The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the
clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine
as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. The
smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not so
bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March liked
the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy
shores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that,
and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he
remembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began to
come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence,
assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid
from the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the color
of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not
gainsay the friendly German.
Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they
showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since
realized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held silently
apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who kept the
Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an
Englishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was
he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or
was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?
He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of the
boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offer
him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually lifted a
shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and that
he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the young
man's eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he felt
that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again.
March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin to
eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the baskets
they had brought with them, or from the boat's provision. But he
prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer, through all the events
of the voyage; and took March's mind off the scenery with a sudden wrench
when he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance. At
the table d'hote, which was served when the landscape began to be less
interesting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across the
table to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout the
different courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt the
young man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for the
semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that he was a
Bostonian.
The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at last
cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their former
Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantled
the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps. The
scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there were
certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than they
remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem was
more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, though
there were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed as
good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of them had been
restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into
trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere
gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the
broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American
dentist.
For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more,
does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on
the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which
might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams
'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'
and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still you
know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the
Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.
Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be
storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really
got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure."
"Well, we have got no denkmal, either," said his wife, meaning the
national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had
just passed, "and that is something in our favor."
"It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was," he returned.
"The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rode
aboard the boat."
He could not answer such a piece of logic as that. He yielded, and began
to praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled slopes
of the upper river. He said they put him in mind of orchards that he had
known in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of travel,
after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in finding
something familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.
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.