March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor,
and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at
being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor wrote
out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of
glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a
rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the
doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his
inner office. It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he
went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his
shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at
once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which
they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in
time to sell it to him.
At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged
with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy
'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be so
finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of the
popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March
heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined
the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the
silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and
poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of
the Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its
steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of
iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There is
an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till
bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;
and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitude
shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then taking
each his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them at
the spring.
A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate is
said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his
eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plush
or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears. They
were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they seemed
all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad is that
its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich. After the Polish Jews,
the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking figures. There
were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in their way too;
and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers brightened the
picture. Here and there a southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine,
looked passionately out of the mass of dull German visages; for at
Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation, are to the
fore. Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the prevalent
effect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or Pole, or
Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and grace
rather than the domestic virtues. There were certain faces, types of
discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end. A
young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a
lasting fascination to March.
What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty
of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years
of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long
disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fused
with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his
fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them
away; he thought the women's voices the worst.
At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action
dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up
to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a
half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade
any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and
after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish
habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a
gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going
sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of
Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond
the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward
the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight. He
liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed
the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and
folds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly,
and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of
Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny
mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the
air was almost warm.
Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,
whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his
turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained
that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he
chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you
had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he
did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not
eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk
much. He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt,
upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life
of a journalist. He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything
as a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say,
"He's smart." He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg; and
upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness
without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.
March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she
gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its
return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-,
morning to them all in English. "Are you going to teach them United
States?" he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not
fail.
"Well," the man admitted, "I try to teach them that much. They like it.
You are an American? I am glad of it. I have 'most lost the use of my
lungs, here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about
dead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German."
His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West. He must be that
sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was
afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should
prove the third or fourth. "Are you taking the cure?" he asked instead.
"Oh, no. My wife is. She'll be along directly; I come down here and drink
the waters to encourage her; doctor said to. That gets me in for the
diet, too. I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever did
in my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I'm full o' prunes! Well, it does me
good to see an American, to know him. I couldn't 'a' told you, it you
hadn't have spoken."
"Well," said March, "I shouldn't have been so sure of you, either, by
your looks."
"Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch. But they know us,
and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money.
I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here. Soon's they got all
our money, or think they have, they say, 'Here, you Americans, this is my
country; you get off;' and we got to get. Ever been over before?"
"A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it."
"It's my first time. My name's Otterson: I'm from out in Iowa."
March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York.
"Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn't an Eastern man you was
just with?"
"No; he's from Chicago. He's a Mr. Stoller."
"Not the buggy man?"
"I believe he makes buggies."
"Well, you do meet everybody here." The Iowan was silent for a moment, as
if, hushed by the weighty thought. "I wish my wife could have seen him. I
just want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don't know what's
keeping her, this morning," he added, apologetically. "Look at that
fellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!" A young officer
was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be mother
and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to him
with caressing words and looks. He was red in the face with his polite
struggles when he broke from them at last. "How they do hang on to a man,
over here!" the Iowa man continued. "And the Americans are as bad as any.
Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place, and our girls
just swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well, it's so, Jenny," he
said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned round to see
when he spoke to her. "If I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man.
And these officers! Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, they
tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your first
glass, yet, Jenny? I'm just going for my second tumbler."
He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;
she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated. She
relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must
be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and
said, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too." He answered that then they should
be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflected
that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who had
amused or interested him before she met them.