It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the
Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the
Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they
remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at
Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who
kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that
she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding
journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it
would be interesting.
They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do
in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of the
same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe
as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape. One gray
little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval
walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more. There
was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog
began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersing
the cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the Russischer
Hof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shivering
in all their wraps till breakfast-time.
There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored the
portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all the
electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree.
Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed each
other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while the
summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted.
They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over their
breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interest
in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel. They were
fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and they
were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire. Many of
them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls running
before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processions
have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxiety
a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before
the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to
the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet.
The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the
morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet.
What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an old
town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town,
handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets,
apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course
Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing
absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive
characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight. Some
sort of monument to the national victory over France there must have
been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record
of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware of gardened
squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic
edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the state
builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal
corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to the
Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at their
public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the most
plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay their
devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house they
revered from the outside.
It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter of
credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius of
Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled himself
by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. March
for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds'
birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born. The
public is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly place
they were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in the
Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar,
which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote. They wondered,
as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean little
court, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to that
understanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, had
meant to be inevitable. Then they became part of some such sight-seeing
retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar,
and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow
sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in
a certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both the
Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separate
house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or
yard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms. The
chief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the most
important is the little chamber in the third story where the poet first
opened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and
which, dying, he implored to be with him more. It is as large as his
death-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down
into the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for
the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet
square. In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is
fairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look
from the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt.
So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such
things go, it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and
well-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family
which Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial
quality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic's
breeches.
From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer,
the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once
was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their
coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was still
so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze
of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer,
the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where the
German emperors were elected for so many centuries. As soon as an emperor
was chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of his
predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself
to the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in the
sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers
could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of
the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they
were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty
of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked
in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a
half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing
in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost,
and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this
cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other
fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the
easier part she had chosen. His only definite impression at the cathedral
seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he
had seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object of
interest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs.
March more and more to not having gone.
As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadth
of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of the
morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of many
Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves to
learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it was
so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with its
bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They liked the
market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full of
fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because
there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedeker
that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the
marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews
had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They were
almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in
Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race,
prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner
so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and
electric-lighting.
As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran
Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. It
grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whom
March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when the
guard came, without asking their leave. Then the climate proved much
colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, and
would not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, or
the hills far off. He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as it
had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, "She may be
another Baroness!" At first he did not know what she meant, then he
remembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorly
enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife was
practising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and giving
her a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose. She failed to
profit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeable
woman, of no more perceptible distinction than their other
fellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (they
resolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he was
no other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way to
Mayence.