After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; she preferred to sleep.
The imperial party was to arrive at half past seven, but at six the crowd
was already dense before the station, and all along the street leading to
the Residenz. It was a brilliant day, with the promise of sunshine,
through which a chilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres. The colors of all
the German states flapped in this breeze from the poles wreathed with
evergreen which encircled the square; the workmen putting the last
touches on the bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, and they had,
scarcely finished their labors when two troops of dragoons rode into the
place and formed before the station, and waited as motionlessly as their
horses would allow.
These animals were not so conscious as lions at the approach of princes;
they tossed and stamped impatiently in the long interval before the
Regent and his daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests. All the
human beings, both those who were in charge and those who were under
charge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their parts well, as if there
were some heavy penalty for failure in the least point. The policemen
keeping the people, in line behind the ropes which restrained them
trembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the troopers twitched. An
involuntary sigh went up from the crowd as the Regent's carriage
appeared, heralded by outriders, and followed by other plain carriages of
Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver. Then the whistle of the
Kaiser's train sounded; a trumpeter advanced and began to blow his
trumpet as they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointed moment
the Emperor and Empress came out of the station through the brilliant
human alley leading from it, mounted their carriages, with the stage
trumpeter always blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the square and
flashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight. The same hollow
groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the spectators as had
welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his fellow-townsmen, with
the same effect of being the conventional cries of a stage mob behind the
scenes.
The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy
face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored
if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply
fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in
acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March that
sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a
scantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly working
toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference
between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic and
dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European,
it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate conviction of
equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity transcending
all social and civic pretences, was what gave their theatrical effect to
the shows of deference from low to high, and of condescension from high
to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince did
not play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harder
part to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from being
found out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across the
stage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid
to be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor
supernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle
like themselves.
In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an
hour and a half for half a minute's glimpse of the imperial party, March
now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to
still greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come to
Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in
itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train,
and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a
multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? He
was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing
that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his
recreance to his wife. This did alloy the pleasure with which he began,
after an excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about the
streets, though he had them almost to himself, so many citizens had
followed the soldiers to the manoeuvres.
It was not till the soldiers began returning from the manoeuvres,
dusty-footed, and in white canvas overalls drawn over their trousers to
save them, that he went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the Swan.
He had given them time enough to imagine him at the review, and to wonder
whether he had seen General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they met
him with such confident inquiries that he would not undeceive them at
once. He let them divine from his inventive answers that he had not gone
to the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, and
the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had not
gone, either. The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowed
the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled his
lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company he
had been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He referred to the
military chiefly in relation to the Miss Stollers' ineffectual
flirtations, which he declared had been outrageous. Their father had
apparently no control over them whatever, or else was too ignorant to
know that they were misbehaving. They were without respect or reverence
for any one; they had talked to General Triscoe as if he were a boy of
their own age, or a dotard whom nobody need mind; they had not only kept
up their foolish babble before him, they had laughed and giggled, they
had broken into snatches of American song, they had all but whistled and
danced. They made loud comments in Illinois English--on the cuteness of
the officers whom they admired, and they had at one time actually got out
their handkerchiefs. He supposed they meant to wave them at the officers,
but at the look he gave them they merely put their hats together and
snickered in derision of him. They were American girls of the worst type;
they conformed to no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal.
They ought to be taken home.
Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreed with him that they
were altogether unformed, and were the effect of their own ignorant
caprices. Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by taking them
away.
"It would hide them, at any rate," he answered. "They would sink back
into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed. We behave like
a parcel of peasants with our women. We think that if no harm is meant or
thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that are
scandalously improper simply because they are innocent. That may be all
very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing had better
stay there, where our peasant manners won't make them conspicuous."
As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March
recurred to the general's closing words. "That was a slap at Mrs. Adding
for letting Kenby go off with her."
She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time
March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and the
Addings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no chance to bring up
these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by
making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any
point where she thought she had scanted it. After all, it consisted
mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered
questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.
March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy's
clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that
he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the
acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.
"Probably," Mrs. March said, "as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding,
he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy."
"Then you think he was really serious about her?"
"Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completely
taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how she
received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight."
"The fight?"
"Yes--that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offering
himself."
"Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?"
"How do I? Didn't you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tell
him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?"
"I had no chance. I don't know that I should have done it, anyway. It
wasn't my affair."
"Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for that
poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes."
"Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose."
"Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it. She had a right to know it."
"Did she think Stoller's willingness to overlook Burnamy's performance
had anything to do with its moral quality?"
Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, "I told her you
thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it
away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a
person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they had
expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned. And hasn't poor Burnamy
done both?"
As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but as
a husband he was not going to come down at once. "I thought probably you
had told her that. You had it pat from having just been over it with me.
When has she heard from him?"
"Why, that's the strangest thing about it. She hasn't heard at all. She
doesn't know where he is. She thought we must know. She was terribly
broken up."
"How did she show it?"
"She didn't show it. Either you want to tease, or you've forgotten how
such things are with young people--or at least girls."
"Yes, it's all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides,
the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very
obliterating to my early impressions of love-making."
"It certainly hasn't been ideal," said Mrs. March with a sigh.
"Why hasn't it been ideal?" he asked. "Kenby is tremendously in love with
her; and I believe she's had a fancy for him from the beginning. If it
hadn't been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now he's
essential to them both in their helplessness. As for Papa Triscoe and his
Europeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they're the
residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding have
nothing to do with their unreality. His being in love with her is no
reason why he shouldn't be helpful to her when she needs him, and every
reason why he should. I call it a poem, such as very few people have the
luck to live out together."
Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she cried
out, "Well, my dear, I do believe you are right! It is ideal, as you say;
it's a perfect poem. And I shall always say--"
She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, and
perceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasm
for all sorts of love-affairs. But she averred that she did not care;
what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it.
They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had left
Carlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escape
from the pressure of others' interests. The tide of travel was towards
Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later. They
were going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way that they
simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary capital they
were alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger, much less a
friend to molest them. The flying landscape without was of their own
early autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purple
it, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women, and
children were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows
everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change. It was always the
German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor;
often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops in
ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within
their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent
life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her as
she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage.
As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplands they were aware of a
finer, cooler air through their open window. The torrents foamed white
out of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along the valleys,
where the hamlets roused themselves in momentary curiosity as the train
roared into them from the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshine had the
glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and the travellers had a
pleasant bewilderment in which their memories of Switzerland and the
White Mountains mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack
sojourns. They chose this place and that in the lovely region where they
lamented that they had not come at once for the after-cure, and they
appointed enough returns to it in future years to consume all the summers
they had left to live.