The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in
America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the
telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying
that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were
as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their
train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all
the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly 'traeger' had done his best to get them
the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so
poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother
and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together. Their
compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these
were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March
had got a window open it did not matter, really.
He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in
theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the
elder lady said in English, "Let me show you," and came to his help.
The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to
different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear,
and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhaps
they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had
cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with
an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likes to do
these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a family
of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken,
abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they entered into a
comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from which it seemed
that the objects and interests of cultivated people in Berlin were quite
the same as those of cultivated people in New York. Each of the parties
to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their respective
civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm and virtue
to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one another
that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad, the
mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she had
admired. In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowing
speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude.
"That was very pretty of her, my dear," said March. "You couldn't have
done that."
"No," she confessed; "I shouldn't have had the courage. The courage of my
emotions," she added, thoughtfully.
"Ah, that's the difference! A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian
couldn't. Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your
convictions?"
"I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of
everything that I used to be sure of."
He laughed, and then he said, "I was thinking how, on our wedding
journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered
you a rose."
"Well?"
"That was to your pretty youth. Now the gracious stranger gives you a
folding stool."
"To rest my poor old feet. Well, I would rather have it than a rose,
now."
"You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower
that time; I noticed it. I didn't see that you looked so very different.
To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but
rosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;
they will keep in any climate."
She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh. "Yes, our age
caricatures our youth, doesn't it?"
"I don't think it gets much fun out of it," he assented.
"No; but it can't help it. I used to rebel against it when it first
began. I did enjoy being young."
"You did, my dear," he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it,
because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could
not bear its expression. "And so did I; and we were both young a long
time. Travelling brings the past back, don't you think? There at that
restaurant, where we stopped for dinner--"
"Yes, it was charming! Just as it used to be! With that white cloth, and
those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the
dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was so
nice! I'm never going home; you may, if you like."
"You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our
railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European."
"I had to do that. But I knew better; they don't begin to be."
"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alike
everywhere. It's the expression of the common civilization of the world.
When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found
that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether I was at
home or abroad. And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this train
which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I didn't
know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot. To be sure,
Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at
Eger, and so that came to the same thing. It's these confounded fifty-odd
years. I used to recollect everything."
He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which
had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had
crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morning and early
afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were
cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow
fields between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger, there was
something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low
hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a
mountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations were
shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the
scenery and the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of
the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting
water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Along
the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were
at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls
were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. At
an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the
children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in
Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question
whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him. He sat
down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had
tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and
tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal
expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,
which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and
now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself. She refused to share
in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the
placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take
away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with
that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one who
profits by travel.