"Oh, sentimentalizing," he answered boldly.
"Well, you will be sick," she said, and he crept back into bed again.
They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement. But he woke early, as
an elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wife
still sleeping. He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the town
as he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity for
Heine's birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with his
waiter at breakfast. After all, was not it more important to know
something of the actual life of a simple common class of men than to
indulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount of
associations could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter said he was
a Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served a
year for nothing. Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he got
a pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as the
one mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid the
hotel two marks a day. March confided to him his secret trouble as to
tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a just tip
was.
He went to his banker's, and when he came back he found his wife with her
breakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine's birthplace
that she heard with indifference of his failure to get any letters. It
was too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed him her plan,
which she had been working out ever since she woke. It contained every
place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined not one should
escape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusing him of
having taken cold when he got up in the night, and acquitting him with
difficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a little fagged, and they
must have a carriage.
They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little
Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way from
his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the outside
before they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the cleanest of
the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty. Below the
houses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is a butcher shop,
with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where the
Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker
displayed their signs.
But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked so
fresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it the
poet's birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by the
people who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, so
anomalously interested in the place. They dismounted, and crossed to the
butcher shop where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but could
not understand their wish to go up stairs. He did not try to prevent
them, however, and they climbed to the first floor above, where a placard
on the door declared it private and implored them not to knock. Was this
the outcome of the inmate's despair from the intrusion of other pilgrims
who had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms? They durst not knock and
ask so much, and they sadly descended to the ground-floor, where they
found a butcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence than the
butcher himself, who told them that the building in front was as new as
it looked, and the house where Heine was really born was the old house in
the rear. He showed them this house, across a little court patched with
mangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wished to visit it he led the
way. The place was strewn both underfoot and overhead with feathers; it
had once been all a garden out to the street, the boy said, but from
these feathers, as well as the odor which prevailed, and the anxious
behavior of a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was plain
that what remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard. There
was one well-grown tree, and the boy said it was of the poet's time; but
when he let them into the house, he became vague as to the room where
Heine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhere upstairs and
that it could not be seen. The room where they stood was the
frame-maker's shop, and they bought of him a small frame for a memorial.
They bought of the butcher's boy, not so commercially, a branch of lilac;
and they came away, thinking how much amused Heine himself would have
been with their visit; how sadly, how merrily he would have mocked at
their effort to revere his birthplace.
They were too old if not too wise to be daunted by their defeat, and they
drove next to the old court garden beside the Rhine where the poet says
he used to play with the little Veronika, and probably did not. At any
rate, the garden is gone; the Schloss was burned down long ago; and
nothing remains but a detached tower in which the good Elector Jan
Wilhelm, of Heine's time, amused himself with his many mechanical
inventions. The tower seemed to be in process of demolition, but an
intelligent workman who came down out of it, was interested in the
strangers' curiosity, and directed them to a place behind the Historical
Museum where they could find a bit of the old garden. It consisted of two
or three low trees, and under them the statue of the Elector by which
Heine sat with the little Veronika, if he really did. Afresh gale blowing
through the trees stirred the bushes that backed the statue, but not the
laurel wreathing the Elector's head, and meeting in a neat point over his
forehead. The laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the Elector, who
stands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and resting his baton
on the nose of a very small lion, who, in the exigencies of
foreshortening, obligingly goes to nothing but a tail under the Elector's
robe.
This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so much that he raised an
equestrian statue to his own renown in the market-place, though he
modestly refused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to the
affection of his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomed wig,
mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as big round as a barrel, and
heavy enough to keep him from coming down on his fore legs as long as he
likes to hold them up. It was to this horse's back that Heine clambered
when a small boy, to see the French take formal possession of Dusseldorf;
and he clung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who had just abdicated,
while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the balcony of the
Rathhaus, and the Electoral arms were taken down from its doorway.
The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothic and French rococo as to
its architectural style, and is charming in its way, but the Marches were
in the market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine's boyhood. They
felt that he might have been the boy who stopped as he ran before them,
and smacked the stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an old
market-woman, and then dashed away before she could frame a protest
against the indignity. From this incident they philosophized that the
boys of Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century as they
were at the beginning; and they felt the fascination that such a
bounteous, unkempt old marketplace must have for the boys of any period.
There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the fruits
were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The
market-place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down
from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a
slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the rapid
current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over, while
a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw to open.
They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy to grow up in, and how
many privileges it offered, how many dangers, how many chances for
hairbreadth escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushed
shrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Rhine with other boys; and
they easily found a leaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in the
Public Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his life and
saved the kitten's. They were not so sure of the avenue through which the
poet saw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white horse when
he took possession of the Elector's dominions. But if it was that where
the statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. comes riding on a horse led by two
Victories, both poet and hero are avenged there on the accomplished fact.
Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the badness of that foolish
denkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden Germany), and the memory
of the singer whom the Hohenzollern family pride forbids honor in his
native place, is immortal in its presence.
On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflections upon the open
neglect, throughout Germany, of the greatest German lyrist, by which the
poet might have profited if he had been present. He contended that it was
not altogether an effect of Hohenzollern pride, which could not suffer a
joke or two from the arch-humorist; but that Heine had said things of
Germany herself which Germans might well have found unpardonable. He
concluded that it would not do to be perfectly frank with one's own
country. Though, to be sure, there would always be the question whether
the Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in the Germany he loved so
tenderly and mocked so pitilessly. He had to own that if he were a negro
poet he would not feel bound to measure terms in speaking of America, and
he would not feel that his fame was in her keeping.
Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany and he accused her of
taking a shabby revenge, in trying to forget him; in the heat of his
resentment that there should be no record of Heine in the city where he
was born, March came near ignoring himself the fact that the poet
Freiligrath was also born there. As for the famous Dusseldorf school of
painting, which once filled the world with the worst art, he rejoiced
that it was now so dead, and he grudged the glance which the beauty of
the new Art Academy extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and is
so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that French
supremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates the
overthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on
horseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, which
the Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. It
is in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt
in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patriotic
monuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, which
these never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dying
warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts were
moved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, which
dropped into equivalent English verse in March's note-book:
Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous laurel;
Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone.
To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of the
German soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war with
Austria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!
The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon
should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September mist,
which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches;
for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks are apt to
be in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, and
sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and said how much
seemed to be done in Germany for the people's comfort and pleasure. In
what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they
were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the children
seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things. The Marches
met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the
winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they found
them everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed subdued, and were
silent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of
Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old
couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each
other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were indeed
children of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossom
back into.
In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and
shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we
choose. But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second
childhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there, people do not joke
above their breath about kings and emperors. If they joke about them in
print, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are severely
enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious as well as
comic. Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out in every walk of
life, and it is said that in family jars a husband sometimes has the last
word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming the sovereign, and so
having her silenced for three months at least behind penitential bars.
"Think," said March, "how simply I could adjust any differences of
opinion between us in Dusseldorf."
"Don't!" his wife implored with a burst of feeling which surprised him.
"I want to go home!"
They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey to
Holland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in the
last half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.
"What! And not go to Holland? What is to become of my after-cure?"
"Oh, it's too late for that, now. We've used up the month running about,
and tiring ourselves to death. I should like to rest a week--to get into
my berth on the Norumbia and rest!"
"I guess the September gales would have something to say about that."
"I would risk the September gales."