In the morning March came home from his bankers gay with the day's
provisional sunshine in his heart, and joyously expectant of his wife's
pleasure in the letters he was bringing. There was one from each of their
children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and read
on the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might be in
them; there were two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without opening
were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs. Adding's, from
the postmarks, seemed to have been following them about for some time.
"They're all right at home," he said. "Do see what those people have been
doing."
"I believe," she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside her
bed to cut the envelopes, "that you've really cared more about them all
along than I have."
"No, I've only been anxious to be done with them."
She got the letters open, and holding one of them up in each hand she
read them impartially and simultaneously; then she flung them both down,
and turned her face into her pillow with an impulse of her inalienable
girlishness. "Well, it is too silly."
March felt authorized to take them up and read them consecutively; when
he had done, so he did not differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha had
written to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had just that evening
become engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her part owned a farther step, and
announced her marriage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in such
matters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in unsparing
terms, and in Agatha's letter there was an avowal of like effect from
Burnamy. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon come to
regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs. Adding professed a certain
humiliation in having realized that, after all her misgiving about him,
Rose seemed rather relieved than otherwise, as if he were glad to have
her off his hands.
"Well," said March, "with these troublesome affairs settled, I don't see
what there is to keep us in Europe any longer, unless it's the consensus
of opinion in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson, that we ought to stay the
winter."
"Stay the winter!" Mrs. March rose from her pillow, and clutched the home
letters to her from the abeyance in which they had fallen on the coverlet
while she was dealing with the others. "What do you mean?"
"It seems to have been prompted by a hint you let drop, which Tom has
passed to Bella and Fulkerson."
"Oh, but that was before we left Carlsbad!" she protested, while she
devoured the letters with her eyes, and continued to denounce the
absurdity of the writers. Her son and daughter both urged that now their
father and mother were over there, they had better stay as long as they
enjoyed it, and that they certainly ought not to come home without going
to Italy, where they had first met, and revisiting the places which they
had seen together when they were young engaged people: without that their
silver wedding journey would not be complete. Her son said that
everything was going well with 'Every Other Week', and both himself and
Mr. Fulkerson thought his father ought to spend the winter in Italy, and
get a thorough rest. "Make a job of it, March," Fulkerson wrote, "and
have a Sabbatical year while you're at it. You may not get another."
"Well, I can tell them," said Mrs. March indignantly, "we shall not do
anything of the kind."
"Then you didn't mean it?"
"Mean it!" She stopped herself with a look at her husband, and asked
gently, "Do you want to stay?"
"Well, I don't know," he answered vaguely. The fact was, he was sick of
travel and of leisure; he was longing to be at home and at work again.
But if there was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were,
at a bargain; which could be fairly divided between them, and leave him
the self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienced a husband not to
see the advantage of it, or to refuse the merit. "I thought you wished to
stay."
"Yes," she sighed, "I did. It has been very, very pleasant, and, if
anything, I have over-enjoyed myself. We have gone romping through it
like two young people, haven't we?"
"You have," he assented. "I have always felt the weight of my years in
getting the baggage registered; they have made the baggage weigh more
every time."
"And I've forgotten mine. Yes, I have. But the years haven't forgotten
me, Basil, and now I remember them. I'm tired. It doesn't seem as if I
could ever get up. But I dare say it's only a mood; it may be only a
cold; and if you wish to stay, why--we will think it over."
"No, we won't, my dear," he said, with a generous shame for his hypocrisy
if not with a pure generosity. "I've got all the good out of it that
there was in it, for me, and I shouldn't go home any better six months
hence than I should now. Italy will keep for another time, and so, for
the matter of that, will Holland."
"No, no!" she interposed. "We won't give up Holland, whatever we do. I
couldn't go home feeling that I had kept you out of your after-cure; and
when we get there, no doubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shall
want to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seems so far off, now! But go
and see when the afternoon train for the Hague leaves, and I shall be
ready. My mind's quite made up on that point."
"What a bundle of energy!" said her husband laughing down at her.
He went and asked about the train to the Hague, but only to satisfy a
superficial conscience; for now he knew that they were both of one mind
about going home. He also looked up the trains for London, and found that
they could get there by way of Ostend in fourteen hours. Then he went
back to the banker's, and with the help of the Paris-New York Chronicle
which he found there, he got the sailings of the first steamers home.
After that he strolled about the streets for a last impression of
Dusseldorf, but it was rather blurred by the constantly recurring pull of
his thoughts toward America, and he ended by turning abruptly at a
certain corner, and going to his hotel.
He found his wife dressed, but fallen again on her bed, beside which her
breakfast stood still untasted; her smile responded wanly to his
brightness. "I'm not well, my dear," she said. "I don't believe I could
get off to the Hague this afternoon."
"Could you to Liverpool?" he returned.
"To Liverpool?" she gasped. "What do you mean?"
"Merely that the Cupania is sailing on the twentieth, and I've
telegraphed to know if we can get a room. I'm afraid it won't be a good
one, but she's the first boat out, and--"
"No, indeed, we won't go to Liverpool, and we will never go home till
you've had your after-cure in Holland." She was very firm in this, but
she added, "We will stay another night, here, and go to the Hague
tomorrow. Sit down, and let us talk it over. Where were we?"
She lay down on the sofa, and he put a shawl over her. "We were just
starting for Liverpool."
"No, no we weren't! Don't say such things, dearest! I want you to help me
sum it all, up. You think it's been a success, don't you?"
"As a cure?"
"No, as a silver wedding journey?"
"Perfectly howling."
"I do think we've had a good time. I never expected to enjoy myself so
much again in the world. I didn't suppose I should ever take so much
interest in anything. It shows that when we choose to get out of our rut
we shall always find life as fresh and delightful as ever. There is
nothing to prevent our coming any year, now that Tom's shown himself so
capable, and having another silver wedding journey. I don't like to think
of it's being confined to Germany quite."
"Oh, I don't know. We can always talk of it as our German-Silver Wedding
Journey."
"That's true. But nobody would understand nowadays what you meant by
German-silver; it's perfectly gone out. How ugly it was! A sort of greasy
yellowish stuff, always getting worn through; I believe it was made worn
through. Aunt Mary had a castor of it, that I can remember when I was a
child; it went into the kitchen long before I grew up. Would a joke like
that console you for the loss of Italy?"
"It would go far to do it. And as a German-Silver Wedding Journey, it's
certainly been very complete."
"What do you mean?"
"It's given us a representative variety of German cities. First we had
Hamburg, you know, a great modern commercial centre."
"Yes! Go on!"
"Then we had Leipsic, the academic."
"Yes!"
"Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a German health resort; then
Nuremberg, the mediaeval; then Anspach, the extinct princely capital;
then Wurzburg, the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the literature
of a great epoch; then imperial Berlin; then Frankfort, the memory of the
old free city; then Dusseldorf, the centre of the most poignant personal
interest in the world--I don't see how we could have done better, if we'd
planned it all, and not acted from successive impulses."
"It's been grand; it's been perfect! As German-Silver Wedding Journey
it's perfect--it seems as if it had been ordered! But I will never let
you give up Holland! No, we will go this afternoon, and when I get to
Schevleningen, I'll go to bed, and stay there, till you've completed your
after-cure."
"Do you think that will be wildly gay for the convalescent?"
She suddenly began to cry. "Oh, dearest, what shall we do? I feel
perfectly broken down. I'm afraid I'm going to be sick--and away from
home! How could you ever let me overdo, so?" She put her handkerchief to
her eyes, and turned her face into the sofa pillow.
This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energy and inextinguishable
interest had not permitted a moment's respite from pleasure since they
left Carlsbad. But he had been married, too long not to understand that
her blame of him was only a form of self-reproach for her own
self-forgetfulness. She had not remembered that she was no longer young
till she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse. The fact had its
pathos and its poetry which no one could have felt more keenly than he.
If it also had its inconvenience and its danger he realized these too.
"Isabel," he said, "we are going home."
"Very well, then it will be your doing."
"Quite. Do you think you could stand it as far as Cologne? We get the
sleeping-car there, and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend."
"This afternoon? Why I'm perfectly strong; it's merely my nerves that are
gone." She sat up, and wiped her eyes. "But Basil! If you're doing this
for me--"
"I'm doing it for myself," said March, as he went out of the room.
She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passage to Dover she
suffered so little from the rough weather that she was an example to many
robust matrons who filled the ladies' cabin with the noise of their
anguish during the night. She would have insisted upon taking the first
train up to London, if March had not represented that this would not
expedite the sailing of the Cupania, and that she might as well stay the
forenoon at the convenient railway hotel, and rest. It was not quite his
ideal of repose that the first people they saw in the coffee-room when
they went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose Adding, who were having
their tea and toast and eggs together in the greatest apparent
good-fellowship. He saw his wife shrink back involuntarily from the
encounter, but this was only to gather force for it; and the next moment
she was upon them in all the joy of the surprise. Then March allowed
himself to be as glad as the others both seemed, and he shook hands with
Kenby while his wife kissed Rose; and they all talked at once. In the
confusion of tongues it was presently intelligible that Mrs. Kenby was
going to be down in a few minutes; and Kenby took March into his
confidence with a smile which was, almost a wink in explaining that he
knew how it was with the ladies. He said that Rose and he usually got
down to breakfast first, and when he had listened inattentively to Mrs.
March's apology for being on her way home, he told her that she was lucky
not to have gone to Schevleningen, where she and March would have frozen
to death. He said that they were going to spend September at a little
place on the English coast, near by, where he had been the day before
with Rose to look at lodgings, and where you could bathe all through the
month. He was not surprised that the Marches were going home, and said,
Well, that was their original plan, wasn't it?
Mrs. Kenby, appearing upon this, pretended to know better, after the
outburst of joyful greeting with the Marches; and intelligently reminded
Kenby that he knew the Marches had intended to pass the winter in Paris.
She was looking extremely pretty, but she wished only to make them see
how well Rose was looking, and she put her arm round his shoulders as she
spoke, Schevleningen had done wonders for him, but it was fearfully cold
there, and now they were expecting everything from Westgate, where she
advised March to come, too, for his after-cure: she recollected in time
to say, She forgot they were on their way home. She added that she did
not know when she should return; she was merely a passenger, now; she
left everything to the men of the family. She had, in fact, the air of
having thrown off every responsibility, but in supremacy, not submission.
She was always ordering Kenby about; she sent him for her handkerchief,
and her rings which she had left either in the tray of her trunk, or on
the pin-cushion, or on the wash-stand or somewhere, and forbade him to
come back without them. He asked for her keys, and then with a joyful
scream she owned that she had left the door-key in the door and the whole
bunch of trunk-keys in her trunk; and Kenby treated it all as the
greatest joke; Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would make
everything come right, and he had lost that look of anxiety which he used
to have; at the most he showed a friendly sympathy for Kenby, for whose
sake he seemed mortified at her. He was unable to regard his mother as
the delightful joke which she appeared to Kenby, but that was merely
temperamental; and he was never distressed except when she behaved with
unreasonable caprice at Kenby's cost.
As for Kenby himself he betrayed no dissatisfaction with his fate to
March. He perhaps no longer regarded his wife as that strong character
which he had sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but she was still
the most brilliant intelligence, and her charm seemed only to have grown
with his perception of its wilful limitations. He did not want to talk
about her so much; he wanted rather to talk about Rose, his health, his
education, his nature, and what was best to do for him. The two were on
terms of a confidence and affection which perpetually amused Mrs. Kenby,
but which left the sympathetic witness nothing to desire in their
relation.
They all came to the train when the Marches started up to London, and
stood waving to them as they pulled out of the station. "Well, I can't
see but that's all right," he said as he sank back in his seat with a
sigh of relief. "I never supposed we should get out of their marriage
half so well, and I don't feel that you quite made the match either, my
dear."
She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys seemed happy together,
and that there was nothing to fear for Rose in their happiness. He would
be as tenderly cared for by Kenby as he could have been by his mother,
and far more judiciously. She owned that she had trembled for him till
she had seen them all together; and now she should never tremble again.
"Well?" March prompted, at a certain inconclusiveness in her tone rather
than her words.
"Well, you can see that it, isn't ideal."
"Why isn't it ideal? I suppose you think that the marriage of Burnamy and
Agatha Triscoe will be ideal, with their ignorances and inexperiences and
illusions."
"Yes! It's the illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them, and at
their age the Kenbys can't have them."
"Kenby is a solid mass of illusion. And I believe that people can go and
get as many new illusions as they want, whenever they've lost their old
ones."
"Yes, but the new illusions won't wear so well; and in marriage you want
illusions that will last. No; you needn't talk to me. It's all very well,
but it isn't ideal."