The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and
flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wet
sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminably
to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomer
and cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part of
the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, than even
Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like that, with double
rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign of
Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restriction
against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred. Otherwise they had to
confess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more proper
and dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America.
To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years'
start; but all the same the fact galled them.
It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their
hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to
Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something
tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with
its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the
spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the
river's brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold
braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to
his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain have
had them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very
slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower,
and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of the
serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All these
retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove,
without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms,
and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant, not
because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of
wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange
demand.
"What!" she cried. "A fire in September!"
"Yes," March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by
the exigency, "yes, if September is cold."
The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or
liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a
word more.
He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and in
less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least
sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. March
made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said she
would have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a supper
of chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when they
supped in her aunt's parlor there all those years ago. He wished to
compute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and he
went down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he found
himself alone with a young English couple and their little boy. They were
friendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable,
apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said he
had contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he was going to
Holland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which March
expected to find there. He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of
faith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of the
dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the court
without, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till the
little English boy got down from his place and shut it.
He alone continued cheerful, for March's spirits certainly did not rise
when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at
another table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he had
met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the
elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the
younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed
to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct
and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style
bragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeable
fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had
become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one only
the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in his scorn
of the German landscape, the German weather, the German government, the
German railway management, and then turned out an American of German
birth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort when he went back to
her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she had discovered
standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was a French clock,
of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the first Empire, and it
looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon occupied Mayence early
in the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her conscience where,
in its danger from the heat of the stove, it rested with the weight of
the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled. She wondered that no one
had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and she required her husband
to remove it at once from the top of the stove to the mantel under the
mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a clock. He said nothing
could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began to fall all apart, like
a clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble base dropped-off; its
pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side. While Mrs. March
lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it together before any
one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new place. Then they both
breathed freer, and returned to sit down before the stove. But at the
same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined on the lacquered top,
the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would see it in the morning;
she would notice the removal of the clock, and would make a merit of
reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord, and in the end they would
be mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer this wrong they agreed to
restore it to its place, and, let it go to destruction upon its own
terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went to
bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.
He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in
Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal
joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his
window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of
pathos in the line:
"Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!"
and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of
youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places,
with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen
silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he
remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.
He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke
early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though young,
were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves
kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw the street
filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some
in uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps, loosely
straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make
out. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said that
these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres,
and who were now going home. He promised March a translation of the song,
but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-going
remained the more poetic with him because its utterance remained
inarticulate.
March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering
about the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit by
the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to the
cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there
added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people of
Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it by
preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an
ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive
offerings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled
themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and
ragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red
guide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle in
a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own
ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar a
priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was
as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle's, or whether somewhere in it he
felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.
He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and
old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river,
which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough river
looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both
as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making. The summer
of life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better return to his
own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal
town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any
one. A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really
a wish to be at work again. He said he must keep this from his wife, who
seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned
to the hotel.
But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer.
They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf
they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March
would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, and
he was afterwards glad that he had done so.
In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up
behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition
which the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeated
agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much,
and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had
plundered them of.
"Now I see," said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, "how
fortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe we
were the instruments of justice."
"Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?" asked her husband.
"The landlord has his own arrangement with justice. When he overcharges
his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my clock."