all. If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chances with the
crowd."
Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offence at the refusal of his
offer, or chose to show none. He said, with the same uncouth abruptness
as before: "Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carlsbad?"
"Burnamy?"
"Mm."
"No."
"Know where he is?"
"I don't in the least."
Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried on, before he said,
"I got to thinking what he done afterwards. He wasn't bound to look out
for me; he might suppose I knew what I was about."
March turned his face and stared in Stoller's, which he was letting hang
forward as he stamped heavily on. Had the disaster proved less than he
had feared, and did he still want Burnamy's help in patching up the
broken pieces; or did he really wish to do Burnamy justice to his friend?
In any case March's duty was clear. "I think Burnamy was bound to look
out for you; Mr. Stoller, and I am glad to know that he saw it in the
same light."
"I know he did," said Stoker with a blaze as from a long-smouldering
fury, "and damn him, I'm not going to have it. I'm not going to, plead
the baby act with him, or with any man. You tell him so, when you get the
chance. You tell him I don't hold him accountable for anything I made him
do. That ain't business; I don't want him around me, any more; but if he
wants to go back to the paper he can have his place. You tell him I stand
by what I done; and it's all right between him and me. I hain't done
anything about it, the way I wanted him to help me to; I've let it lay,
and I'm a-going to. I guess it ain't going to do me any harm, after all;
our people hain't got very long memories; but if it is, let it. You tell
him it's all right."
"I don't know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don't know that I care to
be the bearer of your message," said March.
"Why not?"
"Why, for one thing, I don't agree with you that it's all right. Your
choosing to stand by the consequences of Burnamy's wrong doesn't undo it.
As I understand, you don't pardon it--"
Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Then he said, "I stand by what
I done. I'm not going to let him say I turned him down for doing what I
told him to, because I hadn't the sense to know what I was about."
"Ah, I don't think it's a thing he'll like to speak of in any case," said
March.
Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached, as abruptly as he had
joined him, and March hurried back to his wife, and told her what had
just passed between him and Stoller.
She broke out, "Well, I am surprised at you, my dear! You have always
accused me of suspecting people, and attributing bad motives; and here
you've refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. He
merely wanted to save his savage pride with you, and that's all he wants
to do with Burnamy. How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stoller
doesn't blame him? Why should you refuse to give his message to Burnamy?
I don't want you to ridicule me for my conscience any more, Basil; you're
twice as bad as I ever was. Don't you think that a person can ever
expiate an offence? I've often heard you say that if any one owned his
fault, he put it from him, and it was the same as if it hadn't been; and
hasn't Burnamy owned up over and over again? I'm astonished at you,
dearest."
March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself in the light of her
reasoning; but she went on with some sophistries that restored him to his
self-righteousness.
"I suppose you think he has interfered with Stoller's political ambition,
and injured him in that way. Well, what if he has? Would it be a good
thing to have a man like that succeed in politics? You're always saying
that the low character of our politicians is the ruin of the country; and
I'm sure," she added, with a prodigious leap over all the sequences,
"that Mr. Stoller is acting nobly; and it's your duty to help him relieve
Burnamy's mind." At the laugh he broke into she hastened to say, "Or if
you won't, I hope you'll not object to my doing so, for I shall, anyway!"
She rose as if she were going to begin at once, in spite of his laughing;
and in fact she had already a plan for coming to Stoller's assistance by
getting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspected of knowing
where he was. There had been no chance for them to speak of him either
that morning or the evening before, and after a great deal of controversy
with herself in her husband's presence she decided to wait till they came
naturally together the next morning for the walk to the Capuchin Church
on the hill beyond the river, which they had agreed to take. She could
not keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoe begging her to be sure to
come, and hinting that she had something very important to speak of.
She was not sure but she had been rather silly to do this, but when they
met the girl confessed that she had thought of giving up the walk, and
might not have come except for Mrs. March's note. She had come with Rose,
and had left him below with March; Mrs. Adding was coming later with
Kenby and General Triscoe.
Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news; and if she had
been in doubt before of the girl's feeling for Burnamy she was now in
none. She had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and then the
pain which was also a pleasure, of seeing her blanch with dismay.
"I don't know where he is, Mrs. March. I haven't heard a word from him
since that night in Carlsbad. I expected--I didn't know but you--"
Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the fact skillfully as something
to be regretted simply because it would be such a relief to Burnamy to
know how Mr. Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach him somehow;
you could always get letters to people in Europe, in the end; and, in
fact, it was altogether probable that he was that very instant in
Wurzburg; for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him to write up
the Wagner operas, it would certainly want him to write up the
manoeuvres. She established his presence in Wurzburg by such an
irrefragable chain of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was just
able to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open the door. It was not
Burnamy, as in compliance with every nerve it ought to have been, but her
husband, who tried to justify his presence by saying that they were all
waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked when they were coming.
She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outside with him long
enough to whisper, "Say she's got a headache, or anything you please; but
don't stop talking here with me, or I shall go wild." She then shut
herself in again, with the effect of holding him accountable for the
whole affair.
LVI.
General Triscoe could not keep his irritation, at hearing that his
daughter was not coming, out of the excuses he made to Mrs. Adding; he
said again and again that it must seem like a discourtesy to her. She
gayly disclaimed any such notion; she would not hear of putting off their
excursion to another day; it had been raining just long enough to give
them a reasonable hope of a few hours' drought, and they might not have
another dry spell for weeks. She slipped off her jacket after they
started, and gave it to Kenby, but she let General Triscoe hold her
umbrella over her, while he limped beside her. She seemed to March, as he
followed with Rose, to be playing the two men off against each other,
with an ease which he wished his wife could be there to see, and to judge
aright.
They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the earliest years of the
seventh century, between rows of saints whose statues surmount the piers.
Some are bishops as well as saints; one must have been at Rome in his
day, for he wore his long thick beard in the fashion of Michelangelo's
Moses. He stretched out toward the passers two fingers of blessing and
was unaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them and was giving him
the effect of offering it to the public admiration. Squads of soldiers
tramping by turned to look and smile, and the dull faces of citizens
lighted up at the quaint sight. Some children stopped and remained very
quiet, not to scare away the bird; and a cold-faced, spiritual-looking
priest paused among them as if doubting whether to rescue the
absent-minded bishop from a situation derogatory to his dignity; but he
passed on, and then the sparrow suddenly flew off.
Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with March, but they now pushed
on, and came up with the others at the end of the bridge, where they
found them in question whether they had not better take a carriage and
drive to the foot of the hill before they began their climb. March
thanked them, but said he was keeping up the terms of his cure, and was
getting in all the walking he could. Rose begged his mother not to
include him in the driving party; he protested that he was feeling so
well, and the walk was doing him good. His mother consented, if he would
promise not to get tired, and then she mounted into the two-spanner which
had driven instinctively up to their party when their parley began, and
General Triscoe took the place beside her, while Kenby, with smiling
patience, seated himself in front.
Rose kept on talking with March about Wurzburg and its history, which it
seemed he had been reading the night before when he could not sleep. He
explained, "We get little histories of the places wherever we go. That's
what Mr. Kenby does, you know."
"Oh, yes," said March.
"I don't suppose I shall get a chance to read much here," Rose continued,
"with General Triscoe in the room. He doesn't like the light."
"Well, well. He's rather old, you know. And you musn't read too much,
Rose. It isn't good for you."
"I know, but if I don't read, I think, and that keeps me awake worse. Of
course, I respect General Triscoe for being in the war, and getting
wounded," the boy suggested.
"A good many did it," March was tempted to say.
The boy did not notice his insinuation. "I suppose there were some things
they did in the army, and then they couldn't get over the habit. But
General Grant says in his 'Life' that he never used a profane expletive."
"Does General Triscoe?"
Rose answered reluctantly, "If anything wakes him in the night, or if he
can't make these German beds over to suit him--"
"I see." March turned his face to hide the smile which he would not have
let the boy detect. He thought best not to let Rose resume his
impressions of the general; and in talk of weightier matters they found
themselves at that point of the climb where the carriage was waiting for
them. From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden walls,
till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which ascend to
the crest of the hill where the church stands. Each terrace is planted
with sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports a bass-relief
commemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the stations of the
cross.
Monks and priests were coming and going, and dropped on the steps leading
from terrace to terrace were women and children on their knees in prayer.
It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other Catholic lands;
but here there was a touch of earnest in the Northern face of the
worshipers which the South had never imparted. Even in the beautiful
rococo interior of the church at the top of the hill there was a sense of
something deeper and truer than mere ecclesiasticism; and March came out
of it in a serious muse while the boy at his side did nothing to
interrupt. A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed silently out over
the prospect of river and city and vineyard, purpling together below the
top where he stood, and mixed with this regret was a vague resentment of
his wife's absence. She ought to have been there to share his pang and
his pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything together that without
her he felt unable to get out of either emotion all there was in it.
The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces after the rest of the
party who had left him behind with March. At the last terrace they
stopped and waited; and after a delay that began to be long to Mrs.
Adding, she wondered aloud what could have become of them.
Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and she consented in seeming
to refuse: "It isn't worth while. Rose has probably got Mr. March into
some deep discussion, and they've forgotten all about us. But if you will
go, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind Rose of my existence." She let him
lay her jacket on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat down
on one of the steps, which General Triscoe kept striking with the point
of her umbrella as he stood before her.
"I really shall have to take it from you if you do that any more," she
said, laughing up in his face. "I'm serious."
He stopped. "I wish I could believe you were serious, for a moment."
"You may, if you think it will do you any good. But I don't see why."
The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagerness which might
have been pathetic to any one who liked him. "Do you know this is almost
the first time I have spoken alone with you?"
"Really, I hadn't noticed," said Mrs. Adding.
General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way. "Well, that's
encouraging, at least, to a man who's had his doubts whether it wasn't
intended."
"Intended? By whom? What do you mean, General Triscoe? Why in the world
shouldn't you have spoken alone with me before?"
He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say, and while she smiled
pleasantly she had the look in her eyes of being brought to bay and being
prepared, if it must come to that, to have the worst over, then and
there. She was not half his age, but he was aware of her having no
respect for his years; compared with her average American past as he
understood it, his social place was much higher, but, she was not in the
least awed by it; in spite of his war record she was making him behave
like a coward. He was in a false position, and if he had any one but
himself to blame he had not her. He read her equal knowledge of these
facts in the clear eyes that made him flush and turn his own away.
Then he started with a quick "Hello!" and stood staring up at the steps
from the terrace above, where Rose Adding was staying himself weakly by a
clutch of Kenby on one side and March on the other.
His mother looked round and caught herself up from where she sat and ran
toward him. "Oh, Rose!"
"It's nothing, mother," he called to her, and as she dropped on her knees
before him he sank limply against her. "It was like what I had in
Carlsbad; that's all. Don't worry about me, please!"
"I'm not worrying, Rose," she said with courage of the same texture as
his own. "You've been walking too much. You must go back in the carriage
with us. Can't you have it come here?" she asked Kenby.
"There's no road, Mrs. Adding. But if Rose would let me carry him--"
"I can walk," the boy protested, trying to lift himself from her neck.
"No, no! you mustn't." She drew away and let him fall into the arms that
Kenby put round him. He raised the frail burden lightly to his shoulder,
and moved strongly away, followed by the eyes of the spectators who had
gathered about the little group, but who dispersed now, and went back to
their devotions.
March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom he told he had just
missed Rose and was looking about for him, when Kenby came with her
message for them. They made sure that he was nowhere about the church,
and then started together down the terraces. At the second or third
station below they found the boy clinging to the barrier that protected
the bass-relief from the zeal of the devotees. He looked white and sick,
though he insisted that he was well, and when he turned to come away with
them he reeled and would have fallen if Kenby had not caught him. Kenby
wanted to carry him, but Rose would not let him, and had made his way
down between them.
"Yea, he has such a spirit," she said, "and I've no doubt he's suffering
now more from Mr. Kenby's kindness than from his own sickness he had one
of these giddy turns in Carlsbad, though, and I shall certainly have a
doctor to see him."
"I think I should, Mrs. Adding," said March, not too gravely, for it
seemed to him that it was not quite his business to alarm her further, if
she was herself taking the affair with that seriousness. He questioned
whether she was taking it quite seriously enough, when she turned with a
laugh, and called to General Triscoe, who was limping down the steps of
the last terrace behind them:
"Oh, poor General Triscoe! I thought you had gone on ahead."
General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of being forgotten,
apparently. He assisted with gravity at the disposition of the party for
the return, when they all reached the carriage. Rose had the place beside
his mother, and Kenby wished March to take his with the general and let
him sit with the driver; but he insisted that he would rather walk home,
and he did walk till they had driven out of eight. Then he called a
passing one-spanner, and drove to his hotel in comfort and silence.
LVII.
Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper; then he reported that the
doctor had said Rose was on the verge of a nervous collapse. He had
overworked at school, but the immediate trouble was the high, thin air,
which the doctor said he must be got out of at once, into a quiet place
at the sea-shore somewhere. He had suggested Ostend; or some point on the
French coast; Kenby had thought of Schevleningen, and the doctor had said
that would do admirably.
"I understood from Mrs. Adding," he concluded, "that you were going.
there for your after-cure, Mr. March, and I didn't know but you might be
going soon."
At the mention of Schevleningen the Marches had looked at each other with
a guilty alarm, which they both tried to give the cast of affectionate
sympathy but she dismissed her fear that he might be going to let his
compassion prevail with him to his hurt when he said: "Why, we ought to
have been there before this, but I've been taking my life in my hands in
trying to see a little of Germany, and I'm afraid now that Mrs. March has
her mind too firmly fixed on Berlin to let me think of going to
Schevleningen till we've been there."
"It's too bad!" said Mrs. March, with real regret. "I wish we were
going." But she had not the least notion of gratifying her wish; and they
were all silent till Kenby broke out:
"Look here! You know how I feel about Mrs Adding! I've been pretty frank
with Mr. March myself, and I've had my suspicions that she's been frank
with you, Mrs. March. There isn't any doubt about my wanting to marry
her, and up to this time there hasn't been any doubt about her not
wanting to marry me. But it isn't a question of her or of me, now. It's a
question of Rose. I love the boy," and Kenby's voice shook, and he
faltered a moment. "Pshaw! You understand."
"Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby," said Mrs. March. "I perfectly understand you."
"Well, I don't think Mrs. Adding is fit to make the journey with him
alone, or to place herself in the best way after she gets to
Schevleningen. She's been badly shaken up; she broke down before the
doctor; she said she didn't know what to do; I suppose she's
frightened--"
Kenby stopped again, and March asked, "When is she going?"
"To-morrow," said Kenby, and he added, "And now the question is, why
shouldn't I go with her?"
Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her husband, but he said
nothing, and Kenby seemed not to have supposed that he would say
anything.
"I know it would be very American, and all that, but I happen to be an
American, and it wouldn't be out of character for me. I suppose," he
appealed to Mrs. March, "that it's something I might offer to do if it
were from New York to Florida--and I happened to be going there? And I
did happen to be going to Holland."
"Why, of course, Mr. Kenby," she responded, with such solemnity that
March gave way in an outrageous laugh.
Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but with an inner note of
protest.
"Well," Kenby continued, still addressing her, "what I want you to do is
to stand by me when I propose it."
Mrs. March gathered strength to say, "No, Mr. Kenby, it's your own
affair, and you must take the responsibility."
"Do you disapprove?"
"It isn't the same as it would be at home. You see that yourself."
"Well," said Kenby, rising, "I have to arrange about their getting away
to-morrow. It won't be easy in this hurly-burly that's coming off."
"Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding that I'll come round and see
her to-morrow before she starts."
"Oh! I'm afraid you can't, Mrs. March. They're to start at six in the
morning."
"They are! Then we must go and see them tonight. We'll be there almost as
soon as you are."
March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and she began on the stairs:
"Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laughing so gave us
completely away. And what was there to keep grinning about, all through?"
"Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love. It's always
the most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itself
off in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affection
for Rose, was more than I could stand. I don't apologize for laughing; I
wanted to yell."
His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to save him; and she said
from the point where he had side-tracked her mind: "I don't call it
disingenuous. He was brutally frank. He's made it impossible to treat the
affair with dignity. I want you to leave the whole thing to me, from this
out. Now, will you?"
On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged in her own mind for Mrs.
Adding to get a maid, and for the doctor to send an assistant with her on
the journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme that she had not
the courage to right herself when Mrs. Adding met her with the appeal:
"Oh, Mrs. March, I'm so glad you approve of Mr. Kenby's plan. It does
seem the only thing to do. I can't trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr.
Kenby's intending to go to Schevleningen a few days later anyway. Though
it's too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres."
"I'm sure he won't mind that," Mrs. March's voice said mechanically,
while her thought was busy with the question whether this scandalous
duplicity was altogether Kenby's, and whether Mrs. Adding was as
guiltless of any share in it as she looked. She looked pitifully
distracted; she might not have understood his report; or Kenby might
really have mistaken Mrs. March's sympathy for favor.
"No, he only lives to do good," Mrs. Adding returned. "He's with Rose;
won't you come in and see them?"
Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would not
let him get up. He was full of the trip to Holland, and had already
pushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very general
knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up after
they were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion that he
was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the points
where he had found Kenby wanting.
"Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose," the editor protested,
and he amplified his ignorance for the boy's good to an extent which Rose
saw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other things which his
mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know if March did not
think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a
subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it he
would print it in 'Every Other Week'.
The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. "No, I couldn't do it. But I
wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?" He
wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst
of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.
His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by
to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March
put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her
eyes were dim.
"You see how frail he is?" said Mrs. Adding. "I shall not let him out of
my sight, after this, till he's well again."
She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was not
lost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room a
moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make some
excuse to her for himself; but he said: "I don't know how we're to manage
about the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs.
Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there
isn't a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you think," he
appealed directly to Mrs. March, "that it would do to offer her my room
at the Swan?"
"Why, yes," she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity in
which he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished,
than for what he was now proposing. "Or she could come in with me, and
Mr. March could take it."
"Whichever you think," said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to
ask:
"And what will you do?"
He laughed. "Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shall
manage somehow."
"You might offer to go in with the general," March suggested, and the men
apparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her
feminine worry about ways and means.
"Where is Miss Triscoe?" she asked. "We haven't seen them."
"Didn't Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to supper at a restaurant; the
general doesn't like the cooking here. They ought to have been back
before this."
He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, "I suppose you would
like us to wait."
"It would be very kind of you."
"Oh, it's quite essential," she returned with an airy freshness which
Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.
They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a
cloud on the general's face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs.
March to make.
"I thought that child ought to be in his mother's charge," he said. With
his own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March's plan;
and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother. "By-the-way," the
general turned to March, "I found Stoller at the restaurant where we
supped. He offered me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres. How are
you going?"
"I think I shall go by train. I don't fancy the long drive."
"Well, I don't know that it's worse than the long walk after you leave
the train," said the general from the offence which any difference of
taste was apt to give him. "Are you going by train, too?" he asked Kenby
with indifference.
"I'm not going at all," said Kenby. "I'm leaving Wurzburg in the
morning."
"Oh, indeed," said the general.
Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going with
Rose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and open
recognition of the fact among them. "Yes," she said, "isn't it fortunate
that Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too! I should have been so
unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that long
journey with poor little Rose alone."
"Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly," said the general colorlessly.
Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby was
too simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value of
what she had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as he walked
back with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs.
Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him. Somewhere there had been an
error, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby was
so apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be cross
with him. She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing in the
gayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her. She was
promising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor and
Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her that if
she laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine and
imprisonment. She pretended that she would like to see him led off
between two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he asked
her how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such a
thing happened.
LVIII.
After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; she preferred to sleep.
The imperial party was to arrive at half past seven, but at six the crowd
was already dense before the station, and all along the street leading to
the Residenz. It was a brilliant day, with the promise of sunshine,
through which a chilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres. The colors of all
the German states flapped in this breeze from the poles wreathed with
evergreen which encircled the square; the workmen putting the last
touches on the bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, and they had,
scarcely finished their labors when two troops of dragoons rode into the
place and formed before the station, and waited as motionlessly as their
horses would allow.
These animals were not so conscious as lions at the approach of princes;
they tossed and stamped impatiently in the long interval before the
Regent and his daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests. All the
human beings, both those who were in charge and those who were under
charge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their parts well, as if there
were some heavy penalty for failure in the least point. The policemen
keeping the people, in line behind the ropes which restrained them
trembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the troopers twitched. An
involuntary sigh went up from the crowd as the Regent's carriage
appeared, heralded by outriders, and followed by other plain carriages of
Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver. Then the whistle of the
Kaiser's train sounded; a trumpeter advanced and began to blow his
trumpet as they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointed moment
the Emperor and Empress came out of the station through the brilliant
human alley leading from it, mounted their carriages, with the stage
trumpeter always blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the square and
flashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight. The same hollow
groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the spectators as had
welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his fellow-townsmen, with
the same effect of being the conventional cries of a stage mob behind the
scenes.
The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy
face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored
if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply
fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in
acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March that
sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a
scantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly working
toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference
between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic and
dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European,
it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate conviction of
equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity transcending
all social and civic pretences, was what gave their theatrical effect to
the shows of deference from low to high, and of condescension from high
to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince did
not play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harder
part to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from being
found out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across the
stage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid
to be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor
supernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle
like themselves.
In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an
hour and a half for half a minute's glimpse of the imperial party, March
now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to
still greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come to
Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in
itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train,
and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a
multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? He
was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing
that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his
recreance to his wife. This did alloy the pleasure with which he began,
after an excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about the
streets, though he had them almost to himself, so many citizens had
followed the soldiers to the manoeuvres.
It was not till the soldiers began returning from the manoeuvres,
dusty-footed, and in white canvas overalls drawn over their trousers to
save them, that he went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the Swan.
He had given them time enough to imagine him at the review, and to wonder
whether he had seen General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they met
him with such confident inquiries that he would not undeceive them at
once. He let them divine from his inventive answers that he had not gone
to the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, and
the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had not
gone, either. The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowed
the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled his
lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company he
had been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He referred to the
military chiefly in relation to the Miss Stollers' ineffectual
flirtations, which he declared had been outrageous. Their father had
apparently no control over them whatever, or else was too ignorant to
know that they were misbehaving. They were without respect or reverence
for any one; they had talked to General Triscoe as if he were a boy of
their own age, or a dotard whom nobody need mind; they had not only kept
up their foolish babble before him, they had laughed and giggled, they
had broken into snatches of American song, they had all but whistled and
danced. They made loud comments in Illinois English--on the cuteness of
the officers whom they admired, and they had at one time actually got out
their handkerchiefs. He supposed they meant to wave them at the officers,
but at the look he gave them they merely put their hats together and
snickered in derision of him. They were American girls of the worst type;
they conformed to no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal.
They ought to be taken home.
Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreed with him that they
were altogether unformed, and were the effect of their own ignorant
caprices. Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by taking them
away.
"It would hide them, at any rate," he answered. "They would sink back
into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed. We behave like
a parcel of peasants with our women. We think that if no harm is meant or
thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that are
scandalously improper simply because they are innocent. That may be all
very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing had better
stay there, where our peasant manners won't make them conspicuous."
As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March
recurred to the general's closing words. "That was a slap at Mrs. Adding
for letting Kenby go off with her."
She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time
March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and the
Addings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no chance to bring up
these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by
making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any
point where she thought she had scanted it. After all, it consisted
mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered
questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.
March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy's
clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that
he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the
acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.
"Probably," Mrs. March said, "as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding,
he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy."
"Then you think he was really serious about her?"
"Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completely
taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how she
received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight."
"The fight?"
"Yes--that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offering
himself."
"Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?"
"How do I? Didn't you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tell
him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?"
"I had no chance. I don't know that I should have done it, anyway. It
wasn't my affair."
"Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for that
poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes."
"Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose."
"Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it. She had a right to know it."
"Did she think Stoller's willingness to overlook Burnamy's performance
had anything to do with its moral quality?"
Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, "I told her you
thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it
away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a
person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they had
expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned. And hasn't poor Burnamy
done both?"
As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but as
a husband he was not going to come down at once. "I thought probably you
had told her that. You had it pat from having just been over it with me.
When has she heard from him?"
"Why, that's the strangest thing about it. She hasn't heard at all. She
doesn't know where he is. She thought we must know. She was terribly
broken up."
"How did she show it?"
"She didn't show it. Either you want to tease, or you've forgotten how
such things are with young people--or at least girls."
"Yes, it's all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides,
the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very
obliterating to my early impressions of love-making."
"It certainly hasn't been ideal," said Mrs. March with a sigh.
"Why hasn't it been ideal?" he asked. "Kenby is tremendously in love with
her; and I believe she's had a fancy for him from the beginning. If it
hadn't been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now he's
essential to them both in their helplessness. As for Papa Triscoe and his
Europeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they're the
residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding have
nothing to do with their unreality. His being in love with her is no
reason why he shouldn't be helpful to her when she needs him, and every
reason why he should. I call it a poem, such as very few people have the
luck to live out together."
Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she cried
out, "Well, my dear, I do believe you are right! It is ideal, as you say;
it's a perfect poem. And I shall always say--"
She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, and
perceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasm
for all sorts of love-affairs. But she averred that she did not care;
what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it.
They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had left
Carlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escape
from the pressure of others' interests. The tide of travel was towards
Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later. They
were going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way that they
simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary capital they
were alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger, much less a
friend to molest them. The flying landscape without was of their own
early autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purple
it, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women, and
children were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows
everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change. It was always the
German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor;
often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops in
ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within
their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent
life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her as
she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage.
As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplands they were aware of a
finer, cooler air through their open window. The torrents foamed white
out of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along the valleys,
where the hamlets roused themselves in momentary curiosity as the train
roared into them from the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshine had the
glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and the travellers had a
pleasant bewilderment in which their memories of Switzerland and the
White Mountains mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack
sojourns. They chose this place and that in the lovely region where they
lamented that they had not come at once for the after-cure, and they
appointed enough returns to it in future years to consume all the summers
they had left to live.
LIX.
It was falling night when they reached Weimar, where they found at the
station a provision of omnibuses far beyond the hotel accommodations.
They drove first to the Crown-Prince, which was in a promising state of
reparation, but which for the present could only welcome them to an
apartment where a canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plastered
wall. The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably out to try and
place them at the Elephant. But the Elephant was full, and the Russian
Court was full too. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethought
himself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but very nice, where
they might get rooms, and after the delay of an hour, they got a carriage
and drove away from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord continued to the
last as benevolent as if they had been a profit instead of a loss to him.
The streets of the town at nine o'clock were empty and quiet, and they
instantly felt the academic quality of the place. Through the pale night
they could see that the architecture was of the classic sentiment which
they were destined to feel more and more; at one point they caught a
fleeting glimpse of two figures with clasped hands and half embraced,
which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller; and when they
mounted to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they passed
under a fresco representing Goethe and four other world-famous poets,
Shakspere, Milton, Tasso, and Schiller. The poets all looked like
Germans, as was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them; he
marshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller brought up the rear
and kept them from going astray in an Elysium where they did not speak
the language. For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite American
freshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, and
provided with steam-radiators. In the sense of its homelikeness the
Marches boasted that they were never going away from it.
In the morning they discovered that their windows looked out on the
grand-ducal museum, with a gardened space before and below its
classicistic bulk, where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers were
full of sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares, March strolled
up through the town; but Weimar was as much awake at that hour as at any
of the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets, where he
encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual mood.
He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have shunned:
a 'denkmal' of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as most German
monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monuments
are; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from this he was sensible
that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and he
wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so
controlled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, and
Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Wurzburg, to
reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as characteristic of all
Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over France.
The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night before
was characteristic too, but less offensively so. German statues at the
best are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them,
have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands,
and of being only partially rapt from the spectators. But they were more
unconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and he
quelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller's
shoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typical
equipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But upon
reflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personally
responsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team. He felt that he
might more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic
profiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace. This could be a
sympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet brought
back with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the people,
especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antique had: begun
in their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in any case they
were charming children, and as a test of their culture, he had a mind to
ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue of Herder was,
which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble, and so be done
with as many statues as he could. She answered with a pretty regret in
her tender voice, "That I truly cannot," and he was more satisfied than
if she could, for he thought it better to be a child and honest, than to
know where any German statue was.
He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the Herder
Platz after it. He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; where
Herder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the nobility
and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was shielded
from the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart from other
sinners in a glazed gallery. Herder is buried in the church, and when you
ask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-door in the pavement, and
you think you are going down into the crypt, but you are only to see
Herder's monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save it from
passing feet. Here also is the greatest picture of that great soul Luke
Kranach, who had sincerity enough in his paining to atone for all the
swelling German sculptures in the world. It is a crucifixion, and the
cross is of a white birch log, such as might have been cut out of the
Weimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides, with the bark showing at the
edges. Kranach has put himself among the spectators, and a stream of
blood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon the painter's
head. He is in the company of John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther
stands with his Bible open, and his finger on the line, "The blood of
Jesus cleanseth us."
Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things without his wife,
and partly because he was now very hungry, March turned from them and got
back to his hotel, where she was looking out for him from their open
window. She had the air of being long domesticated there, as she laughed
down at seeing him come; and the continued brilliancy of the weather
added to the illusion of home.
It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America; the sun in that
gardened hollow before the museum was already hot enough to make him glad
of the shelter of the hotel. The summer seemed to have come back to
oblige them, and when they learned that they were to see Weimar in a
festive mood because this was Sedan Day, their curiosity, if not their
sympathy, accepted the chance gratefully. But they were almost moved to
wish that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that all the
public carriages were engaged, and they must have one from a stable if
they wished to drive after breakfast. Still it was offered them for such
a modest number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly and
conversable, that they assented to the course of history, and were more
and more reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducal park
beside the waters of the classic Ilm.
The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and in
places clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color. They
flow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows,
where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport
joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is
in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the
earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure
if not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noble
finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not
for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from
it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set
apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old
World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick
ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude
of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the
leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainly
created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.
March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty had
graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the
companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying first
to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it second to
the cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever the prince
in Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the city;
the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest hospitality. The
travellers remembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducal park,
that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young,
when he too was beautiful and young, and took her home to be his love, to
the just and lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who was even less
reconciled when, after eighteen years of due reflection, the love of
Goethe and Christiane became their marriage. They, wondered just where it
was he saw the young girl coming to meet him as the Grand-Duke's minister
with an office-seeking petition from her brother, Goethe's brother
author, long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of "Rinaldo
Rinaldini."
They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for that
rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as their
sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau von
Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottage to suppose
that there his love-life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resented
the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all, she
removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost
indignantly.
In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers
of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going to
marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is
almost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances
the Grand-Duke's godfatherhood, or Goethe's open constancy to Christiane,
or the tardy consecration of their union after the French sack of,
Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him from the rudeness of the
marauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were no degrees in
such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as people have
tried to think, in their deference to Goethe's greatness. But certainly
the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of world-wide
renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for he could not
have been proof against the censorious public opinion of Weimar, or the
yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.
On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead
embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. The
trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it, and
about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the sweet
lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered a
parting nosegay for her visitors. The few small livingrooms were above
the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion;
in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with
him on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the front
stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which he
might just have risen.
All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the proud
little palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and memorials of
him. His library, his study, his study table, with everything on it just
as he left it when
"Cadde la stanca mana"
are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which he
gasped for "more light" at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms are
full of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which he
did so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waning
leaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly,
faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more and
more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings,
gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness, the
universal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but not in his
contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less keenly personal, less
intimate than the simple garden-house, or else, with the great troop of
people going through it, and the custodians lecturing in various voices
and languages to the attendant groups, the Marches had it less to
themselves, and so imagined him less in it.
LX.
All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common to
them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors in
them one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palaces
themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of the
average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to
have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are
ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little
delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.
As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at
Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was
Goethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least
in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother
had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of
Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringing
Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story of that
great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as a
palace can.
There are certain Poets' Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe,
Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke
used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it
where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and
sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes
they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian
things. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very
nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever
was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and
then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country;
they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of
the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At best
it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority, the
make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful and
ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue each
other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show of
equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a free
republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he was
one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the
impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no sign,
and the poet's friendship with the prince has passed smoothly into
history as one of the things that might really be. They worked and played
together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, each on his
own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not being there which
probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity.
A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery
beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table
where they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by the
consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was
charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted
before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the
custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the
German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were
children. The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered
wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which
are still mouldering there.
This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking
Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where
the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe,
although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. It
seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole
connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew
whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but they
enabled her to verify with the custodian's help certain royal
intermarriages which she had been in doubt about before.
Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a
portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over,
scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the
open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays.
The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines
and clipped trees which formed the coulisses. There was a grassy space
for the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicircular
gradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honored
spectators sat. Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts of
Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and if
ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, it
must have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the drama
is native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air of
modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact. It would be difficult to
be Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining, but
March held that with Goethe's help it might have been done at Weimar, and
his wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theater
that the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put together a sheaf of
the flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs. March for a
souvenir.
They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from another
eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below. In
a moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spirits
sank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had not
asked for coffee. Most of the people about them were taking beer,
including the pretty girls of a young ladies' school, who were there with
their books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers,
apparently for the afternoon.
Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their books
or their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she followed
the glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a table
somewhat obliquely to the left. These were apparently a mother and
daughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back to
Mrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them. They were both
smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself from
the waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if to make
sure that every one saw her smiling.
Mrs. March felt her husband's gaze following her own, and she had just
time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of
astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, "Good gracious!
It's the pivotal girl!"
At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man,
who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out of
the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs.
March could almost have touched him.
She had just strength to say, "Well, my dear! That was the cut direct."
She said this in order to have her husband reassure her. "Nonsense! He
never saw us. Why didn't you speak to him?"
"Speak to him? I never shall speak to him again. No! This is the last of
Mr. Burnamy for me. I shouldn't have minded his not recognizing us, for,
as you say, I don't believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a
girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that's all I wish
to know of him. Don't you try to look him up, Basil! I'm glad-yes, I'm
glad he doesn't know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves
to suffer, and I hope he'll keep on suffering: You were quite right, my
dear--and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don't call
it more than instinct)--not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don't
want you ever should."
She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that
she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him
impatiently to their carriage.
At last he got a chance to say, "I don't think I can quite promise that;
my mind's been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall tell
him."
"What! After you've seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then,
you won't, my dear; that's all! He's behaving very basely to Agatha."
"What's his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my
duty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to his
behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as you
know, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused him
outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible
conditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don't
blame him."
"Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!" cried Mrs. March.
"Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy,
or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning
and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say
it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with
the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with
one pretty girl from another. It's what men have been doing from the
beginning of time."
"Oh, I dare say!"
"Men," he went on, "are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.
They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any
girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made
them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely
amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I
think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had
him first; and I'm all for her."
LXI.
Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the
train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and
strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself.
While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by
which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for
mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and
ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain
which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her
folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless of
her rights came with it. He had done his best to make her think him in
love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be such
an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise to write to him
from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished still
less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that she had not
promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to such
fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with
Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentment
with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl
unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.
It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the
holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with
all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary
excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a
paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the
night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing over
the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the multitude
of Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at the
ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of the
floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charming
even to Burnamy's lack-lustre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafe
with a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he supped
there, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged and
brayed round him unheeded.
Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, "May I
sit at your table?" and he saw an ironical face looking down on him.
"There doesn't seem any other place."
"Why, Mr. March!" Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him,
but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this
faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last,
just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.
March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced
round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament
of lanterns. "This is pretty," he said, "mighty pretty. I shall make Mrs.
March sorry for not coming, when I go back."
"Is Mrs. March--she is--with you--in Weimar?" Burnamy asked stupidly.
March forbore to take advantage of him. "Oh, yes. We saw you out at
Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant
not to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little
flights."
"I never dreamed of your being there--I never saw--" Burnamy began.
"Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was looking
very pretty. Have you been here some time?"
"Not long. A week or so. I've been at the parade at Wurzburg."
"At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is! We
were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was a
great crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?" A waiter
had come up, and was standing at March's elbow. "I suppose I mustn't sit
here without ordering something?"
"White wine and selters," said Burnamy vaguely.
"The very thing! Why didn't I think of it? It's a divine drink: it
satisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home,
in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen 'Every Other Week'
lately?"
"No," said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.
"We've just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in it
that I rather like." March laughed to see the young fellow's face light
up with joyful consciousness. "Come round to my hotel, after you're tired
here, and I'll let you see it. There's no hurry. Did you notice the
little children with their lanterns, as you came along? It's the gentlest
effect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French themselves couldn't
have minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day of
their disaster. You ought to get something out of that, and I've got a
subject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He and his mother were at
Wurzburg; I'm sorry to say the poor little chap didn't seem very well.
They've gone to Holland for the sea air." March had been talking for
quantity in compassion of the embarrassment in which Burnamy seemed
bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the young
fellow merely because he liked him. So far as he could make out, Burnamy
had been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they
had met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logically
defended to Mrs. March that he resumed. "We found another friend of yours
in Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller."
"Mr. Stoller?" Burnamy faintly echoed.
"Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres;
and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the parade with his
family but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death of General
Triscoe."
Again Burnamy echoed him. "General Triscoe?"
"Ah, yes: I didn't tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had come on
with Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby--you remember Kenby, On the
Norumbia?--Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party;
and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him and
his girls."
Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He did
not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having
told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on
recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals,
that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. "I have a message for
you from Mr. Stoller."
"For me?" Burnamy gasped.
"I've been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn't expected to see
you. But it's simply this: he wants you to know--and he seemed to want me
to know--that he doesn't hold you accountable in the way he did. He's
thought it all over, and he's decided that he had no right to expect you
to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of
knowledge. As he said, he doesn't choose to plead the baby act. He says
that you're all right, and your place on the paper is open to you."
Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for
instant response. "I think he's wrong," he said, so harshly that the
people at the next table looked round. "His feeling as he does has
nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn't let me out."
March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, "I think
you're quite right, as to that. But there's such a thing as forgiveness,
you know. It doesn't change the nature of what you've done; but as far as
the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it."
"Yes, I understand that. But I can't accept his forgiveness if I hate
him."
"But perhaps you won't always hate him. Some day you may have a chance to
do him a good turn. It's rather banale; but there doesn't seem any other
way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to get
that poem?"
When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put
it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some
coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had
stood talking.
"No, thank you," said the elder, "I don't propose sitting up all night,
and you'll excuse me if I go to bed now. It's a little informal to leave
a guest--"
"You're not leaving a guest! I'm at home here. I'm staying in this hotel
too."
March said, "Oh!" and then he added abruptly, "Good-night," and went up
stairs under the fresco of the five poets.
"Whom were you talking with below?" asked Mrs. March through the door
opening into his room from hers.
"Burnamy," he answered from within. "He's staying in this house. He let
me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It's one of
those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in
great things."
"Oh! Then you've been telling him," she said, with a mental bound high
above and far beyond the point.
"Everything."
"About Stoller, too?"
"About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and
General Triscoe--and Agatha."
"Very well. That's what I call shabby. Don't ever talk to me again about
the inconsistencies of women. But now there's something perfectly
fearful."
"What is it?"
"A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find
rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn't well, and
they're coming. And I've telegraphed them to come here. Now what do you
say?"
LXII.
They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resign
herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider it
providential. This touched the lingering superstition in which she had
been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very
tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government of
the universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered that
they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that they
could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferior
degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in the
evening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to act
when she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly account for the
renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generally
worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.
It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered
smile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence. While they
talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with Miss
Triscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait over for
her and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, as
they had made all their plans. It was not easy, even in drama where one
has everything one's own way, to prove that she could not without impiety
so far interfere with the course of Providence as to prevent Miss
Triscoe's coming with her father to the same hotel where Burnamy was
staying. She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known he
was staying there when she telegraphed them where to come, and that in
the absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obliged
to suppose that his presence would be embarrassing.
March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the town
and interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and as
soon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogether
from the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy.
They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with the
Triscoes in Wurzburg, and she said: "Did Mr. March tell you they were
coming here? Or, no! We hadn't heard then. Yes, they are coming
to-morrow. They may be going to stay some time. She talked of Weimar when
we first spoke of Germany on the ship." Burnamy said nothing, and she
suddenly added, with a sharp glance, "They wanted us to get them rooms,
and we advised their coming to this house." He started very
satisfactorily, and "Do you think they would be comfortable, here?" she
pursued.
"Oh, yes, very. They can have my room; it's southeast; I shall be going
into other quarters." She did not say anything; and "Mrs. March," he
began again, "what is the use of my beating about the bush? You must know
what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night--"
"No one ever told--"
"Well, you must have made a pretty good guess. But it was a failure. I
ought to have failed, and I did. She said that unless her father liked
it--And apparently he hasn't liked it." Burnamy smiled ruefully.
"How do you know? She didn't know where you were!"
"She could have got word to me if she had had good news for me. They've
forwarded other letters from Pupp's. But it's all right; I had no
business to go back to Carlsbad. Of course you didn't know I was in this
house when you told them to come; and I must clear out. I had better
clear out of Weimar, too."
"No, I don't think so; I have no right to pry into your affairs, but--"
"Oh, they're wide enough open!"
"And you may have changed your mind. I thought you might, when I saw you
yesterday at Belvedere--"
"I was only trying to make bad worse."
"Then I think the situation has changed entirely through what Mr. Stoller
said to Mr. March."
"I can't see how it has. I committed an act of shabby treachery, and I'm
as much to blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it."
"Did Mr. March say that to you?"
"No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn't answer it, and you can't.
You're very good, and very kind, but you can't answer it."
"I can answer it very well," she boasted, but she could find nothing
better to say than, "It's your duty to her to see her and let her know."
"Doesn't she know already?"
"She has a right to know it from you. I think you are morbid, Mr.
Burnamy. You know very well I didn't like your doing that to Mr. Stoller.
I didn't say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it enough
yourself. But I did like your owning up to it," and here Mrs. March
thought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again. "My husband
always says that if a person owns up to an error, fully and faithfully,
as you've always done, they make it the same in its consequences to them
as if it had never been done."
"Does Mr. March say that?" asked Burnamy with a relenting smile.
"Indeed he does!"
Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:
"And what about the consequences to the other fellow?"
"A woman," said Mrs. March, "has no concern with them. And besides, I
think you've done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the
consequences."
"I haven't done anything."
"No matter. You would if you could. I wonder," she broke off, to prevent
his persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way,
"what can be keeping Mr. March?"
Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure of
sauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, and
looking at the pretty children going to school, with books under their
arms. It was the day for the schools to open after the long summer
vacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faces
which, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at least
touch his heart:
When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not the
Schiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one flight
up, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet. The
whole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room fronting
the street stands Schiller's writing-table, with his chair before it;
with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another corner, the
narrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the pillow frame a
picture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like his dead face
lying there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather touching, and the
place with its meagre appointments, as compared with the rich Goethe
house, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in which Schiller
is always falling into the second place. Whether it will be finally so
with him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and upon other
points eternity will not be interrogated. "The great, Goethe and the good
Schiller," they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was something good
in Goethe and something great, in Schiller.
He was so full of the pathos of their inequality before the world that he
did not heed the warning on the door of the pastry-shop near the Schiller
house, and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh paint on it.
He was then in such a state, that he could not bring his mind to bear
upon the question of which cakes his wife would probably prefer, and he
stood helplessly holding up his hand till the good woman behind the
counter discovered his plight, and uttered a loud cry of compassion. She
ran and got a wet napkin, which she rubbed with soap, and then she
instructed him by word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, and she did
not leave him till his rescue was complete. He let her choose a variety
of the cakes for him, and came away with a gay paper bag full of them,
and with the feeling that he had been in more intimate relations with the
life of Weimar than travellers are often privileged to be. He argued from
the instant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry woman a high grade of
culture in all classes; and he conceived the notion of pretending to Mrs.
March that he had got these cakes from, a descendant of Schiller.
His deceit availed with her for the brief moment in which she always,
after so many years' experience of his duplicity, believed anything he
told her. They dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Burnamy
came down to the station with them and was very comfortable to March in
helping him to get their tickets and their baggage registered. The train
which was to take them to Halle, where they were to change for Berlin,
was rather late, and they had but ten minutes after it came in before it
would start again. Mrs. March was watching impatiently at the window of
the waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear the platform and
allow the doors to be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned and ran
into the passage by which the new arrivals were pouring out toward the
superabundant omnibuses. March and Burnamy, who had been talking apart,
mechanically rushed after her and found her kissing Miss Triscoe and
shaking hands with the general amidst a tempest of questions and answers,
from which it appeared that the Triscoes had got tired of staying in
Wurzburg, and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner than they had
intended.
The general was rather much bundled up for a day which was mild for a
German summer day, and he coughed out an explanation that he had taken an
abominable cold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shaken it off yet.
He had a notion that change of air would be better for him; it could not
be worse.
He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather than inimical. While the
ladies were still talking eagerly together in proffer and acceptance of
Mrs. March's lamentations that she should be going away just as Miss
Triscoe was coming, he asked if the omnibus for their hotel was there. He
by no means resented Burnamy's assurance that it was, and he did not
refuse to let him order their baggage, little and large, loaded upon it.
By the time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had so far
detached themselves from each other that they could separate after one
more formal expression of regret and forgiveness. With a lament into
which she poured a world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenched
herself from the place, and suffered herself, to be pushed toward her
train. But with the last long look which she cast over her shoulder,
before she vanished into the waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe and
Burnamy transacting the elaborate politenesses of amiable strangers with
regard to the very small bag which the girl had in her hand. He succeeded
in relieving her of it; and then he led the way out of the station on the
left of the general, while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear.
LXIII.
From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. March tried for a
glimpse of the omnibus in which her proteges were now rolling away
together. As they were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which was
itself out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her seat
she treated the recent incident with a complexity and simultaneity of
which no report can give an idea. At the end one fatal conviction
remained: that in everything she had said she had failed to explain to
Miss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimar and how he happened to
be there with them in the station. She required March to say how she had
overlooked the very things which she ought to have mentioned first, and
which she had on the point of her tongue the whole time. She went over
the entire ground again to see if she could discover the reason why she
had made such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that she was led to
it by his rushing after her with Burnamy before she had had a chance to
say a word about him; of course she could not say anything in his
presence. This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation in the
fact that she had left them together without the least intention or
connivance, and now, no matter what happened, she could not accuse
herself, and he could not accuse her of match-making.
He said that his own sense of guilt was so great that he should not dream
of accusing her of anything except of regret that now she could never
claim the credit of bringing the lovers together under circumstances so
favorable. As soon as they were engaged they could join in renouncing her
with a good conscience, and they would probably make this the basis of
their efforts to propitiate the general.
She said she did not care, and with the mere removal of the lovers in
space, her interest in them began to abate. They began to be of a minor
importance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle, and in the
excitement of settling into the express from Frankfort there were moments
when they were altogether forgotten. The car was of almost American
length, and it ran with almost American smoothness; when the conductor
came and collected an extra fare for their seats, the Marches felt that
if the charge had been two dollars instead of two marks they would have
had every advantage of American travel.
On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and now
sterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost to
its gates. The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs,
and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which put
our outdated depots to shame. The good 'traeger' who took possession of
them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky,
and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation. This
was a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so,
either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver and
his horses. The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest in the
world; at Berlin the horses look like old hair trunks and the drivers
like their moth-eaten contents.
The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and their
approach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as the
ignoble avenue itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean,
tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees,
to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines of
shops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosity
of New York. March quoted in bitter derision:
"Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,
Under the Lindens?"
and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be imagined
with its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the architecture of
Sixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that would be
the famous Unter den Linden, where she had so resolutely decided that
they would stay while in Berlin.