LIII.

March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned,

and left her to have her coffee in her room. He got a pleasant table in

the gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape,

though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain,

had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light. The

waiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with a

card which he insisted was for March. It was not till he put on his

glasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all to

agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

"Well," he said, "why wasn't this card sent up last night?"

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card,

after asking March's nationality, and was then breakfasting in the next

room. March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, and

Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him.

"I thought it must be you," he called out, joyfully, as they struck their

extended hands together, "but so many people look alike, nowadays, that I

don't trust my eyes any more."

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsic

and partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty

German. As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slipped

down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres. He added that he

supposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quite

unembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without

heeding March's answer, he laughed and added: "Of course, I know she must

have told Mrs. March all about it."

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife's absence

he felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit.

"I don't give it up, you know," Kenby went on, with perfect ease. "I'm

not a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old."

"At my age I don't," March put in, and they roared together, in men's

security from the encroachments of time.

"But she happens to be the only woman I've ever really wanted to marry,

for more than a few days at a stretch. You know how it is with us."

"Oh, yes, I know," said March, and they shouted again.

"We're in love, and we're out of love, twenty times. But this isn't a

mere fancy; it's a conviction. And there's no reason why she shouldn't

marry me."

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby. "You mean

the boy," he said. "Well, I like Rose," and now March really felt swept

from his feet. "She doesn't deny that she likes me, but she seems to

think that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, it

will only give me to him. As for devoting her whole life to him, she

couldn't do a worse thing for him. What the boy needs is a man's care,

and a man's will--Good heavens! You don't think I could ever be unkind to

the little soul?" Kenby threw himself forward over the table.

"My dear fellow!" March protested.

"I'd rather cut off my right hand!" Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then he

said, with a humorous drop: "The fact is, I don't believe I should want

her so much if I couldn't have Rose too. I want to have them both. So

far, I've only got no for an answer; but I'm not going to keep it. I had

a letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and--"

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver, which

March knew must be from his wife. "What is keeping you so?" she wrote. "I

am all ready." "It's from Mrs. March," he explained to Kenby. "I am going

out with her on some errands. I'm awfully glad to see you again. We must

talk it all over, and you must--you mustn't--Mrs. March will want to see

you later--I--Are you in the hotel?"

"Oh yes. I'll see you at the one-o'clock table d'hote, I suppose."

March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he should

tell his wife at once of Kenby's presence, or leave her free for the

pleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe and

acceptable form. She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps and

umbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

"Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them. This

is to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance to

bother; the more strangers the better. Wurzburg is richer than anything I

imagined. I've looked it all up; I've got the plan of the city, so that

we can easily find the way. We'll walk first, and take carriages whenever

we get tired. We'll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp of

rococo to begin with; there wasn't half enough of it at Ansbach. Isn't it

strange how we've come round to it?"

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obediently

imbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel and

courtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him in

devout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the rococo.

"What biddable little things we were!" she went on, while March was

struggling to keep Kenby in the background of his consciousness. "The

rococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we were pinning

our faith to pointed arches; and yet I suppose we were perfectly sincere.

Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!" They were now making their

way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the street

leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the

door of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; her

body twisting to show the sculptor's mastery of anatomy, and the halo

held on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays. In fact, the

Virgin's whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in her

arms. "Isn't she delightful?"

"I see what you mean," said March, with a dubious glance at the statue,

"but I'm not sure, now, that I wouldn't like something quieter in my

Madonnas."

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with the cathedral ending the

prospective, was full of the holiday so near at hand. The narrow

sidewalks were thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and up

the middle of the street detachments of military came and went, halting

the little horse-cars and the huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed to

have the sole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jingling or

thundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselves round the

corners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flattening

themselves like posters against the house walls. There were peasants, men

and women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country life

had kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were citizens

in the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were soldiers of all

arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time there were pretty

young girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare arms gloved to the

elbows, who were following a holiday custom of the place in going about

the streets in ball costume. The shop windows were filled with portraits

of the Emperor and the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies of

his family; the German and Bavarian colors draped the facades of the

houses and festooned the fantastic Madonnas posing above so many portals.

The modern patriotism included the ancient piety without disturbing it;

the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and

kept the stamp given it by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the

sovereignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as

wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they

were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There

area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which

approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque

style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and

sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that

there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior came

together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had

felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was,

unimpeachably perfect in its way, "Just," March murmured to his wife, "as

the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century

was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is to find

the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder how much

the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo, too! Look

at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What magnificent

swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get

behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the

baroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though. But how you

long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth."

"I don't," she whispered back. "I'm perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I like

to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic

I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I am

consistent."

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the

way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of

Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for

Longfellow's. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is

outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows,

which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by a

broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the

Meistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as

Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to

themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded

beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the

four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her

husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded

amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. "You are

right! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can't enjoy Gothic here any

more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg."

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit

the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the

heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were

jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for

the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time

for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way

the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the

German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of

their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one

was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their

system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and

yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups

representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood

each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the

vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a

pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and

clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never

meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountain

near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould,

and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of

spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from

the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little

company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the square

without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people

in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts

and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the

Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city's past seemed to

culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

"Why didn't we have something like all this on our first wedding

journey?" she sighed at last. "To think of our battening from Boston to

Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester

and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!"

"Niagara wasn't so bad," he said, "and I will never go back on Quebec."

"Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and

Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a

compensation for our lost youth. But I can't enjoy it as I could when I

was young. It's wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and

Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them."

"They wouldn't care for it," he replied, and upon a daring impulse he

added, "Kenby and Mrs. Adding might." If she took this suggestion in good

part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

"Don't speak of them! They're in just that besotted early middle-age when

life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no

future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.

Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes." She

rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive

fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded

terrace in the background which had tempted her.

"It isn't so bad, being elderly," he said. "By that time we have

accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations. We

have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where we

are at."

"I don't mind being elderly. The world's just as amusing as ever, and

lots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It's the getting more than

elderly; it's the getting old; and then--"

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he

said, "Perhaps there's something else, something better--somewhere."

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure

in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued

fountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat little

urchin-groups on the stone coping. "I don't want cherubs, when I can have

these putti. And those old prince-bishops didn't, either!"

"I don't suppose they kept a New England conscience," he said, with a

vague smile. "It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo."

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court

ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and

shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in

gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of

despair which any perfection inspires. They said how feminine it was, how

exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had

purified and left eternally charming. They remembered their Ruskinian

youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it;

and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly

admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that

time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once

influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously

found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a

rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity. The vast superb palace of the

prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns,

imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb

amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively as

this exquisite work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in its

aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew

were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which it

seemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said. "Or

iron-mongery," he corrected himself upon reflection.