhood which one would

rather not blossom back into.

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and

shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we

choose. But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second

childhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there, people do not joke

above their breath about kings and emperors. If they joke about them

in print, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are

severely enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious

as well as comic. Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out

in every walk of life, and it is said that in family jars a husband

sometimes has the last word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming

the sovereign, and so having her silenced for three months at least

behind penitential bars.

“Think,” said March, “how simply I could adjust any differences of

opinion between us in Dusseldorf.”

“Don't!” his wife implored with a burst of feeling which surprised him.

“I want to go home!”

They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey to

Holland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in the

last half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.

“What! And not go to Holland? What is to become of my after-cure?”

“Oh, it's too late for that, now. We've used up the month running about,

and tiring ourselves to death. I should like to rest a week--to get into

my berth on the Norumbia and rest!”

“I guess the September gales would have something to say about that.”

“I would risk the September gales.”

LXXII.

In the morning March came home from his bankers gay with the day's

provisional sunshine in his heart, and joyously expectant of his wife's

pleasure in the letters he was bringing. There was one from each of

their children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and

read on the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might

be in them; there were two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without

opening were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs.

Adding's, from the postmarks, seemed to have been following them about

for some time.

“They're all right at home,” he said. “Do see what those people have

been doing.”

“I believe,” she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside her

bed to cut the envelopes, “that you've really cared more about them all

along than I have.”

“No, I've only been anxious to be done with them.”

She got the letters open, and holding one of them up in each hand she

read them impartially and simultaneously; then she flung them both down,

and turned her face into her pillow with an impulse of her inalienable

girlishness. “Well, it is too silly.”

March felt authorized to take them up and read them consecutively; when

he had done, so he did not differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha

had written to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had just that

evening become engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her part owned a farther step,

and announced her marriage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in

such matters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in

unsparing terms, and in Agatha's letter there was an avowal of like

effect from Burnamy. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon

come to regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs. Adding professed a certain

humiliation in having realized that, after all her misgiving about him,

Rose seemed rather relieved than otherwise, as if he were glad to have

her off his hands.

“Well,” said March, “with these troublesome affairs settled, I don't see

what there is to keep us in Europe any longer, unless it's the consensus

of opinion in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson, that we ought to stay the

winter.”

“Stay the winter!” Mrs. March rose from her pillow, and clutched the

home letters to her from the abeyance in which they had fallen on the

coverlet while she was dealing with the others. “What do you mean?”

“It seems to have been prompted by a hint you let drop, which Tom has

passed to Bella and Fulkerson.”

“Oh, but that was before we left Carlsbad!” she protested, while she

devoured the letters with her eyes, and continued to denounce the

absurdity of the writers. Her son and daughter both urged that now their

father and mother were over there, they had better stay as long as they

enjoyed it, and that they certainly ought not to come home without going

to Italy, where they had first met, and revisiting the places which

they had seen together when they were young engaged people: without that

their silver wedding journey would not be complete. Her son said that

everything was going well with 'Every Other Week', and both himself and

Mr. Fulkerson thought his father ought to spend the winter in Italy, and

get a thorough rest. “Make a job of it, March,” Fulkerson wrote, “and

have a Sabbatical year while you're at it. You may not get another.”

“Well, I can tell them,” said Mrs. March indignantly, “we shall not do

anything of the kind.”

“Then you didn't mean it?”

“Mean it!” She stopped herself with a look at her husband, and asked

gently, “Do you want to stay?”

“Well, I don't know,” he answered vaguely. The fact was, he was sick of

travel and of leisure; he was longing to be at home and at work again.

But if there was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it

were, at a bargain; which could be fairly divided between them, and

leave him the self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienced a

husband not to see the advantage of it, or to refuse the merit. “I

thought you wished to stay.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I did. It has been very, very pleasant, and, if

anything, I have over-enjoyed myself. We have gone romping through it

like two young people, haven't we?”

“You have,” he assented. “I have always felt the weight of my years in

getting the baggage registered; they have made the baggage weigh more

every time.”

“And I've forgotten mine. Yes, I have. But the years haven't forgotten

me, Basil, and now I remember them. I'm tired. It doesn't seem as if

I could ever get up. But I dare say it's only a mood; it may be only a

cold; and if you wish to stay, why--we will think it over.”

“No, we won't, my dear,” he said, with a generous shame for his

hypocrisy if not with a pure generosity. “I've got all the good out of

it that there was in it, for me, and I shouldn't go home any better six

months hence than I should now. Italy will keep for another time, and

so, for the matter of that, will Holland.”

“No, no!” she interposed. “We won't give up Holland, whatever we do. I

couldn't go home feeling that I had kept you out of your after-cure; and

when we get there, no doubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shall

want to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seems so far off, now! But

go and see when the afternoon train for the Hague leaves, and I shall be

ready. My mind's quite made up on that point.”

“What a bundle of energy!” said her husband laughing down at her.

He went and asked about the train to the Hague, but only to satisfy a

superficial conscience; for now he knew that they were both of one mind

about going home. He also looked up the trains for London, and found

that they could get there by way of Ostend in fourteen hours. Then

he went back to the banker's, and with the help of the Paris-New

York Chronicle which he found there, he got the sailings of the first

steamers home. After that he strolled about the streets for a last

impression of Dusseldorf, but it was rather blurred by the constantly

recurring pull of his thoughts toward America, and he ended by turning

abruptly at a certain corner, and going to his hotel.

He found his wife dressed, but fallen again on her bed, beside which

her breakfast stood still untasted; her smile responded wanly to his

brightness. “I'm not well, my dear,” she said. “I don't believe I could

get off to the Hague this afternoon.”

“Could you to Liverpool?” he returned.

“To Liverpool?” she gasped. “What do you mean?”

“Merely that the Cupania is sailing on the twentieth, and I've

telegraphed to know if we can get a room. I'm afraid it won't be a good

one, but she's the first boat out, and--”

“No, indeed, we won't go to Liverpool, and we will never go home till

you've had your after-cure in Holland.” She was very firm in this,

but she added, “We will stay another night, here, and go to the Hague

tomorrow. Sit down, and let us talk it over. Where were we?”

She lay down on the sofa, and he put a shawl over her. “We were just

starting for Liverpool.”

“No, no we weren't! Don't say such things, dearest! I want you to help

me sum it all, up. You think it's been a success, don't you?”

“As a cure?”

“No, as a silver wedding journey?”

“Perfectly howling.”

“I do think we've had a good time. I never expected to enjoy myself so

much again in the world. I didn't suppose I should ever take so much

interest in anything. It shows that when we choose to get out of our

rut we shall always find life as fresh and delightful as ever. There is

nothing to prevent our coming any year, now that Tom's shown himself

so capable, and having another silver wedding journey. I don't like to

think of it's being confined to Germany quite.”

“Oh, I don't know. We can always talk of it as our German-Silver Wedding

Journey.”

“That's true. But nobody would understand nowadays what you meant by

German-silver; it's perfectly gone out. How ugly it was! A sort of

greasy yellowish stuff, always getting worn through; I believe it was

made worn through. Aunt Mary had a castor of it, that I can remember

when I was a child; it went into the kitchen long before I grew up.

Would a joke like that console you for the loss of Italy?”

“It would go far to do it. And as a German-Silver Wedding Journey, it's

certainly been very complete.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's given us a representative variety of German cities. First we had

Hamburg, you know, a great modern commercial centre.”

“Yes! Go on!”

“Then we had Leipsic, the academic.”

“Yes!”

“Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a German health resort; then

Nuremberg, the mediaeval; then Anspach, the extinct princely capital;

then Wurzburg, the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the

literature of a great epoch; then imperial Berlin; then Frankfort, the

memory of the old free city; then Dusseldorf, the centre of the most

poignant personal interest in the world--I don't see how we could have

done better, if we'd planned it all, and not acted from successive

impulses.”

“It's been grand; it's been perfect! As German-Silver Wedding Journey

it's perfect--it seems as if it had been ordered! But I will never let

you give up Holland! No, we will go this afternoon, and when I get to

Schevleningen, I'll go to bed, and stay there, till you've completed

your after-cure.”

“Do you think that will be wildly gay for the convalescent?”

She suddenly began to cry. “Oh, dearest, what shall we do? I feel

perfectly broken down. I'm afraid I'm going to be sick--and away from

home! How could you ever let me overdo, so?” She put her handkerchief to

her eyes, and turned her face into the sofa pillow.

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energy and

inextinguishable interest had not permitted a moment's respite from

pleasure since they left Carlsbad. But he had been married, too long not

to understand that her blame of him was only a form of self-reproach

for her own self-forgetfulness. She had not remembered that she was no

longer young till she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse.

The fact had its pathos and its poetry which no one could have felt

more keenly than he. If it also had its inconvenience and its danger he

realized these too.

“Isabel,” he said, “we are going home.”

“Very well, then it will be your doing.”

“Quite. Do you think you could stand it as far as Cologne? We get the

sleeping-car there, and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend.”

“This afternoon? Why I'm perfectly strong; it's merely my nerves that

are gone.” She sat up, and wiped her eyes. “But Basil! If you're doing

this for me--”

“I'm doing it for myself,” said March, as he went out of the room.

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passage to Dover she

suffered so little from the rough weather that she was an example to

many robust matrons who filled the ladies' cabin with the noise of their

anguish during the night. She would have insisted upon taking the first

train up to London, if March had not represented that this would not

expedite the sailing of the Cupania, and that she might as well stay the

forenoon at the convenient railway hotel, and rest. It was not quite his

ideal of repose that the first people they saw in the coffee-room when

they went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose Adding, who were

having their tea and toast and eggs together in the greatest apparent

good-fellowship. He saw his wife shrink back involuntarily from the

encounter, but this was only to gather force for it; and the next moment

she was upon them in all the joy of the surprise. Then March allowed

himself to be as glad as the others both seemed, and he shook hands with

Kenby while his wife kissed Rose; and they all talked at once. In the

confusion of tongues it was presently intelligible that Mrs. Kenby

was going to be down in a few minutes; and Kenby took March into his

confidence with a smile which was, almost a wink in explaining that he

knew how it was with the ladies. He said that Rose and he usually got

down to breakfast first, and when he had listened inattentively to Mrs.

March's apology for being on her way home, he told her that she was

lucky not to have gone to Schevleningen, where she and March would have

frozen to death. He said that they were going to spend September at a

little place on the English coast, near by, where he had been the day

before with Rose to look at lodgings, and where you could bathe all

through the month. He was not surprised that the Marches were going

home, and said, Well, that was their original plan, wasn't it?

Mrs. Kenby, appearing upon this, pretended to know better, after the

outburst of joyful greeting with the Marches; and intelligently reminded

Kenby that he knew the Marches had intended to pass the winter in Paris.

She was looking extremely pretty, but she wished only to make them see

how well Rose was looking, and she put her arm round his shoulders as

she spoke, Schevleningen had done wonders for him, but it was fearfully

cold there, and now they were expecting everything from Westgate, where

she advised March to come, too, for his after-cure: she recollected in

time to say, She forgot they were on their way home. She added that she

did not know when she should return; she was merely a passenger, now;

she left everything to the men of the family. She had, in fact, the

air of having thrown off every responsibility, but in supremacy, not

submission. She was always ordering Kenby about; she sent him for her

handkerchief, and her rings which she had left either in the tray of

her trunk, or on the pin-cushion, or on the wash-stand or somewhere, and

forbade him to come back without them. He asked for her keys, and then

with a joyful scream she owned that she had left the door-key in the

door and the whole bunch of trunk-keys in her trunk; and Kenby treated

it all as the greatest joke; Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would

make everything come right, and he had lost that look of anxiety which

he used to have; at the most he showed a friendly sympathy for Kenby,

for whose sake he seemed mortified at her. He was unable to regard his

mother as the delightful joke which she appeared to Kenby, but that

was merely temperamental; and he was never distressed except when she

behaved with unreasonable caprice at Kenby's cost.

As for Kenby himself he betrayed no dissatisfaction with his fate to

March. He perhaps no longer regarded his wife as that strong character

which he had sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but she was still

the most brilliant intelligence, and her charm seemed only to have grown

with his perception of its wilful limitations. He did not want to talk

about her so much; he wanted rather to talk about Rose, his health, his

education, his nature, and what was best to do for him. The two were on

terms of a confidence and affection which perpetually amused Mrs.

Kenby, but which left the sympathetic witness nothing to desire in their

relation.

They all came to the train when the Marches started up to London, and

stood waving to them as they pulled out of the station. “Well, I can't

see but that's all right,” he said as he sank back in his seat with a

sigh of relief. “I never supposed we should get out of their marriage

half so well, and I don't feel that you quite made the match either, my

dear.”

She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys seemed happy together,

and that there was nothing to fear for Rose in their happiness. He would

be as tenderly cared for by Kenby as he could have been by his mother,

and far more judiciously. She owned that she had trembled for him till

she had seen them all together; and now she should never tremble again.

“Well?” March prompted, at a certain inconclusiveness in her tone rather

than her words.

“Well, you can see that it, isn't ideal.”

“Why isn't it ideal? I suppose you think that the marriage of

Burnamy and Agatha Triscoe will be ideal, with their ignorances and

inexperiences and illusions.”

“Yes! It's the illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them, and

at their age the Kenbys can't have them.”

“Kenby is a solid mass of illusion. And I believe that people can go and

get as many new illusions as they want, whenever they've lost their old

ones.”

“Yes, but the new illusions won't wear so well; and in marriage you

want illusions that will last. No; you needn't talk to me. It's all very

well, but it isn't ideal.”

March laughed. “Ideal! What is ideal?”

“Going home!” she said with such passion that he had not the heart to

point out that they were merely returning to their old duties, cares

and pains, with the worn-out illusion that these would be altogether

different when they took them up again.

LXXIII.

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightway to her berth

when she got on board the Cupania, and to her husband's admiration she

remained there till the day before they reached New York. Her theory

was that the complete rest would do more than anything else to calm her

shaken nerves; and she did not admit into her calculations the chances

of adverse weather which March would not suggest as probable in the last

week in September. The event justified her unconscious faith. The ship's

run was of unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of unparalled

smoothness. For days the sea was as sleek as oil; the racks were never

on the tables once; the voyage was of the sort which those who make it

no more believe in at the time than those whom they afterwards weary in

boasting of it.

The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not show the slightest

curiosity to know who her fellow-passengers were. She said that she

wished to be let perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for

this reason she forbade March to bring her a list of the passengers till

after they had left Queenstown lest it should be too exciting. He did

not take the trouble to look it up, therefore; and the first night out

he saw no one whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at breakfast

he found himself to his great satisfaction at the same table with the

Eltwins. They were so much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin

took part in the talk, and told him how they had spent the time of her

husband's rigorous after-cure in Switzerland, and now he was going home

much better than they had expected. She said they had rather thought

of spending the winter in Europe, but had given it up because they were

both a little homesick. March confessed that this was exactly the case

with his wife and himself; and he had to add that Mrs. March was not

very well otherwise, and he should be glad to be at home on her account.

The recurrence of the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin's habitual

gloom, and Mrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subject of their return

for inquiry into Mrs. March's condition; her interest did not so far

overcome her shyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her; and

March found that the fact of the Eltwins' presence on board did not

agitate his wife. It seemed rather to comfort her, and she said she

hoped he would see all he could of the poor old things. She asked if

he had met any one else he knew, and he was able to tell her that there

seemed to be a good many swells on board, and this cheered her very

much, though he did not know them; she liked to be near the rose, though

it was not a flower that she really cared for.

She did not ask who the swells were, and March took no trouble to find

out. He took no trouble to get a passenger-list, and he had the more

trouble when he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished,

as they have a habit of doing, after the first day; the one that he made

interest for with the head steward was a second-hand copy, and had no

one he knew in it but the Eltwins. The social solitude, however, was

rather favorable to certain other impressions. There seemed even more

elderly people than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmosphere was

gray and sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward

voyage; there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men

who were going seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for

the coming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke. They had eaten

their cake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in the

digestion. They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown

summer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was to him. He hated

to be of their dreary company, but spiritually he knew that he was of

it; and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger passengers.

Some matrons who went about clad in furs amused him, for they must have

been unpleasantly warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope

of being able to tell the customs inspector with a good conscience that

the things had been worn, would have sustained one lady draped from head

to foot in Astrakhan.

They were all getting themselves ready for the fray or the play of the

coming winter; but there seemed nothing joyous in the preparation. There

were many young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there were

not many young men, and such as there were kept to the smoking-room.

There was no sign of flirtation among them; he would have given much for

a moment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she could have brightened

those gloomy surfaces with her impartial lamp. March wished that he

could have brought some report from the outer world to cheer his wife,

as he descended to their state-room. They had taken what they could get

at the eleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in

the Norumbia. It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room.

It was on the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if

there had been any sun it could not have got into their window, which

was half the time under water. The green waves, laced with foam, hissed

as they ran across the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned

like the wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open,

and looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he

was going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, “Are

we going down?”

“Not that I know of,” he answered with a gayety he did not feel. “But

I'll ask the head steward.”

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his

fingers convulsively. “If I'm never any better, you will always remember

this happy, summer, won't you? Oh, it's been such a happy summer! It has

been one long joy, one continued triumph! But it was too late; we were

too old; and it's broken me.”

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would

have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray

inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their

barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence. He

ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, “Don't you

think I'd better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?”

She suddenly turned and faced him. “The doctor! Why, I'm not sick,

Basil! If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do

something to stop those waves from slapping against that horrible

blinking one-eyed window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to

help me.”

She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes,

while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that

seemed to open and shut like a weary eye.

“Oh, go away!” she implored. “I shall be better presently, but if you

stand there like that--Go and see if you can't get some other room,

where I needn't feel as if I were drowning, all the way over.”

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he

did not stop short of the purser's office. He made an excuse of getting

greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that

he supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower

deck changed for something a little less intimate with the sea. The

purser was not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that

March wanted something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room

of those on the promenade where he had seen swells going in and out,

for six hundred dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his

wife to look at it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to

take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her. She would

be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated

whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to

the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance

of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred

dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down

thinking. All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the

doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not some last hope in

medicine before he took the desperate step before him. He turned in half

his course, and ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door of

the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched

him to save herself from falling.

“Why, Mr. March!” she shrieked.

“Miss Triscoe!” he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with

her to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie

between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her

and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess

each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had

sorrowed over Mrs. March's sad state, and he had grieved to hear that

her father was going home because he was not at all well, before they

found the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a

grim impatience for his daughter.

“But how is it you're not in the passenger-list?” he inquired of them

both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at

the last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They

were in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting

berths. Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence

of Burnamy not only from her company but from her conversation which

mystified March through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife.

She was a girl who had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately

and rapturously written them of her engagement, there was a silence

concerning her betrothed that had almost positive quality. With his

longing to try Miss Triscoe upon Mrs. March's malady as a remedial

agent, he had now the desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe's

mystery as a solvent. She stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down

and be wrapped up in the chair next her father. She said that if he were

going to ask Mrs. March to let her come to her, it would not be worth

while to sit down; and he hurried below.

“Did you get it?” asked his wife, without looking round, but not so

apathetically as before.

“Oh, yes. That's all right. But now, Isabel, there's something I've got

to tell you. You'd find it out, and you'd better know it at once.”

She turned her face, and asked sternly, “What is it?”

Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, “Miss Triscoe is on board.

Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you.”

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. “And Burnamy?”

“There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out,

spiritually. She didn't mention him, and I talked at least five minutes

with her.”

“Hand me my dressing-sack,” said Mrs. March, “and poke those things on

the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain

across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth.

Put my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the

brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that

your head has made. Now!”

“Then--then you will see her?”

“See her!”

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with

Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led

the way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a

basement room.

“Oh, we're in the basement, too; it was all we could get,” she said in

words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went

back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.

He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was

not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of

the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from

bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely

escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a

week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought

they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and

they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but

the doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. “All

Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter,” he ended.

There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must

wait to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general,

who had been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without

regard to the context, “It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young

man in the most devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March

about--Well it came to nothing, after all; and I don't understand how,

to this day. I doubt if they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose.

I wasn't consulted in the matter either way. It appears that parents are

not consulted in these trifling affairs, nowadays.” He had married his

daughter's mother in open defiance of her father; but in the glare of

his daughter's wilfulness this fact had whitened into pious obedience.

“I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve

of the result.”

A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General

Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy's final rejection than with

his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be

another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the

young man in the general's attitude. But the affair was altogether too

delicate for comment; the general's aristocratic frankness in dealing

with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but

in any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say,

He had always liked Burnamy, himself.

He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to

understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the

instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in

that business with that man--what was his name?

“Stoller?” March prompted. “I don't excuse him in that, but I don't

blame him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the

opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means

expunction, then I don't see why that offence hasn't been pretty well

wiped out.

“Those things are not so simple as they used to seem,” said the general,

with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately

concern his own comfort or advantage.

LXXVI.

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing another

offence of Burnamy's.

“It wasn't,” said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all the

minor facts to the heart of the matter, “that he hadn't a perfect right

to do it, if he thought I didn't care for him. I had refused him at

Carlsbad, and I had forbidden him to speak to me about--on the subject.

But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it. He ought

to have known that I couldn't accept him, on the spur of the moment,

that way; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace,

before he had done anything to justify himself. I couldn't have kept my

self-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he ought

to have seen it. Of course he said afterwards that he didn't see it. But

when--when I found out that SHE had been in Weimar, and all that time,

while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to

see him--let him know how I was really feeling--he was flirting with

that--that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determined

to put an end to everything. And that is what I did; and I shall always

think I--did right--and--”

The rest was lost in Agatha's handkerchief, which she put up to

her eyes. Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl's

unoccupied hand in her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was

past sufficiently to allow her to be heard.

Then she said, “Men are very strange--the best of them. And from the

very fact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush

into a flirtation with somebody else.”

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly

not been beautified by grief. “I didn't blame him for the flirting; or

not so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards. He ought to have

told me the very first instant we were engaged. But he didn't. He let it

go on, and if I hadn't happened on that bouquet I might never have known

anything about it. That is what I mean by--a false nature. I wouldn't

have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself--Oh, it was

too much!”

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She was perching on the

edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not

see, toward the sofa, “I'm afraid that's rather a hard seat for you.

“Oh, no, thank you! I'm perfectly comfortable--I like it--if you don't

mind?”

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay,

sighed and said, “They are not like us, and we cannot help it. They are

more temporizing.”

“How do you mean?” Agatha unmasked again.

“They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time

to bring them right, or to come right of themselves.”

“I don't think Mr. March would trust things to come right of

themselves!” said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March's sincerity.

“Ah, that's just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and

I don't believe we could have lived through without it: we should have

quarrelled ourselves into the grave!”

“Mrs. March!”

“Yes, indeed. I don't mean that he would ever deceive me. But he would

let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without

any fuss.”

“Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?”

“I'm afraid he would--if he thought it would come right. It used to be a

terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don't remember

that he means nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other day

in Ansbach--how long ago it seems!--he let a poor old woman give him her

son's address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look

him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her. I don't believe,

unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that

he'll ever go near the man.”

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, “That is a very different thing.”

“It isn't a different kind of thing. And it shows what men are,--the

sweetest and best of them, that is. They are terribly apt to

be--easy-going.”

“Then you think I was all wrong?” the girl asked in a tremor.

“No, indeed! You were right, because you really expected perfection of

him. You expected the ideal. And that's what makes all the trouble, in

married life: we expect too much of each other--we each expect more of

the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin

over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be

sure of being radiantly happy. But all this talking and all this writing

about love seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect,

even at our craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of

them; and they seem to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep

on after we are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take

nice things as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning! But we

get more and more greedy and exacting--”

“Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everything

after we were engaged?”

“No, I don't say that. But suppose he had put it off till you were

married?” Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, “Would it have

been so bad? Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the

last moment in his desperation was a very good joke. You would have

understood better just how it was, and it might even have made you

fonder of him. You might have seen that he had flirted with some one

else because he was so heart-broken about you.”

“Then you believe that if I could have waited till--till--but when I had

found out, don't you see I couldn't wait? It would have been all very

well if I hadn't known it till then. But as I did know it. Don't you

see?”

“Yes, that certainly complicated it,” Mrs. March admitted. “But I don't

think, if he'd been a false nature, he'd have owned up as he did. You

see, he didn't try to deny it; and that's a great point gained.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Agatha, with conviction. “I saw that

afterwards. But you don't think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or--or

hasty?”

“No, indeed! You couldn't have done differently under the circumstances.

You may be sure he felt that--he is so unselfish and generous--” Agatha

began to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand.

“And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do.”

“No,” the girl protested. “He can never forgive me; it's all over,

everything is over. It would make very little difference to me, what

happened now--if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything. But if I can

only believe I wasn't unjust--”

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behaved with absolute

impartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quite

irrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place had

nothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and all

should be made right between them. The fact that she did not know where

he was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with the

result; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself. She clinched

her argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off,

and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had to do was to keep

willing it, and waiting. There was something very mysterious in it.

“And how long was it till--” Agatha faltered.

“Well, in our ease it was two years.”

“Oh!” said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to reassure her.

“But our case was very peculiar. I could see afterwards that it needn't

have been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that

I was in the wrong. I waited till we met.”

“If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write,” said Agatha. “I

shouldn't care what he thought of my doing it.”

“Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong.”

They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhausted

all the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those they

did not care for. At last the general said, “I'm afraid my daughter will

tire Mrs. March.”

“Oh, I don't think she'll tire my wife. But do you want her?”

“Well, when you're going down.”

“I think I'll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation,”

said March, and he did so before he went below.

He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa.

“I thought I might as well go to lunch,” she said, and then she told him

about Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort

and encourage the girl. “And now, dearest, I want you to find out where

Burnamy is, and give him a hint. You will, won't you! If you could have

seen how unhappy she was!”

“I don't think I should have cared, and I'm certainly not going to

meddle. I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he's

well rid of her. I can't imagine a broken engagement that would more

completely meet my approval. As the case stands, they have my blessing.”

“Don't say that, dearest! You know you don't mean it.”

“I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off. You've done all and more

than you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe. You've offered yourself up,

and you've offered me up--”

“No, no, Basil! I merely used you as an illustration of what men

were--the best of them.”

“And I can't observe,” he continued, “that any one else has been

considered in the matter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy's

flirtation? What is the matter with a little compassion for the pivotal

girl?”

“Now, you know you're not serious,” said his wife; and though he would

not admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interest

which she took in the affair. There was no longer any question of

changing their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the excitement

she did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later after

dinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but

in her liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a

comparative study of the American swells, in the light of her late

experience with the German highhotes. It is true that none of the

swells gave her the opportunity of examining them at close range, as the

highhotes had done. They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after

he thought she could bear it, March told her how near he had come to

making her their equal by an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now

shuddered at the thought; but she contended that in their magnificent

exclusiveness they could give points to European princes; and that this

showed again how when Americans did try to do a thing, they beat the

world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know them;

they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke of them as “rich

people,” and she seemed content to keep away from them with Mrs.

March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March

sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe had

his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain

corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and

mocked their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and

the return of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the

general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into

his own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find

how much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. The

conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East

and the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his

own region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that

he should never go back to his native section. There was the comfort

of kind in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet,

which March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through

sorrow upon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man's habit of early rising, and they usually

found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee,

ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half

past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to

people of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction,

which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and

he asked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on

the Channel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, sodden

British bread, from the spirited and airy Continental tradition of

coffee and rolls.

The major confessed that he was no great hand to notice such things, and

he said he supposed that if the line had never lost a passenger, and got

you to New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased;

he surmised that if they could get their airing outside before they took

their coffee, it would give the coffee a chance to taste better; and

this was what they afterwards did. They met, well buttoned and well

mined up, on the promenade when it was yet so early that they were not

at once sure of each other in the twilight, and watched the morning

planets pale east and west before the sun rose. Sometimes there were no

paling planets and no rising sun, and a black sea, ridged with white,

tossed under a low dark sky with dim rifts.

One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenity and majesty which it

rarely has outside of the theatre. The dawn began over that sea which

was like the rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under

long mauve clouds bathed in solemn light. Above these, in the pale

tender sky, two silver stars hung, and the steamer's smoke drifted

across them like a thin dusky veil. To the right a bank of dun cloud

began to burn crimson, and to burn brighter till it was like a low

hill-side full of gorgeous rugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish

growth of autumnal shrubs. The whole eastern heaven softened and flushed

through diaphanous mists; the west remained a livid mystery. The eastern

masses and flakes of cloud began to kindle keenly; but the stars shone

clearly, and then one star, till the tawny pink hid it. All the zenith

reddened, but still the sun did not show except in the color of the

brilliant clouds. At last the lurid horizon began to burn like a

flame-shot smoke, and a fiercely bright disc edge pierced its level, and

swiftly defined itself as the sun's orb.

Many thoughts went through March's mind; some of them were sad, but in

some there was a touch of hopefulness. It might have been that beauty

which consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself, if no longer

young, a part of the young immortal frame of things. His state was

indefinable, but he longed to hint at it to his companion.

“Yes,” said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh. “I feel as if I could walk

out through that brightness and find her. I reckon that such hopes

wouldn't be allowed to lie to us; that so many ages of men couldn't have

fooled themselves so. I'm glad I've seen this.” He was silent and they

both remained watching the rising sun till they could not bear its

splendor. “Now,” said the major, “it must be time for that mud, as you

call it.” Over their coffee and crackers at the end of the table which

they had to themselves, he resumed. “I was thinking all the time--we

seem to think half a dozen things at once, and this was one of

them--about a piece of business I've got to settle when I reach home;

and perhaps you can advise me about it; you're an editor. I've got a

newspaper on my hands; I reckon it would be a pretty good thing, if it

had a chance; but I don't know what to do with it: I got it in trade

with a fellow who has to go West for his lungs, but he's staying till I

get back. What's become of that young chap--what's his name?--that went

out with us?”

“Burnamy?” prompted March, rather breathlessly.

“Yes. Couldn't he take hold of it? I rather liked him. He's smart, isn't

he?”

“Very,” said March. “But I don't know where he is. I don't know that he

would go into the country--. But he might, if--”

They entered provisionally into the case, and for argument's sake

supposed that Burnamy would take hold of the major's paper if he could

be got at. It really looked to March like a good chance for him, on

Eltwin's showing; but he was not confident of Burnamy's turning up very

soon, and he gave the major a pretty clear notion why, by entering into

the young fellow's history for the last three months.

“Isn't it the very irony of fate?” he said to his wife when he found

her in their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, and

reported the facts to her.

“Irony?” she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined or

desired. “Nothing of the kind. It's a leading, if ever there was one.

It will be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy. And out there

she can sit on her steps!”

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis of

Burnamy's reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and their

settlement in Major Eltwin's town under social conditions that implied a

habit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch. While he

was doing this she showered him with questions and conjectures and

requisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore

saved him from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide,

inquiry into Burnamy's whereabouts.

The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin got out, and found the

second-cabin passengers free of the first-cabin promenade at an hour

when their superiors were not using it. As he watched these inferiors,

decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying their privilege with

a furtive air, and with stolen glances at him, he asked himself in what

sort he was their superior, till the inquiry grew painful. Then he rose

from his chair, and made his way to the place where the material barrier

between them was lifted, and interested himself in a few of them who

seemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on the terms made. A

figure seized his attention with a sudden fascination of conjecture and

rejection: the figure of a tall young man who came out on the promenade

and without looking round, walked swiftly away to the bow of the ship,

and stood there, looking down at the water in an attitude which was

bewilderingly familiar. His movement, his posture, his dress, even,

was that of Burnamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure, felt

a sickening repulsion in the notion of his presence. It would have been

such a cheap performance on the part of life, which has all sorts

of chances at command, and need not descend to the poor tricks of

second-rate fiction; and he accused Burnamy of a complicity in the bad

taste of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if it

were really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of

the Triscoes as he himself had done. He had probably got out of money

and had hurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin

fare on the first boat back. Clearly he was not to blame, but life was

to blame for such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that

he wished to turn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it.

He kept moving toward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few

paces' distance the young man whirled about and showed him the face of a

stranger.

March made some witless remark on the rapid course of the ship as it

cut its way through the water of the bow; the stranger answered with a

strong Lancashire accent; and in the talk which followed, he said he was

going out to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New Bedford, and he

seemed hopeful of some advice or information from March; then he said he

must go and try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean

his wife, and he hurried down to his own, to whom he related his

hair-breadth escape from Burnamy.

“I don't call it an escape at all!” she declared. “I call it the

greatest possible misfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could have

brought them together at once, just when she has seen so clearly that

she was in the wrong, and is feeling all broken up. There wouldn't have

been any difficulty about his being in the second-cabin. We could have

contrived to have them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst you

could have lent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the

first-cabin.”

“I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him,” said March,

“and then he could have eaten with the swells.”

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally

incapable of taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before

the stewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling

that if it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would

really have been Burnamy.

LXXV.

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship

rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping

of the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean

was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no

perceptible motion save from her machinery.

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those early

hours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the

sailors scouring the promenades. He made little acquaintance with his

fellow-passengers. One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker lady

whom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from the

churning screws; but he did not quite get the words out. On the contrary

he talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm near

Boulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-five

years out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in all

its purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board. Now and

then March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of the

usual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times

he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business;

and he philosophized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed

so often without philosophy. He made desperate attempts at times to

interest himself in the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the

betting on the ship's wonderful run was continual.

He thought that people talked less and less as they drew nearer home;

but on the last day out there was a sudden expansion, and some whom he

had not spoken with voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, soft air was

like midsummer the water rippled gently, without a swell, blue under the

clear sky, and the ship left a wide track that was silver in the sun.

There were more sail; the first and second class baggage was got up and

piled along the steerage deck.

Some people dressed a little more than usual for the last dinner which

was earlier than usual, so as to be out of the way against the arrival

which had been variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty. An

indescribable nervousness culminated with the appearance of the customs

officers on board, who spread their papers on cleared spaces of the

dining-tables, and summoned the passengers to declare that they had

nothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves at

the dock.

This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made her way up the Narrows,

and into the North River, where the flare of lights from the crazy

steeps and cliffs of architecture on the New York shore seemed a

persistence of the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics. March blushed for

the grotesque splendor of the spectacle, and was confounded to find some

Englishmen admiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not the

strong point of our race. His wife sat hand in hand with Miss Triscoe,

and from time to time made him count the pieces of small baggage in

the keeping of their steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a

sarcastic calm.

The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways were lifted to her side;

the passengers fumbled and stumbled down their incline, and at the

bottom the Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of their

son and daughter. They all began talking at once, and ignoring

and trying to remember the Triscoes to whom the young Marches were

presented. Bella did her best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered

to get an inspector for the general at the same time as for his father.

Then March, remorsefully remembered the Eltwins, and looked about for

them, so that his son might get them an inspector too. He found the

major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his

pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the

declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the

major's lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran's paper with the mystic

sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated

as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this

indignity at the hands of their government. When March's own inspector

came he was as civil and lenient as our hateful law allows; when he had

finished March tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to

a just shame by his refusal of it. The bed-room steward keeping guard

over the baggage helped put-it together after the search, and protested

that March had feed him so handsomely that he would stay there with it

as long as they wished. This partly restored March's self-respect, and

he could share in General Triscoe's indignation with the Treasury ruling

which obliged him to pay duty on his own purchases in excess of the

hundred-dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing, and they

jointly came far within the limit for two.

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way

to Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly

arranged for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he

was to follow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from

the scene of the customs' havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast

darkness dimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field

where the inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details

from the victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him

on the shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the

same old father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting

influences of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those

good and decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for

the money paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed

through were not foul but merely mean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found

its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would

have been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country

town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women

up and down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.

The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an evening

prolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that now

they must really all go to bed. The children had both to recognize

again and again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his

father about the condition of 'Every Other Week'; Bella had to explain

to her mother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to

meet them with her, but was coming a week later to take her home,

and then she would know the reason why they could not all, go back to

Chicago with him: it was just the place for her father to live, for

everybody to live. At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which

she had maintained her position the night before; the travellers entered

into a full expression of their joy at being home again; March asked

what had become of that stray parrot which they had left in the tree-top

the morning they started; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last

Silver Wedding Journey she ever wished to take, and tried to convince

them all that she had been on the verge of nervous collapse when she

reached the ship. They sat at table till she discovered that it was very

nearly eleven o'clock, and said it was disgraceful.

Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought

in to Tom. He glanced at it, and said to his father, “Oh, yes! This man

has been haunting the office for the last three days. He's got to leave

to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with him,

I said he'd probably find you here this morning. But if you don't want

to see him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose.”

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then

gave it to his wife. “Perhaps I'd as well see him?”

“See him!” she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her

soul was centred. By an effort of self-control which no words can convey

a just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with

a laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to

meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he

looked not merely haggard but shabby. He made an effort for dignity

as well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many

apologies for his persistency. But, he said, he was on his way West,

and he was anxious to know whether there was any chance of his 'Kasper

Hauler' paper being taken if he finished it up. March would have been a

far harder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the

suppliant before him. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and

add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words.

Then Burnamy's dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh,

and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the

steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His

straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts;

his thin overcoat affected March's imagination as something like the

diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the

approach of autumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen,

and he told him of Major Eltwin's wish to see him; and he promised to

go round with him to the major's hotel before the Eltwins left town that

afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from

breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was

making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the

dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street. At the first hint she gave

of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her

son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men's love

affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his

father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the

two women together. This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole

fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then

to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both

remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals,

with no sense of iteration for either of them, “I told her to come

in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will. But if she

doesn't, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either. At

any rate I'm going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we'll see

whether there's anything in that silly theory of your father's. I don't

believe there is,” she said, to be on the safe side.

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford

Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was

not coming across to their house. As the girl persisted in coming and

coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at

the window and nodded, the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter,

and drove her away to her own room, so that no society detail should

hinder the divine chance. She went to the door herself when Agatha rang,

and then she was going to open the way into the parlor where March was

still closeted with Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known they

were there. But a soberer second thought than this prevailed, and she

told the girl who it was that was within and explained the accident of

his presence. “I think,” she said nobly, “that you ought to have the

chance of going away if you don't wish to meet him.”

The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs. March had noted in

her from the first with regard to what she wanted to do, when Burnamy

was in question, answered, “But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March.”

While they stood looking at each other, March came out to ask his wife

if she would see Burnamy, and she permitted herself so much stratagem as

to substitute Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subduing his

proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake.

Half an hour later she thought it time to join the young people, urged

largely by the frantic interest of her daughter. But she returned from

the half-open door without entering. “I couldn't bring myself to break

in on the poor things. They are standing at the window together looking

over at St. George's.”

Bella silently clasped her hands. March gave cynical laugh, and said,

“Well we are in for it, my dear.” Then he added, “I hope they'll take us

with them on their Silver Wedding Journey.”

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Declare that they had nothing to declare

Despair which any perfection inspires

Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love

Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously

Held aloof in a sarcastic calm

Illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them

Married life: we expect too much of each other

Not do to be perfectly frank with one's own country

Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him

Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing

Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste

Race seemed so often without philosophy

Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain

She always came to his defence when he accused himself

PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE TRILOGY:

Affected absence of mind

Affectional habit

All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest is little

All luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest

Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else

Amusing world, if you do not refuse to be amused

Anticipative homesickness

Anticipative reprisal

Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of

Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much

Artists never do anything like other people

As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting

At heart every man is a smuggler

Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars

Ballast of her instinctive despondency

Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever

Beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved

Bewildering labyrinth of error

Biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest

Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does

Brown-stone fronts

But when we make that money here, no one loses it

Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience

Calm of those who have logic on their side

Civilly protested and consented

Clinging persistence of such natures

Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant

Collective silence which passes for sociality

Comfort of the critical attitude

Conscience weakens to the need that isn't

Considerable comfort in holding him accountable

Courage hadn't been put to the test

Courtship

Deadly summer day

Death is peace and pardon

Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach

Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance

Declare that they had nothing to declare

Despair which any perfection inspires

Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him

Dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty

Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love

Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched

Does any one deserve happiness

Does anything from without change us?

Dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad

Effort to get on common ground with an inferior

Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation

Evil which will not let a man forgive his victim

Explained perhaps too fully

Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable

Family buryin' grounds

Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting

Feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk

Feeling rather ashamed,--for he had laughed too

Feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination

Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another

Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously

Futility of travel

Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it

Glad; which considering, they ceased to be

Got their laugh out of too many things in life

Guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction

Had learned not to censure the irretrievable

Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance

Handsome pittance

Happiness is so unreasonable

Happiness built upon and hedged about with misery

He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices

He buys my poverty and not my will

Headache darkens the universe while it lasts

Heart that forgives but does not forget

Held aloof in a sarcastic calm

Helplessness begets a sense of irresponsibility

Helplessness accounts for many heroic facts in the world

Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death

Homage which those who have not pay to those who have

Honest selfishness

Hopeful recklessness

How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing

Humanity may at last prevail over nationality

Hurry up and git well--or something

Hypothetical difficulty

I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours

I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms

I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance

I'm not afraid--I'm awfully demoralized

If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen

Ignorant of her ignorance

Illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them

Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much

Indispensable

Indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography

Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate

It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing

It must be your despair that helps you to bear up

It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time

It's the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn't

Jesting mood in the face of all embarrassments

Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs

Less intrusive than if he had not been there

Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of

Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous

Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony

Life has taught him to truckle and trick

Long life of holidays which is happy marriage

Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence

Made money and do not yet know that money has made them

Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel

Man's willingness to abide in the present

Married life: we expect too much of each other

Married the whole mystifying world of womankind

Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid

Marry for love two or three times

Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign

Muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee

Nervous woes of comfortable people

Never-blooming shrub

Never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it

Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all

No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another

No longer the gross appetite for novelty

No right to burden our friends with our decisions

Not do to be perfectly frank with one's own country

Nothing so apt to end in mutual dislike,--except gratitude

Nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young mother

Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking

Oblivion of sleep

Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him

Only so much clothing as the law compelled

Only one of them was to be desperate at a time

Our age caricatures our youth

Parkman

Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing

Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius

Patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country

People that have convictions are difficult

Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it

Poverty as hopeless as any in the world

Prices fixed by his remorse

Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste

Race seemed so often without philosophy

Recipes for dishes and diseases

Reckless and culpable optimism

Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last

Rejoice in everything that I haven't done

Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage

Repeated the nothings they had said already

Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense

Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him

Seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed

Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him

Self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity

Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain

Servant of those he loved

She always came to his defence when he accused himself

She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that

She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression

Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience

Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom

So hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do

So old a world and groping still

Society: All its favors are really bargains

Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature

Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism

Superstition that having and shining is the chief good

Superstition of the romances that love is once for all

That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be

The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances

There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure

They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart

They can only do harm by an expression of sympathy

Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man

To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes

Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it

Tragical character of heat

Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues

Tried to be homesick for them, but failed

Turn to their children's opinion with deference

Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find

Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine

Used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge

Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness

Voice of the common imbecility and incoherence

Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold

Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit

We get too much into the hands of other people

We don't seem so much our own property

Weariness of buying

What we can be if we must

When you look it--live it

Wilful sufferers

Willingness to find poetry in things around them

Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do

Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child

Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart

Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests

Work he was so fond of and so weary of

Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase