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