They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she
scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she
kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a
day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to see
her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it
better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and it
seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers
about his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how he
liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and
that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no
more, she contented herself with that.
The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound
down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay
stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and
the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road
which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of
dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that
surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the
hill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges
within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only
vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world.
Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines,
with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet
derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing
robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in
Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western
Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,
French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.
The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and
coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright
walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables, served by
pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the
way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver,
glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idle
frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they
suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else
in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at
certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.
"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March
saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was ready
to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had
got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her the
passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and
which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. We
pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not
ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we
are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether different way,
was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamy
told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in the
height of the season, she was personally proud of it.
She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led
March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably
turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where
the names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but there
were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern,
and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on
Broadway. A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little
that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not at
once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill
toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had a jealous blue eye, into
which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth
stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he
wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the
crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being
uncovered.
At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: "Oh! Let me
introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March."
Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to
remember, and took off his hat. "You see Jews enough, here to make you
feel at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got some of 'em in
Chicago, too, I guess. This young man"--he twisted his head toward
Burnamy--"found you easy enough?"
"It was very good of him to meet us," Mrs. March began. "We didn't
expect--"
"Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his
hat on. "We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all I
want to, here. Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me. Well,
he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can't go and drink these
waters hit or miss. I found that out before I came."
"Oh, no!" said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been
advised; but he said to Burnamy:
"I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don't let me
interrupt you," he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand up
toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.
Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the
silence, "Is Mr. Stoller an American?"
"Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy laugh. "His people were
German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as much
American as any of us, doesn't it?"
Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had
come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March
answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. "Oh, for the
West, yes, perhaps," and they neither of them said anything more about
Stoller.
In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their
arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's
patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of
the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. "Yes, yes; very nice, and I know I
shall enjoy it ever so much. But I don't know what you will think of that
poor young Burnamy!"
"Why, what's happened to him?"
"Happened? Stoller's happened."
"Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?"
"Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd have
rejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat. He's like an actor
made up for a Western millionaire. Do you remember that American in
'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came? He, looks
exactly like that, and he has the worst manners. He stood talking to me
with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel as if
he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much. If you don't
give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you; that's all.
I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some sort of hold
upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't imagine; but if
ever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in his!
"Now," said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think
we'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller
myself by that time."
She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she
entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at
Pupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down
with passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and
there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the
ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant and
stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the
largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she
should never have known if she had not seen it there.
The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid
rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast
windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up for
the evening concert. Around them at the different tables there were
groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with that
distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of European
inequality.
"How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil," she said, "beside all these
people! I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm certain
that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs. We don't
even look intellectual! I hope we look good."
"I know I do," said March. The waiter went for their supper, and they
joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room. A French
party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult,
though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two
elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and
were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;
some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a
large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language
which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter. They were
a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a
freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black
lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for no
reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended to
prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet
of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man of
learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr
Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him
till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair
and beard with it above the table.
The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together
at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentleman
had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when
he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except
for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly he
choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before
him, and--
"Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved
for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. "I think I
prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is."
The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their
table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper.
The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he
explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill,
it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see
that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they
could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.
"And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the
aristocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes."
"Oh, yes," he admitted. "The only manners we have at home are black ones.
But you mustn't lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always so
baronial."
"I don't know whether we have manners at home," she said, "and I don't
believe I care. At least we have decencies."
"Don't be a jingo," said her husband.