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Project Gutenberg’s Their Silver Wedding Journey, by William Dean Howells

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Title:  Their Silver Wedding Journey

Author:  William Dean Howells

Release Date:  September 1, 2006 [EBook #4646]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY ***

Produced by David Widger

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY.

By William Dean Howells

Part I.

[NOTE:  Several chapter heading numerals are out of order or missing in
this 1899 edition, however the text is all present in the three volumes.
D.W.]

I.

“You need the rest,” said the Business End; “and your wife wants you to go, as well as your doctor.  Besides, it’s your Sabbatical year, and you, could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine.”

“Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year?” asked the editor.

“No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience.  You needn’t write a line while you’re gone.  I wish you wouldn’t for your own sake; although every number that hasn’t got you in it is a back number for me.”

“That’s very nice of you, Fulkerson,” said the editor.  “I suppose you realize that it’s nine years since we took ‘Every Other Week’ from Dryfoos?”

“Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical,” said Fulkerson.  “The two extra years that you’ve put in here, over and above the old style Sabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit.  It was your right to go, two years ago, and now it’s your duty.  Couldn’t you look at it in that light?”

“I dare say Mrs. March could,” the editor assented.  “I don’t believe she could be brought to regard it as a pleasure on any other terms.”

“Of course not,” said Fulkerson.  “If you won’t take a year, take three months, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway.  You can make up half a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well that you needn’t think about ‘Every Other Week’ from the time you start till the time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back.  I can take a hack at the editing myself, if Tom’s inspiration gives out, and put a little of my advertising fire into the thing.”  He laid his hand on the shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed and shook him in the liking there was between them.  “Now you go, March!  Mrs. Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year, and we want Mrs. March and you to have yours.  You let me go down and engage your passage, and—”

“No, no!” the editor rebelled.  “I’ll think about it;” but as he turned to the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of the question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started to walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though he longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it was a support too; it kept him from wobbling:  She always talked as if the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion, himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the notion.  They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever to find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when they were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going back there, some day, for a long sojourn.  They had not seen the time when they could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreaming is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to work pretty steadily, if not too intensely.  He had been forced to forego the distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because he had their common living to make, and he could not make it by writing graceful verse, or even graceful prose.  He had been many years in a sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of leaving it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always been rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it.  At any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for work he hated.  It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leave Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March as well as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiar ties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise which formed his chance was to be founded.

It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner had imagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicate afforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit.  The magazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on more or less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and ’Every Other Week’ was apparently—the only periodical of the kind conditioned for survival.  It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and it had the instant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed, but which did not change so soon that the magazine had not time to establish itself in a wide acceptance.  It was now no longer a novelty, it was no longer in the maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered upon its second youth with the reasonable hope of many years of prosperity before it.  In fact it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and the Marches had the conditions, almost dismayingly perfect, in which they had often promised themselves to go and be young again in Europe, when they rebelled at finding themselves elderly in America.  Their daughter was married, and so very much to her mother’s mind that she did not worry about her, even though she lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild frontier town to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as he left college, had taken hold on ‘Every Other Week’, under his father’s instruction, with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson’s praise as a chip of the old block.  These two liked each other, and worked into each other’s hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March had ever done.  It amused the father to see his son offering Fulkerson the same deference which the Business End paid to seniority in March himself; but in fact, Fulkerson’s forehead was getting, as he said, more intellectual every day; and the years were pushing them all along together.

Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day he fell down in it.  He had a long sickness, and when he was well of it, he was so slow in getting his grip of work again that he was sometimes deeply discouraged.  His wife shared his depression, whether he showed or whether he hid it, and when the doctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctor with all the strength of a woman’s hygienic intuitions.  March himself willingly consented, at first; but as soon as he got strength for his work, he began to temporize and to demur.  He said that he believed it would do him just as much good to go to Saratoga, where they always had such a good time, as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obliged several times to leave him to his own undoing; she always took him more vigorously in hand afterwards.

II.

When he got home from the ‘Every Other Week’ office, the afternoon of that talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife at Fulkerson’s notion of a Sabbatical year.  She did not think it was so very droll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now the authority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish of absurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which had been his right before.

He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been working to the surface of his thought.  “We could call it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round to all the old places, and see them in the reflected light of the past.”

“Oh, we could!” she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicate responsibility of persuading her that he was joking.

He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson’s absurdity.  “It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical year—a good deal after date.  But I suppose that would make it all the more silvery.”

She faltered in her elation.  “Didn’t you say a Sabbatical year yourself?” she demanded.

“Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression.”

“And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression too!”

“It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it.  Don’t you suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves just as we were when we first met there?”

“No; I don’t believe now that you care anything about it.”

“Well, it couldn’t be done, anyway; so that doesn’t matter.”

“It could be done, if you were a mind to think so.  And it would be the greatest inspiration to you.  You are always longing for some chance to do original work, to get away from your editing, but you’ve let the time slip by without really trying to do anything; I don’t call those little studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won’t take the chance that’s almost forcing itself upon you.  You could write an original book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some love in.”

“Oh, that’s the stalest kind of thing!”

“Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view.  You could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it humorously—of course it is ridiculous—and do something entirely fresh.”

“It wouldn’t work.  It would be carrying water on both shoulders.  The fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the love and the humor wouldn’t mingle any more than oil and vinegar.”

“Well, and what is better than a salad?”

“But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on.”  She was silent, and he yielded to another fancy.  “We might imagine coming upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them—a wedding journey ’en partie carree’.”

“Something like that.  I call it a very poetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

“It isn’t so bad,” he admitted.  “How young we were, in those days!”

“Too young to know what a good time we were having,” she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect.  “I don’t feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple.  I would like to go, just to make sure that I had been.”  He was smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, “What is it?”

“Nothing.  I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who actually hadn’t been before—carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way.”

She shook her head.  “You couldn’t!  They’ve all been!”

“All but about sixty or seventy millions,” said March.

“Well, those are just the millions you don’t know, and couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“And even if you could imagine them, you couldn’t make them interesting.  All the interesting ones have been, anyway.”

“Some of the uninteresting ones too.  I used, to meet some of that sort over there.  I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn’t been.”

“Then why not do it?  I know you could get something out of it.”

“It might be a good thing,” he mused, “to take a couple who had passed their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.  I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations.  I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience.  We needn’t go abroad to manage that.  I think it would be rather nice.”

“I don’t think it would be nice in the least,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don’t want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all.”

“Well, then, let’s talk about our Silver Wedding Journey.”

“I see.  You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it.”

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really silent.  He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor.  He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.  When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented to go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.  To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible thread of association which drew him.

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the outward voyage, and was looking her best.  She was tipped and edged with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted as only a ship knows how to be.  A little uniformed steward ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the ladies’ parlor and music-room.  March made his wife observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large march-panes in the roof.  She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like serving-maids in the ‘Fliegende Blatter’; when they went ashore she challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.

“She has only one fault,” he assented.  “She’s a ship.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I decide.”

Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take, and not whether they should take any.  He explained, at first gently and afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to cross the Atlantic in.

When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprised nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home, offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe.  She answered to all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much that she was glad to give it up.  She gave it up, with the best feeling; all that she would ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to her again.  She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship as the Colmannia did not make him want to go.

At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well.  He had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he had persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards that he would not go abroad on any account.  It was by a psychological juggle which some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day to get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got a plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that they might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts.

IV.

From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so perfectly tacit.

They began to amass maps and guides.  She got a Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information.  He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German.  He used to read German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those poets for a whole generation.  He perceived, of course, that unless the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his pleasure in it.  In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly, had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.

Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place for it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining the respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia.  She carried on her researches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences were alone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she valued them equally at first or second hand.  She heard of ladies who would not cross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for months to get a room on her; she talked with ladies who said that nothing would induce them to cross in her.  There were ladies who said she had twice the motion that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her twin screws was frightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats, and it did not affect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screw boat too.  It was repeated to her in the third or fourth degree of hear-say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as that on the Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line assured her that the table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the French boats.  To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still living who had friends on board, the Colmannia had once got aground, and the Norumbia had once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it might be the Colmannia; they promised to ask and let her know.  Their lightest word availed with her against the most solemn assurances of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but in navigation were not to be trusted; they would say anything from a reckless and culpable optimism.  She obliged March all the same to ask among them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came home saying that one man had told him you could have played croquet on the deck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed, and another that he never saw the racks on in three passages he had made in the Norumbia.

The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, but when they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March liked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly wait for Monday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the Colmannia would be gone before they could engage one.

From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left in town so late in the season, she knew that the only place on any steamer where your room ought to be was probably just where they could not get it.  If you went too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and people tramping up and down on the promenade under your window kept you awake the whole night; if you went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump in your head the whole way over.  If you went too far forward, you got the pitching; if you went aft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of the cooking.  The only place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon on the south side of the ship; it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and you had the sun in your window all the way over.  He asked her if he must take their room there or nowhere, and she answered that he must do his best, but that she would not be satisfied with any other place.

In his despair he went down to the steamer office, and took a room which one of the clerks said was the best.  When he got home, it appeared from reference to the ship’s plan that it was the very room his wife had wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as if he had used a wisdom beyond his sex in getting it.

He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady came with her husband for an evening call, before going into the country.  At sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches’ table, she expressed the greatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe.  They had supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not heard a word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March found rather unduly filial.  In getting a little past the prime of life he did not like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he did not think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated as if they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts of impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so much the better for the little outing!  Under his breath, he confounded this lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always so careful of you.  She made her husband agree with her, and it came out that he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia.  He volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did not have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and the captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did call her unlucky.

“Unlucky?” Mrs. March echoed, faintly.  “Why do they call her unlucky?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  People will say anything about any boat.  You know she broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice.”

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she parted gayly with this over-good young couple.  As soon as they were gone, March knew that she would say:  “You must change that ticket, my dear.  We will go in the Norumbia.”

“Suppose I can’t get as good a room on the Norumbia?”

“Then we must stay.”

In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question them up about the Colmannia.  The people there had never heard she was called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history.  They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of Mrs. March’s anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of their insincerity to her.  At the end she asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his passenger list with a shaking head.  He was afraid there was nothing they would like.

“But we would take anything,” she entreated, and March smiled to think of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.

“We merely want the best,” he put in.  “One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days.”

They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not understand, in the foreign steamship offices.  The clerk turned unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker.  A brief drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia; it was within one of being the same number.  It was so providential, if it was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; even Mrs. March was silent.  In this supreme moment she would not prompt her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that he said, “We will take it.”

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one’s will is never free; and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the events before it.  No event that followed affected it, though the day after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August.  He felt obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all her previous unreason.  Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.

V.

During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been so interesting.  He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly metropolis.  There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat.  Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the truncated towers of St. George’s, and to the plain red-brick, white-trimmed front of the Friends’ Meeting House; he came and went between his dwelling and his office through the two places that form the square, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by one of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers of the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play.  The elders read their English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or merely sat still and stared away the day’s fatigue; while the little ones raced in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and kissing.  Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the brink of the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up behind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.

While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had brought their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soon as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American.  In like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they still pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of it by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; but later when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had not yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New York sunset they were bowed out into.

The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square.  They were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when they were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side, or down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and civilities was lost.  One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.

The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough in our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreous pink.  A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in the long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels.  But at last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before the Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights, which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and made the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for either shore.

VI.

Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath of its morning air before breakfast.  He was now eager to be gone; he had broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of sight.  But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted environment.  He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation with the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of the trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung.  Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of reading the reporter’s story of it in that next day’s paper which he should not see.

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast, which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June.  The illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual.  The heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before, and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring livery-stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by name.

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but somehow it was not the consolation he had expected.  He knew, of course, that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothly bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot of the gangway at the ship’s side, all in the cool of the early morning.  But though he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions, there was by no means enough of it.

The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively, in a fashion, through Mrs. March’s efforts to convince her son that she did not want him to come and see them off.  Of, her daughter’s coming all the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if he did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they were not going.

“Don’t you want to go?” March asked with an obscure resentment.

“I don’t want to seem to go,” she said, with the calm of those who have logic on their side.

As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed her son to come.  She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed to the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that choked the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and landings, she said it more than once to her husband.

She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such refuges as the ship’s architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way.  She pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders.  Some girls, of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry, or at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had sent them flowers.  Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up.  Others, had got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of long-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins.  In the midst of the turmoil children struggled against people’s feet and knees, and bewildered mothers flew at the ship’s officers and battered them with questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled about in their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship’s side on swinging seats, were placidly smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises midway.  Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it.  He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was laughing at his shoulder.  He said that he had to come down with a good-by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following them; but he had always meant to see them off, he owned.  The letter had just come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent another good-by letter with some flowers on board.  Mrs. March scolded at them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting which he thought he had put from him, March went on taking note, as with alien senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia.  The mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs, and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries leading, fore and aft, into the ship.  Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with their hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran before them into the different depths and heights where they hid these burdens, and then ran back for more.  Some of the passengers followed them and made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of them remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out of the doors of the promenades.

The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf, with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh hissings and rattlings and gurglings.  There was no apparent reason why it should all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began to be warnings that were almost threats of the end.  The ship’s whistle sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humbly entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to Europe.  They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she was sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason.  He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last charges about ‘Every Other Week’.

Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arriving passengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks of baggage swung more swiftly into the air.  A bell rang, and there rose women’s cries, “Oh, that is the shore-bell!” and men’s protests, “It is only the first bell!” More and more began to descend the gangways, fore and aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard.

March tried not to be nervous about his son’s lingering; he was ashamed of his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, “Better be off, Tom.”

His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried to Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as if there had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him and would not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last by pushing him into the gangway with her own hands:  he nodded and waved his hat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd.

Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors began to undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship’s side; files of men on the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their approach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomime forbade some belated leavetakers to ascend.  These stood aside, exchanging bows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach; they all tried to make one another hear some last words.  The moment came when the saloon gangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the section of the bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on this side of the world.  An indefinable impulse communicated itself to the steamer:  while it still seemed motionless it moved.  The thick spread of faces on the wharf, which had looked at times like some sort of strange flowers in a level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the air above them was filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds rising from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son’s face; they believed that they did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an impressionistic study.  As the ship swung free of the shed and got into the stream, the shore lost reality.  Up to a certain moment, all was still New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and monstrous shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at sea and on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores, while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.  A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying down the promenade from the steerage.  “Capitan!  Capitan!  There is a woman!” he shouted in nondescript English.  “She must go hout!  She must go hout!” Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship’s command and seemed to penetrate to the ship’s heart; she stopped, as if with a sort of majestic relenting.  A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved seaward again.

“What is it?  Oh, what is it?” his wife demanded of March’s share of their common ignorance.  A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some friends on board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, “What a charming face he had!” even before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have escaped danger.  She would not hear any excuse for her.  “Her children oughtn’t to have been out of her mind for an instant.”

“Don’t you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?” March asked.

She started from him.  “Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?”

In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot’s letters she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times reiterated.  She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of the mail decided.

“I shouldn’t have forgiven myself,” March said, “if we hadn’t let Tom know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well.”

“It’s to Bella, too,” she reasoned.

He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar things when he came with their daughter’s steamer letter and the flowers and fruit she had sent.  She said, Very well, they would all keep, and went on with her unpacking.  He asked her if she did not think these home things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way she should certainly go back on the pilot-boat.  He perceived that her nerves were spent.  He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about the life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn, wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer down their corridor.

VII.

In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife’s anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats in the dining-saloon.  At first he had his ambition for the captain’s table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced Mrs. March that the captain’s table had become a superstition of the past, and conferred no special honor.  It proved in the event that the captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon among the passengers who paid least for their rooms.  But while the Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see what he had done for them.

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the oval openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up into the music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters.  The tables were brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marches thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to the last detail in blue and white violets.  The ports of the saloon were open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the tremor from her screws.  The sound of talking and laughing rose with the clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell of the coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses and carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joy of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair.  When the head steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they both made an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had been a company at some far-forgotten table d’hote in the later sixties.  The head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with “Bleace!” for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the equivalent of their native “Bitte!” Otherwise there was no reason to suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good half of the passengers.  The stewards looked English, however, in conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down.  He need not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or less nodded in return.

A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the left of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were his mother and understood him.  March decided that she had been some time a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have it known.  Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallen lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.  She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black, roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well as she might if she had chosen.  The elderly man on her right, it was easy to see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair hair, now ashen with age, was so different from hers.  He wore his beard cut in the fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic mustache, imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and there was something Gallic in its effect and something remotely military:  he had blue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though be frowned a good deal, and managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as if challenging a potential disagreement with his opinions.

The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of the humorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner of his kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them.  He responded to March’s bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose mother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comely bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness.  She was brilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched on her pretty nose.

If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at once renew itself in that form.  Nothing was said while they were having their first struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if to show how fully they had misunderstood it.  The gentleman at the head of the table intervened at last, and then, “I’m obliged to you,” March said, “for your German.  I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket.”

“Oh, I wasn’t speaking German,” said the other.  “It was merely their kind of English.”

The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect of being tacitly amused.

The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, “You may not get what you ordered, but it will be good.”

“Even if you don’t know what it is!” said the young bride, and then blushed, as if she had been too bold.

Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride for it, and she asked, “Have you ever been on one of these German boats before?  They seem very comfortable.”

“Oh, dear, no! we’ve never been on any boat before.”  She made a little petted mouth of deprecation, and added, simple-heartedly, “My husband was going out on business, and he thought he might as well take me along.”

The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this, and said he did not see why they should not make it a pleasure-trip, too.  They put themselves in a position to be patronized by their deference, and in the pauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of the table, March heard his wife abusing their inexperience to be unsparingly instructive about European travel.  He wondered whether she would be afraid to own that it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed the ocean; though that might seem recent to people who had never crossed at all.

They listened with respect as she boasted in what an anguish of wisdom she had decided between the Colmannia and the Norumbia.  The wife said she did not know there was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs. March perfervidly assured her that there was all the difference in the world, she submitted and said she supposed she ought to be thankful that they, had hit upon the right one.  They had telegraphed for berths and taken what was given them; their room seemed to be very nice.

“Oh,” said Mrs. March, and her husband knew that she was saying it to reconcile them to the inevitable, “all the rooms on the Norumbia are nice.  The only difference is that if they are on the south side you have the sun.”

“I’m not sure which is the south side,” said the bride.  “We seem to have been going west ever since we started, and I feel as if we should reach home in the morning if we had a good night.  Is the ocean always so smooth as this?”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Mrs. March.  “It’s never so smooth as this,” and she began to be outrageously authoritative about the ocean weather.  She ended by declaring that the June passages were always good, and that if the ship kept a southerly course they would have no fogs and no icebergs.  She looked round, and caught her husband’s eye.  “What is it?  Have I been bragging?  Well, you understand,” she added to the bride, “I’ve only been over once, a great while ago, and I don’t really know anything about it,” and they laughed together.  “But I talked so much with people after we decided to go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times.”

“I know,” said the other lady, with caressing intelligence.  “That is just the way with—” She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the head steward was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March.  He came forward, stuffing his cap into the pocket of his blue serge sack, and smiled down on the company with such happiness in his gay eyes that March wondered what chance at this late day could have given any human creature his content so absolute, and what calamity could be lurking round the corner to take it out of him.  The new-comer looked at March as if he knew him, and March saw at a second glance that he was the young fellow who had told him about the mother put off after the start.  He asked him whether there was any change in the weather yet outside, and he answered eagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the mere sound of words were a favor done him, that their ship had just spoken one of the big Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalled back that she had met ice; so that they would probably keep a southerly course, and not have it cooler till they were off the Banks.

The mother of the boy said, “I thought we must be off the Banks when I came out of my room, but it was only the electric fan at the foot of the stairs.”

“That was what I thought,” said Mrs. March.  “I almost sent my husband back for my shawl!” Both the ladies laughed and liked each other for their common experience.

The gentleman at the head of the table said, “They ought to have fans going there by that pillar, or else close the ports.  They only let in heat.”

They easily conformed to the American convention of jocosity in their talk; it perhaps no more represents the individual mood than the convention of dulness among other people; but it seemed to make the young man feel at home.

“Why, do you think it’s uncomfortably warm?” he asked, from what March perceived to be a meteorology of his own.  He laughed and added, “It is pretty summerlike,” as if he had not thought of it before.  He talked of the big mail-boat, and said he would like to cross on such a boat as that, and then he glanced at the possible advantage of having your own steam-yacht like the one which he said they had just passed, so near that you could see what a good time the people were having on board.  He began to speak to the Marches; his talk spread to the young couple across the table; it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she might ignore without apparent rejection, and without really avoiding the boy, it glanced off toward the father and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest with the gentleman at the head of the table.

It was not that the father and daughter had slighted his overture, if it was so much as that, but that they were tacitly preoccupied, or were of some philosophy concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not suffer them, for the present, at least, to share in the common friendliness.  This is an attitude sometimes produced in people by a sense of just, or even unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes by transient annoyance.  The cause was not so deep-seated but Mrs. March, before she rose from her place, believed that she had detected a slant of the young lady’s eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man; and she leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a matter where all logical steps are impertinent.  She did not announce her arrival at this point till the young man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon, and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under the table.

He went away with her thanks, and then she said to her husband, “Well, he’s perfectly charming, and I don’t wonder she’s taken with him; that kind of cold girl would be, though I’m not sure that she is cold.  She’s interesting, and you could see that he thought so, the more he looked at her; I could see him looking at her from the very first instant; he couldn’t keep his eyes off her; she piqued his curiosity, and made him wonder about her.”

“Now, look here, Isabel!  This won’t do.  I can stand a good deal, but I sat between you and that young fellow, and you couldn’t tell whether he was looking at that girl or not.”

“I could!  I could tell by the expression of her face.”

“Oh, well!  If it’s gone as far as that with you, I give it up.  When are you going to have them married?”

“Nonsense!  I want you to find out who all those people are.  How are you going to do it?”

“Perhaps the passenger list will say,” he suggested.

VIII.

The list did not say of itself, but with the help of the head steward’s diagram it said that the gentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R. M. Kenby; the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and Miss Triscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs. Leffers; the mother and her son were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in last was Mr. L. J. Burnamy.  March carried the list, with these names carefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his wife in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and the character of the people from it.  In this sort of conjecture long experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left.  Some fishing-boats flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; but already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious solitude of the ocean was beginning.  There was no swell; the sea lay quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sun flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud.  With the light fair wind, there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from the smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.

The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of Fourteenth Street on a summer’s day, and showed much the social average of a New York shopping thoroughfare.  Distinction is something that does not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still more retrusive.  A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures.  His criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he could wonder if they felt it or envied him.  At Hoboken he had seen certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the prevailing type.  It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but he wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did.  It might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that his glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies that forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that the trouble was with his glasses.  He made what he could of a pretty girl who had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and was luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat.  She had already attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more.  She kept moving herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing now this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned.

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot leaving the ship.  He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held her from the ship’s side with their oars; in the offing lay the white steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other times.  The Norumbia’s screws turned again under half a head of steam; the pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and caught the bundle of letters tossed after him.  Then his men let go the line that was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer’s departure was finally closed.  It had been dramatically heightened perhaps by her final impatience to be off at some added risks to the pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and March smiled to think how men whose lives are all of dangerous chances seem always to take as many of them as they can.

He heard a girl’s fresh voice saying at his shoulder, “Well, now we are off; and I suppose you’re glad, papa!”

“I’m glad we’re not taking the pilot on, at least,” answered the elderly man whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father and daughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him.  He wondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating the beauty of the ship’s passengers:  he saw now that she was not only extremely pretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even had distinction.  He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same time of reproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance and not very successful denial in her father’s; and he went back with these impressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the ship had stopped.

She had not noticed the ship’s stopping, in her study of the passenger list, and she did not care for the pilot’s leaving; but she seemed to think his having overheard those words of the father and daughter an event of prime importance.  With a woman’s willingness to adapt the means to the end she suggested that he should follow them up and try to overhear something more; she only partially realized the infamy of her suggestion when he laughed in scornful refusal.

“Of course I don’t want you to eavesdrop, but I do want you to find out about them.  And about Mr. Burnamy, too.  I can wait, about the others, or manage for myself, but these are driving me to distraction.  Now, will you?”

He said he would do anything he could with honor, and at one of the earliest turns he made on the other side of the ship he was smilingly halted by Mr. Burnamy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if he were not Mr. March of ‘Every Other Week’; he had seen the name on the passenger list, and felt sure it must be the editor’s.  He seemed so trustfully to expect March to remember his own name as that of a writer from whom he had accepted a short poem, yet unprinted, that the editor feigned to do so until he really did dimly recall it.  He even recalled the short poem, and some civil words he said about it caused Burnamy to overrun in confidences that at once touched and amused him.

IX.

Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found, when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boat out.  His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office of the Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in by sufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been given up, in one of the saloon-deck rooms.  It was that or nothing; and he felt rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled him to come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the difference between the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which he would have taken if he had been allowed a choice.

With the three hundred dollars he had got for his book, less the price of his passage, changed into German bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely buttoned in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe from pillage as from poverty when he came out from buying his ticket; he covertly pressed his arm against his breast from time to time, for the joy of feeling his money there and not from any fear of finding it gone.  He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he, as he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.

He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret included.  When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again in lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze, which he made the most of by keeping his hat off.  It did not really matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather which had nothing to do with the temperature.  Partly because he was born to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him, and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, he was opulently content with the present moment.  But he thought very tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he had already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America.  New York was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got a foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, he believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurt him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.

He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky.  He fancied, for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as to see it more and more objectively.  It was his power of detachment from this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charm as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them together for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do with his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself.  Perhaps he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; he could, detach himself from his art as well as his material.

Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work.  He knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of unprofessional tenderness in his nature.  He was good to his mother, and he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he had left her when he came to Chicago.  After he got that invitation from the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not know it was he who had invented that nickname for him.  He promptly avowed this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the Bird of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away.  He failed to move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for softening toward him that he was from Burnamy’s own part of Indiana, and was a benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was graduated.  But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad of his good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as most people seem to get their luck.  They liked him, and some of them liked him for his clean young life as well as for his cleverness.  His life was known to be as clean as a girl’s, and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes, though he had rather more chin than most girls.

The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if the conductor would put him off at the right place.  It was nearly nine o’clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where he had decided to pass the night.  After he found her, and went on board, he was glad he had not gone sooner.  A queasy odor of drainage stole up from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden silences of trampling sea-boots.  Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then he went to his state-room.  His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into his berth.

He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving impressions.  He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner.  He thought he would use the material first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he found himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had begun to dream, and that he must get up.  He was just going to get up, when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new day outside.  He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six; he glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night alone in it.  Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth, and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no feature or emotion of the ship’s departure.

When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air.  His room-mate was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage, and Burnamy tried to infer him from it.  He perceived a social quality in his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own equipment.  The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here and there.  They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B. Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and he now imagined a trespass on his property.  But he reassured himself by a glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship’s passage down the stream and through the Narrows.  After breakfast he came to his room again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he professed a much more general purpose.  He blamed himself for not having got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet; but there was a pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he thought might do.

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into; and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down the narrow passage where he supposed it was.  A lady was standing at an open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning forward with her head within and talking to some one there.  Before he could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say:  “Perhaps he’s some young man, and wouldn’t care.”

Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within.  The lady spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, “No, I don’t suppose you could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer.”

She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a moment at the threshold.  She looked round over her shoulder and discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage.  She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape; with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood staring into the doorway of his room.

He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast.  He begged his pardon, as he entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him.  “I’m afraid I left my things all over the place, when I got up this morning.”

The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the way over.  “You slept on board, then,” he suggested, arresting himself with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain pocket of his steamer bag.

“Oh, yes,” Burnamy laughed, nervously:  “I came near oversleeping, and getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself, and so—”

He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye.  He would have liked to offer his lower berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it.  He noticed that as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a weary easing of his person from one limb to the other.  He stooped to pull his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.

“Let me get that out for you!” He caught it up and put it on the sofa under the port.  “Is that where you want it?”

“Why, yes,” the other assented.  “You’re very good,” and as he took out his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the intimacies of the situation.  “Have you arranged with the bath-steward yet?  It’s such a full boat.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then he had not known that there was a bath-steward.  “Shall I get him for you?”

“No; no.  Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you.”

Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse for lingering.  In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth.  He went away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag, he said, abruptly:  “Mr. Triscoe, I wish you’d take the lower berth.  I got it at the eleventh hour by some fellow’s giving it up, and it isn’t as if I’d bargained for it a month ago.”

The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy fancied suspicion and even resentment.  But he said, after the moment of reflection which he gave himself, “Why, thank you, if you don’t mind, really.”

“Not at all!” cried the young man.  “I should like the upper berth better.  We’ll, have the steward change the sheets.”

“Oh, I’ll see that he does that,” said Mr. Triscoe.  “I couldn’t allow you to take any trouble about it.”  He now looked as if he wished Burnamy would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.

X.

In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which he believed would take his listener’s intelligent fancy, and he stopped so long before he had tired him that March said he would like to introduce him to his wife.  He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his own youth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to the young fellow’s advantage.  But they were both from the middle West; in their native accent and their local tradition they were the same; they were the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in their literary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions.

Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would be delighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March said she was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and asked him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite.  Without giving him time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father had left in charge of ‘Every Other Week’ for the few months they were to be gone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago.  She made him sit down by her in March’s chair, and before he left them March heard him magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do something more for the magazine soon.  He sauntered away and did not know how quickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush which became him in her eyes:

“Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell you about, if you will let me.”

“Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy,” she began, but she saw that he did not wish her to continue.

“Because,” he went on, “it’s a little matter that I shouldn’t like to go wrong in.”

He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to her father, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth.  He said he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid they might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it.

“I see,” said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, “She looks like rather a proud girl.”

“Yes,” the young fellow sighed.

“She is very charming,” she continued, thoughtfully, but not so judicially.

“Well,” Burnamy owned, “that is certainly one of the complications,” and they laughed together.

She stopped herself after saying, “I see what you mean,” and suggested, “I think I should be guided by circumstances.  It needn’t be done at once, I suppose.”

“Well,” Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh of embarrassment, “I’ve done it already.”

“Oh!  Then it wasn’t my advice, exactly, that you wanted.”

“No!”

“And how did he take it?”

“He said he should be glad to make the exchange if I really didn’t mind.”  Burnamy had risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay.  She merely said:

“Oh, well, I’m glad it turned out so nicely.”

“I’m so glad you think it was the thing to do.”  He managed to laugh again, but he could not hide from her that he was not feeling altogether satisfied.  “Would you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him?” he asked, as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.

“Do, please!” she entreated, and it seemed to her that he had hardly left her when her husband came up.  “Why, where in the world did he find you so soon?”

“Did you send him for me?  I was just hanging round for him to go.”  March sank into the chair at her side.  “Well, is he going to marry her?”

“Oh, you may laugh!  But there is something very exciting!” She told him what had happened, and of her belief that Burnamy’s handsome behavior had somehow not been met in kind.

March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh.  “It seems to me that this Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was entitled to.  Why shouldn’t he have offered him the lower berth?  And why shouldn’t the old gentleman have taken it just as he did?  Did you want him to make a counteroffer of his daughter’s hand?  If he does, I hope Mr. Burnamy won’t come for your advice till after he’s accepted her.”

“He wasn’t very candid.  I hoped you would speak about that.  Don’t you think it was rather natural, though?”

“For him, very likely.  But I think you would call it sinuous in some one you hadn’t taken a fancy to.”

“No, no.  I wish to be just.  I don’t see how he could have come straight at it.  And he did own up at last.”  She asked him what Burnamy had done for the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem, yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it had temperament.

“He has temperament, too,” she commented, and she had made him tell her everything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, before she let the talk turn to other things.

The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; the steamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them with an effect of long habit.  Those who would be walking up and down had begun their walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room; ladies who were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the music-room.  Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the rail, and the promenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or work slowly round them.  Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss parties at another were forming among the young people.  It was as lively and it was as dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea.  It was not the least cooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.

In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly.  The deck-steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and he had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch sounded.  It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from winding it.  His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity, and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.

XI.

At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people at the Marches’ table did not renew the premature intimacy of their breakfast talk.  Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and March went on deck without her.  He began to walk to and from the barrier between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary betters of the saloon.

There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for a little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work.  They gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and he feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if not just, then inevitable.  He argued with them that the sort of barrier which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, ran invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before their kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse the fact he was defending.  Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue?  He made them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole second cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced.  But they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, and strolled off toward the steerage.

There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck at the bow.  They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return to their own.  They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked down at them.  Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they writhed with the current.  A young mother seated flat on the deck, with her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his toothache-swollen face.  The owner of the battery carried it away, and a group of little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the space he had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating some plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table.  He began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.

An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, “I shouldn’t want a child of mine down there.”

“No,” March responded, “it isn’t quite what one would choose for one’s own.  It’s astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the case of others.”

“I suppose it’s something we’ll have to get used to on the other side,” suggested the stranger.

“Well,” answered March, “you have some opportunities to get used to it on this side, if you happen to live in New York,” and he went on to speak of the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or money as this poverty of the steerage.

The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed.  “I don’t believe I should like to live in New York, much,” he said, and March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live.  It appeared that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but he said it suited him.  He added that he had never expected to go to Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought he had better go out and try Carlsbad.

March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his own case.  The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if it detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home.  His heart opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up.  When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him, but that his name was Eltwin.  He betrayed a simple wish to have March realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.

He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of affliction.  “There are too many elderly invalids on this ship.  I knock against people of my own age everywhere.  Why aren’t your youthful lovers more in evidence, my dear?  I don’t believe they are lovers, and I begin to doubt if they’re young even.”

“It wasn’t very satisfactory at lunch, certainly,” she owned.  “But I know it will be different at dinner.”  She was putting herself together after a nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before.  “I want you to look very nice, dear.  Shall you dress for dinner?” she asked her husband’s image in the state-room glass which she was preoccupying.

“I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots,” it answered.

“I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and White Star boats, when it’s good weather,” she went on, placidly.  “I shouldn’t want those people to think you were not up in the convenances.”

They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March flung out, “I shouldn’t want them to think you weren’t.  There’s such a thing as overdoing.”

She attacked him at another point.  “What has annoyed you?  What else have you been doing?”

“Nothing.  I’ve been reading most of the afternoon.”

“The Maiden Knight?”

This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board.  It was just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal wave.  It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for historical romance, while it flattered woman’s instinct of superiority by the celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous and wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.

March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, “I suppose you didn’t waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of ’Every Other Week’?”

“Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair—for advertising purposes, probably.”

“Mr. Burnamy has another,” she said.  “I saw it sticking out of his pocket this morning.”

“Oh, yes.  He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if it had his poem in it.  He’s an ingenuous soul—in some ways.”

“Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men are going to dress, and let him know.  He would never think of it himself.”

“Neither would I,” said her husband.

“Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset,” she sighed.

She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong.  Every one talked; even the father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she spoke.  She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father addressed to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.

XII.

The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the ice-closet.  Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they were aware of alien witnesses.  They looked up as by a single impulse, and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down upon their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with yet hungrier eyes.  A boy’s nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the height of the man’s elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.

The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite movements.

The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell.  “I’m glad it didn’t begin with the Little Neck clams!”

“Probably they only let those people come for the dessert,” March suggested.

The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down.  The young bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a scene.  The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the port, and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at Burnamy.

The young fellow laughed.  “I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done about it, unless we pass out a plate.”

Mr. Kenby shook his head.  “It wouldn’t do.  We might send for the captain.  Or the chief steward.”

The faces at the port vanished.  At other ports profiles passed and repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them, but they paused no more.

The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made such a cruel thing possible.

“Oh,” he mocked, “they had probably had a good substantial meal of their own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a purely aesthetic treat.  But supposing it wasn’t, we’re doing something like it every day and every moment of our lives.  The Norumbia is a piece of the whole world’s civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to shore with unchanged classes, and conditions.  A ship’s merely a small stage, where we’re brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity.”

“Well, then,” she protested, “I don’t like being brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it.  And I don’t believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and I’m sorry we came on the Norumbia.”

“Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn’t hide anything,” he began, and he was going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed in time.

“If there’s anything worse, for pity’s sake don’t tell me,” she entreated, and he forebore.

He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out of sight.  He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases.  He had lived a happy life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been, must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?

“Say something,” said his wife.  “What are you thinking about?”

“Oh, Burnamy,” he answered, honestly enough.

“I was thinking about the children,” she said.  “I am glad Bella didn’t try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she is getting to be very sensible.  I hope Tom won’t take the covers off the furniture when he has the fellows in to see him.”

“Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if the moths eat up every stick of furniture.”

“Yes, so do I. And of course you’re wishing that you were there with him!” March laughed guiltily.  “Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for us to start off alone for Europe, at our age.”

“Nothing of the kind,” he retorted in the necessity he perceived for staying her drooping spirits.  “I wouldn’t be anywhere else on any account.  Isn’t it perfectly delicious?  It puts me in mind of that night on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal.  There was the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn’t a bit softer than this.”

He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.

“Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again,” she said, and they talked a long time of the past.

All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of the ship’s course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.  In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.

Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with some lady.  She clutched her husband’s arm and stayed him in rich conjecture.

“Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?”

They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again.  She was tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.

“No; it’s that pivotal girl,” said March; and his wife said, “Well, I’m glad he won’t be put down by them.”

In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, “I don’t see why you didn’t tell me sooner, papa.”

“It was such an unimportant matter that I didn’t think to mention it.  He offered it, and I took it; that was all.  What difference could it have made to you?”

“None.  But one doesn’t like to do any one an injustice.”

“I didn’t know you were thinking anything about it.”

“No, of course not.”

XIII.

The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say they have never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days out neither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy when the ship would be in.  There was only a day or two when it could really be called rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemed wilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the stairs-landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifying the monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed without noticing them.

The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened, but the leaden sea lay level as before.  The sun shone in the afternoon; with the sunset the fog came thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the night; from the dense folds of the mist answering noises called back to her.  Just before dark two men in a dory shouted up to her close under her bows, and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of fishing-schooners were seen, and their bells pealed; once loud cries from a vessel near at hand made themselves heard.  Some people in the dining-saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes, and the card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the fog without.

The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her.  In the ranks of steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters there.

By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they found beyond the Banks.  They now talked of the heat of the first days out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards across the bow end to keep off the rain.  Yet a day or two more and the sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in their poor variety.  Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep.  On the rim of the ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against the horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight.  A few tramp steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her.  One day a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of the promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsily from wave to wave.  The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre.  Commonly it was livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling spray.  These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage.  Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim evening thickened over the waters.  Sometimes the moon looked through the ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship.  Through every change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man’s heart stops) in a course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge of the sea.

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony, with certain events which were part of the monotony.  In the morning the little steward’s bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards.  Then they went on deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down, or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or the music-room.  At eleven o’clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their berths or chairs.  They did the same things in the afternoon that they had done in the forenoon; and at four o’clock the deck-stewards came round with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again to the music of the band.  There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and after dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills and toast.  At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the smoking-rooms.

There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places:  a whiff of whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the engine-room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the dining-saloon.

The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous.  The walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware that there was no refuge if they got tired of one another.  The flirting itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.

There seemed to be very little of it.  There were not many young people on board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls.  The young men were mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among the steamer chairs.  It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in the steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion.  The passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to it unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along the rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in his berth with a book under the convenient electric light.  He was safe there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship’s run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves.  He did not meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and then rather obtruded upon the public.  There were people whom he encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark whom he never met by day.  But none of these were people of the great world.  Before six o’clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers, whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom of the saloon promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never been to Europe.  But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of withholding him from March’s advances.  Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became frankly bride and groom.  They seldom talked with any one else, except at table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces; they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other’s hands under it.

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy, and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland, after the summer’s travel, and settling down with him at school there.  She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the first grade in his quality of editor of ‘Every Other Week’, but as a sage of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in ’Every Other Week’, and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy confessed to have had.  They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others much more his seniors.  He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March upon Kenby’s practice of always taking up the language of the country he visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher opinion of him from March’s approval.

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had written and what he meant to write.  When he passed them where they sat together, March heard the young fellow’s perpetually recurring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal girl, and Miss Triscoe’s indifference to him, in which a less penetrating scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal.  It was only at table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break in the reserve of the father and daughter.  The signs of this were so fine that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity.  But at breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of people accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the Marches, and began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March of ’Every Other Week’, which he seemed to know of in its relation to him; and the young girl addressed herself to Mrs. March’s motherly sense not the less acceptably because indirectly.  She spoke of going out with her father for an indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish than hers, and she made some inquiries about places in Germany; they had never been in Germany.  They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of Dresden with its American colony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs. March know anything about Weimar?

Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace in Germany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was going with her husband.  She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl’s style was of New York rather than of Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place.  Mrs. March began to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and to class them.  She had decided from the first that they were society people, but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells whom she had met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of holding themselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a right to do that if they chose.

When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on between these and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs. March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which March knew he should not be able to postpone.

He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not at once accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of an advance from them because of their neutral literary quality, through which they were of no social world, but potentially common to any.  Later she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what she wanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl’s toward finding out something about Burnamy.

The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his round with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring corner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to have her advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her.  The girl took March’s vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip.  Mrs. March did the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doing it, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her a hundredth bow with a hundredth smile.  He perceived that she wished to get rid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief.

“May I take yours too?” he said very passively to Miss Triscoe.

“You are very good.” she answered, and gave it.

Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, “Do you know Mr. Burnamy, Miss Triscoe?” The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to make talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March.  The pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment of isolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, and hurried off to join her.

Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in Miss Triscoe’s mind.

“Then you don’t feel that it was a very distinct success?” her husband asked on his return.

“Not on the surface,” she said.

“Better let ill enough alone,” he advised.

She did not heed him.  “All the same she cares for him.  The very fact that she was so cold shows that.”

“And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?”

“If she wants it to.”

XIV.

At dinner that day the question of ‘The Maiden Knight’ was debated among the noises and silences of the band.  Young Mrs. Leffers had brought the book to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it down before the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading it to her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon.

“Don’t you think it’s perfectly fascinating,” she asked Mrs. Adding, with her petted mouth.

“Well,” said the widow, doubtfully, “it’s nearly a week since I read it, and I’ve had time to get over the glow.”

“Oh, I could just read it forever!” the bride exclaimed.

“I like a book,” said her husband, “that takes me out of myself.  I don’t want to think when I’m reading.”

March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected in time that Mr. Leffers had really stated his own motive in reading.  He compromised.  “Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me.”

“Yes,” said the other, “that is what I mean.”

“The question is whether ‘The Maiden Knight’ fellow does it,” said Kenby, taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.

“What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be single-handed,” said March.

“No,” his wife corrected him, “what a man thinks she can.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, “that we’re like the English in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder.”

“If you’ll say a row of bricks,” March assented, “I’ll agree with you.  It’s certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get going.  It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in the popularity of a given book.”

“It’s like the run of a song, isn’t it?” Kenby suggested.  “You can’t stand either, when it reaches a given point.”

He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest of the table.

“It’s very curious,” March said.  “The book or the song catches a mood, or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted—”

“The discouraging part is,” Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the Marches, “that it’s never a question of real taste.  The things that go down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar palate—Now in France, for instance,” he suggested.

“Well, I don’t know,” returned the editor.  “After all, we eat a good deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people.  Even when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn’t so bad as absinthe.”

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, “If we can’t get ice-water in Europe, I don’t know what Mr. Leffers will do,” and the talk threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and European customs.

Burnamy could not bear to let it.  “I don’t pretend to be very well up in French literature,” he began, “but I think such a book as ’The Maiden Knight’ isn’t such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty well-built story when they like it.  Of course it’s sentimental, and it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character, and it makes the reader imagine it too.  The man who wrote that book may be a donkey half the time, but he’s a genius the other half.  By-and-by he’ll do something—after he’s come to see that his ’Maiden Knight’ was a fool—that I believe even you won’t be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book.”

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to March in the end, he deferred with authority still.  March liked him for coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned to like yet.  “Yes,” he said, “if he has the power you say, and can keep it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!”

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother viewed his rapture with tender amusement.  The steward was at Kenby’s shoulder with the salad and his entreating “Bleace!” and Triscoe seemed to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy’s general disagreement.  He said at last:  “I’m afraid we haven’t the documents.  You don’t seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven’t read ’The Maiden Knight’.”  He added to March:  “But I don’t defend absinthe.  Ice-water is better.  What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both for raw whiskey—and for milk-and-water.”

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next.  “The doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth Wednesday morning.  I always like to get a professional opinion on the ship’s run.”

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.

“We had quite a literary dinner,” she remarked, hovering for a moment near the chair which she later sank into.  “It must have made you feel very much at home.  Or perhaps you’re so tired of it at home that you don’t talk about books.”

“We always talk shop, in some form or other,” said Mrs. March.  “My husband never tires of it.  A good many of the contributors come to us, you know.”

“It must be delightful,” said the girl.  She added as if she ought to excuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers if she had chosen, “I’m sorry one sees so little of the artistic and literary set.  But New York is such a big place.”

“New York people seem to be very fond of it,” said Mrs. March.  “Those who have always lived there.”

“We haven’t always lived there,” said the girl.  “But I think one has a good time there—the best time a girl can have.  It’s all very well coming over for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere.  Are you going out for a long time?”

“Only for the summer.  First to Carlsbad.”

“Oh, yes.  I suppose we shall travel about through Germany, and then go to Paris.  We always do; my father is very fond of it.”

“You must know it very well,” said Mrs. March, aimlessly.

“I was born there,—if that means knowing it.  I lived there—till I was eleven years old.  We came home after my mother died.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. March.

The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of those leaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrived at asking, “Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?”

Mrs. March laughed.  “He is going to be, as soon as his poem is printed.”

“Poem?”

“Yes.  Mr. March thinks it’s very good.”

“I thought he spoke very nicely about ‘The Maiden Knight’.  And he has been very nice to papa.  You know they have the same room.”

“I think Mr. Burnamy told me,” Mrs. March said.

The girl went on.  “He had the lower berth, and he gave it up to papa; he’s done everything but turn himself out of doors.”

“I’m sure he’s been very glad,” Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy’s behalf, but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences they should shrink and wither away.

“I always tell papa that there’s no country like America for real unselfishness; and if they’re all like that, in Chicago!” The girl stopped, and added with a laugh, “But I’m always quarrelling with papa about America.”

“We have a daughter living in Chicago,” said Mrs. March, alluringly.

But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all she meant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs. March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy.  She gave another of her leaps.  “I don’t see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe, at home.  They say that there was a time when there were no chaperons before hoops, you know.”  She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting one slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, as if she were getting ready to rise at any moment.  “When they used to sit on their steps.”

“It was very pleasant before hoops—in every way,” said Mrs. March.  “I was young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was always simpler than in New York.  I used to sit on our steps.  It was delightful for girls—the freedom.”

“I wish I had lived before hoops,” said Miss Triscoe.

“Well, there must be places where it’s before hoops yet:  Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, for all I know,” Mrs. March suggested.  “And there must be people in that epoch everywhere.”

“Like that young lady who twists and turns?” said Miss Triscoe, giving first one side of her face and then the other.  “They have a good time.  I suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another.  If it came in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come in chaperons.  You’ll think I’m a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimes I wish there was more America instead of less.  I don’t believe it’s as bad as people say.  Does Mr. March,” she asked, taking hold of the chair with one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, while she gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, “does he think that America is going—all wrong?”

“All wrong?  How?”

“Oh, in politics, don’t you know.  And government, and all that.  And bribing.  And the lower classes having everything their own way.  And the horrid newspapers.  And everything getting so expensive; and no regard for family, or anything of that kind.”

Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered, still cautiously, “I don’t believe he does always.  Though there are times when he is very much disgusted.  Then he says that he is getting too old—and we always quarrel about that—to see things as they really are.  He says that if the world had been going the way that people over fifty have always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in the time of the anthropoidal apes.”

“Oh, yes:  Darwin,” said Miss Triscoe, vaguely.  “Well, I’m glad he doesn’t give it up.  I didn’t know but I was holding out just because I had argued so much, and was doing it out of—opposition.  Goodnight!” She called her salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched her gliding out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of the ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and wondered if Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were a young man she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.

The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his many bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came toward her from the opposite direction.  She nodded brightly to him, and he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.

“Here is your chair!” Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out of the chair next her own.  “Mr. March is wandering about the ship somewhere.”

“I’ll keep it for him,” said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his hand with an “Oh; thank you,” which seemed also a permission for him to wrap it about her in the chair.

He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the promenade.  The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the music-room, as she had done the day before.  At first she revolved there as if she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner; then she moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously alone.  Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs. March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too.  She waited for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept chatting on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away.  Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him.  Then she heard him saying, “Would you like a turn or two?” and Miss Triscoe answering, “Why, yes, thank you,” and promptly getting out of her chair as if the pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all nothing.

She had the composure to say, “You can leave your shawl with me, Miss Triscoe,” and to receive her fervent, “Oh, thank you,” before they sailed off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of the music-room.  Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from which she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when he happened along.

He chose to be perverse about her romance.  “Well, now, you had better let them alone.  Remember Kendricks.”  He meant one of their young friends whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left them in lasting doubt of what they had done.  “My sympathies are all with the pivotal girl.  Hadn’t she as much right to him, for the time being, or for good and all, as Miss Triscoe?”

“That depends upon what you think of Burnamy.”

“Well, I don’t like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from her just when she’s made sure of him.  How do you suppose she is feeling now?”

“She isn’t feeling at all.  She’s letting her revolving light fall upon half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or consecutively.  All that she wants to make sure of is that they’re young men—or old ones, even.”

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said.  “I’ve been having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room.”

“You smell like it,” said his wife, not to seem too eager:  “Well?”

“Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout.  He doesn’t think things are going as they should in America.  He hasn’t been consulted, or if he has, his opinion hasn’t been acted upon.”

“I think he’s horrid,” said Mrs. March.  “Who are they?”

“I couldn’t make out, and I couldn’t ask.  But I’ll tell you what I think.”

“What?”

“That there’s no chance for, Burnamy.  He’s taking his daughter out to marry her to a crowned head.”

XV.

It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade.  Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three or four deep.  Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps.  The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and was prettily treated with German, and American flags:  it was hard to go wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March’s wing.

Where they stood they could see Burnamy’s face, flashing and flushing in the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained talking and laughing till the music began again.

“Don’t you want to try it?” he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.

“Isn’t it rather—public?” she asked back.

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.

“Perhaps it is rather obvious,” he said, and he made a long glide over the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter.  The next moment her hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each other within the circle.

“How well she dances!” said Miss Triscoe.

“Do you think so?  She looks as if she had been wound up and set going.”

“She’s very graceful,” the girl persisted.

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of passengers on all steamers.  There were recitations in English and German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever more piano performance.  Most of those who took part were of the race gifted in art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its fathers counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme, with an audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned by Mr. Burnamy:  her husband had refused to come to the entertainment.  She hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.

The next morning, at five o’clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the pretty harbor of Plymouth.  In the cool early light the town lay distinct along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls dividing the green fields.  The very iron-clads in the harbor close at hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the sunrise had not quite faded.  The breath of the land came freshly out over the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves.  Gulls wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices on the tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the ship’s side.  A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage they formed picturesque groups on the tender’s deck, and they set out for the shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they left clustering along the rail of the Norumbia.  Mr. and Mrs. Leffers bade March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee with them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated; these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed at others.  The seats of the Lefferses were given to March’s old Ohio friend and his wife.  He tried to engage them in the tally which began to be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held aloof.

Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent is apparently of no interest to Europe.  There were some meagre New York stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.

“I always have to get used to it over again,” said Kenby.  “This is the twentieth time I have been across, and I’m just as much astonished as I was the first, to find out that they don’t want to know anything about us here.”

“Oh,” said March, “curiosity and the weather both come from the west.  San Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago about New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels the other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave.”

“Ah, but London doesn’t care a rap about Vienna,” said Kenby.

“Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own side.  It isn’t an infallible analogy.”

Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the discussion.  He gulped it, and broke out.  “Why should they care about us, anyway?”

March lightly ventured, “Oh, men and brothers, you know.”

“That isn’t sufficient ground.  The Chinese are men and brothers; so are the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we’re not impatient for the latest news about them.  It’s civilization that interests civilization.”

“I hope that fact doesn’t leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?” Burnamy put in, with a smile.

“Do you think we are civilized?” retorted the other.

“We have that superstition in Chicago,” said Burnamy.  He added, still smiling, “About the New-Yorkers, I mean.”

“You’re more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed.  New York is an anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can say that,” Kenby cheerfully protested, “since the Reformers came in.  Look at our streets!”

“Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals.  But how long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?”

“Oh, never in the world!” said the optimistic head of the table.

“I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn’t feel that it is one of the things that help to establish Tammanys with us.  You will see our Tammany in power after the next election.”  Kenby laughed in a large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other’s flame.  “New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it’s morally a frontier mining-town.  Socially it’s—” He stopped as if he could not say what.

“I think it’s a place where you have a very nice time, papa,” said his daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about it.

Her father went on as if he had not heard her.  “It’s as vulgar and crude as money can make it.  Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there’s enough, it counts for everything.  In less than a year you’ll have Tammany in power; it won’t be more than a year till you’ll have it in society.”

“Oh no!  Oh no!” came from Kenby.  He did not care much for society, but he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the amenities.

“Isn’t society a good place for Tammany to be in?” asked March in the pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby’s laugh.

“There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.  Society is as bad as all the rest of it.  And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially, the whole country wishes to be and tries to be.”

There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could find just the terms of refutation.

“Well,” said Kenby at last, “it’s a good thing there are so many lines to Europe.  We’ve still got the right to emigrate.”

“Yes, but even there we don’t escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers for exercising a man’s right to live where he chooses.  And there is no country in Europe—except Turkey, or Spain—that isn’t a better home for an honest man than the United States.”

The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to speak.  Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe’s eye, and said, slowly and distinctly:  “I don’t know just what reason you have to feel as you do about the country.  I feel differently about it myself—perhaps because I fought for it.”

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe’s cheek, flush, and then he doubted its validity.

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a violent impulse upon it.  He said, coldly, “I was speaking from that stand-point.”

The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though he had put himself in the wrong.  His old hand trembled beside his plate, and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife was sharing his pain and shame.

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in Cuxhaven.  Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line before, and asked several questions.  Her father did not speak again, and after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto.  Eltwin rose at the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke another defeat, in some way.

Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe’s eye, “I think I ought to beg your pardon, sir.  I do beg your pardon.”

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside to let the two men come together.

“That is all right, Colonel—”

“Major,” Eltwin conscientiously interposed.

“Major,” Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand which had been tremulously rising toward him.  “There can’t be any doubt of what we did, no matter what we’ve got.”

“No, no!” said the other, eagerly.  “That was what I meant, sir.  I don’t think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the country has a right to think what he pleases about it.”

Triscoe said, “That is all right, my dear sir.  May I ask your regiment?”

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife of the one and the daughter of the other.  They saw the young girl making some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.

“That was rather fine, my dear,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, I don’t know.  It was a little too dramatic, wasn’t it?  It wasn’t what I should have expected of real life.”

“Oh, you spoil everything!  If that’s the spirit you’re going through Europe in!”

“It isn’t.  As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform.”

XVI.

That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom able to use it so aptly.  He always found that people suffered, his belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union.  Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied motives which impelled men at that time; but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man of property and a man of family, in doing so.  His family had improved as time passed, and it was now so old that back of his grandfather it was lost in antiquity.  This ancestor had retired from the sea and become a merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his son established himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-trader whose social position was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to realize just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery was; it heightened the effect of his pose.

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted Brigadier-General at the close.  With this honor, and with the wound which caused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was not long in going to pieces in his hands.  Then the young couple went to live in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died when the child was ten years old.  A little later his father-in-law died, and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a right to expect.

The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the Republic as they had been under the Second Empire.  He was still willing to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be used on a citizen’s ticket in his district; but his provision-man was sent to Congress instead.  Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them.  She had no duties, but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian.  Her character was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for the summer.

The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at Berne.  Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without it.  He was really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved it.  His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children.  She did not think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father.  She said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived?  They seemed to have everything there, like any place.  She had wanted to ask Mrs. Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March’s suggestion he took one of the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where the Norumbia was to land again.  The young people talked across Mrs. March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like airy clefts in low banks of clouds.  It seemed all the nicer not to know just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of the ship.  Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea.  There had been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they shrank from forming others.  Then the charm of the idle, eventless life grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable end.

Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles.  Burnamy and Miss Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated to have the voyage over.  They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water.  At Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French fortifications much more on show than the English had been.  Nothing marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought.  The elder couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and, leave the young people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship.  Burnamy was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe.  If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact.  Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an intolerable resignation to the girl’s absence.

“Yes,” said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, “that terrible patience of youth!”

“Patience?  Folly!  Stupidity!  They ought to be together every instant!  Do they suppose that life is full of such chances?  Do they think that fate has nothing to do but—”

She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, “Hang round and wait on them?”

“Yes!  It’s their one chance in a life-time, probably.”

“Then you’ve quite decided that they’re in love?” He sank comfortably back, and put up his weary legs on the chair’s extension with the conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.

“I’ve decided that they’re intensely interested in each other.”

“Then what more can we ask of them?  And why do you care what they do or don’t do with their chance?  Why do you wish their love well, if it’s that?  Is marriage such a very certain good?”

“It isn’t all that it might be, but it’s all that there is.  What would our lives have been without it?” she retorted.

“Oh, we should have got on.  It’s such a tremendous risk that we, ought to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point.  I don’t mind their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing.  I doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he hadn’t selected himself, and his daughter doesn’t strike me as a young lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice.  She has her little charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after?  You wouldn’t want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe’s money, even if she had money, and I doubt if she has much.  It’s all very pretty to have a girl like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn’t altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in the very world she belongs to.  I don’t think it’s for us to promote the affair.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” she sighed.  “I will let them alone from this out.  Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very long.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any harm done yet,” said her husband, with a laugh.

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she suffered from an illogical disappointment.  The young people got through the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement; she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their chairs on deck.

There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a remorseful pang.  “Well,” she said, “I wish we were going to be in New York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg.”

“Oh, no!  Oh, no!” he protested.  “Not so bad as that, my dear.  This is the last night, and it’s hard to manage, as the last night always is.  I suppose the last night on earth—”

“Basil!” she implored.

“Well, I won’t, then.  But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger.  I’ve never seen a Dutch lugger, and—”

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by.  They were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up into his face while he talked.

“Now,” Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, “let us go instantly.  I wouldn’t for worlds have them see us here when they get found again.  They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that would spoil everything.  Come!”

XVII.

Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss Triscoe’s prompting.  He had not to wait long.

“And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?”

“Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public.”

“How could you tell that they were-taking?”

“They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them.”

“And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?”

“I don’t believe it was.  The theory in the office was that he didn’t think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things into shape.”

“What things?”

“Oh—ideas.  He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics.  He owns shares in everything but the United States Senate—gas, electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers—and now he would like some Senate.  That’s what I think.”

She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father’s fiercest accusals of the country.  “How fascinating it is!” she said, innocently.

“And I suppose they all envy your coming out?”

“In the office?”

“Yes.  I should envy, them—staying.”

Burnamy laughed.  “I don’t believe they envy me.  It won’t be all roses for me—they know that.  But they know that I can take care of myself if it isn’t.”  He remembered something one of his friends in the office had said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.

She abruptly left the mere personal question.  “And which would you rather write:  poems or those kind of sketches?”

“I don’t know,” said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms.  “I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there are things you can’t say in prose.  I used to write a great deal of verse in college; but I didn’t have much luck with editors till Mr. March took this little piece for ’Every Other Week’.”

“Little?  I thought it was a long poem!”

Burnamy laughed at the notion.  “It’s only eight lines.”

“Oh!” said the girl.  “What is it about?”

He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in a person of his make.  “I can repeat it if you won’t give me away to Mrs. March.”

“Oh, no indeed!” He said the lines over to her very simply and well.  “They are beautiful—beautiful!”

“Do you think so?” he gasped, in his joy at her praise.

“Yes, lovely.  Do you know, you are the first literary man—the only literary man—I ever talked with.  They must go out—somewhere!  Papa must meet them at his clubs.  But I never do; and so I’m making the most of you.”

“You can’t make too much of me, Miss Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

She would not mind his mocking.  “That day you spoke about ’The Maiden Knight’, don’t you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that way.  I didn’t know you were an author then.”

“Well, I’m not much of an author now,” he said, cynically, to retrieve his folly in repeating his poem to her.

“Oh, that will do for you to say.  But I know what Mrs. March thinks.”

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; ’Every Other Week’ was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs. March’s interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know just how much she thought of him as a writer?  “Did she like the poem.”

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March’s liking for Burnamy.  “But it wouldn’t do to tell you all she said!” This was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his personal history.  “And you didn’t know any one when, you went up to Chicago from—”

“Tippecanoe?  Not exactly that.  I wasn’t acquainted with any one in the office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to let me try my hand.  That was all I could ask.”

“Of course!  You knew you could do the rest.  Well, it is like a romance.  A woman couldn’t have such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.

“But women do!” Burnamy retorted.  “There is a girl writing on the paper now—she’s going to do the literary notices while I’m gone—who came to Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who’s made her way single-handed from interviewing up.”

“Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm.  “Is she nice?”

“She’s mighty clever, and she’s nice enough, too, though the kind of journalism that women do isn’t the most dignified.  And she’s one of the best girls I know, with lots of sense.”

“It must be very interesting,” said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in the way she said it.  “I suppose you’re quite a little community by yourselves.”

“On the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don’t.  There’s quite a regiment of people on a big paper.  If you’d like to come out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhaps you could get the Woman’s Page to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette.”

He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, “Do women write it?”

He laughed reminiscently.  “Well, not always.  We had one man who used to do it beautifully—when he was sober.  The department hasn’t had any permanent head since.”

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it in fully.  She abruptly left the subject.  “Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?”

“About one, I believe—there’s a consensus of stewards to that effect, anyway.”  After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?”

“We are going to Dresden, first, I believe.  Then we may go on down to Vienna.  But nothing is settled, yet.”

“Are you going direct to Dresden?”

“I don’t know.  We may stay in Hamburg a day or two.”

“I’ve got to go straight to Carlsbad.  There’s a sleeping-car that will get me there by morning:  Mr. Stoller likes zeal.  But I hope you’ll let me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow.”

“You’re very kind.  You’ve been very good already—to papa.”  He protested that he had not been at all good.  “But he’s used to taking care of himself on the other side.  Oh, it’s this side, now!”

“So it is!  How strange that seems!  It’s actually Europe.  But as long as we’re at sea, we can’t realize it.  Don’t you hate to have experiences slip through your fingers?”

“I don’t know.  A girl doesn’t have many experiences of her own; they’re always other people’s.”

This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.  He only suggested, “Well; sometimes they make other people have the experiences.”

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left the question.  “Do you understand German?”

“A little.  I studied it at college, and I’ve cultivated a sort of beer-garden German in Chicago.  I can ask for things.”

“I can’t, except in French, and that’s worse than English, in Germany, I hear.”

“Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment.  Will you?”

She did not answer.  “It must be rather late, isn’t it?” she asked.  He let her see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it’s very late,” and led the way within.  “I must look after my packing; papa’s always so prompt, and I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left home; we expect to get one in Dresden.  Good-night!”

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the first young lady he had known who had a maid.  The fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.

XVIII.

The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the shore.  No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage.  People went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a moment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls.  At an early hour after breakfast the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give, anxiously conferred together.  The question whether you ought ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship.  March made the experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an officer of the ship.  He also collected a handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where the Norumbia had dropped anchor.  People who had brought their hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge them afresh not to forget it.  The tender came alongside, and the transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every one sat down in some other’s chair.  At last the trunks were all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with the hand-baggage.  “Is this Hoboken?” March murmured in his wife’s ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed action of the kinematograph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing rain.  Burnamy’s smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from Burnamy’s smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles.  Rose Adding was talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.

Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh count that it was all there.  But he need not have taken the trouble; their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have been very tired of.  He brought their handbags into the customs-room at the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee with unexpected cordiality.

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the restaurant.  It was full of strange noises and figures and odors—the shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars.  Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, “Krahnay, Krahnay!” When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and shouted, “Crane!  Crane!” and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry, “Kren!  Kren!” But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.

People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd.  There was a great deal of talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served them with what they chose for them.  Otherwise the Germans, though voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual with these amiable people.

Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife, and leaned over her son to ask, “Do you know what lese-majesty is?  Rose is afraid I’ve committed it!”

“No, I don’t,” said March.  “But it’s the unpardonable sin.  What have you been doing?”

“I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he said at half past three, I said, ‘How tiresome!’ Rose says the railroads belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table, it’s constructive censure of the Emperor, and that’s lese-majesty.”  She gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March’s face with an appealing smile.

“Well, I don’t think you’ll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March.  She’s been complaining of the coffee.”

“Indeed I shall say what I like,” said Mrs. March.  “I’m an American.”

“Well, you’ll find you’re a German, if you like to say anything disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor’s railroad station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your account.”

Mrs. Adding asked:  “Then they won’t punish ladies?  There, Rose!  I’m safe, you see; and you’re still a minor, though you are so wise for your years.”

She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.

“I don’t know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,”, said Mrs. March.  “And you’ve joined with her in her joking.  Go and speak, to him!”

The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen.  March overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man’s face.  March tried to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said:  “Oh, yes.  I understood that.  But I got to thinking; and I don’t want my mother to take any risks.”

“I don’t believe she will, really, Rose.  But I’ll speak to her, and tell her she can’t be too cautious.”

“Not now, please!” the boy entreated.

“Well, I’ll find another chance,” March assented.  He looked round and caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her father appeared not to see March.  “It’s all right, with Rose,” he said, when he sat down again by his wife; “but I guess it’s all over with Burnamy,” and he told her what he had seen.  “Do you think it came to any displeasure between them last night?  Do you suppose he offered himself, and she—”

“What nonsense!” said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace.  “It’s her father who’s keeping her away from him.”

“I shouldn’t mind that.  He’s keeping her away from us, too.”  But at that moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came over to speak to his wife.  She said they were going on to Dresden that evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other on the train or in Hamburg.  March, at this advance, went to speak with her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.

“They’re Goths,” he said of the Germans.  “I could hardly get that stupid brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch.”

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now.  The young fellow asked if he could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the train.  He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe he did not seem in a hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, “Yes, you can see that as far as they’re concerned.”

“It’s a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these affairs,” he said.  “How simple it would be if there were no parties to them but the lovers!  But nature is always insisting upon fathers and mothers, and families on both sides.”

XIX.

The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia’s people alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.  Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes rising half-way.  No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little sea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.  Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails.  The gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for the inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold.  Flowers were blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a dogged energy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottages and even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses were double lines of low willows.  At the first stop the train made, the passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the station, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proof that vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements.  But it was not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly in slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German affections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.

A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, which had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window.  This boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, if their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism, was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia’s passengers, and they met no more in their sea-solidarity.  Of their table acquaintance the Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking for them.  He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg at seven.  He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven; Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they were in the same carriage with the Eltwins.  He had got a letter from Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage rooms for them at the hotel where he was going to stay with him.

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors.  There was really no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general frenzy.  With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector.  The officer opened one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which were to go to the hotel overnight.  At last the division was made; the Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went back into the station.

They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at the door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands.  They were not proud, but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank, they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have been worse.

As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German lands.  It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult.  March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had not been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but his wife would not be amused.  She said that no country which suffered such a thing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no city in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughly trolleyed as Hamburg.  The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights of connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they drove to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.

XX.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus, over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, and children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer of the fatherland.  It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was the novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, and their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain immutably preposterous.  They are apparently imagined for the stature of sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.

The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier, who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house.  At the dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner, stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until they were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward.  He let them get fairly seated before he started the car, and so lost the fun of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each other for support.  The Germans have so little sense of humor that probably no one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon the floor.  No one apparently found it droll that the conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no one smiled at their efforts to make him understand where they wished to go, and he did not wink at the other passengers in trying to find out.  Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the dismounting passenger had taken time to get well away from it.  When the Marches got into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond their street, the conductor would not take their fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March’s self-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff like a drum-major’s, who left his place at the circus door to get their tickets.  He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling in their hearts.  “One ought always to overpay them,” March sighed, “and I will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for it.  That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we come out.”  As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who showed them to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by his remorse.

“One ought to do it,” he said.  “We are of the quality of good geniuses to these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in the road.  It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than we.”  His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience between them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus, of all modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire.  The house was full from floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either German or English.  They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic attraction of “Miss Darlings, the American Star,” as she was billed in English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the pantomimic piece which closed the evening.

This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany.  When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the right mood to enjoy the allegory of “The Enchanted Mountain’s Fantasy; the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the Steep Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains, which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day’s Circus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy Ballet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen Splendor of Costume.”  The Marches were happy in this allegory, and happier in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent, and which here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces of the ‘coryphees’ to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures.  They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment, of good-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they would have got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a pang.

They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished, and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too poignant.  In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them.  Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the truth, to know why she had not met any others.  She had read much of the prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman, and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it.  But she had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kind had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

XXI.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast.  He said Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities chose to indulge the popular grudge or not.  He was himself in a joyful flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from military service.  He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest blessing of heaven.  He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to say if there were not something that he could do for them.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who could think of nothing; “tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was in Hamburg.  My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants to look him up everywhere.”

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man had apparently never known it.  His face fell; he wished to make Mrs. March believe that it was only Heine’s uncle who had lived there; but she was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know the house by his bust set in its front.  The portier and the head waiter shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it rained there every day.  As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he should by no means Miss Heine’s dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of a house bearing the promised bust.  They dismounted in order to revere it more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock, whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt, when he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any sort of two-pair back.  The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy would have been.  There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the little crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay.  To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a stationer-and-bookseller’s next to the butcher’s had heard of him, but he had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front escape him.  He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse, and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.  They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their timber-laced gables.  The facades with their lattices stretching in bands quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress.  They could not have said which delighted them more—the houses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her shipping.  At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and seemed the expression of the home-side of her history.  The sense of this gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics.  In the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity, that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful new Rathhaus.  It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger.  He could not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like the New York Stock Exchange.  The spectacle was not so frantic; people were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other’s noses; but they were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its clamor.  He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first, examples of modern German art.  The custodian led him gently about and said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any of them.

XXII.

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge of their baggage.  But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered themselves for recognition.  A porter vanished with their hand-baggage before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of alien boxes.  One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrap of paper which recorded their number and destination.  The interpreter and the porters took their fees with a professional effect of dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking and eating and drinking in the restaurant.  They burst through with the rest when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent upon escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had got very good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliated by their needless tumult.

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful joy in some of the long-estranged facts.  The road was rougher than the roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage.  Mrs. March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward her.  Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that stage.  But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error.  At the point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been forgotten.  She said she could not see how any people could be both so selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying something offensive:

“You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are.”

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

“Yes, there’s something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human beings?”

This was at ten o’clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him.  The darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense:  long levels, densely wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.

The villages and peasants’ cottages were notably few; but there was here and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.

She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and was going home to Potsdam for a visit.  She seemed like a German girl out of ‘The Initials’, and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to invest herself with some romantic interest as an American.  She failed to move the girl’s fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them just before they left their hotel.  She failed, later, on the same ground with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at Magdeburg, and talked over the ‘London Illustrated News’ with an English-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact of Mrs. March’s nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall with fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and could make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by saying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come across the sea.

“Yes,” March assented, “but that was a great while ago, and Americans were much rarer than they are now in Europe.  The Italians are so much more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you wanted to impress them.  Heaven knows how little they cared!  And then, you were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought so.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and now I’m a plain old woman.”

“Oh, not quite so bad as that.”

“Yes, I am!  Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss Triscoe?”

“Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl.  They would have found her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have had to have been here thirty years ago.”

She laughed a little ruefully.  “Well, at any rate, I should like to know how Miss Triscoe would have affected them.”

“I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank.  I could imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the royalties to her friend.  There is romance for you!”

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours’ journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul.  A sense of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.  The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing.  This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself Little Paris.  The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers.  It was rather more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the rain forgot itself.  The place was better shaded than need be in that sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others.  It had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France.  These monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be.  It is not for the victories of a people that any other people can care.  The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them, till time has softened it to a memory

“Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”

It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of 1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore years before.  Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for the sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern character of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal function; and March was more taken with the notion of the little gardens which his guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of Leipsic and enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes.  He saw certain of these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and sometimes furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his pleasure in the evening air, with his family.  The guide said he had such a garden himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised vegetables and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied that on the simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him a glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their character of victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon.  But probably they would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on making themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over nationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three years’ service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the language, he might not have risen to this.  He would have tried, for he was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a ‘valet de place’ by profession.  There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing race (which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper of a small restaurant.  He gladly abandoned his business to the care of his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him.  In his zeal to do something he possessed himself of March’s overcoat when they dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole place.  The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes, how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well.  They spared themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one’s maker and one’s neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals, which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent bridges, even during the drizzle.  There seemed to be no churches to do, and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene of Napoleon’s first great defeat.

By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at the little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relics from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it.  Old muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums, gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations, autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind, filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a loud pounding voice and a bad breath.  When he wished them to enjoy some gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte’s expense, and put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible that March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that the French had not won the battle of Leipsic.  He walked away musing pensively upon the traveller’s inadequacy to the ethics of history when a breath could so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had cleansed his lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still a Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground where Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empire slipping through his blood-stained fingers.  It was with difficulty that he could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out then or afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon’s or not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly’s.

While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite quarter, and advancing toward them.  He wore the imperial crossed by the pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, and March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming ruin in the face.

“Why, it’s Miss Triscoe!” cried his wife, and before March had noticed the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushed upon each other, and encountered with a kiss.  At the same time the visage of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General Triscoe, who gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.

The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting two days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distant prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven.  He might still have been in a pout with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and he said, “What a pity Napoleon didn’t thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!  His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had some chance of being civilized under the French.  All this unification of nationalities is the great humbug of the century.  Every stupid race thinks it’s happy because it’s united, and civilization has been set back a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about; and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up.  What a farce it is!  What’s become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, or the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?”

March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put by General Triscoe made it offensive.  “I don’t know.  Isn’t it rather quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts?  The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before them were.  And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peace is civilization.  Perhaps after a great many ages people will come together through their real interests, the human interests; but at present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism can unite them.  By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it.”

“Perhaps,” said the general, discontentedly.  “I don’t see much promise of any kind in the future.”

“Well, I don’t know.  When you think of the solid militarism of Germany, you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army is the great field of the Socialist propaganda.  The army itself may be shaped into the means of democracy—even of peace.”

“You’re very optimistic,” said Triscoe, curtly.  “As I read the signs, we are not far from universal war.  In less than a year we shall make the break ourselves in a war with Spain.”  He looked very fierce as he prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.

“Well, I’ll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war with Spain.  You can’t ask more than that, General Triscoe?”

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the ’battle of Leipsic’, or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men.  For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of geological remoteness.  The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by her father’s having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way of Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without stopping in Hamburg.  They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained the whole day before, and they had not gone out.  She asked when Mrs. March was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next morning; her husband wished to begin his cure at once.

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe’s symptoms.

“Oh, he hasn’t any.  But I know he can’t be well—with his gloomy opinions.”

“They may come from his liver,” said Mrs. March.  “Nearly everything of that kind does.  I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is the great place for that, you know.”

“Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn’t like Dresden.  It isn’t very far, is it?”

They referred to Mrs. March’s Baedeker together, and found that it was five hours.

“Yes, that is what I thought,” said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.

“If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel.  We’re going to Pupp’s; most of the English and Americans go to the hotels on the Hill, but Pupp’s is in the thick of it in the lower town; and it’s very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he’s been there often.  Mr. Burnamy is to get our rooms.”

“I don’t suppose I can get papa to go,” said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to Carlsbad with Burnamy—probably on the way from Cuxhaven.  She looked up from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground.  “You didn’t meet him here this morning?”

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, “Has Mr. Burnamy been here?”

“He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided to stop over a day.  They left on the twelve-o’clock train to-day.”

Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.

“No, we didn’t see him,” she said, carelessly.

The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe said, “We’re going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere, Mrs. March.”

“Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can’t; it’s so little!”

“Agatha,” said the girl’s father, “Mr. March tells me that the museum over there is worth seeing.”

“Well,” the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches, and moved gracefully away with her father.

“I should have thought it was Agnes,” said Mrs. March, following them with her eyes before she turned upon her husband.  “Did he tell you Burnamy had been here?  Well, he has!  He has just gone on to Carlsbad.  He made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with her.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but of course he did.”

“Then it’s all settled?”

“No, it isn’t settled.  It’s at the most interesting point.”

“Well, don’t read ahead.  You always want to look at the last page.”

“You were trying to look at the last page yourself,” she retorted, and she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him agree that Miss Triscoe’s getting her father to Carlsbad was only a question of time.

They parted heart’s-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther room when they went down to supper.  The waiter, much distracted from their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon.  The revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were apparently set to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the university town.  They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue.  They were not easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were sometimes both students and bicyclers.  As bicyclers they kept about in the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened, they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and waltz in the square before the hotel.  At one moment of the holiday some chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of ribbons somewhere.  It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at home.

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest in the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they were not content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged it in every pleasure and employment of civil life.  He estimated, perhaps not very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore citizens’ dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of the women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women had their peasant costume.

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an hour’s interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from them.  This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the common hire, while the man took the common tip.  They made haste to leave the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to the Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance.  The idea of her colonial progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages from her Central-African possessions.  They were getting their supper at the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand and began to chase a boy round the camp.  The boy was lighter-footed, and easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket.  None of the other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled away to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves with the image of Old Leipsic.

This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in the old streets of Hamburg.  A drama had just begun to be represented on a platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century beer-house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in the costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in the open air.  Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of it a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century.  But it drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play, and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy beyond the sober wont of the fatherland.  The conductor took a special interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.  From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low.  He generalized from the guide’s content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man’s clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex.  He was able to note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted.  Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved.  The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery.  He bemoaned himself after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise.  “It is a life of excitements, but not of movements,” he explained to March; and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too.  “For sugar?” he asked, as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, “No; liver.”

“Ah!” said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground with him.

XXV.

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.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars
Calm of those who have logic on their side
Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance
Explained perhaps too fully
Futility of travel
Humanity may at last prevail over nationality
Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much
Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of
Life of the ship, like the life of the sea:  a sodden monotony
Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous
Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel
Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all
Our age caricatures our youth
Prices fixed by his remorse
Recipes for dishes and diseases
Reckless and culpable optimism
Repeated the nothings they had said already
She cares for him:  that she was so cold shows that
She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression
Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism
They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart
Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine
Wilful sufferers
Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart
Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests
Work he was so fond of and so weary of

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

PART II.

XXVI.

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.

XXVII.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make up to him in the reading-room, that night.  He laid down a New York paper ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian, Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

“I wonder,” he said, “how long it’ll take’em, over here, to catch on to our way of having pictures?”

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him.  From the politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller’s preference.  “I suppose it will be some time yet.”

“I wish,” said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences and relevancies, “I could ha’ got some pictures to send home with that letter this afternoon:  something to show how they do things here, and be a kind of object-lesson.”  This term had come up in a recent campaign when some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their employees what would happen if the employees voted their political opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was fond of using it.  “I’d like ’em to see the woods around here, that the city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and everything, and give ’em some practical ideas.”

Burnamy made an uneasy movement.

“I’d ‘a’ liked to put ’em alongside of some of our improvements, and show how a town can be carried on when it’s managed on business principles.”

“Why didn’t you think of it?”

“Really, I don’t know,” said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience.

They had not met the evening before on the best of terms.  Stoller had expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for the delay.  But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that by working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had got Stoller’s crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time for the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor’s name in his paper.  It was a sort of rough but very full study of the Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipal ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control in everything.  It condemned the aristocratic constitution of the municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence, and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and no idleness, and which was managed like any large business.

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and Burnamy suffered it submissively until now.  But now, at the change in Burnamy’s tone, he changed his manner a little.

“Seen your friends since supper?” he asked.

“Only a moment.  They are rather tired, and they’ve gone to bed.”

That the fellow that edits that book you write for?”

“Yes; he owns it, too.”

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller’s respect, and he asked more deferentially, “Makin’ a good thing out of it?”

“A living, I suppose.  Some of the high-class weeklies feel the competition of the ten-cent monthlies.  But ‘Every Other Week’ is about the best thing we’ve got in the literary way, and I guess it’s holding its own.”

“Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad,” Stoller said, with a return to the sourness of his earlier mood.  “I don’t know as I care much for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you.  No snap to him.”  He clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy, “You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest.”

Stoller’s father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start.  He could remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese and pickle the pigs’ feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a price as they could extort from the townspeople.  She was a good and tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the exhaustion of their invention.  No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky, rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf; and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans.  He hated his native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as “Nix come arouce in de Dytchman’s house.”  He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back to it.  He regarded his father’s business as part of his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.  When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than when they were children.  He was long deeply in love with an American girl whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an American.  He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as fragilely and nasally American as anybody.  She made him a good, sickly, fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob’s father had died and left his money to his son, with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she could.  He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived; and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so hard to be American.  She could not help her native accent, but she kept silence when her son’s wife had company; and when her eldest granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his financial importance in the community.  He first commended himself to the Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes that he was elected on a citizens’ ticket to the Legislature.  In the reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin sooner or later; they said, “You can’t swing a bolt like you can a strike.”

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had grown up together.  His wife died shortly after, and within four years he lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go wrong first.  But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the best.  His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg, for a little discipline if not education.  He had now left them there, to learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and shame, and music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether blame them.  He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des Vaches.  It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point of wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame in his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in Stoller’s pale eyes and huge beak.

XXVIII.

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.

XXIX.

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there was no tenderness like a young contributor’s.

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp’s just the time and space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee which are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from the beginning that Pupp’s had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the concert was there.  Still it was amusing, and they were patient of Burnamy’s delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go with them to the Posthof.  He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread.  The earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in the town, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is no longer of such binding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery.  You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by half past seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into the basket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker’s maids, she puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a festive rustling as they go.

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent, where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and rain impartially through upon its army of little tables.  By this time the slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal them beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points with wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is bordered with shops and restaurants a great part of its length.  In leafy nooks between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of all those races and languages.  Booths glittering with the lapidary’s work in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut about the feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer.  He waited politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his German.

“You’ll find,” he said, as they crossed the road again, “that it’s well to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass.  I should still be lagging along in my thirties if it hadn’t been for fooling, and here I am well on in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever.”

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that morning the sun was shining.  At the verge of the open space a group of pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her breast, met them and bade them a ‘Guten Morgen’ of almost cheerful note, but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.

“Ah, Lili!  We want an extra good table, this morning.  These are some American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of the Marches; “I get you one.”

“You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn’t had one already.”

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found.  She had crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places.  Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them, and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders.  The girls were all from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for sometimes they paid for their places.

“What a mass of information!” said March.  “How did you come by it?”

“Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe.”

“It’s not a bad habit, if one doesn’t carry it too far.  How did Lili learn her English?”

“She takes lessons in the winter.  She’s a perfect little electric motor.  I don’t believe any Yankee girl could equal her.”

“She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did.  What astonishes one over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own level.  And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to equal them in any other way.  At Pupp’s, if we go to one end of the out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us:  one to bring our coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them.  If we go to the other end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less than the least I give any three of the men waiters.”

“You ought to be ashamed of that,” said his wife.

“I’m not.  I’m simply proud of your sex, my dear.”

“Women do nearly everything, here,” said Burnamy, impartially.  “They built that big new Kaiserbad building:  mixed the mortar, carried the hods, and laid the stone.”

“That makes me prouder of the sex than ever.  But come, Mr. Burnamy!  Isn’t there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?”

“Well, I can’t say,” Burnamy hesitated.

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill, sweet promises of haste.  The morning sun fell broken through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the men with harlequin patches of light and shade.  A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust.  Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours.  She was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests.  In her history there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullen young fellow . . . .  Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.

“I don’t believe,” he said, “that I recognize-any celebrities here.”

“I’m sorry,” said March.  “Mrs. March would have been glad of some Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere well-borns.  But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness.”

“I’m satisfied with the picturesqueness,” said his wife.  “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Burnamy.”

“Why can’t we have this sort of thing at home?”

“We’re getting something like it in the roof-gardens,” said March.  “We couldn’t have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us.  At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table.  At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this.  So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the mosquito-line into the night air.  I haven’t seen a fly since I came to Europe.  I really miss them; it makes me homesick.”

“There are plenty in Italy,” his wife suggested.

“We must get down there before we go home.”

“But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany?  Why did no traveller ever put it in his book?  When your stewardess said so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff.”  He turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor:  “Isn’t Lili rather long?  I mean for such a very prompt person.  Oh, no!”

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted “Fraulein!” to Lili; with her hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the tables.  She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, “In a minute!” and vanished in the crowd.

“Does that mean anything in particular?  There’s really no hurry.”

“Oh, I think she’ll come now,” said Burnamy.  March protested that he had only been amused at Lili’s delay; but his wife scolded him for his impatience; she begged Burnamy’s pardon, and repeated civilities passed between them.  She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail.  There was no one so effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.

“They all wear corsets,” Burnamy explained.

“How much you know already!” said Mrs. March.  “I can see that Europe won’t be lost on you in anything.  Oh, who’s that?” A lady whose costume expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove with a graceful tilt.  Burnamy was silent.  “She must be an American.  Do you know who she is?”

“Yes.”  He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies inspire.  “What grace!  Is she beautiful?”

“Very.”  Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful.  She asked March to look, but he refused.

“Those things are too squalid,” he said, and she liked him for saying it; she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and the breakfast was lost.  Tears came into the girl’s eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks.  “There!  That is what I call tragedy,” said March.  “She’ll have to pay for those things.”

“Oh, give her the money, dearest!”

“How can I?”

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial breakfasts on two well-laden trays.  She forestalled Burnamy’s reproaches for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.

“I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American princess.”

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of their compatriots as make them.

“Oh, come now, Lili!” said Burnamy.  “We have queens in America, but nothing so low as princesses.  This was a queen, wasn’t it?”

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her.  “All people say it is princess,” she insisted.

“Well, if she’s a princess we must look her up after breakfast,” said Burnamy.  “Where is she sitting?”

She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder, and her hireling trying to keep up with her.

“We’re all very proud of Lili’s having a hired man,” said Burnamy.  “We think it reflects credit on her customers.”

March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an early-rising invalid.  “What coffee!”

He drew a long sigh after the first draught.

“It’s said to be made of burnt figs,” said Burnamy, from the inexhaustible advantage of his few days’ priority in Carlsbad.

“Then let’s have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible.  But why burnt figs?  That seems one of those doubts which are much more difficult than faith.”

“It’s not only burnt figs,” said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, “if it is burnt figs, but it’s made after a formula invented by a consensus of physicians, and enforced by the municipality.  Every cafe in Carlsbad makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price.”

“You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves,” sighed March.

“Oh, I know a lot more things.  Are you fond of fishing?”

“Not very.”

“You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught them.”

“I don’t see why that isn’t a good notion:  the last thing I should want to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally acquainted with.  Well, I’m never going away from Carlsbad.  I don’t wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back.”

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together about the place, and had given him to put in shape.  It was run in the interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was ‘kurgemass’.  He won such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time:  he said to March, “But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal acquaintance, there’s a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you, and you know what you are eating.”

“Is it a municipal restaurant?”

“Semi-municipal,” said Burnamy, laughing.

“We’ll take Mrs. March,” said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt the limitations of a woman’s sense of humor, which always define themselves for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the breakfasters.  The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was lost in them.  The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of “Fraulein!  Fraulein!” that followed them.  The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues.  It was more than an hour before Burnamy caught Lili’s eye, and three times she promised to come and be paid before she came.  Then she said, “It is so nice, when you stay a little,” and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was still in her place.

“Do go and see who it can be!” Mrs. March entreated.  “We’ll wait here,” and he obeyed.  “I am not sure that I like him,” she said, as soon as he was out of hearing.  “I don’t know but he’s coarse, after all.  Do you approve of his knowing so many people’s ‘taches’ already?”

“Would it be any better later?” he asked in tern.  “He seemed to find you interested.”

“It’s very different with us; we’re not young,” she urged, only half seriously.

Her husband laughed.  “I see you want me to defend him.  Oh, hello!” he cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who was nodding to them from as far as she could see them.  “This is the easy kind of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a novel.”

XXX.

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her.  “Do you know I felt it must be you, all the time!  When did you come?  Where is your father?  What hotel are you staying at?”

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of the hotels on the hill.  On the way back to her father it appeared that he wished to consult March’s doctor; not that there was anything the matter.

The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his fellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but he seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his hand, to have drunk it all.  Was March going off on his forenoon tramp?  He believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug, though he thought of trying it, now he was there.  He was told the walks were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he thought Mrs. March would like it.

“I shall like your account of it,” she answered.  “But I’ll walk back on a level, if you please.”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Triscoe pleaded, “come with us!”

She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where the girl’s real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.

March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain.  At first they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and less possible to include him in it.  When it began to concern their common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.

“They’re so young in their thoughts,” said Burnamy, “and they seem as much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.  They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is now; don’t you think?  I mean, in the eighteen-sixties.”

“Oh, yes, I can see that.”

“I don’t know why we shouldn’t be born older in each generation than people were in the last.  Perhaps we are,” he suggested.

“I don’t know how you mean,” said the girl, keeping vigorously up with him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.

“I don’t believe I can quite make it out myself.  But fancy a man that began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past experience of the whole race—”

“He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn’t he?”

“Rather monstrous, yes,” he owned, with a laugh.  “But that’s where the psychological interest would come in.”

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it.  “I suppose you’ve been writing all sorts of things since you came here.”

“Well, it hasn’t been such a great while as it’s seemed, and I’ve had Mr. Stoller’s psychological interests to look after.”

“Oh, yes!  Do you like him?”

“I don’t know.  He’s a lump of honest selfishness.  He isn’t bad.  You know where to have him.  He’s simple, too.”

“You mean, like Mr. March?”

“I didn’t mean that; but why not?  They’re not of the same generation, but Stoller isn’t modern.”

“I’m very curious to see him,” said the girl.

“Do you want me to introduce him?”

“You can introduce him to papa.”

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead.  He saw them, and called up:  “Don’t wait for me.  I’ll join you, gradually.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss Triscoe.  “I want to get the Hirschensprung in,” he explained.  “It’s the cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away from an emperor who was after him.”

“Oh, yes.  They have them everywhere.”

“Do they?  Well, anyway, there’s a noble view up there.”

There was no view on the way up.  The Germans’ notion of a woodland is everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes primevally herded in.  It means the close-set stems of trees, with their tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts.  When the sun shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and there with the gold that trickles through.  There is nothing of the accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil.  They remain nurseries, but they have the charm which no human care can alienate.  The smell of their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of exemption from care.  There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and was less intrusive than if he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has played from the beginning of time.  The other invalids who haunted the forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the forest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama.  He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met, however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated their reunion in response to the young man’s longing, her will making itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to imagine.

He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, he was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them.  The thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest of the year in demolishing.

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from the Hirschensprung.  It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.

XXXI.

Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with Miss Triscoe.  He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful lines which defined, the girl’s figure from the slant of her flowery hat to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist.  One happy morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment, and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.

The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shops beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and his daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors in the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could get them.  They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs. March back to the shop.  The man had already put up his shutters, and was just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the stork-scissors they had seen in the window.  The gas was out, and the shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.

“I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March,” he laughed, nervously, “and you must let me lend you the money.”

“Why, of course!” she answered, joyfully humoring his feint.  “Shall I put my card in for the man to send home to her with them?”

“Well—no.  No.  Not your card—exactly.  Or, yes!  Yes, you must, I suppose.”

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after supper listening to the concert at Pupp’s, and thanked Mrs. March for the scissors.  Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe joined them, to her father’s frowning mystification.  He stared round for a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interest Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in.  He had to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concert through beside Miss Triscoe.

“What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?” March demanded, when his wife and he were alone.

“Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest,” she began, in a tone which he felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.

“Look here, my dear!  Didn’t you promise to let this love-affair alone?”

“That was on the ship.  And besides, what would you have done, I should like to know?  Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?” She added, carelessly, “He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him.”

“Oh, does he!”

“Yes.  He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we will chaperon them.  And I promised that you would.”

“That I would?”

“It will do just as well if you go.  And it will be very amusing; you can see something of Carlsbad society.”

“But I’m not going!” he declared.  “It would interfere with my cure.  The sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of unwholesome things.”

“Nonsense!  The refreshments will be ‘kurgemass’, of course.”

“You can go yourself,” he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs. March.  It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.

“Very well, then,” she said at last, “I will go.”

It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to pay two florins and a half.  There must have been some sort of restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy’s party went with a good deal of amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none unless it was the advantages which the military had.  The long hall over the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking.  The military enjoyed the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the dining space.  There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes, and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space.  From the gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety, and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to the dancing-floor, and toward ten o’clock it became rather crowded.  A party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic versions of the waltz.  At first they danced with the young men who came with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, and danced with any of the officers who asked them.

“I know it’s the custom,” said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to be dancing all the time with Burnamy, “but I never can like it without an introduction.”

“No,” said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away, “I don’t believe papa would, either.”

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her.  She glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused herself with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good fortune, Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did not know, came up at the moment.  She rose and put her hand on his arm, and they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away.  The officer looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. March with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably asking her to dance.  She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much that she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown children and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-dated waltz.

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they were suddenly revolving with the rest. . .  A tide of long-forgotten girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy.  She saw them falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously apologizing and incessantly bowing.

“Oh, are you hurt?” Mrs. March implored.  “I’m sure you must be killed; and I did it!  I don’t know, what I was thinking of!”

The girl laughed.  “I’m not hurt a bit!”

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and congratulation.  In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all right.  “How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!” she said, and she laughed again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous.  “But I’m glad those American girls didn’t see me.  And I can’t be too thankful papa didn’t come!”

Mrs. March’s heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would think of her.  “You must tell him I did it.  I can never lift up my head!”

“No, I shall not.  No one did it,” said the girl, magnanimously.  She looked down sidelong at her draperies.  “I was so afraid I had torn my dress!  I certainly heard something rip.”

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy’s coat, which he had caught into his hand and held in place till he could escape to the men’s dressing-room, where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected by the ladies.  He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to Miss Triscoe’s pension, and then to Mrs. March’s hotel.

It was quite eleven o’clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room.  She decided not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had danced passed between the tables near her.  He caught her eye and bowed with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, “Who’s your pretty young friend?”

“Oh, that!” she answered carelessly.  “That was one of the officers at the ball,” and she laughed.

“You seem to be in the joke, too,” he said.  “What is it?”

“Oh, something.  I’ll tell you some time.  Or perhaps you’ll find out.”

“I’m afraid you won’t let me wait.”

“No, I won’t,” and now she told him.  She had expected teasing, ridicule, sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of retrospective tenderness which he showed.  “I wish I could have seen you; I always thought you danced well.”  He added:  “It seems that you need a chaperon too.”

The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal.  In the grounds an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit for hers.  It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe’s sitting in turn, and then Burnamy.  Then he had the inspiration to propose that they should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was within the scope of the silhouettist’s art; he posed them in his little bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison phonograph.

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group.  “Why not?” he pleaded.

“You oughtn’t to ask,” she returned.  “You’ve no business to have Miss Triscoe’s picture, if you must know.”

“But you’re there to chaperon us!” he persisted.

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, “You need a chaperon who doesn’t lose her head, in a silhouette.”  But it seemed useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, “Shall we let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?”

Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel.  In turning from the gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with Mrs. Adding and Rose.  The ladies exclaimed at each other in an astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had something to say.  The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into her hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes, and she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised to be back in an hour.

“Well, now what scrape are you in?” March asked when his wife came home, and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could not fail to note.  He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed very comfortable.

His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at the ball.

He said, lazily:  “They seem to be working you for all you’re worth.  Is that it?”

“No; there is something worse.  Something’s happened which throws all that quite in the shade.  Mrs. Adding is here.”

“Mrs. Adding?” he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not allow was growing on him.

“Don’t be stupid, dear!  Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the Norumbia.  The mother of the nice boy.”

“Oh, yes!  Well, that’s good!”

“No, it isn’t!  Don’t say such a thing—till you know!” she cried, with a certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the fact.  He sat up as if better to confront the mystery.  “I have been at her hotel, and she has been telling me that she’s just come from Berlin, and that Mr. Kenby’s been there, and—Now I won’t have you making a joke of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for; though of course with the others on our hands you’re not to blame for not thinking of it.  But you can see yourself that she’s young and good-looking.  She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not for him, I don’t believe she would hesitate—”

“For heaven’s sake, what are you driving at?” March broke in, and she answered him as vehemently:

“He’s asked her to marry him!”

“Kenby?  Mrs. Adding?”

“Yes!”

“Well, now, Isabel, this won’t do!  They ought to be ashamed of themselves.  With that morbid, sensitive boy!  It’s shocking—”

“Will you listen?  Or do you want me to stop?” He arrested himself at her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time to sink in, “She refused him, of course!”

“Oh, all right, then!”

“You take it in such a way that I’ve a great mind not to tell you anything more about it.”

“I know you have,” he said, stretching himself out again; “but you’ll do it, all the same.  You’d have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm and collected.”

“She refused him,” she began again, “although she respects him, because she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son.  Of course she’s very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man twice her age, and she’s not thirty-five yet.  I don’t think she ever cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about him.”

“I never heard of him.  I—”

Mrs. March made a “tchck!” that would have recalled the most consequent of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true intent of her words.  He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:  “Well, I won’t do it.  If she’s refused him, that’s the end of it; she needn’t know anything about him, and she has no right to.”

“Now I think differently,” said Mrs. March, with an inductive air.  “Of course she has to know about him, now.”  She stopped, and March turned his head and looked expectantly at her.  “He said he would not consider her answer final, but would hope to see her again and—She’s afraid he may follow her—What are you looking at me so for?”

“Is he coming here?”

“Am I to blame if he is?  He said he was going to write to her.”

March burst into a laugh.  “Well, they haven’t been beating about the bush!  When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her, without the least hope from her, I can’t help admiring the simple directness of these elders.”

“And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?” she cut in eagerly.

“I’ll say I don’t like the subject.  What am I in Carlsbad for?  I came for the cure, and I’m spending time and money on it.  I might as well go and take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to Kenby.”

“I know it’s bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,” said Mrs. March.  “I don’t believe he’ll want to talk with you; but if—”

“Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel?  I’m not going to have them round in my bread-trough!”

“She isn’t.  She’s at one of the hotels on the hill.”

“Very well, let her stay there, then.  They can manage their love-affairs in their own way.  The only one I care the least for is the boy.”

“Yes, it is forlorn for him.  But he likes Mr. Kenby, and—No, it’s horrid, and you can’t make it anything else!”

“Well, I’m not trying to.”  He turned his face away.  “I must get my nap, now.”  After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, “The first thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us that they’re going to get divorced.”  Then he really slept.

XXXII.

The mid-day dinner at Pupp’s was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew anything about them.  The father by his dress must have been a Protestant clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish and ladylike.  They commended themselves by always taking the table d’hote dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and the rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle:  the husband ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was not good for him.  A young girl of a different fascination remained as much a mystery.  She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became more bewildering as she advanced through her meal, especially at supper, which she made of a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle’s length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein.  A curious contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper.  At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance of the family group.

Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses of domesticity and heart:  a young bride fed her husband soup from her own plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her two pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newly betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helpless fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check; the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change of costume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves.  The Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which had eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in any wise eventuate.  Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts of middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired, and everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love.  It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp’s that it flourished.  For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be destined to be put by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less; and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.  “We could have managed,” he said, at the close of their dinner, as he looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, “we could have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and Kenby launched upon us is too much.  Of course I like Kenby, and if the widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing:  a wife more or a widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe; but—” He stopped, and then he went on:  “Men and women are well enough.  They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times together.  But why should they get in love?—It is sure to make them uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others.”  He broke off, and stared about him.  “My dear, this is really charming—almost as charming as the Posthof.”  The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth where the musicians were giving the afternoon concert.  Between its two stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange, and all the middle tints of modern millinery.  Above on one side were the agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall.  “It would be about as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew about intruded here,” he said, “as to have a two-spanner carriage driven through this crowd.  It ought to be forbidden by the municipality.”

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she answered:  “See that handsome young Greek priest!  Isn’t he an archimandrite?  The portier said he was.”

“Then let him pass for an archimandrite.  Now,” he recurred to his grievance again, dreamily, “I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose Adding.  Oh;” he broke out, “they will spoil everything.  They’ll be with us morning, noon, and night,” and he went on to work the joke of repining at his lot.  The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers’ pretence of being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more capable of than so many lunatics.  How could they care for pretty girls playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon?  Or a cartful of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine?  Or a whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning?  Or those preposterous maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies were full of rain?  Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a horseshoe.  Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before it?  These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really care for them?  A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts.  Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality of these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she might have felt it if only he had done so.  But as it was it would be lost upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs. March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal figure carved in ebony and ivory.  They took a roundabout way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not an hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit.  She denounced him for saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of lovers while he was willing to think of young married people.  He contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door.  While they lingered, sharing the splendid creature’s hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty bystanders.  Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate delays.  After repeated agitations at the door among portiers, proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps.  The hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties.  There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman got down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even wandered aside.  There came a moment when at some signal the carriage drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention.  Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off.  At last an indescribable significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; they spoke inaudibly together.  The footman mounted to his place; the coachman gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down the street, round the corner, out of sight.  The man in the tall hat and dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; the statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.

“My dear, this is humiliating.”

“Not at all!  I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.  Think how near we came to seeing them!”

“I shouldn’t feel so shabby if we had seen them.  But to hang round here in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last!  I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?”

“What thing?”

“This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the Ages.”

“I don’t know what you mean.  I’m sure it’s very natural to want to see a Prince.”

“Only too natural.  It’s so deeply founded in nature that after denying royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier for it than anybody else.  Perhaps we may come back to it!”

“Nonsense!”

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousand years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics of the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times had passed like fever dreams.  That dull, inglorious empire had antedated or outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and all the fleeting democracies which sprang from these.

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of the Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.  It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious recognition.  “Hello!  Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanging round here for a sight of these kings.  Well, we don’t have a great many of ’em, and it’s natural we shouldn’t want to miss any.  But now, you Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you don’t seem to get enough of ’em.  Think it’s human nature, or did it get so ground into us in the old times that we can’t get it out, no difference what we say?”

“That’s very much what I’ve been asking myself,” said March.  “Perhaps it’s any kind of show.  We’d wait nearly as long for the President to come out, wouldn’t we?”

“I reckon we would.  But we wouldn’t for his nephew, or his second cousin.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be in the way of the succession.”

“I guess you’re right.”  The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March’s philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:

“But I don’t, deny that we should wait for the President because he’s a kind of king too.  I don’t know that we shall ever get over wanting to see kings of some kind.  Or at least my wife won’t.  May I present you to Mrs. March?”

“Happy to meet you, Mrs. March,” said the Iowan.  “Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson.  I’m the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about a chance like this.  I don’t mean that you’re—”

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of her unexpected likings:  “I understand, Mr. Otterson.  And I would rather be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sight of a king.”

“Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson,” said March.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the lady, “I’d like to see a king too, if it didn’t take all night.  Good-evening,” she said, turning her husband about with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March, and was not going to have it.

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly:  “The trouble with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there’s such a flow of language it carries me away, and I don’t know just where I’m landing.”

XXXIII.

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer.  One day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the Duke on his bicycle.  After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries:  two young French gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March’s exacting passion for an aristocratic air in their order.  The Duke was fat and fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair, as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed as English tailors could imagine them.

“It wouldn’t do for the very highest sort of Highhotes,” March declared, “to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like everything else, to their inferiors.”

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March’s the German Hoheit had now become Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery which it poured upon the feudal structure of society.  They applied it with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a few days after the Duke and Duchess:  he was such a young King, and of such a little country.  They watched for him from the windows of the reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him.  His moderated approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she was ambuscading.  Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator.  She was destined to see him so often afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like himself, after the informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one night with some of his faithful followers.  Burnamy had offered Mrs. March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him, places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father to join them.

“Why not?” she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.

“Why,” he said, “perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it.”

“Perhaps you had,” she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed with a knot between his eyes.

“The fact is, you know, this isn’t my treat, exactly.  It’s Mr. Stoller’s.”  At the surprise in her face he hurried on.  “He’s got back his first letter in the paper, and he’s so much pleased with the way he reads in print, that he wants to celebrate.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, non-committally.

Burnamy laughed again.  “But he’s bashful, and he isn’t sure that you would all take it in the right way.  He wants you as friends of mine; and he hasn’t quite the courage to ask you himself.”

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said:  “That’s very nice of him.  Then he’s satisfied with—with your help?  I’m glad of that.”

“Thank you.  He’s met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant to you if they went, too.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“He thought,” Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, “that we might all go to the opera, and then—then go for a little supper afterwards at Schwarzkopf’s.”

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can sup so late as ten o’clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, none but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.

“Oh!” said Mrs. March.  “I don’t know how a late supper would agree with my husband’s cure.  I should have to ask him.”

“We could make it very hygienic,” Burnamy explained.

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy’s uncandor so much that March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, “Oh, nonsense,” and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoe accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter.  That made six people, Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them.

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone when they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy.  The comedy always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a five-o’clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got to sleep by nine o’clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least, and that orgy at Schwarzkopf’s might not be at all good for him.  But still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see, as people do in the back of a box.  Stoller was not much at ease in evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and required Miss Triscoe to admire him.  As for Burnamy’s beauty it was not necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth; and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician presence than this yet unprinted contributor to ‘Every Other Week’.  He and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner in Stoller’s presence.  Her husband always denied that it existed, or if it did that it was anything but Burnamy’s effort to get on common ground with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the range of the general conversation.  He leaned over the ladies, from time to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss Triscoe.  He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite, and certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to Mrs. March’s thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was very simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish; her beauty was dazzling.

“Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the orchestra?” asked Burnamy.  “He’s ninety-six years old, and he comes to the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises, and sleeps through till the end of the act.”

“How dear!” said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her.  “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know him, Mr. March?”

“I should consider it a liberal education.  They have brought these things to a perfect system in Europe.  There is nothing to make life pass smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom.  My dear,” he added to his wife, “I wish we’d seen this sage before.  He’d have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy.  I’m always coming as Burnamy’s guest, after this.”

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate.  He whispered joyfully, “Ah!  We’ve got two kings here to-night,” and he indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York.

“He isn’t bad-looking,” said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe.  “I’ve not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once, when I was staying a month in Venice; but I don’t think they any of them looked the part better.  I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like the rest.”

“Dream!” said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes.  “He’s dead sure of it.”

“Oh, you don’t really mean that!”

“I don’t know why I should have changed my mind.”

“Then it’s as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba.  It’s better than that.  The thing is almost unique; it’s a new situation in history.  Here’s a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal status, no objective existence.  He has no sort of public being, except in the affection of his subjects.  It took an upheaval little short of an earthquake to unseat him.  His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such a hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression at the head of the oppressed.  When he’s in power again, he will be as subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will.”

“We’ve only begun,” said the general.  “This kind of king is municipal, now; but he’s going to be national.  And then, good-by, Republic!”

“The only thing like it,” March resumed, too incredulous of the evil future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, “is the rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some sort of legislated tenure of it.  The King of New York is sovereign by force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of the majority.  Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and quality?”

“It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn’t it?”

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to any sort of inquiry which is not personal.  Stoller had scarcely spoken yet; he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force, “Why shouldn’t he have the power, if they’re willing to let him?”

“Yes,” said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.  “That’s what we must ask ourselves more and more.”

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at Stoller.  “Well, I don’t know.  Do you think it’s quite right for a man to use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?”

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point of saying that he thought just this.  He asked instead, “What’s wrong about it?”

“Well, that’s one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose.  But if a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain consideration—say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn’t too hard—should you feel it morally right to accept the offer?  I don’t say think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it.”

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any response, the curtain rose.

XXXIV.

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town.  If it is a starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own.  By nine o’clock everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour; the few feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a caution of silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the opera; the little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as the restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the whole place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight.  People get quickly home to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they slip into the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an exemplary drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseous waters of Giesshubl.  Few are of the bold badness which delights in a supper at Schwarzkopf’s, and even these are glad of the drawn curtains which hide their orgy from the chance passer.

The invalids of Burnamy’s party kept together, strengthening themselves in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not strictly ‘kurgemass’.  Mrs. March played upon the interest which each of them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of their cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alone together.  The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of and into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of the hill-sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from which some white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.

He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which watches over it day and night from its piny cliff.  He had a fancy for a poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the crucifix’s vigil.  He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keep the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling over the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and a voice calling, “Look here!  Who’s running this supper party, anyway?”

His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness.  They answered him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, “Why, it’s Mr. Stoller’s treat, you know.”

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set for their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly.  He appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March’s having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening.  But she did not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the table, dropped into it.  He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him; he could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs. March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong, selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled grudge and greed that was very curious.

Stoller’s courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose at the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten, he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, “What’s the reason we can’t all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking about?”

“To Engelhaus?  I don’t know any reason, as far as I’m concerned,” answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller was obliged to ask March:

“You heard about it?”

“Yes.”  General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, “It was the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and it’s very picturesque, I believe.”

“It sounds promising,” said the general.  “Where is it?”

“Isn’t to-morrow our mineral bath?” Mrs. March interposed between her husband and temptation.

“No; the day after.  Why, it’s about ten or twelve miles out on the old postroad that Napoleon took for Prague.”

“Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it,” said the general, and he alone of the company lighted a cigar.  He was decidedly in favor of the excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect of using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor.  They were six, and two carriages would take them:  a two-spanner for four, and a one-spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home in time for supper.

Stoller asserted himself to say:  “That’s all right, then.  I want you to be my guests, and I’ll see about the carriages.”  He turned to Burnamy:  “Will you order them?”

“Oh,” said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, “the portier will get them.”

“I don’t understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept.  Surely, he can’t like that man!” said Mrs. March to her husband in their own room.

“Oh, I fancy that wouldn’t be essential.  The general seems to me, capable of letting even an enemy serve his turn.  Why didn’t you speak, if you didn’t want to go?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted to go.”

“And I knew it wouldn’t do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that she wished to go.”

“Do you think Burnamy did?”

“He seemed rather indifferent.  And yet he must have realized that he would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon.”

XXXV.

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each of their elders in turn.  It would have been grotesque for either March or Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat of the two-spanner without demur.  He asked her leave to smoke, and then he scarcely spoke to her.  But he talked to the two men in front of him almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with Triscoe’s contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their employers.  He accused some of Stoller’s most honored and envied capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.

“I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right way,” Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to bring in.  “I believe in having the government run on business principles.  They’ve got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort of thing, and it works.  I been lookin’ into it, and I got this young man, yonder”—he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner! “to help me put it in shape.  I believe it’s going to make our folks think, the best ones among them.  Here!” He drew a newspaper out of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full length, and handed it to Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to run his eye over it.  “You tell me what you think of that.  I’ve put it out for a kind of a feeler.  I got some money in that paper, and I just thought I’d let our people see how a city can be managed on business principles.”

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of harvest.  They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness.  Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land.  In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load.  From the upturned earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose.  But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains.  Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the distant haze.  Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his wife’s presence, and answered her vaguely.  She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign themselves.  They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe.  He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, “I should like to see what your contemporaries have to say to all that.”

“Well, sir,” Stoller returned, “maybe I’ll have the chance to show you.  They got my instructions over there to send everything to me.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.  They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the two-spanner behind.  They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel they had both read, and he was saying, “I suppose you think he was justly punished.”

“Punished?” she repeated.  “Why, they got married, after all!”

“Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy.”

“Then it seems to me that she was punished; too.”

“Well, yes; you might say that.  The author couldn’t help that.”

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

“I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero.  The girl was very exacting.”

“Why,” said Burnamy, “I supposed that women hated anything like deception in men too much to tolerate it at all.  Of course, in this case, he didn’t deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn’t that worse?”

“Yes, that was worse.  She could have forgiven him for deceiving her.”

“Oh!”

“He might have had to do that.  She wouldn’t have minded his fibbing outright, so much, for then it wouldn’t have seemed to come from his nature.  But if he just let her believe what wasn’t true, and didn’t say a word to prevent her, of course it was worse.  It showed something weak, something cowardly in him.”

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh.  “I suppose it did.  But don’t you think it’s rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?”

“Yes, it is,” she assented.  “That is why I say she was too exacting.  But a man oughn’t to defend him.”

Burnamy’s laugh had more pleasure in it, now.  “Another woman might?”

“No.  She might excuse him.”

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with them.  By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls.  Ever since they had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail.  The detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.

“I believe,” Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to the ruin alone, “that if you hadn’t required any quarterings of nobility from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron.  He’s a robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn’t have any scruple in levying tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair and his crossbowmen were not on a strike.  But they would be on a strike, probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union crossbowmen.”

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, “I don’t see how you can have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him.”

“Oh,” Burnamy replied in kind, “he buys my poverty and not my will.  And perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more.”

“Have you been doing something very wicked?”

“What should you have to say to me, if I had?” he bantered.

“Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you,” she mocked back.

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned.  A church at its base looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him.  He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village’s claims upon the visitors’ interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.

XXXVI.

The path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill, to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more directly.  Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden, bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her store, and man must make the most of them.  Miss Triscoe seemed to find flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her.  She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands for her skirt, and so did him two favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon them, for its maintenance.  The castle, by his story, had descended from robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly permanent.  The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cistern which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their wine in time of siege.

From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure.  With General Triscoe’s leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of the present.  It was more a difference in method than anything else that distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now.  What was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by steamer?  They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.

“Then you believe in free trade,” said Stoller, severely.

“No.  I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff laws.”

“I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night,” said Miss Triscoe, “that people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way their things are tumbled over by the inspectors.”

“It’s shocking,” said Mrs. March, magisterially.

“It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times,” her husband resumed.  “But I’m glad the travellers make no resistance.  I’m opposed to private war as much as I am to free trade.”

“It all comes round to the same thing at last,” said General Triscoe.  “Your precious humanity—”

“Oh, I don’t claim it exclusively,” March protested.

“Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.  He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his course, and coming back to where he started.”

Stoller said, “I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can’t stand the duties.”

“Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,” March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer.  He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot.  The land fell away from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into the distance.  “I don’t suppose,” Burnamy said, “that life ever does much better than this, do you?  I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and saying ‘Unberufen.’  I might knock on your bouquet; that’s wood.”

“It would spoil the flowers,” she said, looking down at them in her belt.  She looked up and their eyes met.

“I wonder,” he said, presently, “what makes us always have a feeling of dread when we are happy?”

“Do you have that, too?” she asked.

“Yes.  Perhaps it’s because we know that change must come, and it must be for the worse.”

“That must be it.  I never thought of it before, though.”

“If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears beforehand—it may come to that.”

“I hope it won’t.  I’d rather not know when I was to be happy; it would spoil the pleasure; and wouldn’t be any compensation when it was the other way.”

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief.  “Oh!  Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?” he called gayly up to him.

“I guess we’ve seen about all there is,” he answered.  “Hadn’t we better be going?” He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

“All right,” said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this one built only a few years before.  Then he locked the doors after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified themselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived in the chief house of the village.  It was uncommonly pretty; where all the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place.  March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.

“Oh, give him something!” Mrs. March entreated.  “He’s such a dear.”

“No, no!  I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,” he refused; and then he was about to yield.

“Hold on!” said Stoller, assuming the host.  “I got the change.”

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details.  Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three side-altars.  The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it is broken and obliterated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he wished to display the sepultural devices.  The graves here were planted with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with weeds and brambles:  This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into them.  One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the village.  He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping.  It is a subject much celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it.  He knew that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them.  With a curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate.  Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

“That is all?” he asked of the spectral sacristan.

“That is all,” the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something handsome.

“No, no,” said Stoller, detecting his gesture.  “Your money a’n’t good.”

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient.  In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered a sad “Danke.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

“Oh, have I lost my glove in there?” said Mrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

“Let me go and find it for you,” Burnamy entreated.

“Well,” she consented, and she added, “If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow.”

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence:  some men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand.  He came back directly, saying, “No, he didn’t find it.”

She laughed, and held both gloves up.  “No wonder!  I had it all the time.  Thank you ever so much.”

“How are we going to ride back?” asked Stoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably.  No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, “Oh, I think the way we came, is best.”

“Did that absurd creature,” she apostrophized her husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival at Pupp’s, “think I was going to let him drive back with Agatha?”

“I wonder,” said March, “if that’s what Burnamy calls her now?”

“I shall despise him if it isn’t.”

XXXVII.

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together.  He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young man did not sit down after putting his letters before him.  He said, with an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, “I have looked through the papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see.”

“What do you mean?” said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain articles were strongly circumscribed in ink.  The papers varied, but their editorials did not, in purport at least.  Some were grave and some were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller.  They all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the Honorable Jacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on foot.  He flung the papers all down at last.  “Why, they’re a pack of fools!  They don’t know what they’re talking about!  I want city government carried on on business principles, by the people, for the people.  I don’t care what they say!  I know I’m right, and I’m going ahead on this line if it takes all—” The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sight of Burnamy’s pale face.  “What’s the matter with you?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Do you mean to tell me it is”—he could not bring himself to use the word—“what they say?”

“I suppose,” said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, “it’s what you may call municipal socialism.”

Stoller jumped from his seat.  “And you knew it when you let me do it?”

“I supposed you knew what you were about.”

“It’s a lie!” Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step backward.

“Look out!” shouted Burnamy.  “You never asked me anything about it.  You told me what you wanted done, and I did it.  How could I believe you were such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talking about?” He added, in cynical contempt, “But you needn’t worry.  You can make it right with the managers by spending a little more money than you expected to spend.”

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something.  “I can take care of myself, young man.  How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing!” said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March called, before he reached their table, “Why, Mr. Burnamy, what’s the matter?”

He smiled miserably.  “Oh, I haven’t slept very well.  May I have my coffee with you?  I want to tell you something; I want you to make me.  But I can’t speak till the coffee comes.  Fraulein!” he besought a waitress going off with a tray near them.  “Tell Lili, please, to bring me some coffee—only coffee.”

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee.  “Ah, thank you, Lili,” he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been rejected.  After gulping his coffee, he turned to her:  “I want to say good-by.  I’m going away.”

“From Carlsbad?” asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.

The water came into his eyes.  “Don’t, don’t be good to me, Mrs. March!  I can’t stand it.  But you won’t, when you know.”

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about to prompt him.  At the end, “That’s all,” he said, huskily, and then he seemed to be waiting for March’s comment.  He made none, and the young fellow was forced to ask, “Well, what do you think, Mr. March?”

“What do you think yourself?”

“I think, I behaved badly,” said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from Mrs. March nerved him to add:  “I could make out that it was not my business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself.  I suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned up a day late, here; or hadn’t acted toward me as if I were a hand in his buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded.”

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March’s eyes; but her husband only looked the more serious.

He asked gently, “Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a justification.”

Burnamy laughed forlornly.  “It certainly wouldn’t justify me.  You might say that it made the case all the worse for me.”  March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on.  “But I didn’t suppose they would be onto him so quick, or perhaps at all.  I thought—if I thought anything—that it would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those things.”  He paused, and in March’s continued silence he went on.  “The chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had brought up.”

“But you let him take that chance,” March suggested.

“Yes, I let him take it.  Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!”

“Yes.”

“Of course I didn’t think it out at the time.  But I don’t deny that I had a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets’ nest he was poking his thick head into.  It makes me sick, now, to think I had.  I oughtn’t to have let him; he was perfectly innocent in it.  After the letter went, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t; and then I took the chances too.  I don’t believe he could have ever got forward in politics; he’s too honest—or he isn’t dishonest in the right way.  But that doesn’t let me out.  I don’t defend myself!  I did wrong; I behaved badly.  But I’ve suffered for it.

“I’ve had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and felt like a murderer with his victim when I’ve been alone with Stoller.  When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe that it hadn’t happened.  You can’t think what a nightmare it’s been!  Well, I’ve ruined Stoller politically, but I’ve ruined myself, too.  I’ve spoiled my own life; I’ve done what I can never explain to—to the people I want to have believe in me; I’ve got to steal away like the thief I am.  Good-by!” He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and then to Mrs. March.

“Why, you’re not going away now!” she cried, in a daze.

“Yes, I am.  I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o’clock train.  I don’t think I shall see you again.”  He clung to her hand.  “If you see General Triscoe—I wish you’d tell them I couldn’t—that I had to—that I was called away suddenly—Good-by!” He pressed her hand and dropped it, and mixed with the crowd.  Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to March:  “Should you—do you think I ought to see Stoller, and—and tell him I don’t think I used him fairly?”

“You ought to know—” March began.

But before he could say more, Burnamy said, “You’re right,” and was off again.

“Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!” Mrs. March lamented.

“I wish,” he said, “if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as true to him as I was to that poor fellow.  He condemned himself; and he was right; he has behaved very badly.”

“You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!”

“Now, Isabel!”

“Oh, yes, I know what you will say.  But I should have tempered justice with mercy.”

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it.  In their earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on all moral questions.  She still believed that she was better fitted for their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she had weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met the issue with courage and conscience.  She could not believe he did so by inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issues and the responsibility.  He made no reply, and she said:  “I suppose you’ll admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy’s manner to Stoller.”

He would confess no more than that there ought to have been.  “I don’t see how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience.  I’m not sure I like his being able to do so.”

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:  “I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?”

“Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the plural—”

“Don’t laugh!  It’s wicked to laugh!  It’s heartless!” she cried, hysterically.  “What will he do, poor fellow?”

“I’ve an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow.  But, at any rate, he’s doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller.”

“Oh, Stoller!  I care nothing for Stoller!  Don’t speak to me of Stoller!”

Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him, walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap.  He erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in at his loudly shouted, “Herein!”

“What do you want?” he demanded, brutally.

This simplified Burnamy’s task, while it made it more loathsome.  He answered not much less brutally, “I want to tell you that I think I used you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame.”  He could have added, “Curse you!” without change of tone.

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog’s when he snarls.  “You want to get back!”

“No,” said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke.  “I don’t want to get back.  Nothing would induce me.  I’m going away on the first train.”

“Well, you’re not!” shouted Stoller.  “You’ve lied me into this—”

“Look out!” Burnamy turned white.

“Didn’t you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?” Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath.  “Well, then, you got to lie me out of it.  I been going over the damn thing, all night—and you can do it for me.  I know you can do it,” he gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper.  “Look here!  You see if you can’t.  I’ll make it all right with you.  I’ll pay you whatever you think is right—whatever you say.”

“Oh!” said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.

“You kin,” Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety.  “I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy.”  He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy’s hands, and pointed out a succession of marked passages.  “There!  And here!  And this place!  Don’t you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or was just ironical?” He went on to prove how the text might be given the complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not impossibly out.  “I can’t put it in writing as well as you; but I’ve done all the work, and all you’ve got to do is to give it some of them turns of yours.  I’ll cable the fellows in our office to say I’ve been misrepresented, and that my correction is coming.  We’ll get it into shape here together, and then I’ll cable that.  I don’t care for the money.  And I’ll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel”—he picked up the paper that had had fun with him—“and fix him all right, so that he’ll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and—You see, don’t you?”

The thing did appeal to Burnamy.  If it could be done, it would enable him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than anything else in the world.  But he heard himself saying, very gently, almost tenderly, “It might be done, Mr. Stoller.  But I couldn’t do it.  It wouldn’t be honest—for me.”

“Yah!” yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it into Burnamy’s face.  “Honest, you damn humbug!  You let me in for this, when you knew I didn’t mean it, and now you won’t help me out because it a’n’t honest!  Get out of my room, and get out quick before I—”

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with “If you dare!” He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply.  He braved Stoller’s onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as little a moral hero as he well could.

XXXVIII.

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day’s pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point of view for a time, and has to work back to it.  He began at the belated breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when they did not go to the Posthof, “Didn’t you have a nice time, yesterday, papa?”

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.

“What do you call a nice time?” he temporized, not quite able to resist her gayety.

“Well, the kind of time I had.”

“Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass?  I took cold in that old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a brass kettle.  I suffered all night from it.  And that ass from Illinois—”

“Oh, poor papa!  I couldn’t go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in the one-spanner.”

“I don’t know.  Their interest in each other isn’t so interesting to other people as they seem to think.”

“Do you feel that way really, papa?  Don’t you like their being so much in love still?”

“At their time of life?  Thank you it’s bad enough in young people.”

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out her father’s coffee.

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as he put his cup down, “I don’t know what they make this stuff of.  I wish I had a cup of good, honest American coffee.”

“Oh, there’s nothing like American food!” said his daughter, with so much conciliation that he looked up sharply.

But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter.  She blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:

“I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me to look you in the face.  If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs. March.  I have no heart to tell you.”

Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy’s several times over in a silent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself, and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and was reaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a sense of his presence.

“Oh, excuse me, papa,” she said, and she gave him the butter.  “Here’s a very strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you’d better see.”  She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as he read it.

After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do with letters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory on the back.  Then he looked up and asked:  “What do you suppose he’s been doing?”

“I don’t believe he’s been doing anything.  It’s something that Mr. Stoller’s been doing to him.”

“I shouldn’t infer that from his own words.  What makes you think the trouble is with Stoller?”

“He said—he said yesterday—something about being glad to be through with him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid of wronging him.  And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believe that he’s done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it.”

“It proves nothing of the kind,” said the general, recurring to the note.  After reading it again, he looked keenly at her:  “Am I to understand that you have given him the right to suppose you would want to know the worst—or the best of him?”

The girl’s eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate.  She began:  “No—”

“Then confound his impudence!” the general broke out.  “What business has he to write to you at all about this?”

“Because he couldn’t go away without it!” she returned; and she met her father’s eye courageously.  “He had a right to think we were his friends; and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn’t it manly of him to wish to tell us first himself?”

Her father could not say that it was not.  But he could and did say, very sceptically:  “Stuff!  Now, see here, Agatha:  what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see Mrs. March, and then—”

“You mustn’t do anything of the kind, my dear,” said her father, gently.  “You’ve no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose.”  He put up his hand to interrupt her protest.  “This thing has got to be gone to the bottom of.  But you’re not to do it.  I will see March myself.  We must consider your dignity in this matter—and mine.  And you may as well understand that I’m not going to have any nonsense.  It’s got to be managed so that it can’t be supposed we’re anxious about it, one way or the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way—”

“No, no!  He oughtn’t to have done so.  He was to blame.  He couldn’t have written to you, though, papa—”

“Well, I don’t know why.  But that’s no reason why we should let it be understood that he has written to you.  I will see March; and I will manage to see his wife, too.  I shall probably find them in the reading-room at Pupp’s, and—”

The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp’s, where they all sat down on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him.  “You knew,” she said, “that Mr. Burnamy had left us?”

“Left!  Why?” asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to trust her husband’s poverty of invention.  She looked at him, and he answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing:  “He’s had some trouble with Stoller.”  He went on to tell the general just what the trouble was.

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind.  “You think he’s behaved badly.”

“I think he’s behaved foolishly—youthfully.  But I can understand how strongly he was tempted.  He could say that he was not authorized to stop Stoller in his mad career.”

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband’s arm.

“I’m not so sure about that,” said the general.

March added:  “Since I saw him this morning, I’ve heard something that disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light.  It’s something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy’s wickedness.  He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I was cherishing in my bosom,” and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy’s injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions he had allowed him ignorantly to express.

The general grunted again.  “Of course he had to refuse, and he has behaved like a gentleman so far.  But that doesn’t justify him in having let Stoller get himself into the scrape.”

“No,” said March.  “It’s a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.  And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller.”

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm.  “I don’t, one bit.  He was thoroughly selfish from first to last.  He has got just what he deserved.”

“Ah, very likely,” said her husband.  “The question is about Burnamy’s part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course.”

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of no concern to him.  “I believe,” he said, rising, “I’ll have a look at some of your papers,” and he went into the reading-room.

“Now,” said Mrs. March, “he will go home and poison that poor girl’s mind.  And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against Burnamy.”

“Then why didn’t you do it yourself, my dear?” he teased; but he was really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as an ethical problem.

The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way down the Alte Wiese.  He went directly back to his daughter, and reported Burnamy’s behavior with entire exactness.  He dwelt upon his making the best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad business.

“Now, you know all about it,” he said at the end, “and I leave the whole thing to you.  If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March.  I don’t know but I’d rather you’d satisfy yourself—”

“I will not see Mrs. March.  Do you think I would go back of you in that way?  I am satisfied now.”

XXXIX.

Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a good deal.  He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March’s greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his opinions and conform to his conclusions.  This was not easy, for sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March’s opinions were whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from March that he was matching them with Kenby’s on some points, and suffering from their divergence.  He came to join the sage in his early visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off together on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company.  He was patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he learned to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March’s replies seemed to be mixed.  He examined him upon many features of German civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him to be.  He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy.  March owned that the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of the women.

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was troubled by his friend’s apparent acceptance of unjust things on their picturesque side.  Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades.  “Ah, delightful!” March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.

“But don’t you think, Mr. March,” the boy ventured, “that the man had better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?”

“Well, I don’t know.  There are more of them; and he wouldn’t be half so graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of their aching backs.”  The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his shoulder as they walked on.  “You find a lot of things in Europe that need putting right, don’t you, Rose?”

“Yes; I know it’s silly.”

“Well, I’m not sure.  But I’m afraid it’s useless.  You see, these old customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions.  We think they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel and ugly they are; but probably they couldn’t.  I’m afraid that the Emperor of Austria himself couldn’t change them, in his sovereign plenitude of power.  The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he’s as much grounded in the conditions as any.”  This was the serious way Rose felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to laugh when he went on.  “The women have so much of the hard work to do, over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies.  They couldn’t let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers’ horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin.”

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for the boy’s confusion.  She said the child adored him, and it was a sacrilege to play with his veneration.  She always interfered to save him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of self-respect to side with the mocker.  She understood this, and magnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should not trifle with Rose’s ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.

“Oh, I’m not his only ideal,” March protested.  “He adores Kenby too, and every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby’s gospel.”

Mrs. March caught her breath.  “Kenby!  Do you really think, then, that she—”

“Oh, hold on, now!  It isn’t a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don’t say Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father.  I merely want you to understand that I’m the object of a divided worship, and that when I’m off duty as an ideal I don’t see why I shouldn’t have the fun of making Mrs. Adding laugh.  You can’t pretend she isn’t wrapped up in the boy.  You’ve said that yourself.”

“Yes, she’s wrapped up in him; she’d give her life for him; but she is so light.  I didn’t suppose she was so light; but it’s borne in upon me more and more.”

They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance the Triscoes had fallen into.  One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs. March’s room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers’ clubs from the neighboring towns.  The spectacle prospered through its first half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able to lend even a bicycle parade.  The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming banners.  Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a bower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club costumes and insignia.  In the height of the display a sudden mountain shower gathered and broke upon them.  They braved it till it became a drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to any shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways.  The men used their greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made no appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if they expected nothing else.

Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted.  “There’s your chance, Rose.  Why don’t you go down and rebuke those fellows?”

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly attacked her husband in his behalf.  “Why don’t you go and rebuke them yourself?”

“Well, for one thing, there isn’t any conversation in my phrase-book Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in the Wet.”  Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into going on.  “For another thing, I think it’s very well for you ladies to realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of our civilization you are.  It ought to make you grateful for your privileges.”

“There is something in that,” Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.

“Oh, there is no civilization but ours,” said Mrs. March, in a burst of vindictive patriotism.  “I am more and more convinced of it the longer I stay in Europe.”

“Perhaps that’s why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the world,” said March.

The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills the Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk.  Just now, it began to play a pot pourri of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees below clapped and cheered.

“That was opportune of the band,” said March.  “It must have been a telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director.  But a pot pourri of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up here on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman.  The only thing in this medley that’s the least characteristic or original is Dixie; and I’m glad the South has brought us back into the Union.”

“You don’t know one note from another, my dear,” said his wife.

“I know the ‘Washington Post.’”

“And don’t you call that American?”

“Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was Portuguese.”

“Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe’s pessimism,” said Mrs. March; and she added:  “But whether we have any national melodies or not, we don’t poke women out in the rain and keep them soaking!”

“No, we certainly don’t,” he assented, with such a well-studied effect of yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, “I hope Rose isn’t acting on my suggestion?”

“I hate to have you tease him, dearest,” his wife interposed.

“Oh, no,” the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh.  “He’s too much afraid of lese-majesty, for that.  But I dare say he couldn’t stand the sight.  He’s queer.”

“He’s beautiful!” said Mrs. March.

“He’s good,” the mother admitted.  “As good as the day’s long.  He’s never given me a moment’s trouble—but he troubles me.  If you can understand!”

“Oh, I do understand!” Mrs. March returned.  “By his innocence, you mean.  That is the worst of children.  Their innocence breaks our hearts and makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things.”

“His innocence, yes,” pursued Mrs. Adding, “and his ideals.”  She began to laugh again.  “He may have gone off for a season of meditation and prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers.  His mind is turning that way a good deal lately.  It’s only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor.  You mustn’t be disappointed.”

“I shall be sorry,” said the editor.  “But now that you mention it, I think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to periodical literature.  I supposed he might simply have exhausted his questions—or my answers.”

“No; it goes deeper than that.  I think it’s Europe that’s turned his mind in the direction of reform.  At any rate he thinks now he will be a reformer.”

“Really!  What kind of one?  Not religious, I hope?”

“No.  His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social.  I don’t make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does.  He tells me everything, and sometimes I don’t feel equal to it, spiritually or even intellectually.”

“Don’t laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!” Mrs. March entreated.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind my laughing,” said the mother, gayly.  Rose came shyly back into the room, and she said, “Well, did you rebuke those bad bicyclers?” and she laughed again.

“They’re only a custom, too, Rose,”, said March, tenderly.  “Like the man resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” the boy returned.

“They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century.  That’s what we’re always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements.”

“There, doesn’t that console you?” asked his mother, and she took him away with her, laughing back from the door.  “I don’t believe it does, a bit!”

“I don’t believe she understands the child,” said Mrs. March.  “She is very light, don’t you think?  I don’t know, after all, whether it wouldn’t be a good thing for her to marry Kenby.  She is very easygoing, and she will be sure to marry somebody.”

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, “You might put these ideas to her.”

XL.

With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go.  In the diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself.  The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches’ way, or they fancied so; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him looking very obliquely into it at eight o’clock in the morning.  The yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass was silvery gray with the belated dews.  The breakfasters were fewer than they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of “Himbeeren!  Himbeeren!” plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by the receding summer.

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the ‘schone’ Lili brought them.  Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed was a sacrifice in behalf of March’s inability.

Lili’s delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them.  In this event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against their table, and say:  “Oh, no.  You stay a little.  It is so nice.”  One day after such an entreaty, she said, “The queen is here, this morning.”

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes.  “The queen!”

“Yes; the young lady.  Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen.  She is there with her father.”  She nodded in the direction of a distant corner, and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general.  “She is not seeming so gayly as she was being.”

March smiled.  “We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili.  The summer is going.”

“But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?” the girl asked, resting her tray on the corner of the table.

“No, I’m afraid he won’t,” March returned sadly.

“He was very good.  He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that Augusta did break when she was falling down.  He was paying before he went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to pay.”

“Ah!” said March, and his wife said, “That was like him!” and she eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some pathetic facts about Augusta’s poverty and gratitude.  “I think Miss Triscoe ought to know it.  There goes the wretch, now!” she broke off.  “Don’t look at him!” She set her husband the example of averting his face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table.  “Ugh!  I hope he won’t be able to find a single place.”

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March’s face with grave sympathy.  “He certainly doesn’t deserve one.  Don’t let us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can.”  They got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief which the ladies let drop from their laps.

“Have you been telling?” March asked his wife.

“Have I told you anything?” she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.  “Anything that you didn’t as good as know, already?”

“Not a syllable!” Mrs. Adding replied in high delight.  “Come, Rose!”

“Well, I suppose there’s no use saying anything,” said March, after she left them.

“She had guessed everything, without my telling her,” said his wife.

“About Stoller?”

“Well-no.  I did tell her that part, but that was nothing.  It was about Burnamy and Agatha that she knew.  She saw it from the first.”

“I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old Kenby.”

“I’m not sure, after all, that she cares for him.  If she doesn’t, she oughtn’t to let him write to her.  Aren’t you going over to speak to the Triscoes?”

“No, certainly not.  I’m going back to the hotel.  There ought to be some steamer letters this morning.  Here we are, worrying about these strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children on the other side of the ocean.”

“I worry about them, too,” said the mother, fondly.  “Though there is nothing to worry about,” she added.

“It’s our duty to worry,” he insisted.

At the hotel the portier gave them four letters.  There was one from each of their children:  one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness of Chicago as a summer city ("You would think she was born out there!” sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in spite of the heat they were having ("And just think how cool it is here!” his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of ‘Every Other Week’.  There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy’s editorial instinct, and ironically proposing March’s resignation in his favor.

“I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not,” said Mrs. March, proudly.  “What does ’Burnamy say?”

“How do you know it’s from him?”

“Because you’ve been keeping your hand on it!  Give it here.”

“When I’ve read it.”

The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use it in ‘Every Other Week’.  He had come upon a book about that hapless foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically.  Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place.  He thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.

“And, not a word—not a syllable—about Miss Triscoe!” cried Mrs. March.  “Shall you take his paper?”

“It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn’t it?”

They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter, or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his parting interview with Stoller.  He had recovered from his remorse for letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he could celebrate his final virtue in the matter.  He was glad he had been able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their merciful conjectures.  He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart.  If he had been older, he might not have taken it.

XLI.

The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian summer.  For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.

The day was important as the last of March’s cure, and its pleasures began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness with the Eltwins.  He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet, sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next.  Eltwin said that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.

“Well,” he apologized, “we’re all that’s left, and I suppose we like to keep together.”  He paused, and at the look in March’s face he suddenly went on.  “I haven’t been well for three or four years; but I always fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to.  I said I couldn’t leave home; and, I don’t suppose I ever should.  But my home left me.”

As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal her withered hand into his.

“We’d had a large family, but they’d all died off, with one thing or another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter.  Seemed perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it.  It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go.  And so we’re here.”  His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, “I don’t know what it is always makes me want to kick that man.”

The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was well, and Major Eltwin better.  He did not notice their replies, but said to March, “The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp’s readingroom, to go with them to the Posthof for breakfast.”

“Aren’t you going, too?” asked March.

“No, thank you,” said the general, as if it were much finer not; “I shall breakfast at our pension.”  He strolled off with the air of a man who has done more than his duty.

“I don’t suppose I ought to feel that way,” said Eltwin, with a remorse which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife’s hand had prompted in him.  “I reckon he means well.”

“Well, I don’t know,” March said, with a candor he could not wholly excuse.

On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real pathos as these poor old people’s; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he could not give himself this pleasure.  He tried to amuse her on the way from Pupp’s, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe Sans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to breakfast.  She said, “Poor Mr. March!” and laughed inattentively; when he went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation between Pupp’s and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife frowned at him.

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved.

At the Posthof the ‘schone’ Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of July.  She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a sunny spot in the gallery.  “You are tired of Carlsbad?” she said caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.

“Not of the Posthof,” said the girl, listlessly.

“Posthof, and very little Lili?” She showed, with one forefinger on another, how very little she was.

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with abrupt seriousness, “Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table, and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it.  I have scolded her, and I have made her give it to me.”

She took from under her apron a man’s handkerchief, which she offered to Mrs. March.  It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B. But, “Whose can it be?” they asked each other.

“Why, Burnamy’s,” said March; and Lili’s eyes danced.  “Give it here!”

His wife caught it farther away.  “No, I’m going to see whose it is, first; if it’s his, I’ll send it to him myself.”

She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and was holding them in her lap.  They fell to the ground when she now rose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up.  Miss Triscoe was too quick for her.

“Oh, let me carry them for you!” she entreated, and after a tender struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist.  She was not the kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited the girl’s advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it in every case, with Miss Triscoe’s eager approval.  In the Stadt Park they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been sitting, they seemed to be followed.  They looked round and saw no one more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat brims are.  He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, “Something left lying,” passed on.

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March’s sandals and of Burnamy’s handkerchief.

“Oh, I put it in one of the toes!” she lamented, and she fled back to their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the public security, and putting a baby in its nurse’s arms into such doubts of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry.  She laughed breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March.  “That comes of having no pocket; I didn’t suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March!  Wasn’t it absurd?”

“It’s one of those things,” Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards, “that they can always laugh over together.”

“They?  And what about Burnamy’s behavior to Stoller?”

“Oh, I don’t call that anything but what will come right.  Of course he can make it up to him somehow.  And I regard his refusal to do wrong when Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence.”

“Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you.  My only hope is that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa’s poison will neutralize yours somehow.”

XLII.

One of the pleasantest incidents of March’s sojourn in Carlsbad was his introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived of him as a brother artist.  This led to much bowing and smiling from the manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have ended, and still been far beyond his desert.  He had not thought of going to the opera on the Emperor’s birthnight, but after dinner a box came from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in decency accept so great a favor.  At the same time she argued that they could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty and distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe and her father.

“And why not Major Eltwin and his wife?  Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?”

She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came.  The foyer of the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with whose side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could.  At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon the honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august.  The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded to an artist’s impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him the pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; he bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while her husband was gone.

She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone, and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest with him.  On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in their young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect.  “I wish we were going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the whole situation.  Do you think we have made a mistake in having the Triscoes?”

“We!” he retorted.  “Oh, that’s good!  I’m going to shirk him, when it comes to going behind the scenes.”

“No, no, dearest,” she entreated.  “Snubbing will only make it worse.  We must stand it to the bitter end, now.”

The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood.  Then the curtain fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General Triscoe and his daughter came in.

Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to her hospitality.  She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted full.  Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face.  The girl’s eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side to side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it.  Her father, in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civil occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance; and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other, till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act at least.

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who, ‘als Gast’ from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it.  She merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.

“That is grand, isn’t it?” said March, following one of the tremendous strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages.  “It’s fine to see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all those steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundless fields of cabbage.  But it’s rather pathetic.”

“It’s disgusting,” said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:

“Well, I don’t know.  It’s amusing.  Do you suppose we shall see her when we go behind, March?”

He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they hurried to the rear door of the theatre.  It was slightly ajar, and they pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders.  With their rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.

“This is rather weird,” said March, faltering at the sight.  “I wonder if we might ask these young ladies where to go?” General Triscoe made no answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business.  The voice belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the young ladies.

March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and wished to find his room.

The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it.  He pressed down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to force them back to the door.  The mild nature of the editor might have yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was roused.  He shrugged the gendarme’s hand from his shoulder, and with a voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the devil he meant.  The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the general’s tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs.  From time to time March interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants.  They grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub.  As soon as the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to him.  But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain.  In the lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing could have been more honorable than their dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who had received them so stormily.  He opened the door for them, and stood with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.

XLIII.

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen.  He had knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did not fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked so frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of him inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simply as a surprise.  She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sit down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-New York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took in.  He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice was softened more and more in Mrs. March’s breast, and she left him to the talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady, between him and Miss Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very wicked in his being in her box.  One might say that it was not very nice of him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other hand it was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see Miss Triscoe that he could not help coming.  It was altogether in his favor that he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated; the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and General Triscoe going behind the scenes.  Burnamy said he envied them the chance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth, where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances.  He said he was going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finished looking up that Kaspar Hauser business.  He seemed to think Mrs. March would know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. March was so much interested.  She wondered if she ought to tell him about his handkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss Triscoe’s keeping.  She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he was.  He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his Tuxedo, and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt front.

At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took their offered hands.  In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay and speak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time he recognized anything clandestine in his visit.  He laughed nervously, and said, “No, thank you!” and shut himself out.

“We must tell them,” said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she was glad that the girl answered with a note of indignation.

“Why, certainly, Mrs. March.”

They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when March and the general came back; and after the opera was over and they got out into the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was obliged to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with his daughter.

The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thickly set little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning the Tepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops.  High above all, against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its skeleton had been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of the doubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christ looked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in the streets and on the bridges.

They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they responded docilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps of the bridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient appeals of “Bitte schon!  Bitte schon!” He laughed to think of a New York cop saying “Please prettily!  Please prettily!” to a New York crowd which he wished to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to think how far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and hearts might be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:

“A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker.”

It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in the sudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side.  Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to push frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl.  He had an interminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going to call out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless absurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss.  Triscoe on his arm.

“Here she is, Mr. March,” he said, as if there were nothing strange in his having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all from the theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss Triscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in and rescued her.  Before March could formulate any question in his bewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation for him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight of his wife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning their necks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and his charge.  Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express the astonishment that filled him, when he was aware of an ominous shining of her eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.

She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to forbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy’s presence to her father.

It would not have been just the time for either.  Not only Mrs. March was with the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from that place, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about in the crowd.  The general was still, expressing a gratitude which became more pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight of his daughter, “Ah; you’ve found us, have you?” and went on talking to Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, “Did you see me beckoning?”

“Look here, my dear!” March said to his wife as soon as they parted from the rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he would see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly home alone.  “Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?”

“He’s going away on the twelve-o’clock train tonight,” she answered, firmly.

“What has that got to do with it?  Where did you see him?”

“In the box, while you were behind the scenes.”

She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for the ground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him.  She asked suddenly, “Where did you see him?” and he told her in turn.

He added severely, “Her father ought to know.  Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Why didn’t you?” she retorted with great reason.

“Because I didn’t think he was just in the humor for it.”  He began to laugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did not seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again.  “Besides, I was afraid she was going to blubber, any way.”

“She wouldn’t have blubbered, as you call it.  I don’t know why you need be so disgusting!  It would have given her just the moral support she needed.  Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us.  You ought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally when you came up with her.  You will have yourself to thank for all the trouble that comes of it, now, my dear.”

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him.  “All right!  I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn’t behaved with angelic wisdom.”

“Why,” she said, after reflection, “I don’t see what either of us has done.  We didn’t get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence in any way.”

“Oh!  Make Triscoe believe that!  He knows you’ve done all you could to help the affair on.”

“Well, what if I have?  He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soon as he saw her, to-night.  She looked very pretty.”

“Well, thank Heaven! we’re off to-morrow morning, and I hope we’ve seen the last of them.  They’ve done what they could to spoil my cure, but I’m not going to have them spoil my aftercure.”

XLIV.

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where they had already taken a lavish leave of the ‘schone’ Lili, with a sense of being promptly superseded in her affections.  They found a place in the red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp’s, and were served by the pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as Ein-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of “Komm’ gleich, bitte schon!” was like a bird’s note.  Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so aerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink.  A young married couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.

“If you had told them we were going, dear,” said Mrs. March, when the couple were themselves gone, “we should have been as old as ever.  Don’t let us tell anybody, this morning, that we’re going.  I couldn’t bear it.”

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their confidence, in the process of paying their bill.  He put on his high hat and came out to see them off.  The portier was already there, standing at the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long drive to the station.  The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer them a fellow-republican’s good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another summer.  Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as their two-spanner whirled away.

“They say that he is going to be made a count.”

“Well, I don’t object,” said March.  “A man who can feed fourteen thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke.”

At the station something happened which touched them even more than these last attentions of the hotel.  They were in their compartment, and were in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March’s name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing.  “I was afraid I shouldn’t get here in time,” he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

“Why Rose!  From your mother?”

“From me,” he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor, when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace.  “I want to kiss you,” she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her handkerchief.  “I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest child!”

“He’s about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I’m sorry to leave behind,” March assented.  “He’s the only unmarried one that wasn’t in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I’m not sure that I should have been safe even from Rose.  Carlsbad has been an interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that it will begin again.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “now we can have each other all to ourselves.”

“Yes.  It’s been very different from our first wedding journey in that.  It isn’t that we’re not so young now as we were, but that we don’t seem so much our own property.  We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk.  The disadvantage of living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people.”

“Yes, it is.  I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too.”

“I don’t know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had died young—or younger,” he suggested.

“No, I don’t know that it is,” she assented.  She added, from an absence where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, “I hope she’ll write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that he was there.”

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartments round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasing illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost held each other’s hands.  In later life there are such moments when the youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young.  But it is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband in mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silver wedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure.  If he had found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water of the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight again till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got back to salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.  The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a blue sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land, and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurely harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare arms unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and beauty, to watch them go by.  Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow oat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the week before, and then loitered away with them.  Flocks of geese waddled in sculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by little girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed the flying train.  There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long barren acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails themselves.  From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows, sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor outside their compartments and tried to pass each other.  Their vast stomachs beat together in a vain encounter.

“Zu enge!” said one, and “Ja, zu enge!” said the other, and they laughed innocently in each other’s’ faces, with a joy in their recognition of the corridor’s narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finest wit.

All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grew enchanting, with a fairy quaintness.  The scenery was Alpine, but the scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children’s story.  All the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high timber-laced gables.

“We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they were children,” said March.

“No,” his wife returned; “it would have been too much for them.  Nobody but grown people could bear it.”

The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was trolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator which was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up.  All the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were as nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense of a world elsewhere outlived.  In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and the commonplace.  Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the gothic spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive grace and beauty almost never.  It is the architectural speech of a strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people’s fancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.

They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture.  It was a sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside. of the city gate to a trolley-car.  The conductor with their fare demanded their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose; and the conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the public garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make the most favorable impression upon strangers.  It was in fact so like all other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, that it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, and they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they rested from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate the charm of the city.

The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy (flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o’clock table d’hote they took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city.  Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry.  A tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed themselves in assault.  The blood shed in forgotten battles would have flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city.  From its ramparts the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if one has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it is here that more than anywhere else one may feast it.  The prospect of tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost in it.  The multitudinous roofs of red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press upon one another in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise of ground and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse or scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond which looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty uplands.

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on all the murderous engines and implements of torture.  First in German and then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men had been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which had beheaded eight hundred persons.  When she took the established fee from March she suggested, with a demure glance, “And what more you please for saying it in English.”

“Can you say it in Russian?” demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seen dwelling on her from the beginning.  She laughed archly, and responded with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers over to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of the Burg.  These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the past are perpetually suffering in the present, and there was some special painting and varnishing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming to Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand.  But if they had been in the unmolested discomfort of their unlivable magnificence, their splendor was such as might well reconcile the witness to the superior comfort of a private station in our snugger day.  The Marches came out owning that the youth which might once have found the romantic glories of the place enough was gone from them.  But so much of it was left to her that she wished to make him stop and look at the flirtation which had blossomed out between that pretty young girl and the Russian, whom they had scarcely missed from their party in the Burg.  He had apparently never parted from the girl, and now as they sat together on the threshold of the gloomy tower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words, for they were both laughing as if they understood each other perfectly.

In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, March would have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but it began to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove off to find the famous Little Goose Man.  This is what every one does at Nuremberg; it would be difficult to say why.  When they found the Little Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his pedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the goose under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of the wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowers and lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the watery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.

The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared away, and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out.  The portier dissembled any slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he could think of inspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which was giving a summer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which they surprised, after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of back square.  They got the best places at a price which ought to have been mortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other harmless bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a decoration by no means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort.  Each seat fronted a shelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator could put his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer passed constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet where he could stay himself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments.

It was “The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg” upon which they had oddly chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an American girl in it.  She was an American girl of the advanced pattern, and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter.  She seemed to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German conception of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the occasional English words which she used.

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the theatre it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as a night could be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrow streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotel lay.  How pretty, they said, to call that charming port the Ladies’ Gate!  They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, but satisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slim maidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom they imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual procession.

XLV.

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is still insistent in all its art.  This expresses their pride at once and their simplicity with a childish literality.  At its best it is never so good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its best.  The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.  Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence.  The water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in its simple-hearted truth.  The long ages have made it even more affecting than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in passing till their features are scarcely distinguishable; and the sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back into the mother-marble.  It is of the same tradition and impulse with that supreme glory of the native sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of richly carven story; and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great things today, his work would be of kindred inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rather a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and the descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops.  The vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in the praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers.  “So simple, and yet so noble!” she said.  She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told them at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist fell asleep in despair of winning his patron’s daughter, and saw in a vision the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him her hand.  They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a novel of Georg Ebers’s, but added to the regular fee for the church a gift worthy of an inedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the Nuremberg manner.  They missed there the constant, sweet civility of Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a little cordiality.  They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses of such beauty:

“That kings to have the like, might wish to die.”

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-century patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the upper.  She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for the murder.

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented to let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, with their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and the matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others.  She suffered more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the Canossa palace at Verona.  A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige was part of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg whenever they came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both to the German and northern Italian art.  They knew that it was an effect which had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the older land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found it in its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsened in the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.

In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar.  There was to be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers.  She was of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred years ago.  In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself after enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which seems the final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.

XLVI.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing.  She could not have understood the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon.  Then she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic lands.  The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses, were locked against tourist curiosity.

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some question of their way.  He answered in English, and in the parley that followed they discovered that they were all Americans.  The stranger proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said he had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he had taken on Staten Island.  He had been seventeen years in New York, and now a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers, and joined them is a common interest.  The German-American said he was bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider.  He said that the Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy.  He warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany; beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York.  The working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and as he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such Americanism as they had in common.  He had reverted to an entirely German effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing to own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only country left them.

“He was rather pathetic, my dear,” said March, in the discomfort he knew his wife must be feeling as well as himself.  “How odd to have the lid lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the witch’s caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!  And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the mouths of those poor glass-workers!”

“I thought that was hard,” she sighed.  “It must have been his bread, too.”

“Let’s hope it was not his cake, anyway.  I suppose,” he added, dreamily, “that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern activities.  The Italians didn’t repel us by assuming to be of our epoch in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive memories.  I wonder if they’re still as charming.”

“Oh, no,” she returned, “nothing is as charming as it used to be.  And now we need the charm more than ever.”

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were to take turns in cheering each other up.  “Well, perhaps we don’t deserve it.  And I’m not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were young.  We’ve got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now.  They made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.  Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die?  We’ve got that to consider.”  He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a phrase.

They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope of intimate impressions.  The peasant women, serving portions of milk from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms.  But he could not feel that these things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered his retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief book-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he wanted, and more local histories than he should ever read.  He made a last effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerk if there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, and the clerk said there was not one.

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make his meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to listen to them.  She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through.  The bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as little, but delicately blond.  Nature had admirably mated them, and if art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride’s mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly.  Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyes without protest.  But later, when they met the lovers in the street, walking arm in arm, with the bride’s mother behind them gloating upon their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed of such folly.  She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest thing in life.

“Well, isn’t it?” his wife asked.

“Yes, that’s the worst of it.  It shows how poverty-stricken life really is.  We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be.”

“I think we have been happy enough, and that we’ve had as much good as was wholesome for us,” she returned, hurt.

“You’re always so concrete!  I meant us in the abstract.  But if you will be personal, I’ll say that you’ve been as happy as you deserve, and got more good than you had any right to.”

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.

He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternal accusation of his murderess.  “It’s rather hard on her, that he should be having the last word, that way,” he said.  “She was a woman, no matter what mistakes she had committed.”

“That’s what I call ’banale’,” said Mrs. March.

“It is, rather,” he confessed.  “It makes me feel as if I must go to see the house of Durer, after all.”

“Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later.”

It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Durer’s house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they reached it.  The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly have been different in Durer’s time.  His dwelling, in no way impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house.  It was cavernous and cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there.  It in no wise suggested the calling of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer’s time to take themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors’ book, and paid the visitor’s fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a reproduction of one of Durer’s pictures; and then they came away, by no means dissatisfied with his house.  By its association with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse than Ariosto’s house at Ferrara, or Petrarch’s at Arqua, or Michelangelo’s at Florence.  “But what I admire,” he said, “is our futility in going to see it.  We expected to surprise some quality of the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it; and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard to save his widow from coming to want.”

“Who said she did that?”

“A friend of his who hated her.  But he had to allow that she was a God-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience.”

“Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going.”

“Yes; but I don’t like her laying her plans to survive him; though women always do that.”

They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though they would rather have been alone.  They lifted their eyes for their expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.

The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter; March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage.  They arrived at the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time.

She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; but she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance.  No doubt she was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and she knew more, as the American wives of young American business men always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels.  She recognized her merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather than personal.  March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not get his feet wet.  She made March promise not to take him far, and to bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers.  The young man began to talk about his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.

XLVII.

The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs. March, who said, as soon as they were gone, “I believe I would rather meet people of our own age after this.  I used to think that you could keep young by being with young people; but I don’t, now.  There world is very different from ours.  Our world doesn’t really exist any more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we needn’t realize it.  Young people,” she went on, “are more practical-minded than we used to be; they’re quite as sentimental; but I don’t think they care so much for the higher things.  They’re not so much brought up on poetry as we were,” she pursued.  “That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our time; but now she didn’t know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred.”  Her tone entreated him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them.  “They couldn’t have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!”

“I see what you mean.  But do you think it’s as sacred to us as it would have been twenty-five years ago?  I had an irreverent feeling now and then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg.”

“Oh, yes; so had I. We’re that modern, if we’re not so young as we were.”

“We were very simple, in those days.”

“Well, if we were simple, we knew it!”

“Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at it.”

“We had a good time.”

“Too good.  Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had not been so good.  We might have our cake now if we hadn’t eaten it.”

“It would be mouldy, though.”

“I wonder,” he said, recurring to the Lefferses; “how we really struck them.”

“Well, I don’t believe they thought we ought to be travelling about alone, quite, at our age.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” After a moment he said, “I dare say they don’t go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did.”

“Indeed they do!  They had an awful quarrel just before they got to Nuremberg:  about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by express that she wanted to keep with them.  But she said it had been a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again.”  The elders looked at each other in the light of experience, and laughed.  “Well,” she ended, “that’s one thing we’re through with.  I suppose we’ve come to feel more alike than we used to.”

“Or not to feel at all.  How did they settle it about the baggage?”

“Oh!  He insisted on her keeping it with her.”  March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said:  “Well, they gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American philistinism.  I don’t mind their thinking us queer; they must have thought Nuremberg was queer.”

“Yes.  We oldsters are always queer to the young.  We’re either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we’re ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be like us, and wouldn’t, for the world.  The worst of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don’t, at the bottom of our hearts, believe we’re like that, when we meet.  I suppose that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.”

“I wonder,” said Mrs. March, “if she’s told him yet,” and March perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.

“She’s had time enough.  But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her.”

“Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in that way.  I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have accepted him conditionally.”

“Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?”

“Stoller?  No!  To her father’s liking it.”

“Ah, that’s quite as hard.  What makes you think she accepted him at all?”

“What do you think she was crying about?”

“Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity.  If she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about it.”  Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to atone for his stupidity.  “Perhaps she’s told him on the instalment plan.  She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad.  Poor old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach!  He could make things very smooth for us.”

“Well, you needn’t flatter yourself that you’ll find him in Ansbach.  I’m sure I don’t know where he is.”

“You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask.”

“I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me,” she said, with dignity.

“Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her.  I’ve asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the poste restante in Ansbach.  Isn’t it good to see the crows again, after those ravens around Carlsbad?”

She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the open window.  The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground ready for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foraging parties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignant protest.  She said, with a smile for the crows, “Yes.  And I’m thankful that I’ve got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens,” she added in dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.

“I’m thankful too, my dear.  I’d much rather have things on my own.  I’m more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you’re to blame.”

They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied.  It was only that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy’s furtive reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it, and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that might well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.

She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than because the right time had come.  She began as they sat at breakfast.  “Papa, there is something that I have got to tell you.  It is something that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because—”

She hesitated for the reason, and “Well!” said her father, looking up at her from his second cup of coffee.  “What is it?”

Then she answered, “Mr. Burnamy has been here.”

“In Carlsbad?  When was he here?”

“The night of the Emperor’s birthday.  He came into the box when you were behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd.”

“Well?”

“I thought you ought to know.  Mrs. March said I ought to tell you.”

“Did she say you ought to wait a week?” He gave way to an irascibility which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, “Why did he come back?”

“He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris.”  The girl had the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge.  She looked steadily at her father, and added:  “He said he came back because he couldn’t help it.  He—wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and Mr. Stoller.  He wanted to come back and tell me—that.”

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave the word to him, now.  He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with a mildness that seemed to surprise her, “Have you heard anything from him since?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.  I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must tell you about it.”

The case was less simple than it would once have been for General Triscoe.  There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put his paternal love and duty in a new light.  He was no more explicit with himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very prosperously married.  On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to extremes concerning him.

“He was very anxious,” she went on, “that you should know just how it was.  He thinks everything of your judgment and—and—opinion.”  The general made a consenting noise in his throat.  “He said that he did not wish me to ‘whitewash’ him to you.  He didn’t think he had done right; he didn’t excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the stand-point of a gentleman.”

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, “How do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?”

“I don’t believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March—”

“Oh, Mrs. March!” the general snorted.

“—says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy does.”

“I doubt it.  At any rate, I understood March quite differently.”

“She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr. Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse for what he had done before.”  As she spoke on she had become more eager.

“There’s something in that,” the general admitted, with a candor that he made the most of both to himself and to her.  “But I should like to know what Stoller had to say of it all.  Is there anything,” he inquired, “any reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?”

“N—no.  Only, I thought—He thinks so much of your opinion that—if—”

“Oh, he can very well afford to wait.  If he values my opinion so highly he can give me time to make up my mind.”

“Of course—”

“And I’m not responsible,” the general continued, significantly, “for the delay altogether.  If you had told me this before—Now, I don’t know whether Stoller is still in town.”

He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with him.  She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered him.  If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could delay and make sure.  The accepted theory of such matters is that people know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them.  But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often act contrary to their convictions and impulses.  If the statistics were accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would step round to Pupp’s and see if Stoller were still there.  But on the way he stepped up to Mrs. Adding’s hotel on the hill, and he came back, after an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rather casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before.  By this time the fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.

He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered that they had not.  They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and then push on to Holland for Mr. March’s after-cure.  There was no relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked whether he wished to send any word.

“No.  I understand,” he intimated, “that there is nothing at all in the nature of a—a—an understanding, then, with—”

“No, nothing.”

“Hm!” The general waited a moment.  Then he ventured, “Do you care to say—do you wish me to know—how he took it?”

The tears came into the girl’s eyes, but she governed herself to say, “He—he was disappointed.”

“He had no right to be disappointed.”

It was a question, and she answered:  “He thought he had.  He said—that he wouldn’t—trouble me any more.”

The general did not ask at once, “And you don’t know where he is now—you haven’t heard anything from him since?”

Agatha flashed through her tears, “Papa!”

“Oh!  I beg your pardon.  I think you told me.”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else
Effort to get on common ground with an inferior
He buys my poverty and not my will
Honest selfishness
Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate
Less intrusive than if he had not been there
Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign
Only one of them was to be desperate at a time
Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last
Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold
We don’t seem so much our own property
We get too much into the hands of other people

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

PART III.

XLVIII.

At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowed himself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted an impulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette.  In the talk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained that he was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line of road, and was travelling officially.  March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and the young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherish the Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture was permitted in Nuremberg.  But they would find enough classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence into their wish to see this former capital when March told him they were going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed Germany of the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now extinct.

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was.  In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was not much out of the way to Holland.  They took more and more credit to themselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of their companion’s enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them with the drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was both Italian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray of the architecture which was almost Mantuan.  They rested their sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points, against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of the houses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an old mansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square planted with pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca.

The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped with the Bavarian colors, and they were obscurely flattered to learn that Prince Leopold, the brother of the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms there, on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg, and was momently expected with his suite.  They realized that they were not of the princely party, however, when they were told that he had sole possession of the dining-room, and they went out to another hotel, and had their supper in keeping delightfully native.  People seemed to come there to write their letters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers; they called for stationery like characters in old comedy, and the clatter of crockery and the scratching of pens went on together; and fortune offered the Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion from their own hotel in the cold popular reception of the prince which they got back just in time to witness.  A very small group of people, mostly women and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, but there was no cheering or any sign of public interest.  Perhaps he personally merited none; he looked a dull, sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and after he had mounted to his apartment, the officers of his staff stood quite across the landing, and barred the passage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs. March’s presence, as they talked together.

“Well, my dear,” said her husband, “here you have it at last.  This is what you’ve been living for, ever since we came to Germany.  It’s a great moment.”

“Yes.  What are you going to do?”

“Who?  I?  Oh, nothing!  This is your affair; it’s for you to act.”

If she had been young, she might have withered them with a glance; she doubted now if her dim eyes would have any such power; but she advanced steadily upon them, and then the officers seemed aware of her, and stood aside.

March always insisted that they stood aside apologetically, but she held as firmly that they stood aside impertinently, or at least indifferently, and that the insult to her American womanhood was perfectly ideal.  It is true that nothing of the kind happened again during their stay at the hotel; the prince’s officers were afterwards about in the corridors and on the stairs, but they offered no shadow of obstruction to her going and coming, and the landlord himself was not so preoccupied with his highhotes but he had time to express his grief that she had been obliged to go out for supper.

They satisfied the passion for the little obsolete capital which had been growing upon them by strolling past the old Resident at an hour so favorable for a first impression.  It loomed in the gathering dusk even vaster than it was, and it was really vast enough for the pride of a King of France, much more a Margrave of Ansbach.  Time had blackened and blotched its coarse limestone walls to one complexion with the statues swelling and strutting in the figure of Roman legionaries before it, and standing out against the evening sky along its balustraded roof, and had softened to the right tint the stretch of half a dozen houses with mansard roofs and renaissance facades obsequiously in keeping with the Versailles ideal of a Resident.  In the rear, and elsewhere at fit distance from its courts, a native architecture prevailed; and at no great remove the Marches found themselves in a simple German town again.  There they stumbled upon a little bookseller’s shop blinking in a quiet corner, and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach, which they carried home, and studied between drowsing and waking.  The wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seeking their nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance.  They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and better qualified than they would otherwise have been for their second visit to the Schloss, which they paid early the next morning.

They were so early, indeed, that when they mounted from the great inner court, much too big for Ansbach, if not for the building, and rung the custodian’s bell, a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room, where she kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner, said the custodian was busy, and could not be seen till ten o’clock.  She seemed, in her nook of the pretentious pile, as innocently unconscious of its history as any hen-sparrow who had built her nest in some coign of its architecture; and her friendly, peaceful domesticity remained a wholesome human background to the tragedies and comedies of the past, and held them in a picturesque relief in which they were alike tolerable and even charming.

The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil of fable, and above ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time of the Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick.  Between these times she had her various rulers, ecclesiastical and secular, in various forms of vassalage to the empire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereignty was in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in a constantly increasing splendor till the last sold her outright to the King of Prussia in 1791, and went to live in England on the proceeds.  She had taken her part in the miseries and glories of the wars that desolated Germany, but after the Reformation, when she turned from the ancient faith to which she owed her cloistered origin under St. Gumpertus, her people had peace except when their last prince sold them to fight the battles of others.  It is in this last transaction that her history, almost in the moment when she ceased to have a history of her own, links to that of the modern world, and that it came home to the Marches in their national character; for two thousand of those poor Ansbach mercenaries were bought up by England and sent to put down a rebellion in her American colonies.

Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave, because of certain qualities which made him the Best Margrave, in spite of the defects of his qualities.  He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally known in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the Worst Margrave, but who had certainly a bad trick of putting his subjects to death without trial, and in cases where there was special haste, with his own hand.  He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because he believed that the republican influences in Holland would be wholesome for him, and then he sent him to travel in Italy; but when the boy came home looking frail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official travelling companion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer hanged without process for this crime.  One of the gentlemen of his realm, for a pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he had, at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrows and bullets or hanged for desertion, besides many whose penalties his clemency commuted to the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who killed his hunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel.  A soldier’s wife was hanged for complicity in a case of desertion; a young soldier who eloped with the girl he loved was brought to Ansbach from a neighboring town, and hanged with her on the same gallows.  A sentry at the door of one of the Margrave’s castles amiably complied with the Margrave’s request to let him take his gun for a moment, on the pretence of wishing to look at it.  For this breach of discipline the prince covered him with abuse and gave him over to his hussars, who bound him to a horse’s tail and dragged him through the streets; he died of his injuries.  The kennel-master who had charge of the Margrave’s dogs was accused of neglecting them:  without further inquiry the Margrave rode to the man’s house and shot him down on his own threshold.  A shepherd who met the Margrave on a shying horse did not get his flock out of the way quickly enough; the Margrave demanded the pistols of a gentleman in his company, but he answered that they were not loaded, and the shepherd’s life was saved.  As they returned home the gentleman fired them off.  “What does that mean?” cried the Margrave, furiously.  “It means, gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight, for not having heard my pistols an hour sooner.”

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his moments of regret; but perhaps it is not altogether strange that when he died, the whole population “stormed through the streets to meet his funeral train, not in awe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall of human grandeur, but to unite in an eager tumult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who had long held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and in chains.”  For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had reigned over his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right.

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their instinctive revolt from the belief that any man not untamably savage could be guilty of his atrocities; and they called his son the Last Margrave, with a touch of the poetry which perhaps records a regret for their extinction as a state.  He did not harry them as his father had done; his mild rule was the effect partly of the indifference and distaste for his country bred, by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless also it was the effect of a kindly nature.  Even in the matter of selling a few thousands of them to fight the battles of a bad cause on the other side of the world, he had the best of motives, and faithfully applied the proceeds to the payment of the state debt and the embellishment of the capital.

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the Great, and was so constantly at war with her husband that probably she had nothing to do with the marriage which the Wild Margrave forced upon their son.  Love certainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Margrave early escaped from it to the society of Mlle. Clairon, the great French tragedienne, whom he met in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make her home with him in Ansbach.  She lived there seventeen years, and though always an alien, she bore herself with kindness to all classes, and is still remembered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a Klarungswecke in its imperfect French.

No roll of butter records in faltering accents the name of the brilliant and disdainful English lady who replaced this poor tragic muse in the Margrave’s heart, though the lady herself lived to be the last Margravine of Ansbach, where everybody seems to have hated her with a passion which she doubtless knew how to return.  She was the daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and the wife of Lord Craven, a sufficiently unfaithful and unworthy nobleman by her account, from whom she was living apart when the Margrave asked her to his capital.  There she set herself to oust Mlle. Clairon with sneers and jests for the theatrical style which the actress could not outlive.  Lady Craven said she was sure Clairon’s nightcap must be a crown of gilt paper; and when Clairon threatened to kill herself, and the Margrave was alarmed, “You forget,” said Lady Craven, “that actresses only stab themselves under their sleeves.”

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great tragedienne returned to Paris, where she remained true to her false friend, and from time to time wrote him letters full of magnanimous counsel and generous tenderness.  But she could not have been so good company as Lady Craven, who was a very gifted person, and knew how to compose songs and sing them, and write comedies and play them, and who could keep the Margrave amused in many ways.  When his loveless and childless wife died he married the English woman, but he grew more and more weary of his dull little court and his dull little country, and after a while, considering the uncertain tenure sovereigns had of their heads since the French King had lost his, and the fact that he had no heirs to follow him in his principality, he resolved to cede it for a certain sum to Prussia.  To this end his new wife’s urgence was perhaps not wanting.  They went to England, where she outlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs.

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantly that he was worth waiting for.  He was as vainglorious of the palace as any grand-monarching margrave of them all.  He could not have been more personally superb in showing their different effigies if they had been his own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a single splendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like rooms he led them through.  The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so poignantly interesting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she perished of her pleasure, one of the things she saw.  She had for once a surfeit of highhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and canopies, the tapestries, the historical associations with the margraves and their marriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon.  The Great Napoleon’s man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters when he occupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his arrangements for taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over to Bavaria, with whom it still remains.  Twice the Great Frederick had sojourned in the palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the Wild Margrave, and more than once it had welcomed her next neighbor and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercingly plaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the air.  Here, oddly enough, the spell of the Wild Margrave weakened in the presence of his portrait, which signally failed to justify his fame of furious tyrant.  That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular and historical conception of him than the impression he made upon his exalted contemporaries.  The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could so far excuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say:  “The Margrave of Ansbach . . . was a young prince who had been very badly educated.  He continually ill-treated my sister; they led the life of cat and dog.  My sister, it is true, was sometimes in fault . . . .  Her education had been very bad. . .  She was married at fourteen.”

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he would easily have known them for Americans by the handsome fee they gave him; they came away flown with his praise; and their national vanity was again flattered when they got out into the principal square of Ansbach.  There, in a bookseller’s window, they found among the pamphlets teaching different languages without a master, one devoted to the Amerikanische Sprache as distinguished from the Englische Sprache.  That there could be no mistake, the cover was printed with colors in a German ideal of the star-spangled banner; and March said he always knew that we had a language of our own, and that now he was going in to buy that pamphlet and find out what it was like.  He asked the young shop-woman how it differed from English, which she spoke fairly well from having lived eight years in Chicago.  She said that it differed from the English mainly in emphasis and pronunciation.  “For instance, the English say ‘half past’, and the Americans ‘Half past’; the English say ‘laht’ and the Americans say ’late’.”

The weather had now been clear quite long enough, and it was raining again, a fine, bitter, piercing drizzle.  They asked the girl if it always rained in Ansbach; and she owned that it nearly always did.  She said that sometimes she longed for a little American summer; that it was never quite warm in Ansbach; and when they had got out into the rain, March said:  “It was very nice to stumble on Chicago in an Ansbach book-store.  You ought to have told her you had a married daughter in Chicago.  Don’t miss another such chance.”

“We shall need another bag if we keep on buying books at this rate,” said his wife with tranquil irrelevance; and not to give him time for protest; she pushed him into a shop where the valises in the window perhaps suggested her thought.  March made haste to forestall her there by saying they were Americans, but the mistress of the shop seemed to have her misgivings, and “Born Americans, perhaps?” she ventured.  She had probably never met any but the naturalized sort, and supposed these were the only sort.  March re-assured her, and then she said she had a son living in Jersey City, and she made March take his address that he might tell him he had seen his mother; she had apparently no conception what a great way Jersey City is from New York.

Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out.  “Now, that is what I never can get used to in you, Basil, and I’ve tried to palliate it for twenty-seven years.  You know you won’t look up that poor woman’s son!  Why did you let her think you would?”

“How could I tell her I wouldn’t?  Perhaps I shall.”

“No, no!  You never will.  I know you’re good and kind, and that’s why I can’t understand your being so cruel.  When we get back, how will you ever find time to go over to Jersey City?”

He could not tell, but at last he said:  “I’ll tell you what!  You must keep me up to it.  You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, and this will be such a pleasure!”

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took his arm; and he began, from the example of this good mother, to philosophize the continuous simplicity and sanity of the people of Ansbach under all their civic changes.  Saints and soldiers, knights and barons, margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone, and left their single-hearted, friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them.  The people had suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and apparently prospered on under all governments and misgovernments.  When the court was most French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must have remained immutably German, dull, and kind.  After all, he said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the same.

“Yes, that is all very well,” she returned, “and you can theorize interestingly enough; but I’m afraid that poor mother, there, had no more reality for you than those people in the past.  You appreciate her as a type, and you don’t care for her as a human being.  You’re nothing but a dreamer, after all.  I don’t blame you,” she went on.  “It’s your temperament, and you can’t change, now.”

“I may change for the worse,” he threatened.  “I think I have, already.  I don’t believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his.  I look back in wonder and admiration at myself.  I’ve steadily lost touch with life since then.  I’m a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and the good as I used to be when I was young.  Oh, I have the grace to be troubled at times, now, and once I never was.  It never occurred to me then that the world wasn’t made to interest me, or at the best to instruct me, but it does, now, at times.”

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best ground he could take with her.  “I think you behaved very well with Burnamy.  You did your duty then.”

“Did I?  I’m not so sure.  At any rate, it’s the last time I shall do it.  I’ve served my term.  I think I should tell him that he was all right in that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now.”

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, provisionally, “that we don’t come upon a trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?”

“Ah, you’ve been hoping he would turn up!”

“Yes.  I don’t deny it.  I feel very unhappy about him.”

“I don’t.  He’s too much like me.  He would have been quite capable of promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City.  When I think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy.”

“I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he’s got rid of his highhotes,” said Mrs. March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the comfort of having it nearly all to themselves.  Prince Leopold had risen early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got away to the manoeuvres somewhere at six o’clock; the decorations had been removed, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the prince had rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks waddling about in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence of a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing till the hour of noon should sound.  He sat there immovable, but at the last stroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the station.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the night before was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by its splendor.  After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the prince might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at this modest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediate royalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he could not have done better than dine at the Golden Star.  If he paid no more than two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as abundantly.  The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread, March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting the bread of Carlsbad.

After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not so incomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served them in a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the time when it was a patrician mansion.  The garden had roses in it and several sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries, currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all harmoniously contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where no one of the seasons can very well know itself from the others.  It had not been raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that the shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in Germany, between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London.  Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described Burnamy’s beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had been a woman, could not have failed to remember him.  But he failed, with a real grief, apparently, and certainly a real politeness, to recall either his name or his person.  The landlord was an intelligent, good-looking young fellow; he told them that he was lately married, and they liked him so much that they were sorry to see him afterwards privately boxing the ears of the piccolo, the waiter’s little understudy.  Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not have witnessed his punishment; his being in a dress-coat seemed to make it also an indignity.

In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the old Orangery of the Schloss for a cup of tea, and found themselves in the company of several Ansbach ladies who had brought their work, in the evident habit of coming there every afternoon for their coffee and for a dish of gossip.  They were kind, uncomely, motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed her hair at the table; and they all sat outside of the cafe with their feet on the borders of the puddles which had not dried up there in the shade of the building.

A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows of trees, stretched before them with the sunset light on it, and it was all very quiet and friendly.  The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from some herb apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked like willow leaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove in each cup, and they sat contentedly over it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladies were, talking about.  These had recognized the strangers for Americans, and one of them explained that Americans spoke the same language as the English and yet were not quite the same people.

“She differs from the girl in the book-store,” said March, translating to his wife.  “Let us get away before she says that we are not so nice as the English,” and they made off toward the avenue of trees beyond the lawn.

There were a few people walking up and down in the alley, making the most of the moment of dry weather.  They saluted one another like acquaintances, and three clean-shaven, walnut-faced old peasants bowed in response to March’s stare, with a self-respectful civility.  They were yeomen of the region of Ansbach, where the country round about is dotted with their cottages, and not held in vast homeless tracts by the nobles as in North Germany.

The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March at breakfast, not without a certain tacit pride in it to the disadvantage of the Prussians, was at the supper table, and was disposed to more talk, which he managed in a stout, slow English of his own.  He said he had never really spoken English with an English-speaking person before, or at all since he studied it in school at Munich.

“I should be afraid to put my school-boy German against your English,” March said, and, when he had understood, the other laughed for pleasure, and reported the compliment to his wife in their own parlance.  “You Germans certainly beat us in languages.”

“Oh, well,” he retaliated, “the Americans beat us in some other things,” and Mrs. March felt that this was but just; she would have liked to mention a few, but not ungraciously; she and the German lady kept smiling across the table, and trying detached vocables of their respective tongues upon each other.

The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but was in Ansbach on an affair of business; he asked March if he were not going to see the manoeuvres somewhere.  Till now the manoeuvres had merely been the interesting background of their travel; but now, hearing that the Emperor of Germany, the King of Saxony, the Regent of Bavaria, and the King of Wurtemberg, the Grand-Dukes of Weimar and Baden, with visiting potentates of all sorts, and innumerable lesser highhotes, foreign and domestic, were to be present, Mrs. March resolved that they must go to at least one of the reviews.

“If you go to Frankfort, you can see the King of Italy too,” said the Bavarian, but he owned that they probably could not get into a hotel there, and he asked why they should not go to Wurzburg, where they could see all the sovereigns except the King of Italy.

“Wurzburg?  Wurzburg?” March queried of his wife.  “Where did we hear of that place?”

“Isn’t it where Burnamy said Mr. Stoller had left his daughters at school?”

“So it is!  And is that on the way to the Rhine?” he asked the Bavarian.

“No, no!  Wurzburg is on the Main, about five hours from Ansbach.  And it is a very interesting place.  It is where the good wine comes from.”

“Oh, yes,” said March, and in their rooms his wife got out all their guides and maps and began to inform herself and to inform him about Wurzburg.  But first she said it was very cold and he must order some fire made in the tall German stove in their parlor.  The maid who came said “Gleich,” but she did not come back, and about the time they were getting furious at her neglect, they began getting warm.  He put his hand on the stove and found it hot; then he looked down for a door in the stove where he might shut a damper; there was no door.

“Good heavens!” he shouted.  “It’s like something in a dream,” and he ran to pull the bell for help.

“No, no!  Don’t ring!  It will make us ridiculous.  They’ll think Americans don’t know anything.  There must be some way of dampening the stove; and if there isn’t, I’d rather suffocate than give myself away.”  Mrs. March ran and opened the window, while her husband carefully examined the stove at every point, and explored the pipe for the damper in vain.  “Can’t you find it?” The night wind came in raw and damp, and threatened to blow their lamp out, and she was obliged to shut the window.

“Not a sign of it.  I will go down and ask the landlord in strict confidence how they dampen their stoves in Ansbach.”

“Well, if you must.  It’s getting hotter every moment.”  She followed him timorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp, turned low for the night.

He looked at his watch; it was eleven o’clock.  “I’m afraid they’re all in bed.”

“Yes; you mustn’t go!  We must try to find out for ourselves.  What can that door be for?”

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in the wall near their room, and it yielded to his pull.  “Get a candle,” he whispered, and when she brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway.

“Oh, do you think you’d better?” she hesitated.

“You can come, too, if you’re afraid.  You’ve always said you wanted to die with me.”

“Well.  But you go first.”

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway.  “Just come in here, a moment.”  She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half the height of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down where in one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in a grin of derision.  This grin was the damper of their stove, and this was where the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive, and was still joyously chuckling to itself.  “I think that Munich man was wrong.  I don’t believe we beat the Germans in anything.  There isn’t a hotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, and every one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to the convenience of kindling a fire in it.”

L.

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a rainy morning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the long-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see the passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres.  They were troops of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through the groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they took the steady downpour on their dripping helmets.  Some of them were smoking, but none smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid on the sidewalk.  An old officer halted his staff to scold a citizen who had given him a mistaken direction.  The shame of the erring man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less, though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used them with equal scorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round on horseback behind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them amused himself by turning the silver bangles on his wrist.

Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridge spanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way to the market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St. Gumpertus.  The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemed to be also a fair, with peasants’ clothes and local pottery for sale, as well as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old women squatting before them.  It was all as picturesque as the markets used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back.  Her laugh reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid.  When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil the soldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the street under their windows.  A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a corseted officer’s, from time to time came out of the house across the way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there.  Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and disappeared with them in-doors.  Once she paused from her work to joke with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.

“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. March.  “I think it’s good exercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fat fellows at the window.  I suppose she’ll saw the wood in the cellar, and then lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves’ dressing-rooms.”

“Don’t laugh!  It’s too disgraceful.”

“Well, I don’t know!  If you like, I’ll offer these gentlemen across the way your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller.”

“I wish you’d offer my opinion of them.  They’ve been staring in here with an opera-glass.”

“Ah, that’s a different affair.  There isn’t much going on in Ansbach, and they have to make the most of it.”

The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set at right angles with them, and nothing which went on in the streets was lost.  Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare moments they lay full of sun.  At such times the Marches were puzzled by the sight of citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they had forgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the brief respites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to dry them; and some other sights remained baffling to the last.  Once a man with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidly after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows; but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew.  Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station:  a young man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking old woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting question whether she was the young man’s servant in her best clothes, or merely his mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression of the courtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church.  In the little ex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborly interest in the curiosity of strangers which endears Italian witness.  The white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying “Gleich!” instead of “Subito!” The architecture of the houses was a party to the illusion.  St. Johannis, like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sort of Teutonized renaissance.

The rococo margraves and margravines used of course to worship in St. Johannis Church.  Now they all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in the crypt of the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble, with draperies of black samite, more and more funereally vainglorious to the last.  Their courtly coffins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with the little coffins of the children that died before they came to the knowledge of their greatness.  On one of these a kneeling figurine in bronze holds up the effigy of the child within; on another the epitaph plays tenderly with the fate of a little princess, who died in her first year.

In the Rose-month was this sweet Rose taken.
For the Rose-kind hath she earth forsaken.
The Princess is the Rose, that here no longer blows.
From the stem by death’s hand rudely shaken.
Then rest in the Rose-house.
Little Princess-Rosebud dear!
There life’s Rose shall bloom again
In Heaven’s sunshine clear.

While March struggled to get this into English words, two German ladies, who had made themselves of his party, passed reverently away and left him to pay the sacristan alone.

“That is all right,” he said, when he came out.  “I think we got the most value; and they didn’t look as if they could afford it so well; though you never can tell, here.  These ladies may be the highest kind of highhotes practising a praiseworthy economy.  I hope the lesson won’t be lost on us.  They have saved enough by us for their coffee at the Orangery.  Let us go and have a little willow-leaf tea!”

The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it had kept of the days when an Orangery was essential to the self-respect of every sovereign prince, and of so many private gentlemen.  On their way they always passed the statue of Count Platen, the dull poet whom Heine’s hate would have delivered so cruelly over to an immortality of contempt, but who stands there near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted with flowers, and ignores his brilliant enemy in the comfortable durability of bronze; and there always awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of Kaspar Hauser’s fate; which his murder affixes to it with a red stain.

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe they went up into that nook of the plantation where the simple shaft of church-warden’s Gothic commemorates the assassination on the spot where it befell.  Here the hapless youth, whose mystery will never be fathomed on earth, used to come for a little respite from his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesick for the kindness of his Nuremberg friends; and here his murderer found him and dealt him the mortal blow.

March lingered upon the last sad circumstance of the tragedy in which the wounded boy dragged himself home, to suffer the suspicion and neglect of his guardian till death attested his good faith beyond cavil.  He said this was the hardest thing to bear in all his story, and that he would like to have a look into the soul of the dull, unkind wretch who had so misread his charge.  He was going on with an inquiry that pleased him much, when his wife pulled him abruptly away.

“Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascination of it, and you are wanting to take the material from Burnamy!”

“Oh, well, let him have the material; he will spoil it.  And I can always reject it, if he offers it to ’Every Other Week’.”

“I could believe, after your behavior to that poor woman about her son in Jersey City, you’re really capable of it.”

“What comprehensive inculpation!  I had forgotten about that poor woman.”

LI.

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg banker to send them came just as they were leaving Ansbach.  The landlord sent them down to the station, and Mrs. March opened them in the train, and read them first so that she could prepare him if there were anything annoying in them, as well as indulge her livelier curiosity.

“They’re from both the children,” she said, without waiting for him to ask.  “You can look at them later.  There’s a very nice letter from Mrs. Adding to me, and one from dear little Rose for you.”  Then she hesitated, with her hand on a letter faced down in her lap.  “And there’s one from Agatha Triscoe, which I wonder what you’ll think of.”  She delayed again, and then flashed it open before him, and waited with a sort of impassioned patience while he read it.

He read it, and gave it back to her.  “There doesn’t seem to be very much in it.”

“That’s it!  Don’t you think I had a right to there being something in it, after all I did for her?”

“I always hoped you hadn’t done anything for her, but if you have, why should she give herself away on paper?  It’s a very proper letter.”

“It’s a little too proper, and it’s the last I shall have to do with her.  She knew that I should be on pins and needles till I heard how her father had taken Burnamy’s being there, that night, and she doesn’t say a word about it.”

“The general may have had a tantrum that she couldn’t describe.  Perhaps she hasn’t told him, yet.”

“She would tell him instantly!” cried Mrs. March who began to find reason in the supposition, as well as comfort for the hurt which the girl’s reticence had given her.  “Or if she wouldn’t, it would be because she was waiting for the best chance.”

“That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult father.  She may be waiting for the best chance to say how he took it.  No, I’m all for Miss Triscoe, and I hope that now, if she’s taken herself off our hands, she’ll keep off.”

“It’s altogether likely that he’s made her promise not to tell me anything about it,” Mrs. March mused aloud.

“That would be unjust to a person who had behaved so discreetly as you have,” said her husband.

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was a junction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train began to move.  She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English tastelessness.  She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her his seat.  She accepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the English of a German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who had been teaching in England and had acquired the national feeling for dress.  But in this character she found her interesting, and even a little pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which the other met eagerly enough.  They were now running among low hills, not so picturesque as those between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same toylike quaintness in the villages dropped here and there in their valleys.  One small town, completely walled, with its gray houses and red roofs, showed through the green of its trees and gardens so like a colored print in a child’s story-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy in it, and then accounted for her rapture by explaining to the stranger that they were Americans and had never been in Germany before.  The lady was not visibly affected by the fact, she said casually that she had often been in that little town, which she named; her uncle had a castle in the country back of it, and she came with her husband for the shooting in the autumn.  By a natural transition she spoke of her children, for whom she had an English governess; she said she had never been in England, but had learnt the language from a governess in her own childhood; and through it all Mrs. March perceived that she was trying to impress them with her consequence.  To humor her pose, she said they had been looking up the scene of Kaspar Hauser’s death at Ansbach; and at this the stranger launched into such intimate particulars concerning him, and was so familiar at first hands with the facts of his life, that Mrs. March let her run on, too much amused with her pretensions to betray any doubt of her.  She wondered if March were enjoying it all as much, and from time to time she tried to catch his eye, while the lady talked constantly and rather loudly, helping herself out with words from them both when her English failed her.  In the safety of her perfect understanding of the case, Mrs. March now submitted farther, and even suffered some patronage from her, which in another mood she would have met with a decided snub.

As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopes of the Wurzburg, hills, the stranger said she was going to change there, and take a train on to Berlin.  Mrs. March wondered whether she would be able to keep up the comedy to the last; and she had to own that she carried it off very easily when the friends whom she was expecting did not meet her on the arrival of their train.  She refused March’s offers of help, and remained quietly seated while he got out their wraps and bags.  She returned with a hardy smile the cold leave Mrs. March took of her; and when a porter came to the door, and forced his way by the Marches, to ask with anxious servility if she, were the Baroness von-----, she bade the man get them. a ‘traeger’, and then come back for her.  She waved them a complacent adieu before they mixed with the crowd and lost sight of her.

“Well, my dear,” said March, addressing the snobbishness in his wife which he knew to be so wholly impersonal, “you’ve mingled with one highhote, anyway.  I must say she didn’t look it, any more than the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, and yet she’s only a baroness.  Think of our being three hours in the same compartment, and she doing all she could to impress us and our getting no good of it!  I hoped you were feeling her quality, so that we should have it in the family, anyway, and always know what it was like.  But so far, the highhotes have all been terribly disappointing.”

He teased on as they followed the traeger with their baggage out of the station; and in the omnibus on the way to their hotel, he recurred to the loss they had suffered in the baroness’s failure to dramatize her nobility effectually.  “After all, perhaps she was as much disappointed in us.  I don’t suppose we looked any more like democrats than she looked like an aristocrat.”

“But there’s a great difference,” Mrs. March returned at last.  “It isn’t at all a parallel case.  We were not real democrats, and she was a real aristocrat.”

“To be sure.  There is that way of looking at it.  That’s rather novel; I wish I had thought of that myself.  She was certainly more to blame than we were.”

LII.

The square in front of the station was planted with flag-poles wreathed in evergreens; a triumphal arch was nearly finished, and a colossal allegory in imitation bronze was well on the way to completion, in honor of the majesties who were coming for the manoeuvres.  The streets which the omnibus passed through to the Swan Inn were draped with the imperial German and the royal Bavarian colors; and the standards of the visiting nationalities decked the fronts of the houses where their military attaches were lodged; but the Marches failed to see our own banner, and were spared for the moment the ignominy of finding it over an apothecary shop in a retired avenue.  The sun had come out, the sky overhead was of a smiling blue; and they felt the gala-day glow and thrill in the depths of their inextinguishable youth.

The Swan Inn sits on one of the long quays bordering the Main, and its windows look down upon the bridges and shipping of the river; but the traveller reaches it by a door in the rear, through an archway into a back street, where an odor dating back to the foundation of the city is waiting to welcome him.

The landlord was there, too, and he greeted the Marches so cordially that they fully partook his grief in being able to offer them rooms on the front of the house for two nights only.  They reconciled themselves to the necessity of then turning out for the staff of the King of Saxony, the more readily because they knew that there was no hope of better things at any other hotel.

The rooms which they could have for the time were charming, and they came down to supper in a glazed gallery looking out on the river picturesque with craft of all fashions:  with row-boats, sail-boats, and little steamers, but mainly with long black barges built up into houses in the middle, and defended each by a little nervous German dog.  Long rafts of logs weltered in the sunset red which painted the swift current, and mantled the immeasurable vineyards of the hills around like the color of their ripening grapes.  Directly in face rose a castled steep, which kept the ranging walls and the bastions and battlements of the time when such a stronghold could have defended the city from foes without or from tumult within.  The arches of a stately bridge spanned the river sunsetward, and lifted a succession of colossal figures against the crimson sky.

“I guess we have been wasting our time, my dear,” said March, as they, turned from this beauty to the question of supper.  “I wish we had always been here!”

Their waiter had put them at a table in a division of the gallery beyond that which they entered, where some groups of officers were noisily supping.  There was no one in their room but a man whose face was indistinguishable against the light, and two young girls who glanced at them with looks at once quelled and defiant, and then after a stare at the officers in the gallery beyond, whispered together with suppressed giggling.  The man fed on without noticing them, except now and then to utter a growl that silenced the whispering and giggling for a moment.  The Marches, from no positive evidence of any sense, decided that they were Americans.

“I don’t know that I feel responsible for them as their fellow-countryman; I should, once,” he said.

“It isn’t that.  It’s the worry of trying to make out why they are just what they are,” his wife returned.

The girls drew the man’s attention to them and he looked at them for the first time; then after a sort of hesitation he went on with his supper.  They had only begun theirs when he rose with the two girls, whom Mrs. March now saw to be of the same size and dressed alike, and came heavily toward them.

“I thought you was in Carlsbad,” he said bluntly to March, with a nod at Mrs. March.  He added, with a twist of his head toward the two girls, “My daughters,” and then left them to her, while he talked on with her husband.  “Come to see this foolery, I suppose.  I’m on my way to the woods for my after-cure; but I thought I might as well stop and give the girls a chance; they got a week’s vacation, anyway.”  Stoller glanced at them with a sort of troubled tenderness in his strong dull face.

“Oh, yes.  I understood they were at school here,” said March, and he heard one of them saying, in a sweet, high pipe to his wife:

“Ain’t it just splendid?  I ha’n’t seen anything equal to it since the Worrld’s Fairr.”  She spoke with a strong contortion of the Western r, and her sister hastened to put in:

“I don’t think it’s to be compared with the Worrld’s Fairr.  But these German girls, here, just think it’s great.  It just does me good to laff at ’em, about it.  I like to tell ’em about the electric fountain and the Courrt of Lionorr when they get to talkin’ about the illuminations they’re goun’ to have.  You goun’ out to the parade?  You better engage your carriage right away if you arre.  The carrs’ll be a perfect jam.  Father’s engaged ourrs; he had to pay sixty marrks forr it.”

They chattered on without shyness and on as easy terms with a woman of three times their years as if she had been a girl of their own age; they willingly took the whole talk to themselves, and had left her quite outside of it before Stoller turned to her.

“I been telling Mr. March here that you better both come to the parade with us.  I guess my twospanner will hold five; or if it won’t, we’ll make it.  I don’t believe there’s a carriage left in Wurzburg; and if you go in the cars, you’ll have to walk three or four miles before you get to the parade-ground.  You think it over,” he said to March.  “Nobody else is going to have the places, anyway, and you can say yes at the last minute just as well as now.”

He moved off with his girls, who looked over their shoulders at the officers as they passed on through the adjoining room.

“My dear!” cried Mrs. March.  “Didn’t you suppose he classed us with Burnamy in that business?  Why should he be polite to us?”

“Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters.  He’s probably heard of your performance at the Kurhaus ball.  But he knows that I thought Burnamy in the wrong.  This may be Stoller’s way of wiping out an obligation.  Wouldn’t you like to go with him?”

“The mere thought of his being in the same town is prostrating.  I’d far rather he hated us; then he would avoid us.”

“Well, he doesn’t own the town, and if it comes to the worst, perhaps we can avoid him.  Let us go out, anyway, and see if we can’t.”

“No, no; I’m too tired; but you go.  And get all the maps and guides you can; there’s so very little in Baedeker, and almost nothing in that great hulking Bradshaw of yours; and I’m sure there must be the most interesting history of Wurzburg.  Isn’t it strange that we haven’t the slightest association with the name?”

“I’ve been rummaging in my mind, and I’ve got hold of an association at last,” said March.  “It’s beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloon window Wurzburger Hof-Brau.”

“No matter if it is beer.  Find some sketch of the history, and we’ll try to get away from the Stollers in it.  I pitied those wild girls, too.  What crazy images of the world must fill their empty minds!  How their ignorant thoughts must go whirling out into the unknown!  I don’t envy their father.  Do hurry back!  I shall be thinking about them every instant till you come.”

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothing to sit looking through the long twilight at the lovely landscape that the sort of bruise given by their encounter with the Stollers had left her consciousness before March returned.  She made him admire first the convent church on a hill further up the river which exactly balanced the fortress in front of them, and then she seized upon the little books he had brought, and set him to exploring the labyrinths of their German, with a mounting exultation in his discoveries.  There was a general guide to the city, and a special guide, with plans and personal details of the approaching manoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them; and there was a sketch of the local history:  a kind of thing that the Germans know how to write particularly, well, with little gleams of pleasant humor blinking through it.  For the study of this, Mrs. March realized, more and more passionately, that they were in the very most central and convenient point, for the history of Wurzburg might be said to have begun with her prince-bishops, whose rule had begun in the twelfth century, and who had built, on a forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg on that vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn.  There had of course been history before that, but ’nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell, nothing that so united the glory of this world and the next as that of the prince-bishops.  They had made the Marienburg their home, and kept it against foreign and domestic foes for five hundred years.  Shut within its well-armed walls they had awed the often-turbulent city across the Main; they had held it against the embattled farmers in the Peasants’ War, and had splendidly lost it to Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back again and held it till Napoleon took it from them.  He gave it with their flock to the Bavarians, who in turn briefly yielded it to the Prussians in 1866, and were now in apparently final possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and gone, and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and kingdoms enough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated by the presence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony, grand-ducal Baden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates among those who speak the beautiful language of the Ja.

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supreme place which they had at once taken in Mrs. March’s fancy.  The potentates were all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops had built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to come down from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city, and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church.  Tiepolo had come up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after year, in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the most sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism.  It prevailed so universally in Wurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched in a period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modern Protestantism.  Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are now of the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to the Catholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to the baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very well with but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymaking known outside of the colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch.  The prince-bishops had their finger in everybody’s pie, and they portioned out the cakes and ale, which were made according to formulas of their own.  The distractions were all of a religious character; churches, convents, monasteries, abounded; ecclesiastical processions and solemnities were the spectacles that edified if they did not amuse the devout population.

It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all this spiritual severity that one of the greatest modern scientific discoveries should have been made in Wurzburg, and that the Roentgen rays should now be giving her name a splendor destined to eclipse the glories of her past.

Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so; or at least that the name of Roentgen would ever lend more lustre to his city than that of Longfellow’s Walther von der Vogelweide.  She was no less surprised than pleased to realize that this friend of the birds was a Wurzburger, and she said that their first pilgrimage in the morning should be to the church where he lies buried.

LIII.

March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned, and left her to have her coffee in her room.  He got a pleasant table in the gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape, though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain, had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light.  The waiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with a card which he insisted was for March.  It was not till he put on his glasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all to agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

“Well,” he said, “why wasn’t this card sent up last night?”

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card, after asking March’s nationality, and was then breakfasting in the next room.  March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, and Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him.

“I thought it must be you,” he called out, joyfully, as they struck their extended hands together, “but so many people look alike, nowadays, that I don’t trust my eyes any more.”

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsic and partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty German.  As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slipped down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres.  He added that he supposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quite unembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without heeding March’s answer, he laughed and added:  “Of course, I know she must have told Mrs. March all about it.”

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife’s absence he felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit.

“I don’t give it up, you know,” Kenby went on, with perfect ease.  “I’m not a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old.”

“At my age I don’t,” March put in, and they roared together, in men’s security from the encroachments of time.

“But she happens to be the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to marry, for more than a few days at a stretch.  You know how it is with us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” said March, and they shouted again.

“We’re in love, and we’re out of love, twenty times.  But this isn’t a mere fancy; it’s a conviction.  And there’s no reason why she shouldn’t marry me.”

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby.  “You mean the boy,” he said.  “Well, I like Rose,” and now March really felt swept from his feet.  “She doesn’t deny that she likes me, but she seems to think that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, it will only give me to him.  As for devoting her whole life to him, she couldn’t do a worse thing for him.  What the boy needs is a man’s care, and a man’s will—Good heavens!  You don’t think I could ever be unkind to the little soul?” Kenby threw himself forward over the table.

“My dear fellow!” March protested.

“I’d rather cut off my right hand!” Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then he said, with a humorous drop:  “The fact is, I don’t believe I should want her so much if I couldn’t have Rose too.  I want to have them both.  So far, I’ve only got no for an answer; but I’m not going to keep it.  I had a letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and—”

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver, which March knew must be from his wife.  “What is keeping you so?” she wrote.  “I am all ready.”  “It’s from Mrs. March,” he explained to Kenby.  “I am going out with her on some errands.  I’m awfully glad to see you again.  We must talk it all over, and you must—you mustn’t—Mrs. March will want to see you later—I—Are you in the hotel?”

“Oh yes.  I’ll see you at the one-o’clock table d’hote, I suppose.”

March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he should tell his wife at once of Kenby’s presence, or leave her free for the pleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe and acceptable form.  She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps and umbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

“Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them.  This is to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance to bother; the more strangers the better.  Wurzburg is richer than anything I imagined.  I’ve looked it all up; I’ve got the plan of the city, so that we can easily find the way.  We’ll walk first, and take carriages whenever we get tired.  We’ll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp of rococo to begin with; there wasn’t half enough of it at Ansbach.  Isn’t it strange how we’ve come round to it?”

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obediently imbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel and courtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him in devout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the rococo.

“What biddable little things we were!” she went on, while March was struggling to keep Kenby in the background of his consciousness.  “The rococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we were pinning our faith to pointed arches; and yet I suppose we were perfectly sincere.  Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!” They were now making their way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the street leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the door of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; her body twisting to show the sculptor’s mastery of anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays.  In fact, the Virgin’s whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in her arms.  “Isn’t she delightful?”

“I see what you mean,” said March, with a dubious glance at the statue, “but I’m not sure, now, that I wouldn’t like something quieter in my Madonnas.”

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with the cathedral ending the prospective, was full of the holiday so near at hand.  The narrow sidewalks were thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and up the middle of the street detachments of military came and went, halting the little horse-cars and the huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed to have the sole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jingling or thundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselves round the corners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flattening themselves like posters against the house walls.  There were peasants, men and women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country life had kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were citizens in the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were soldiers of all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time there were pretty young girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare arms gloved to the elbows, who were following a holiday custom of the place in going about the streets in ball costume.  The shop windows were filled with portraits of the Emperor and the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies of his family; the German and Bavarian colors draped the facades of the houses and festooned the fantastic Madonnas posing above so many portals.  The modern patriotism included the ancient piety without disturbing it; the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovereignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose.  There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style.  For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all.  This interior came together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo.  It was, unimpeachably perfect in its way, “Just,” March murmured to his wife, “as the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century was perfected in certain times and places.  But the odd thing is to find the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany.  I wonder how much the prince-bishops really liked it.  But they had become rococo, too!  Look at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave!  What magnificent swell!  How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the baroque style.  It expresses the eighteenth century, though.  But how you long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth.”

“I don’t,” she whispered back.  “I’m perfectly wild with Wurzburg.  I like to have a thing go as far as it can.  At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get.  I am consistent.”

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for Longfellow’s.  The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows, which now represent the birds he loved.  The cenotaph is surmounted by a broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the Meistersinger’s feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to themselves.  In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation.  “You are right!  Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can’t enjoy Gothic here any more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg.”

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it.  They were in time for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one was an American and a republican.  She softened a little toward their system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa.  They stood each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing.  There was an old fountain near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould, and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of spray.  At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet.  Though the square without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city’s past seemed to culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

“Why didn’t we have something like all this on our first wedding journey?” she sighed at last.  “To think of our battening from Boston to Niagara and back!  And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!”

“Niagara wasn’t so bad,” he said, “and I will never go back on Quebec.”

“Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg!  Perhaps this is meant as a compensation for our lost youth.  But I can’t enjoy it as I could when I was young.  It’s wasted on my sere and yellow leaf.  I wish Burnamy and Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them.”

“They wouldn’t care for it,” he replied, and upon a daring impulse he added, “Kenby and Mrs. Adding might.”  If she took this suggestion in good part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

“Don’t speak of them!  They’re in just that besotted early middle-age when life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.  Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes.”  She rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded terrace in the background which had tempted her.

“It isn’t so bad, being elderly,” he said.  “By that time we have accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations.  We have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view.  We know where we are at.”

“I don’t mind being elderly.  The world’s just as amusing as ever, and lots of disagreeable things have dropped out.  It’s the getting more than elderly; it’s the getting old; and then—”

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he said, “Perhaps there’s something else, something better—somewhere.”

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued fountains all coming together.  She put her hand on one of the fat little urchin-groups on the stone coping.  “I don’t want cherubs, when I can have these putti.  And those old prince-bishops didn’t, either!”

“I don’t suppose they kept a New England conscience,” he said, with a vague smile.  “It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo.”

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of despair which any perfection inspires.  They said how feminine it was, how exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had purified and left eternally charming.  They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.  The vast superb palace of the prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns, imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively as this exquisite work of the court ironsmith.  It related itself in its aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which it seemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said.  “Or iron-mongery,” he corrected himself upon reflection.

LIV.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests, but he remembered him again when he called a carriage, and ordered it driven to their hotel.  It was the hour of the German mid-day table d’hote, and they would be sure to meet him there.  The question now was how March should own his presence in time to prevent his wife from showing her ignorance of it to Kenby himself, and he was still turning the question hopelessly over in his mind when the sight of the hotel seemed to remind her of a fact which she announced.

“Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I am not going to sit through a long table d’hote.  I want you to send me up a simple beefsteak and a cup of tea to our rooms; and I don’t want you to come near for hours; because I intend to take a whole afternoon nap.  You can keep all the maps and plans, and guides, and you had better go and see what the Volksfest is like; it will give you some notion of the part the people are really taking in all this official celebration, and you know I don’t care.  Don’t come up after dinner to see how I am getting along; I shall get along; and if you should happen to wake me after I had dropped off—”

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at the reading-room window, waiting for the dinner hour, and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs. March as they passed up the corridor.  But she looked so tired that he had decided to spare her till she came down to dinner; and as he sat with March at their soup, he asked if she were not well.

March explained, and he provisionally invented some regrets from her that she should not see Kenby till supper.

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wurzburg wines for their mutual consolation in her absence, and in the friendliness which its promoted they agreed to spend the afternoon together.  No man is so inveterate a husband as not to take kindly an occasional release to bachelor companionship, and before the dinner was over they agreed that they would go to the Volksfest, and get some notion of the popular life and amusements of Wurzburg, which was one of the few places where Kenby had never been before; and they agreed that they would walk.

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, past a barrack full of soldiers.  They met detachments of soldiers everywhere, infantry, artillery, cavalry.

“This is going to be a great show,” Kenby said, meaning the manoeuvres, and he added, as if now he had kept away from the subject long enough and had a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, “I should like to have Rose see it, and get his impressions.”

“I’ve an idea he wouldn’t approve of it.  His mother says his mind is turning more and more to philanthropy.”

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of Mrs. Adding.  “It’s one of the prettiest things to see how she understands Rose.  It’s charming to see them together.  She wouldn’t have half the attraction without him.”

“Oh, yes,” March assented.  He had often wondered how a man wishing to marry a widow managed with the idea of her children by another marriage; but if Kenby was honest; it was much simpler than he had supposed.  He could not say this to him, however, and in a certain embarrassment he had with the conjecture in his presence he attempted a diversion.  “We’re promised something at the Volksfest which will be a great novelty to us as Americans.  Our driver told us this morning that one of the houses there was built entirely of wood.”

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest, this civil feature of the great military event at hand, which the Marches had found largely set forth in the programme of the parade, did not fully keep the glowing promises made for it; in fact it could not easily have done so.  It was in a pleasant neighborhood of new villas such as form the modern quarter of every German city, and the Volksfest was even more unfinished than its environment.  It was not yet enclosed by the fence which was to hide its wonders from the non-paying public, but March and Kenby went in through an archway where the gate-money was as effectually collected from them as if they were barred every other entrance.

The wooden building was easily distinguishable from the other edifices because these were tents and booths still less substantial.  They did not make out its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds, four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, and the rest were devoted to amusements of the usual country-fair type.  Apparently they had little attraction for country people.  The Americans met few peasants in the grounds, and neither at the Edison kinematograph, where they refreshed their patriotism with some scenes of their native life, nor at the little theatre where they saw the sports of the arena revived, in the wrestle of a woman with a bear, did any of the people except tradesmen and artisans seem to be taking part in the festival expression of the popular pleasure.

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether by slight, or by main strength, or by a previous understanding with him, was a slender creature, pathetically small and not altogether plain; and March as they walked away lapsed into a pensive muse upon her strange employ.  He wondered how she came to take it up, and whether she began with the bear when they were both very young, and she could easily throw him.

“Well, women have a great deal more strength than we suppose,” Kenby began with a philosophical air that gave March the hope of some rational conversation.  Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a doting smile came into his face.  “When we went through the Dresden gallery together, Rose and I were perfectly used up at the end of an hour, but his mother kept on as long as there was anything to see, and came away as fresh as a peach.”

Then March saw that it was useless to expect anything different from him, and he let him talk on about Mrs. Adding all the rest of the way back to the hotel.  Kenby seemed only to have begun when they reached the door, and wanted to continue the subject in the reading-room.

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had got through the afternoon, and he escaped to her.  He would have told her now that Kenby was in the house, but he was really so sick of the fact himself that he could not speak of it at once, and he let her go on celebrating all she had seen from the window since she had waked from her long nap.  She said she could never be glad enough that they had come just at that time.  Soldiers had been going by the whole afternoon, and that made it so feudal.

“Yes,” he assented.  “But aren’t you coming up to the station with me to see the Prince-Regent arrive?  He’s due at seven, you know.”

“I declare I had forgotten all about it.  No, I’m not equal to it.  You must go; you can tell me everything; be sure to notice how the Princess Maria looks; the last of the Stuarts, you know; and some people consider her the rightful Queen of England; and I’ll have the supper ordered, and we can go down as soon as you’ve got back.”

LV.

March felt rather shabby stealing away without Kenby; but he had really had as much of Mrs. Adding as he could stand, for one day, and he was even beginning to get sick of Rose.  Besides, he had not sent back a line for ‘Every Other Week’ yet, and he had made up his mind to write a sketch of the manoeuvres.  To this end he wished to receive an impression of the Prince-Regent’s arrival which should not be blurred or clouded by other interests.  His wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, and would have helped him out with his observations, but Kenby would have got in the way, and would have clogged the movement of his fancy in assigning the facts to the parts he would like them to play in the sketch.

At least he made some such excuses to himself as he hurried along toward the Kaiserstrasse.  The draught of universal interest in that direction had left the other streets almost deserted, but as he approached the thoroughfare he found all the ways blocked, and the horse-cars, ordinarily so furiously headlong, arrested by the multiple ranks of spectators on the sidewalks.  The avenue leading from the railway station to the palace was decorated with flags and garlands, and planted with the stems of young firs and birches.  The doorways were crowded, and the windows dense with eager faces peering out of the draped bunting.  The carriageway was kept clear by mild policemen who now and then allowed one of the crowd to cross it.

The crowd was made up mostly of women and boys, and when March joined them, they had already been waiting an hour for the sight of the princes who were to bless them with a vision of the faery race which kings always are to common men.  He thought the people looked dull, and therefore able to bear the strain of expectation with patience better than a livelier race.  They relieved it by no attempt at joking; here and there a dim smile dawned on a weary face, but it seemed an effect of amiability rather than humor.  There was so little of this, or else it was so well bridled by the solemnity of the occasion, that not a man, woman, or child laughed when a bareheaded maid-servant broke through the lines and ran down between them with a life-size plaster bust of the Emperor William in her arms:  she carried it like an overgrown infant, and in alarm at her conspicuous part she cast frightened looks from side to side without arousing any sort of notice.  Undeterred by her failure, a young dog, parted from his owner, and seeking him in the crowd, pursued his search in a wild flight down the guarded roadway with an air of anxiety that in America would have won him thunders of applause, and all sorts of kindly encouragements to greater speed.  But this German crowd witnessed his progress apparently without interest, and without a sign of pleasure.  They were there to see the Prince-Regent arrive, and they did not suffer themselves to be distracted by any preliminary excitement.  Suddenly the indefinable emotion which expresses the fulfilment of expectation in a waiting crowd passed through the multitude, and before he realized it March was looking into the friendly gray-bearded face of the Prince-Regent, for the moment that his carriage allowed in passing.  This came first preceded by four outriders, and followed by other simple equipages of Bavarian blue, full of highnesses of all grades.  Beside the Regent sat his daughter-in-law, the Princess Maria, her silvered hair framing a face as plain and good as the Regent’s, if not so intelligent.

He, in virtue of having been born in Wurzburg, is officially supposed to be specially beloved by his fellow townsmen; and they now testified their affection as he whirled through their ranks, bowing right and left, by what passes in Germany for a cheer.  It is the word Hoch, groaned forth from abdominal depths, and dismally prolonged in a hollow roar like that which the mob makes behind the scenes at the theatre before bursting in visible tumult on the stage.  Then the crowd dispersed, and March came away wondering why such a kindly-looking Prince-Regent should not have given them a little longer sight of himself; after they had waited so patiently for hours to see him.  But doubtless in those countries, he concluded, the art of keeping the sovereign precious by suffering him to be rarely and briefly seen is wisely studied.

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby’s presence; and he did so as soon as he sat down to supper with his wife.  “I ought to have told you the first thing after breakfast.  But when I found you in that mood of having the place all to ourselves, I put it off.”

“You took terrible chances, my dear,” she said, gravely.

“And I have been terribly punished.  You’ve no idea how much Kenby has talked to me about Mrs. Adding!”

She broke out laughing.  “Well, perhaps you’ve suffered enough.  But you can see now, can’t you, that it would have been awful if I had met him, and let out that I didn’t know he was here?”

“Terrible.  But if I had told, it would have spoiled the whole morning for you; you couldn’t have thought of anything else.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, airily.  “What should you think if I told you I had known he was here ever since last night?” She went on in delight at the start he gave.  “I saw him come into the hotel while you were gone for the guide-books, and I determined to keep it from you as long as I could; I knew it would worry you.  We’ve both been very nice; and I forgive you,” she hurried on, “because I’ve really got something to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me that Burnamy is here!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions!  No, Burnamy isn’t here, poor fellow!  And don’t suppose that I’m guilty of concealment because I haven’t told you before.  I was just thinking whether I wouldn’t spare you till morning, but now I shall let you take the brunt of it.  Mrs. Adding and Rose are here.”  She gave the fact time to sink in, and then she added, “And Miss Triscoe and her father are here.”

“What is the matter with Major Eltwin and his wife being here, too?  Are they in our hotel?”

“No, they are not.  They came to look for rooms while you were off waiting for the Prince-Regent, and I saw them.  They intended to go to Frankfort for the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was not even standing-room there, and so the general telegraphed to the Spanischer Hof, and they all came here.  As it is, he will have to room with Rose, and Agatha and Mrs. Adding will room together.  I didn’t think Agatha was looking very well; she looked unhappy; I don’t believe she’s heard, from Burnamy yet; I hadn’t a chance to ask her.  And there’s something else that I’m afraid will fairly make you sick.”

“Oh, no; go on.  I don’t think anything can do that, after an afternoon of Kenby’s confidences.”

“It’s worse than Kenby,” she said with a sigh.  “You know I told you at Carlsbad I thought that ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs. Adding.”

“Kenby?  Why of co—”

“Don’t be stupid, my dear!  No, not Kenby:  General Triscoe.  I wish you could have been here to see him paying her all sort; of silly attentions, and hear him making her compliments.”

“Thank you.  I think I’m just as well without it.  Did she pay him silly attentions and compliments, too?”

“That’s the only thing that can make me forgive her for his wanting her.  She was keeping him at arm’s-length the whole time, and she was doing it so as not to make him contemptible before his daughter.”

“It must have been hard.  And Rose?”

“Rose didn’t seem very well.  He looks thin and pale; but he’s sweeter than ever.  She’s certainly commoner clay than Rose.  No, I won’t say that!  It’s really nothing but General Triscoe’s being an old goose about her that makes her seem so, and it isn’t fair.”

March went down to his coffee in the morning with the delicate duty of telling Kenby that Mrs. Adding was in town.  Kenby seemed to think it quite natural she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at all strange that she should come to them with General Triscoe and his daughter.  He asked if March would not go with him to call upon her after breakfast, and as this was in the line of his own instructions from Mrs. March, he went.

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that was not merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general’s behavior toward her.  If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in a guise of sisterly affection for each other.  At the most the general showed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under any conditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other awake a good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call out.  He joked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on a comradery with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by contrast with the pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting.  There was a certain question in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby to account for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security so tacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife had said; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reported this, she lost her patience with him.  In a girl, she said, plainness was unhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look an inch below the surface:  She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heard from Burnamy since the Emperor’s birthday; that she was at swords’-points with her father, and so desperate that she did not care what became of her.

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after his wife had talked herself tired of them all, he proposed going out again to look about the city, where there was nothing for the moment to remind them of the presence of their friends or even of their existence.  She answered that she was worrying about all those people, and trying to work out their problem for them.  He asked why she did not let them work it out themselves as they would have to do, after all her worry, and she said that where her sympathy had been excited she could not stop worrying, whether it did any good or not, and she could not respect any one who could drop things so completely out of his mind as he could; she had never been able to respect that in him.

“I know, my dear,” he assented.  “But I don’t think it’s a question of moral responsibility; it’s a question of mental structure, isn’t it?  Your consciousness isn’t built in thought-tight compartments, and one emotion goes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply close the doors and shut the emotion in, and keep on.”

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it out in all its implications, and could not, after their long experience of each other, realize that she was not enjoying the joke too, till she said she saw that he merely wished to tease.  Then, too late, he tried to share her worry; but she protested that she was not worrying at all; that she cared nothing about those people:  that she was nervous, she was tired; and she wished he would leave her, and go out alone.

He found himself in the street again, and he perceived that he must be walking fast when a voice called him by name, and asked him what his hurry was.  The voice was Stoller’s, who got into step with him and followed the first with a second question.

“Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres with me?”

His bluntness made it easy for March to answer:  “I’m afraid my wife couldn’t stand the drive back and forth.”

“Come without her.”

“Thank you.  It’s very kind of you.  I’m not certain that I shall go at all.  If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chances with the crowd.”

Stoller insisted no further.  He felt no offence at the refusal of his offer, or chose to show none.  He said, with the same uncouth abruptness as before:  “Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carlsbad?”

“Burnamy?”

“Mm.”

“No.”

“Know where he is?”

“I don’t in the least.”

Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried on, before he said, “I got to thinking what he done afterwards.  He wasn’t bound to look out for me; he might suppose I knew what I was about.”

March turned his face and stared in Stoller’s, which he was letting hang forward as he stamped heavily on.  Had the disaster proved less than he had feared, and did he still want Burnamy’s help in patching up the broken pieces; or did he really wish to do Burnamy justice to his friend?

In any case March’s duty was clear.  “I think Burnamy was bound to look out for you; Mr. Stoller, and I am glad to know that he saw it in the same light.”

“I know he did,” said Stoker with a blaze as from a long-smouldering fury, “and damn him, I’m not going to have it.  I’m not going to, plead the baby act with him, or with any man.  You tell him so, when you get the chance.  You tell him I don’t hold him accountable for anything I made him do.  That ain’t business; I don’t want him around me, any more; but if he wants to go back to the paper he can have his place.  You tell him I stand by what I done; and it’s all right between him and me.  I hain’t done anything about it, the way I wanted him to help me to; I’ve let it lay, and I’m a-going to.  I guess it ain’t going to do me any harm, after all; our people hain’t got very long memories; but if it is, let it.  You tell him it’s all right.”

“I don’t know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don’t know that I care to be the bearer of your message,” said March.

“Why not?”

“Why, for one thing, I don’t agree with you that it’s all right.  Your choosing to stand by the consequences of Burnamy’s wrong doesn’t undo it.  As I understand, you don’t pardon it—”

Stoller gulped and did not answer at once.  Then he said, “I stand by what I done.  I’m not going to let him say I turned him down for doing what I told him to, because I hadn’t the sense to know what I was about.”

“Ah, I don’t think it’s a thing he’ll like to speak of in any case,” said March.

Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached, as abruptly as he had joined him, and March hurried back to his wife, and told her what had just passed between him and Stoller.

She broke out, “Well, I am surprised at you, my dear!  You have always accused me of suspecting people, and attributing bad motives; and here you’ve refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt.  He merely wanted to save his savage pride with you, and that’s all he wants to do with Burnamy.  How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stoller doesn’t blame him?  Why should you refuse to give his message to Burnamy?  I don’t want you to ridicule me for my conscience any more, Basil; you’re twice as bad as I ever was.  Don’t you think that a person can ever expiate an offence?  I’ve often heard you say that if any one owned his fault, he put it from him, and it was the same as if it hadn’t been; and hasn’t Burnamy owned up over and over again?  I’m astonished at you, dearest.”

March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself in the light of her reasoning; but she went on with some sophistries that restored him to his self-righteousness.

“I suppose you think he has interfered with Stoller’s political ambition, and injured him in that way.  Well, what if he has?  Would it be a good thing to have a man like that succeed in politics?  You’re always saying that the low character of our politicians is the ruin of the country; and I’m sure,” she added, with a prodigious leap over all the sequences, “that Mr. Stoller is acting nobly; and it’s your duty to help him relieve Burnamy’s mind.”  At the laugh he broke into she hastened to say, “Or if you won’t, I hope you’ll not object to my doing so, for I shall, anyway!”

She rose as if she were going to begin at once, in spite of his laughing; and in fact she had already a plan for coming to Stoller’s assistance by getting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspected of knowing where he was.  There had been no chance for them to speak of him either that morning or the evening before, and after a great deal of controversy with herself in her husband’s presence she decided to wait till they came naturally together the next morning for the walk to the Capuchin Church on the hill beyond the river, which they had agreed to take.  She could not keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoe begging her to be sure to come, and hinting that she had something very important to speak of.

She was not sure but she had been rather silly to do this, but when they met the girl confessed that she had thought of giving up the walk, and might not have come except for Mrs. March’s note.  She had come with Rose, and had left him below with March; Mrs. Adding was coming later with Kenby and General Triscoe.

Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news; and if she had been in doubt before of the girl’s feeling for Burnamy she was now in none.  She had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and then the pain which was also a pleasure, of seeing her blanch with dismay.

“I don’t know where he is, Mrs. March.  I haven’t heard a word from him since that night in Carlsbad.  I expected—I didn’t know but you—”

Mrs. March shook her head.  She treated the fact skillfully as something to be regretted simply because it would be such a relief to Burnamy to know how Mr. Stoller now felt.  Of course they could reach him somehow; you could always get letters to people in Europe, in the end; and, in fact, it was altogether probable that he was that very instant in Wurzburg; for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him to write up the Wagner operas, it would certainly want him to write up the manoeuvres.  She established his presence in Wurzburg by such an irrefragable chain of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was just able to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open the door.  It was not Burnamy, as in compliance with every nerve it ought to have been, but her husband, who tried to justify his presence by saying that they were all waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked when they were coming.

She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outside with him long enough to whisper, “Say she’s got a headache, or anything you please; but don’t stop talking here with me, or I shall go wild.”  She then shut herself in again, with the effect of holding him accountable for the whole affair.

LVI.

General Triscoe could not keep his irritation, at hearing that his daughter was not coming, out of the excuses he made to Mrs. Adding; he said again and again that it must seem like a discourtesy to her.  She gayly disclaimed any such notion; she would not hear of putting off their excursion to another day; it had been raining just long enough to give them a reasonable hope of a few hours’ drought, and they might not have another dry spell for weeks.  She slipped off her jacket after they started, and gave it to Kenby, but she let General Triscoe hold her umbrella over her, while he limped beside her.  She seemed to March, as he followed with Rose, to be playing the two men off against each other, with an ease which he wished his wife could be there to see, and to judge aright.

They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the earliest years of the seventh century, between rows of saints whose statues surmount the piers.  Some are bishops as well as saints; one must have been at Rome in his day, for he wore his long thick beard in the fashion of Michelangelo’s Moses.  He stretched out toward the passers two fingers of blessing and was unaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them and was giving him the effect of offering it to the public admiration.  Squads of soldiers tramping by turned to look and smile, and the dull faces of citizens lighted up at the quaint sight.  Some children stopped and remained very quiet, not to scare away the bird; and a cold-faced, spiritual-looking priest paused among them as if doubting whether to rescue the absent-minded bishop from a situation derogatory to his dignity; but he passed on, and then the sparrow suddenly flew off.

Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with March, but they now pushed on, and came up with the others at the end of the bridge, where they found them in question whether they had not better take a carriage and drive to the foot of the hill before they began their climb.  March thanked them, but said he was keeping up the terms of his cure, and was getting in all the walking he could.  Rose begged his mother not to include him in the driving party; he protested that he was feeling so well, and the walk was doing him good.  His mother consented, if he would promise not to get tired, and then she mounted into the two-spanner which had driven instinctively up to their party when their parley began, and General Triscoe took the place beside her, while Kenby, with smiling patience, seated himself in front.

Rose kept on talking with March about Wurzburg and its history, which it seemed he had been reading the night before when he could not sleep.  He explained, “We get little histories of the places wherever we go.  That’s what Mr. Kenby does, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said March.

“I don’t suppose I shall get a chance to read much here,” Rose continued, “with General Triscoe in the room.  He doesn’t like the light.”

“Well, well.  He’s rather old, you know.  And you musn’t read too much, Rose.  It isn’t good for you.”

“I know, but if I don’t read, I think, and that keeps me awake worse.  Of course, I respect General Triscoe for being in the war, and getting wounded,” the boy suggested.

“A good many did it,” March was tempted to say.

The boy did not notice his insinuation.  “I suppose there were some things they did in the army, and then they couldn’t get over the habit.  But General Grant says in his ‘Life’ that he never used a profane expletive.”

“Does General Triscoe?”

Rose answered reluctantly, “If anything wakes him in the night, or if he can’t make these German beds over to suit him—”

“I see.”  March turned his face to hide the smile which he would not have let the boy detect.  He thought best not to let Rose resume his impressions of the general; and in talk of weightier matters they found themselves at that point of the climb where the carriage was waiting for them.  From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden walls, till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which ascend to the crest of the hill where the church stands.  Each terrace is planted with sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports a bass-relief commemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the stations of the cross.

Monks and priests were coming and going, and dropped on the steps leading from terrace to terrace were women and children on their knees in prayer.  It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other Catholic lands; but here there was a touch of earnest in the Northern face of the worshipers which the South had never imparted.  Even in the beautiful rococo interior of the church at the top of the hill there was a sense of something deeper and truer than mere ecclesiasticism; and March came out of it in a serious muse while the boy at his side did nothing to interrupt.  A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed silently out over the prospect of river and city and vineyard, purpling together below the top where he stood, and mixed with this regret was a vague resentment of his wife’s absence.  She ought to have been there to share his pang and his pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything together that without her he felt unable to get out of either emotion all there was in it.

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces after the rest of the party who had left him behind with March.  At the last terrace they stopped and waited; and after a delay that began to be long to Mrs. Adding, she wondered aloud what could have become of them.

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and she consented in seeming to refuse:  “It isn’t worth while.  Rose has probably got Mr. March into some deep discussion, and they’ve forgotten all about us.  But if you will go, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind Rose of my existence.”  She let him lay her jacket on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat down on one of the steps, which General Triscoe kept striking with the point of her umbrella as he stood before her.

“I really shall have to take it from you if you do that any more,” she said, laughing up in his face.  “I’m serious.”

He stopped.  “I wish I could believe you were serious, for a moment.”

“You may, if you think it will do you any good.  But I don’t see why.”

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagerness which might have been pathetic to any one who liked him.  “Do you know this is almost the first time I have spoken alone with you?”

“Really, I hadn’t noticed,” said Mrs. Adding.

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way.  “Well, that’s encouraging, at least, to a man who’s had his doubts whether it wasn’t intended.”

“Intended?  By whom?  What do you mean, General Triscoe?  Why in the world shouldn’t you have spoken alone with me before?”

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say, and while she smiled pleasantly she had the look in her eyes of being brought to bay and being prepared, if it must come to that, to have the worst over, then and there.  She was not half his age, but he was aware of her having no respect for his years; compared with her average American past as he understood it, his social place was much higher, but, she was not in the least awed by it; in spite of his war record she was making him behave like a coward.  He was in a false position, and if he had any one but himself to blame he had not her.  He read her equal knowledge of these facts in the clear eyes that made him flush and turn his own away.

Then he started with a quick “Hello!” and stood staring up at the steps from the terrace above, where Rose Adding was staying himself weakly by a clutch of Kenby on one side and March on the other.

His mother looked round and caught herself up from where she sat and ran toward him.  “Oh, Rose!”

“It’s nothing, mother,” he called to her, and as she dropped on her knees before him he sank limply against her.  “It was like what I had in Carlsbad; that’s all.  Don’t worry about me, please!”

“I’m not worrying, Rose,” she said with courage of the same texture as his own.  “You’ve been walking too much.  You must go back in the carriage with us.  Can’t you have it come here?” she asked Kenby.

“There’s no road, Mrs. Adding.  But if Rose would let me carry him—”

“I can walk,” the boy protested, trying to lift himself from her neck.

“No, no! you mustn’t.”  She drew away and let him fall into the arms that Kenby put round him.  He raised the frail burden lightly to his shoulder, and moved strongly away, followed by the eyes of the spectators who had gathered about the little group, but who dispersed now, and went back to their devotions.

March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom he told he had just missed Rose and was looking about for him, when Kenby came with her message for them.  They made sure that he was nowhere about the church, and then started together down the terraces.  At the second or third station below they found the boy clinging to the barrier that protected the bass-relief from the zeal of the devotees.  He looked white and sick, though he insisted that he was well, and when he turned to come away with them he reeled and would have fallen if Kenby had not caught him.  Kenby wanted to carry him, but Rose would not let him, and had made his way down between them.

“Yea, he has such a spirit,” she said, “and I’ve no doubt he’s suffering now more from Mr. Kenby’s kindness than from his own sickness he had one of these giddy turns in Carlsbad, though, and I shall certainly have a doctor to see him.”

“I think I should, Mrs. Adding,” said March, not too gravely, for it seemed to him that it was not quite his business to alarm her further, if she was herself taking the affair with that seriousness.  He questioned whether she was taking it quite seriously enough, when she turned with a laugh, and called to General Triscoe, who was limping down the steps of the last terrace behind them:

“Oh, poor General Triscoe!  I thought you had gone on ahead.”

General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of being forgotten, apparently.  He assisted with gravity at the disposition of the party for the return, when they all reached the carriage.  Rose had the place beside his mother, and Kenby wished March to take his with the general and let him sit with the driver; but he insisted that he would rather walk home, and he did walk till they had driven out of eight.  Then he called a passing one-spanner, and drove to his hotel in comfort and silence.

LVII.

Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper; then he reported that the doctor had said Rose was on the verge of a nervous collapse.  He had overworked at school, but the immediate trouble was the high, thin air, which the doctor said he must be got out of at once, into a quiet place at the sea-shore somewhere.  He had suggested Ostend; or some point on the French coast; Kenby had thought of Schevleningen, and the doctor had said that would do admirably.

“I understood from Mrs. Adding,” he concluded, “that you were going. there for your after-cure, Mr. March, and I didn’t know but you might be going soon.”

At the mention of Schevleningen the Marches had looked at each other with a guilty alarm, which they both tried to give the cast of affectionate sympathy but she dismissed her fear that he might be going to let his compassion prevail with him to his hurt when he said:  “Why, we ought to have been there before this, but I’ve been taking my life in my hands in trying to see a little of Germany, and I’m afraid now that Mrs. March has her mind too firmly fixed on Berlin to let me think of going to Schevleningen till we’ve been there.”

“It’s too bad!” said Mrs. March, with real regret.  “I wish we were going.”  But she had not the least notion of gratifying her wish; and they were all silent till Kenby broke out:

“Look here!  You know how I feel about Mrs Adding!  I’ve been pretty frank with Mr. March myself, and I’ve had my suspicions that she’s been frank with you, Mrs. March.  There isn’t any doubt about my wanting to marry her, and up to this time there hasn’t been any doubt about her not wanting to marry me.  But it isn’t a question of her or of me, now.  It’s a question of Rose.  I love the boy,” and Kenby’s voice shook, and he faltered a moment.  “Pshaw!  You understand.”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby,” said Mrs. March.  “I perfectly understand you.”

“Well, I don’t think Mrs. Adding is fit to make the journey with him alone, or to place herself in the best way after she gets to Schevleningen.  She’s been badly shaken up; she broke down before the doctor; she said she didn’t know what to do; I suppose she’s frightened—”

Kenby stopped again, and March asked, “When is she going?”

“To-morrow,” said Kenby, and he added, “And now the question is, why shouldn’t I go with her?”

Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her husband, but he said nothing, and Kenby seemed not to have supposed that he would say anything.

“I know it would be very American, and all that, but I happen to be an American, and it wouldn’t be out of character for me.  I suppose,” he appealed to Mrs. March, “that it’s something I might offer to do if it were from New York to Florida—and I happened to be going there?  And I did happen to be going to Holland.”

“Why, of course, Mr. Kenby,” she responded, with such solemnity that March gave way in an outrageous laugh.

Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but with an inner note of protest.

“Well,” Kenby continued, still addressing her, “what I want you to do is to stand by me when I propose it.”

Mrs. March gathered strength to say, “No, Mr. Kenby, it’s your own affair, and you must take the responsibility.”

“Do you disapprove?”

“It isn’t the same as it would be at home.  You see that yourself.”

“Well,” said Kenby, rising, “I have to arrange about their getting away to-morrow.  It won’t be easy in this hurly-burly that’s coming off.”

“Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding that I’ll come round and see her to-morrow before she starts.”

“Oh!  I’m afraid you can’t, Mrs. March.  They’re to start at six in the morning.”

“They are!  Then we must go and see them tonight.  We’ll be there almost as soon as you are.”

March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and she began on the stairs:

“Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laughing so gave us completely away.  And what was there to keep grinning about, all through?”

“Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love.  It’s always the most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itself off in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affection for Rose, was more than I could stand.  I don’t apologize for laughing; I wanted to yell.”

His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to save him; and she said from the point where he had side-tracked her mind:  “I don’t call it disingenuous.  He was brutally frank.  He’s made it impossible to treat the affair with dignity.  I want you to leave the whole thing to me, from this out.  Now, will you?”

On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged in her own mind for Mrs. Adding to get a maid, and for the doctor to send an assistant with her on the journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme that she had not the courage to right herself when Mrs. Adding met her with the appeal:

“Oh, Mrs. March, I’m so glad you approve of Mr. Kenby’s plan.  It does seem the only thing to do.  I can’t trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr. Kenby’s intending to go to Schevleningen a few days later anyway.  Though it’s too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres.”

“I’m sure he won’t mind that,” Mrs. March’s voice said mechanically, while her thought was busy with the question whether this scandalous duplicity was altogether Kenby’s, and whether Mrs. Adding was as guiltless of any share in it as she looked.  She looked pitifully distracted; she might not have understood his report; or Kenby might really have mistaken Mrs. March’s sympathy for favor.

“No, he only lives to do good,” Mrs. Adding returned.  “He’s with Rose; won’t you come in and see them?”

Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would not let him get up.  He was full of the trip to Holland, and had already pushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very general knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up after they were settled in Schevleningen.  The boy scoffed at the notion that he was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the points where he had found Kenby wanting.

“Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose,” the editor protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy’s good to an extent which Rose saw was a joke.  He left Holland to talk about other things which his mother thought quite as bad for him.  He wished to know if March did not think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it he would print it in ‘Every Other Week’.

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter.  “No, I couldn’t do it.  But I wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it.  He could.  Will you tell him about it?” He wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.

His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway.  Mrs. March put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her eyes were dim.

“You see how frail he is?” said Mrs. Adding.  “I shall not let him out of my sight, after this, till he’s well again.”

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was not lost upon the witnesses.  He asked them to come into the reading-room a moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make some excuse to her for himself; but he said:  “I don’t know how we’re to manage about the Triscoes.  The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there isn’t a room to be had in this house for love or money.  Do you think,” he appealed directly to Mrs. March, “that it would do to offer her my room at the Swan?”

“Why, yes,” she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity in which he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished, than for what he was now proposing.  “Or she could come in with me, and Mr. March could take it.”

“Whichever you think,” said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to ask:

“And what will you do?”

He laughed.  “Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair.  I shall manage somehow.”

“You might offer to go in with the general,” March suggested, and the men apparently thought this was a joke.  Mrs. March did not laugh in her feminine worry about ways and means.

“Where is Miss Triscoe?” she asked.  “We haven’t seen them.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Adding tell you?  They went to supper at a restaurant; the general doesn’t like the cooking here.  They ought to have been back before this.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, “I suppose you would like us to wait.”

“It would be very kind of you.”

“Oh, it’s quite essential,” she returned with an airy freshness which Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a cloud on the general’s face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs. March to make.

“I thought that child ought to be in his mother’s charge,” he said.  With his own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March’s plan; and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother.  “By-the-way,” the general turned to March, “I found Stoller at the restaurant where we supped.  He offered me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres.  How are you going?”

“I think I shall go by train.  I don’t fancy the long drive.”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s worse than the long walk after you leave the train,” said the general from the offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him.  “Are you going by train, too?” he asked Kenby with indifference.

“I’m not going at all,” said Kenby.  “I’m leaving Wurzburg in the morning.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the general.

Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going with Rose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and open recognition of the fact among them.  “Yes,” she said, “isn’t it fortunate that Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too!  I should have been so unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that long journey with poor little Rose alone.”

“Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly,” said the general colorlessly.

Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby was too simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value of what she had done.  She thought he must certainly explain, as he walked back with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs. Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him.  Somewhere there had been an error, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby was so apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be cross with him.  She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing in the gayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her.  She was promising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor and Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her that if she laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine and imprisonment.  She pretended that she would like to see him led off between two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he asked her how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such a thing happened.

LVIII.

After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; she preferred to sleep.  The imperial party was to arrive at half past seven, but at six the crowd was already dense before the station, and all along the street leading to the Residenz.  It was a brilliant day, with the promise of sunshine, through which a chilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres.  The colors of all the German states flapped in this breeze from the poles wreathed with evergreen which encircled the square; the workmen putting the last touches on the bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, and they had, scarcely finished their labors when two troops of dragoons rode into the place and formed before the station, and waited as motionlessly as their horses would allow.

These animals were not so conscious as lions at the approach of princes; they tossed and stamped impatiently in the long interval before the Regent and his daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests.  All the human beings, both those who were in charge and those who were under charge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their parts well, as if there were some heavy penalty for failure in the least point.  The policemen keeping the people, in line behind the ropes which restrained them trembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the troopers twitched.  An involuntary sigh went up from the crowd as the Regent’s carriage appeared, heralded by outriders, and followed by other plain carriages of Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver.  Then the whistle of the Kaiser’s train sounded; a trumpeter advanced and began to blow his trumpet as they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointed moment the Emperor and Empress came out of the station through the brilliant human alley leading from it, mounted their carriages, with the stage trumpeter always blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the square and flashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight.  The same hollow groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the spectators as had welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his fellow-townsmen, with the same effect of being the conventional cries of a stage mob behind the scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March that sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a scantier return than it merited.  He had perhaps been insensibly working toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.  He wondered whether the innate conviction of equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity transcending all social and civic pretences, was what gave their theatrical effect to the shows of deference from low to high, and of condescension from high to low.  If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince did not play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harder part to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from being found out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across the stage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra.  If the star staid to be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor supernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an hour and a half for half a minute’s glimpse of the imperial party, March now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to still greater humiliation and disappointment.  He had certainly come to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train, and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder?  He was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his recreance to his wife.  This did alloy the pleasure with which he began, after an excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about the streets, though he had them almost to himself, so many citizens had followed the soldiers to the manoeuvres.

It was not till the soldiers began returning from the manoeuvres, dusty-footed, and in white canvas overalls drawn over their trousers to save them, that he went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the Swan.  He had given them time enough to imagine him at the review, and to wonder whether he had seen General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they met him with such confident inquiries that he would not undeceive them at once.  He let them divine from his inventive answers that he had not gone to the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, and the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had not gone, either.  The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowed the same wish.  He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company he had been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres.  He referred to the military chiefly in relation to the Miss Stollers’ ineffectual flirtations, which he declared had been outrageous.  Their father had apparently no control over them whatever, or else was too ignorant to know that they were misbehaving.  They were without respect or reverence for any one; they had talked to General Triscoe as if he were a boy of their own age, or a dotard whom nobody need mind; they had not only kept up their foolish babble before him, they had laughed and giggled, they had broken into snatches of American song, they had all but whistled and danced.  They made loud comments in Illinois English—on the cuteness of the officers whom they admired, and they had at one time actually got out their handkerchiefs.  He supposed they meant to wave them at the officers, but at the look he gave them they merely put their hats together and snickered in derision of him.  They were American girls of the worst type; they conformed to no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal.  They ought to be taken home.

Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreed with him that they were altogether unformed, and were the effect of their own ignorant caprices.  Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by taking them away.

“It would hide them, at any rate,” he answered.  “They would sink back into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed.  We behave like a parcel of peasants with our women.  We think that if no harm is meant or thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that are scandalously improper simply because they are innocent.  That may be all very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing had better stay there, where our peasant manners won’t make them conspicuous.”

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March recurred to the general’s closing words.  “That was a slap at Mrs. Adding for letting Kenby go off with her.”

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and the Addings and Kenby to see that church.  She had had no chance to bring up these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any point where she thought she had scanted it.  After all, it consisted mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy’s clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

“Probably,” Mrs. March said, “as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding, he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy.”

“Then you think he was really serious about her?”

“Now my dear!  He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completely taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how she received him.  Of course, that put an end to the fight.”

“The fight?”

“Yes—that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offering himself.”

“Oh!  And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?”

“How do I?  Didn’t you see yourself what friends they were?  Did you tell him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?”

“I had no chance.  I don’t know that I should have done it, anyway.  It wasn’t my affair.”

“Well, then, I think you might.  It would have been everything for that poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes.”

“Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose.”

“Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it.  She had a right to know it.”

“Did she think Stoller’s willingness to overlook Burnamy’s performance had anything to do with its moral quality?”

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, “I told her you thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they had expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned.  And hasn’t poor Burnamy done both?”

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but as a husband he was not going to come down at once.  “I thought probably you had told her that.  You had it pat from having just been over it with me.  When has she heard from him?”

“Why, that’s the strangest thing about it.  She hasn’t heard at all.  She doesn’t know where he is.  She thought we must know.  She was terribly broken up.”

“How did she show it?”

“She didn’t show it.  Either you want to tease, or you’ve forgotten how such things are with young people—or at least girls.”

“Yes, it’s all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl.  Besides, the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very obliterating to my early impressions of love-making.”

“It certainly hasn’t been ideal,” said Mrs. March with a sigh.

“Why hasn’t it been ideal?” he asked.  “Kenby is tremendously in love with her; and I believe she’s had a fancy for him from the beginning.  If it hadn’t been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now he’s essential to them both in their helplessness.  As for Papa Triscoe and his Europeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they’re the residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding have nothing to do with their unreality.  His being in love with her is no reason why he shouldn’t be helpful to her when she needs him, and every reason why he should.  I call it a poem, such as very few people have the luck to live out together.”

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she cried out, “Well, my dear, I do believe you are right!  It is ideal, as you say; it’s a perfect poem.  And I shall always say—”

She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, and perceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasm for all sorts of love-affairs.  But she averred that she did not care; what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it.

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had left Carlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escape from the pressure of others’ interests.  The tide of travel was towards Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later.  They were going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way that they simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary capital they were alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger, much less a friend to molest them.  The flying landscape without was of their own early autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purple it, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women, and children were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change.  It was always the German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor; often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops in ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her as she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage.

As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplands they were aware of a finer, cooler air through their open window.  The torrents foamed white out of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along the valleys, where the hamlets roused themselves in momentary curiosity as the train roared into them from the many tunnels.  The afternoon sunshine had the glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and the travellers had a pleasant bewilderment in which their memories of Switzerland and the White Mountains mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack sojourns.  They chose this place and that in the lovely region where they lamented that they had not come at once for the after-cure, and they appointed enough returns to it in future years to consume all the summers they had left to live.

LIX.

It was falling night when they reached Weimar, where they found at the station a provision of omnibuses far beyond the hotel accommodations.  They drove first to the Crown-Prince, which was in a promising state of reparation, but which for the present could only welcome them to an apartment where a canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plastered wall.  The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably out to try and place them at the Elephant.  But the Elephant was full, and the Russian Court was full too.  Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethought himself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but very nice, where they might get rooms, and after the delay of an hour, they got a carriage and drove away from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord continued to the last as benevolent as if they had been a profit instead of a loss to him.

The streets of the town at nine o’clock were empty and quiet, and they instantly felt the academic quality of the place.  Through the pale night they could see that the architecture was of the classic sentiment which they were destined to feel more and more; at one point they caught a fleeting glimpse of two figures with clasped hands and half embraced, which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller; and when they mounted to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they passed under a fresco representing Goethe and four other world-famous poets, Shakspere, Milton, Tasso, and Schiller.  The poets all looked like Germans, as was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them; he marshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller brought up the rear and kept them from going astray in an Elysium where they did not speak the language.  For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite American freshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, and provided with steam-radiators.  In the sense of its homelikeness the Marches boasted that they were never going away from it.

In the morning they discovered that their windows looked out on the grand-ducal museum, with a gardened space before and below its classicistic bulk, where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers were full of sun.  In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares, March strolled up through the town; but Weimar was as much awake at that hour as at any of the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets, where he encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual mood.  He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have shunned:  a ‘denkmal’ of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as most German monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dog team.  In the shock from this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, and Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Wurzburg, to reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as characteristic of all Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over France.

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night before was characteristic too, but less offensively so.  German statues at the best are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them, have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands, and of being only partially rapt from the spectators.  But they were more unconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and he quelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller’s shoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typical equipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing.  But upon reflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personally responsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team.  He felt that he might more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic profiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace.  This could be a sympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet brought back with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the people, especially the children, were bow-legged.  Perhaps the antique had:  begun in their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in any case they were charming children, and as a test of their culture, he had a mind to ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue of Herder was, which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble, and so be done with as many statues as he could.  She answered with a pretty regret in her tender voice, “That I truly cannot,” and he was more satisfied than if she could, for he thought it better to be a child and honest, than to know where any German statue was.

He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the Herder Platz after it.  He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; where Herder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the nobility and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was shielded from the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart from other sinners in a glazed gallery.  Herder is buried in the church, and when you ask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-door in the pavement, and you think you are going down into the crypt, but you are only to see Herder’s monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save it from passing feet.  Here also is the greatest picture of that great soul Luke Kranach, who had sincerity enough in his paining to atone for all the swelling German sculptures in the world.  It is a crucifixion, and the cross is of a white birch log, such as might have been cut out of the Weimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides, with the bark showing at the edges.  Kranach has put himself among the spectators, and a stream of blood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon the painter’s head.  He is in the company of John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther stands with his Bible open, and his finger on the line, “The blood of Jesus cleanseth us.”

Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things without his wife, and partly because he was now very hungry, March turned from them and got back to his hotel, where she was looking out for him from their open window.  She had the air of being long domesticated there, as she laughed down at seeing him come; and the continued brilliancy of the weather added to the illusion of home.

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America; the sun in that gardened hollow before the museum was already hot enough to make him glad of the shelter of the hotel.  The summer seemed to have come back to oblige them, and when they learned that they were to see Weimar in a festive mood because this was Sedan Day, their curiosity, if not their sympathy, accepted the chance gratefully.  But they were almost moved to wish that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that all the public carriages were engaged, and they must have one from a stable if they wished to drive after breakfast.  Still it was offered them for such a modest number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly and conversable, that they assented to the course of history, and were more and more reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducal park beside the waters of the classic Ilm.

The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and in places clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color.  They flow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows, where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is in Germany.  At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure if not the profit of it.  At last, the prince, the knight, the noble finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from it and vainly thinks to keep from it.  Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainly created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty had graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying first to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it second to the cottage of a poet.  But in fact it is Goethe who is forever the prince in Weimar.  His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the city; the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest hospitality.  The travellers remembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducal park, that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young, when he too was beautiful and young, and took her home to be his love, to the just and lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who was even less reconciled when, after eighteen years of due reflection, the love of Goethe and Christiane became their marriage.  They, wondered just where it was he saw the young girl coming to meet him as the Grand-Duke’s minister with an office-seeking petition from her brother, Goethe’s brother author, long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for that rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as their sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau von Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottage to suppose that there his love-life with Christiane began.  Mrs. March even resented the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all, she removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going to marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is almost of age.  Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances the Grand-Duke’s godfatherhood, or Goethe’s open constancy to Christiane, or the tardy consecration of their union after the French sack of, Weimar, when the girl’s devotion had saved him from the rudeness of the marauding soldiers.  For her New England soul there were no degrees in such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as people have tried to think, in their deference to Goethe’s greatness.  But certainly the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of world-wide renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for he could not have been proof against the censorious public opinion of Weimar, or the yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house.  The trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it, and about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the sweet lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered a parting nosegay for her visitors.  The few small livingrooms were above the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion; in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with him on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the front stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which he might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the proud little palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and memorials of him.  His library, his study, his study table, with everything on it just as he left it when

“Cadde la stanca mana”

are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which he gasped for “more light” at last.  The handsome, well-arranged rooms are full of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which he did so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waning leaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly, faded.  They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more and more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings, gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness, the universal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but not in his contemporaneous Germany.  But it is all less keenly personal, less intimate than the simple garden-house, or else, with the great troop of people going through it, and the custodians lecturing in various voices and languages to the attendant groups, the Marches had it less to themselves, and so imagined him less in it.

LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common to them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors in them one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palaces themselves.  It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of the average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was Goethe’s friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least in the humanities.  He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringing Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller.  The story of that great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as a palace can.

There are certain Poets’ Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian things.  The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country; they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends!  At best it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority, the make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful and ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue each other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show of equality faithfully to the end.  Goethe was born citizen of a free republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he was one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no sign, and the poet’s friendship with the prince has passed smoothly into history as one of the things that might really be.  They worked and played together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, each on his own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not being there which probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity.

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table where they had spread their luncheon.  They were somewhat subdued by the consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were children.  The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which are still mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe, although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners.  It seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but they enabled her to verify with the custodian’s help certain royal intermarriages which she had been in doubt about before.

Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over, scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays.

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines and clipped trees which formed the coulisses.  There was a grassy space for the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicircular gradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honored spectators sat.  Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder.  It was all very pretty, and if ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, it must have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the drama is native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air of modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact.  It would be difficult to be Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining, but March held that with Goethe’s help it might have been done at Weimar, and his wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theater that the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put together a sheaf of the flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs. March for a souvenir.

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from another eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below.  In a moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spirits sank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had not asked for coffee.  Most of the people about them were taking beer, including the pretty girls of a young ladies’ school, who were there with their books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers, apparently for the afternoon.

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their books or their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she followed the glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a table somewhat obliquely to the left.  These were apparently a mother and daughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back to Mrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them.  They were both smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself from the waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if to make sure that every one saw her smiling.

Mrs. March felt her husband’s gaze following her own, and she had just time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, “Good gracious!  It’s the pivotal girl!”

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man, who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out of the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs. March could almost have touched him.

She had just strength to say, “Well, my dear!  That was the cut direct.”

She said this in order to have her husband reassure her.  “Nonsense!  He never saw us.  Why didn’t you speak to him?”

“Speak to him?  I never shall speak to him again.  No!  This is the last of Mr. Burnamy for me.  I shouldn’t have minded his not recognizing us, for, as you say, I don’t believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that’s all I wish to know of him.  Don’t you try to look him up, Basil!  I’m glad-yes, I’m glad he doesn’t know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves to suffer, and I hope he’ll keep on suffering:  You were quite right, my dear—and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don’t call it more than instinct)—not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don’t want you ever should.”

She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him impatiently to their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, “I don’t think I can quite promise that; my mind’s been veering round in the other direction.  I think I shall tell him.”

“What!  After you’ve seen him flirting with that girl?  Very well, then, you won’t, my dear; that’s all!  He’s behaving very basely to Agatha.”

“What’s his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my duty to him?  He has a right to know what Stoller thinks.  And as to his behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it?  So far as you know, there is nothing whatever between them.  She either refused him outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible conditions with him.  Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don’t blame him.”

“Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!” cried Mrs. March.

“Yes, with a pivotal girl.  Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning and twisting that way to get breath.  But attribute the worst motive:  say it is to make people look at her!  Well, Burnamy has a right to look with the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with one pretty girl from another.  It’s what men have been doing from the beginning of time.”

“Oh, I dare say!”

“Men,” he went on, “are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.  They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made them unhappy, they are still more susceptible.  Burnamy may be merely amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe.  She had him first; and I’m all for her.”

LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself.  While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and ashamed.  He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless of her rights came with it.  He had done his best to make her think him in love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise to write to him from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished still less to hear from her.  It was some comfort to reflect that she had not promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to such fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentment with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with all the other German princes.  Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing over the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the multitude of Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at the ends of sticks.  Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of the floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charming even to Burnamy’s lack-lustre eyes.  He went by his hotel and on to a cafe with a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he supped there, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged and brayed round him unheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, “May I sit at your table?” and he saw an ironical face looking down on him.  “There doesn’t seem any other place.”

“Why, Mr. March!” Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him, but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last, just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament of lanterns.  “This is pretty,” he said, “mighty pretty.  I shall make Mrs. March sorry for not coming, when I go back.”

“Is Mrs. March—she is—with you—in Weimar?” Burnamy asked stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him.  “Oh, yes.  We saw you out at Belvedere this afternoon.  Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant not to see us.  A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little flights.”

“I never dreamed of your being there—I never saw—” Burnamy began.

“Of course not.  Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was looking very pretty.  Have you been here some time?”

“Not long.  A week or so.  I’ve been at the parade at Wurzburg.”

“At Wurzburg!  Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is!  We were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place.  But there was a great crowd for you to hide in from us.  What had I better take?” A waiter had come up, and was standing at March’s elbow.  “I suppose I mustn’t sit here without ordering something?”

“White wine and selters,” said Burnamy vaguely.

“The very thing!  Why didn’t I think of it?  It’s a divine drink:  it satisfies without filling.  I had it a night or two before we left home, in the Madison Square Roof Garden.  Have you seen ‘Every Other Week’ lately?”

“No,” said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.

“We’ve just got our mail from Nuremberg.  The last number has a poem in it that I rather like.”  March laughed to see the young fellow’s face light up with joyful consciousness.  “Come round to my hotel, after you’re tired here, and I’ll let you see it.  There’s no hurry.  Did you notice the little children with their lanterns, as you came along?  It’s the gentlest effect that a warlike memory ever came to.  The French themselves couldn’t have minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day of their disaster.  You ought to get something out of that, and I’ve got a subject in trust for you from Rose Adding.  He and his mother were at Wurzburg; I’m sorry to say the poor little chap didn’t seem very well.  They’ve gone to Holland for the sea air.”  March had been talking for quantity in compassion of the embarrassment in which Burnamy seemed bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the young fellow merely because he liked him.  So far as he could make out, Burnamy had been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they had met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logically defended to Mrs. March that he resumed.  “We found another friend of yours in Wurzburg:  Mr. Stoller.”

“Mr. Stoller?” Burnamy faintly echoed.

“Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres; and they made the most of it.  He wanted us to go to the parade with his family but we declined.  The twins were pretty nearly the death of General Triscoe.”

Again Burnamy echoed him.  “General Triscoe?”

“Ah, yes:  I didn’t tell you.  General Triscoe and his daughter had come on with Mrs. Adding and Rose.  Kenby—you remember Kenby, On the Norumbia?—Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party; and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him and his girls.”

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go.  He did not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  “I have a message for you from Mr. Stoller.”

“For me?” Burnamy gasped.

“I’ve been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn’t expected to see you.  But it’s simply this:  he wants you to know—and he seemed to want me to know—that he doesn’t hold you accountable in the way he did.  He’s thought it all over, and he’s decided that he had no right to expect you to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of knowledge.  As he said, he doesn’t choose to plead the baby act.  He says that you’re all right, and your place on the paper is open to you.”

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for instant response.  “I think he’s wrong,” he said, so harshly that the people at the next table looked round.  “His feeling as he does has nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn’t let me out.”

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, “I think you’re quite right, as to that.  But there’s such a thing as forgiveness, you know.  It doesn’t change the nature of what you’ve done; but as far as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it.”

“Yes, I understand that.  But I can’t accept his forgiveness if I hate him.”

“But perhaps you won’t always hate him.  Some day you may have a chance to do him a good turn.  It’s rather banale; but there doesn’t seem any other way.  Well, I have given you his message.  Are you going with me to get that poem?”

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had stood talking.

“No, thank you,” said the elder, “I don’t propose sitting up all night, and you’ll excuse me if I go to bed now.  It’s a little informal to leave a guest—”

“You’re not leaving a guest!  I’m at home here.  I’m staying in this hotel too.”

March said, “Oh!” and then he added abruptly, “Good-night,” and went up stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

“Whom were you talking with below?” asked Mrs. March through the door opening into his room from hers.

“Burnamy,” he answered from within.  “He’s staying in this house.  He let me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night.  It’s one of those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in great things.”

“Oh!  Then you’ve been telling him,” she said, with a mental bound high above and far beyond the point.

“Everything.”

“About Stoller, too?”

“About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and General Triscoe—and Agatha.”

“Very well.  That’s what I call shabby.  Don’t ever talk to me again about the inconsistencies of women.  But now there’s something perfectly fearful.”

“What is it?”

“A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow.  He isn’t well, and they’re coming.  And I’ve telegraphed them to come here.  Now what do you say?”

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resign herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider it providential.  This touched the lingering superstition in which she had been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government of the universe.  As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered that they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that they could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferior degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in the evening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to act when she saw him in the morning.  If he could plausibly account for the renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generally worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered smile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence.  While they talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with Miss Triscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait over for her and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, as they had made all their plans.  It was not easy, even in drama where one has everything one’s own way, to prove that she could not without impiety so far interfere with the course of Providence as to prevent Miss Triscoe’s coming with her father to the same hotel where Burnamy was staying.  She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known he was staying there when she telegraphed them where to come, and that in the absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obliged to suppose that his presence would be embarrassing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the town and interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and as soon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogether from the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy.  They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with the Triscoes in Wurzburg, and she said:  “Did Mr. March tell you they were coming here?  Or, no!  We hadn’t heard then.  Yes, they are coming to-morrow.  They may be going to stay some time.  She talked of Weimar when we first spoke of Germany on the ship.”  Burnamy said nothing, and she suddenly added, with a sharp glance, “They wanted us to get them rooms, and we advised their coming to this house.”  He started very satisfactorily, and “Do you think they would be comfortable, here?” she pursued.

“Oh, yes, very.  They can have my room; it’s southeast; I shall be going into other quarters.”  She did not say anything; and “Mrs. March,” he began again, “what is the use of my beating about the bush?  You must know what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night—”

“No one ever told—”

“Well, you must have made a pretty good guess.  But it was a failure.  I ought to have failed, and I did.  She said that unless her father liked it—And apparently he hasn’t liked it.”  Burnamy smiled ruefully.

“How do you know?  She didn’t know where you were!”

“She could have got word to me if she had had good news for me.  They’ve forwarded other letters from Pupp’s.  But it’s all right; I had no business to go back to Carlsbad.  Of course you didn’t know I was in this house when you told them to come; and I must clear out.  I had better clear out of Weimar, too.”

“No, I don’t think so; I have no right to pry into your affairs, but—”

“Oh, they’re wide enough open!”

“And you may have changed your mind.  I thought you might, when I saw you yesterday at Belvedere—”

“I was only trying to make bad worse.”

“Then I think the situation has changed entirely through what Mr. Stoller said to Mr. March.”

“I can’t see how it has.  I committed an act of shabby treachery, and I’m as much to blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it.”

“Did Mr. March say that to you?”

“No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn’t answer it, and you can’t.  You’re very good, and very kind, but you can’t answer it.”

“I can answer it very well,” she boasted, but she could find nothing better to say than, “It’s your duty to her to see her and let her know.”

“Doesn’t she know already?”

“She has a right to know it from you.  I think you are morbid, Mr. Burnamy.  You know very well I didn’t like your doing that to Mr. Stoller.  I didn’t say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it enough yourself.  But I did like your owning up to it,” and here Mrs. March thought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again.  “My husband always says that if a person owns up to an error, fully and faithfully, as you’ve always done, they make it the same in its consequences to them as if it had never been done.”

“Does Mr. March say that?” asked Burnamy with a relenting smile.

“Indeed he does!”

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

“And what about the consequences to the other fellow?”

“A woman,” said Mrs. March, “has no concern with them.  And besides, I think you’ve done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the consequences.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“No matter.  You would if you could.  I wonder,” she broke off, to prevent his persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way, “what can be keeping Mr. March?”

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure of sauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, and looking at the pretty children going to school, with books under their arms.  It was the day for the schools to open after the long summer vacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faces which, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at least touch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not the Schiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one flight up, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet.  The whole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room fronting the street stands Schiller’s writing-table, with his chair before it; with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another corner, the narrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the pillow frame a picture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like his dead face lying there.  It is all rather tasteless, and all rather touching, and the place with its meagre appointments, as compared with the rich Goethe house, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in which Schiller is always falling into the second place.  Whether it will be finally so with him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and upon other points eternity will not be interrogated.  “The great, Goethe and the good Schiller,” they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was something good in Goethe and something great, in Schiller.

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality before the world that he did not heed the warning on the door of the pastry-shop near the Schiller house, and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh paint on it.  He was then in such a state, that he could not bring his mind to bear upon the question of which cakes his wife would probably prefer, and he stood helplessly holding up his hand till the good woman behind the counter discovered his plight, and uttered a loud cry of compassion.  She ran and got a wet napkin, which she rubbed with soap, and then she instructed him by word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, and she did not leave him till his rescue was complete.  He let her choose a variety of the cakes for him, and came away with a gay paper bag full of them, and with the feeling that he had been in more intimate relations with the life of Weimar than travellers are often privileged to be.  He argued from the instant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry woman a high grade of culture in all classes; and he conceived the notion of pretending to Mrs. March that he had got these cakes from, a descendant of Schiller.

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment in which she always, after so many years’ experience of his duplicity, believed anything he told her.  They dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Burnamy came down to the station with them and was very comfortable to March in helping him to get their tickets and their baggage registered.  The train which was to take them to Halle, where they were to change for Berlin, was rather late, and they had but ten minutes after it came in before it would start again.  Mrs. March was watching impatiently at the window of the waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear the platform and allow the doors to be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned and ran into the passage by which the new arrivals were pouring out toward the superabundant omnibuses.  March and Burnamy, who had been talking apart, mechanically rushed after her and found her kissing Miss Triscoe and shaking hands with the general amidst a tempest of questions and answers, from which it appeared that the Triscoes had got tired of staying in Wurzburg, and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner than they had intended.

The general was rather much bundled up for a day which was mild for a German summer day, and he coughed out an explanation that he had taken an abominable cold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shaken it off yet.  He had a notion that change of air would be better for him; it could not be worse.

He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather than inimical.  While the ladies were still talking eagerly together in proffer and acceptance of Mrs. March’s lamentations that she should be going away just as Miss Triscoe was coming, he asked if the omnibus for their hotel was there.  He by no means resented Burnamy’s assurance that it was, and he did not refuse to let him order their baggage, little and large, loaded upon it.  By the time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had so far detached themselves from each other that they could separate after one more formal expression of regret and forgiveness.  With a lament into which she poured a world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenched herself from the place, and suffered herself, to be pushed toward her train.  But with the last long look which she cast over her shoulder, before she vanished into the waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe and Burnamy transacting the elaborate politenesses of amiable strangers with regard to the very small bag which the girl had in her hand.  He succeeded in relieving her of it; and then he led the way out of the station on the left of the general, while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear.

LXIII.

From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. March tried for a glimpse of the omnibus in which her proteges were now rolling away together.  As they were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which was itself out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her seat she treated the recent incident with a complexity and simultaneity of which no report can give an idea.  At the end one fatal conviction remained:  that in everything she had said she had failed to explain to Miss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimar and how he happened to be there with them in the station.  She required March to say how she had overlooked the very things which she ought to have mentioned first, and which she had on the point of her tongue the whole time.  She went over the entire ground again to see if she could discover the reason why she had made such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that she was led to it by his rushing after her with Burnamy before she had had a chance to say a word about him; of course she could not say anything in his presence.  This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation in the fact that she had left them together without the least intention or connivance, and now, no matter what happened, she could not accuse herself, and he could not accuse her of match-making.

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great that he should not dream of accusing her of anything except of regret that now she could never claim the credit of bringing the lovers together under circumstances so favorable.  As soon as they were engaged they could join in renouncing her with a good conscience, and they would probably make this the basis of their efforts to propitiate the general.

She said she did not care, and with the mere removal of the lovers in space, her interest in them began to abate.  They began to be of a minor importance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle, and in the excitement of settling into the express from Frankfort there were moments when they were altogether forgotten.  The car was of almost American length, and it ran with almost American smoothness; when the conductor came and collected an extra fare for their seats, the Marches felt that if the charge had been two dollars instead of two marks they would have had every advantage of American travel.

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and now sterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost to its gates.  The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs, and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which put our outdated depots to shame.  The good ‘traeger’ who took possession of them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky, and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation.  This was a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so, either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver and his horses.  The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest in the world; at Berlin the horses look like old hair trunks and the drivers like their moth-eaten contents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and their approach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as the ignoble avenue itself.  It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean, tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees, to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines of shops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosity of New York.  March quoted in bitter derision:

“Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,
Under the Lindens?”

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be imagined with its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the architecture of Sixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that would be the famous Unter den Linden, where she had so resolutely decided that they would stay while in Berlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other because it proved second-rate in everything but its charges.  They ate a poorish table d’hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart to get a rise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which fed upon the crumbs about their feet while they dined.  Their English-speaking waiter said that it was a very warm evening, and they never knew whether this was because he was a humorist, or because he was lonely and wished to talk, or because it really was a warm evening, for Berlin.  When they had finished, they went out and drove about the greater part of the evening looking for another hotel, whose first requisite should be that it was not on Unter den Linden.  What mainly determined Mrs. March in favor of the large, handsome, impersonal place they fixed upon was the fact that it was equipped for steam-heating; what determined March was the fact that it had a passenger-office where when he wished to leave, he could buy his railroad tickets and have his baggage checked without the maddening anxiety, of doing it at the station.  But it was precisely in these points that the hotel which admirably fulfilled its other functions fell short.  The weather made a succession of efforts throughout their stay to clear up cold; it merely grew colder without clearing up, but this seemed to offer no suggestion of steam for heating their bleak apartment and the chilly corridors to the management.  With the help of a large lamp which they kept burning night and day they got the temperature of their rooms up to sixty; there was neither stove nor fireplace, the cold electric bulbs diffused a frosty glare; and in the vast, stately dining-room with its vaulted roof, there was nothing to warm them but their plates, and the handles of their knives and forks, which, by a mysterious inspiration, were always hot.  When they were ready to go, March experienced from the apathy of the baggage clerk and the reluctance of the porters a more piercing distress than any he had known at the railroad stations; and one luckless valise which he ordered sent after him by express reached his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with an accumulation of charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits, and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English railroad hotels.  They looked from their windows down into a gardened square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of Berlin and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind the cold any more than the stone kings and generals.  The aspect of this square, like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of the imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris.  Even the rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin.  The suggestion of Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic which the city wears in its native air.  The crowd lacks this as much as the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the men except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no style such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets.  The Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the little children are plain.  Every one is ill dressed, but no one is ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in New York.  That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made to serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebration of the German triumph over France.  Berlin has never the presence of a great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence.  There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages.  The prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture.  There are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.  They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which fails of any impression.  If they were only furiously baroque they would be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is a self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic, more noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass.  This offensive art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic spirit, and bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in literature bears to romance.  It finds its apotheosis in the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I., a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering bronze, commemorating the victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the war with the last French Emperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the victors by its ugliness.  The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men and animals backs away from the imperial palace, and saves itself too soon from plunging over the border of a canal behind it, not far from Rauch’s great statue of the great Frederic.  To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noble work is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic acting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned and bewildered by its wild explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to the imperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the obligation to visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them.  They entered the court without opposition from the sentinel, and joined other strangers straggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner of the building, where after they had increased to some thirty, a custodian took charge of them, and led them up a series of inclined plains of brick to the state apartments.  In the antechamber they found a provision of immense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put on for their passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls.  These roomy slippers were designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and upon the mixed company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree humiliating.  The women’s skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the men were openly put to shame, and they shuffled forward with their bodies at a convenient incline like a company of snow-shoers.  In the depths of his own abasement March heard a female voice behind him sighing in American accents, “To think I should be polishing up these imperial floors with my republican feet!”

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his own heart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in the historical order of the family portraits recording the rise of the Prussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors.  He began to realize here the fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is not the effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity.  There is nothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodies and proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of French art it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pride in the German triumph over the French in war.  March found it tiresome beyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense of it with his felt shoes.  “Well,” he confided to his wife when they were fairly out-of-doors, “if Prussia rose in the strength of silence, as Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and tall talk.”

“Yes, isn’t she!” Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire for excess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerly about her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which ought to have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly because the troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly more in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington.  Again the German officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when she met them on the side-walks.  There were scarcely any of them, and perhaps that might have been the reason why they were not more aggressive; but a whole company of soldiers marching carelessly up to the palace from the Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as our own militia often puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as they looked at her.  She declared that personally there was nothing against the Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and modest-looking men; it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, that they, began to bully and to brag.

LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Linden almost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into with them.  It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to fact and form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an English dinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian.  The waiter who served it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligent appreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectful opinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held.  After the manner of strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting from such of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and it would really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with the world at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and car conductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers and ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen; for by these rather than by its society women and its statesmen and divines, is it really judged in the books of travellers; some attention also should be paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised.  In the railroad cafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches that if they had not been people of great strength of character he would have undone the favorable impression the soldiers and civilians of Berlin generally had been at such pains to produce in them; and throughout the week of early September which they passed there, it rained so much and so bitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they might have come away thinking it’s the worst climate in the world, if it had not been for a man whom they saw in one of the public gardens pouring a heavy stream from his garden hose upon the shrubbery already soaked and shuddering in the cold.  But this convinced them that they were suffering from weather and not from the climate, which must really be hot and dry; and they went home to their hotel and sat contentedly down in a temperature of sixty degrees.  The weather, was not always so bad; one day it was dry cold instead of wet cold, with rough, rusty clouds breaking a blue sky; another day, up to eleven in the forenoon, it was like Indian summer; then it changed to a harsh November air; and then it relented and ended so mildly, that they hired chairs in the place before the imperial palace for five pfennigs each, and sat watching the life before them.  Motherly women-folk were there knitting; two American girls in chairs near them chatted together; some fine equipages, the only ones they saw in Berlin, went by; a dog and a man (the wife who ought to have been in harness was probably sick, and the poor fellow was forced to take her place) passed dragging a cart; some schoolboys who had hung their satchels upon the low railing were playing about the base of the statue of King William III. in the joyous freedom of German childhood.

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine, but to the Americans, who were Southern by virtue of their sky, the brightness had a sense of lurking winter in it, such as they remembered feeling on a sunny day in Quebec.  The blue heaven looked sad; but they agreed that it fitly roofed the bit of old feudal Berlin which forms the most ancient wing of the Schloss.  This was time-blackened and rude, but at least it did not try to be French, and it overhung the Spree which winds through the city and gives it the greatest charm it has.  In fact Berlin, which is otherwise so grandiose without grandeur and so severe without impressiveness, is sympathetic wherever the Spree opens it to the sky.  The stream is spanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well be unpicturesque, especially if they have statues to help them out.  The Spree abounds in bridges, and it has a charming habit of slow hay-laden barges; at the landings of the little passenger-steamers which ply upon it there are cafes and summer-gardens, and these even in the inclement air of September suggested a friendly gayety.

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevated road in Berlin which they made in an impassioned memory of the elevated road in New York.  The brick viaducts which carry this arch the Spree again and again in their course through and around the city, but with never quite such spectacular effects as our spidery tressels, achieve.  The stations are pleasant, sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, but have not the comic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours, and are not so frequent.  The road is not so smooth, the cars not so smooth-running or so swift.  On the other hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are never overcrowded.  The line is at times above, at times below the houses, and at times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs.  The train whirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old houses, into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up without order or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and along the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided the vacant lots.  Everywhere the city was growing out over the country, in blocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellow brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburban dwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went two successive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has some admirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but on both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them.  The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him and asked, “Wie gestern?” and from this he argued an affectionate constancy in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of strangers.  At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized his signature and remarked that it did not look like the signature in his letter of credit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the moneyed classes of Prussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind doubt by Hebrew bankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews were politer than the Christians in Germany.  In starting for Potsdam he asked a traeger where the Potsdam train was and the man said, “Dat train dare,” and in coming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and she thanked him in English.  From these incidents, both occurring the same day in the same place, the inference of a widespread knowledge of our language in all classes of the population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization in the capital.  He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainy afternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of the Thiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifference to the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather.  One evening at a summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the ‘Puppenfee’ and the operetta of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, he observed that the greater part of the audience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and he noted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number of Americans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where they mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of them in the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came out, confidently addressed him in English.  But he took stock of his impressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all, that he could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of the environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in the Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they had a great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds of horsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near to the popular life.  They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society by driving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautiful houses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green park from the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated and delightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing but their unsupported conjecture.

LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin.  They chose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandy plains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills surrounding Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick’s sake, and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waited with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade before they were led through Voltaire’s room and Frederick’s death chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Souci even in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of the great Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes of their owners.  The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as the Germans conceived it.  The gardened terrace from which the low, one-story building, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into a many-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally French the colonnaded front opening to a perspective of artificial ruins, with broken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against the sky.  Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and the furnishing.  At that time there, was in fact no other taste, and Frederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved upon French taste even in his intimate companionship.  The droll story of his coquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be his guest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the very air in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which they parted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one side, and with merciless mockery on the other.  Voltaire was long ago revenged upon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in their comedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick’s fame the trace of those lacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is the singular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one feels there the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important to mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of the lovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wander among the statues and the roses heavy with the shower.  Then they walked back to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses in differing architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal of beauty.  It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococco statues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials of royalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh and spirit of their visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved in the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came to his kingdom.  It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on its terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroque allegories of all sorts:  Everywhere the statues outnumbered the visitors, who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally did not mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in a mildewed restaurant, where a compatriotic accent caught their ear in a voice saying to the waiter, “We are in a hurry.”  They looked round and saw that it proceeded from the pretty nose of a young American girl, who sat with a party of young American girls at a neighboring table.  Then they perceived that all the people in that restaurant were Americans, mostly young girls, who all looked as if they were in a hurry.  But neither their beauty nor their impatience had the least effect with the waiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, and alarmed the Marches with the misgiving that they should not have time for the final palace on their list.

This was the palace where the father of Frederick, the mad old Frederick William, brought up his children with that severity which Solomon urged but probably did not practise.  It is a vast place, but they had time for it all, though the custodian made the most of them as the latest comers of the day, and led them through it with a prolixity as great as their waiter’s.  He was a most friendly custodian, and when he found that they had some little notion of what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with his patronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests.  They saw everything but the doorway where the faithful royal father used to lie in wait for his children and beat them, princes and princesses alike, with his knobby cane as they came through.  They might have seen this doorway without knowing it; but from the window overlooking the parade-ground where his family watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic grenadiers, they made sure of just such puddles as Frederick William forced his family to sit with their feet in, while they dined alfresco on pork and cabbage; and they visited the room of the Smoking Parliament where he ruled his convives with a rod of iron, and made them the victims of his bad jokes.  The measuring-board against which he took the stature of his tall grenadiers is there, and one room is devoted to those masterpieces which he used to paint in the agonies of gout.  His chef d’oeuvre contains a figure with two left feet, and there seemed no reason why it might not. have had three.  In another room is a small statue of Carlyle, who did so much to rehabilitate the house which the daughter of it, Wilhelmina, did so much to demolish in the regard of men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there is a chamber where Napoleon slept, which is not likely to be occupied soon by any other self-invited guest of his nation.  It is perhaps to keep the princes of Europe humble that hardly a palace on the Continent is without the chamber of this adventurer, who, till he stooped to be like them, was easily their master.  Another democracy had here recorded its invasion in the American stoves which the custodian pointed out in the corridor when Mrs. March, with as little delay as possible, had proclaimed their country.  The custodian professed an added respect for them from the fact, and if he did not feel it, no doubt he merited the drink money which they lavished on him at parting.

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when he let them out of his carriage at the station, he excused the rainy day to them.  He was a merry fellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughed at the bad weather, as if it had been a good joke on them.

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shone on the stems of the pines on the way back to Berlin, contributed to the content in which they reviewed their visit to Potsdam.  They agreed that the place was perfectly charming, and that it was incomparably expressive of kingly will and pride.  These had done there on the grand scale what all the German princes and princelings had tried to do in imitation and emulation of French splendor.  In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a historical growth as at Versailles, but was the effect of family genius, in which there was often the curious fascination of insanity.

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies, personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are gathered and historically disposed.  The princes of the mighty line who stand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate. father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure, terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears something of the madness which showed in the life of the sire.

They went through many rooms in which the memorials of the kings and queens, the emperors and empresses were carefully ordered, and felt no kindness except before the relics relating to the Emperor Frederick and his mother.  In the presence of the greatest of the dynasty they experienced a kind of terror which March expressed, when they were safely away, in the confession of his joy that those people were dead.

LXVI.

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. March had such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the orders of an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went to bed.  Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and his convalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not always keep his temper.  In the absence of actual offence, either from his daughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form; it centred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward Rose Adding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in the same measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part, directly or indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold.

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he was constantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that he did not over-value Burnamy’s sacrifice and devotion, and that it was not an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about.  In giving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotel altogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as great vexation as he had accepted the room.  He besought him not to go, but so ungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for his manner by the kindness of her own.

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were not eager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she had hitherto shared only with him.  He was old, and certain luxuries had become habits if not necessaries with him.  Of course he did not say this to himself; and still less did he say it to her.  But he let her see that he did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such close relations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches were somehow to blame for it.  This made it impossible for her to write at once to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that it should not make her unjust to Burnamy.  She would not avoid him; she would not let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she felt his kindness and was glad of his help.

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as a fellow-countryman would have been precious.  He got them a doctor, against General Triscoe’s will; he went for his medicines; he lent him books and papers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him.  But with the girl he attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing like the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantage in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said:  “I suppose you must have been all over Weimar by this time.”

“Well, I’ve been here, off and on, almost a month.  It’s an interesting place.  There’s a good deal of the old literary quality left.”

“And you enjoy that!  I saw”—she added this with a little unnecessary flush—“your poem in the paper you lent papa.”

“I suppose I ought to have kept that back.  But I couldn’t.”  He laughed, and she said:

“You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place.”

“It isn’t lying about loose, exactly.”  Even in the serious and perplexing situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace conceptions of it.  They had their value with him as those of a more fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater world.  At the same time he believed that she was now interposing them between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return to the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad.  He looked at her ladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate.  Perhaps there had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination.  He must leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing enough to speak of what had happened since:  of coming on to Wurzburg with the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose’s collapse, and of his mother’s flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was so fortunately going to Holland, too.  He on his side told her of going to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strange they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his hopes.  With a lover’s indefinite power of blinding himself to what is before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him, more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for her to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in the little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always the only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness of their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them.  The Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at the station.  He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on his arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a zeal that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy.  The general in fact preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general gave way, and left him in charge.  The retiring watcher was then apt to encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of the wooden-tubbed evergreens.  From the habit of doing this they one day suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum.  There was here a bench in the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other frequenters of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young strangers, so that they would silently rise and leave it to them when they saw them coming.  Apparently they yielded not only to their right, but to a certain authority which resides in lovers, and which all other men, and especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.  But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled to say what it was.  It was known that the gracious young lady’s father, who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact that they were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever was phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other’s society.

If their free American association was indistinguishably like the peasant informality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of Kenby and Mrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not be fully cognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing to prevent it.  His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he believed himself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have had some other physician if he had not found consolation in their difference of opinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled to cherish for the doctor in view of the man’s complete ignorance of the case.  In proof of his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed some time after the doctor said he might get up.

Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not till then that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter and Burnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipated theirs.  He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which had brought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothing more of it.  The divine patience and confidence of their youth might sometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who had seen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their reunion in Weimar.  To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understanding which had been made without reference to his wishes, and had not been directly brought to his knowledge.

“Agatha,” he said, after due note of a gay contest between her and Burnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent to his room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the open air, “how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?”

“Why, I don’t know!” she answered, startled from her work of beating the sofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand.  “I never asked him.”  She looked down candidly into his face where he sat in an easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa.  “What makes you ask?”

He answered with another question.  “Does he know that we had thought of staying here?”

“Why, we’ve always talked of that, haven’t we?  Yes, he knows it.  Didn’t you want him to know it, papa?  You ought to have begun on the ship, then.  Of course I’ve asked him what sort of place it was.  I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to.”

“Have I said that?  It’s perfectly easy to push on to Paris.  Unless—”

“Unless what?” Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully.  But in spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and strength and courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man.

He said querulously, “I don’t see why you take that tone with me.  You certainly know what I mean.  But if you don’t care to deal openly with me, I won’t ask you.”  He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same time a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her forehead.  “You must know—you’re not a child,” he continued, still with averted eyes, “that this sort of thing can’t go on...  It must be something else, or it mustn’t be anything at all.  I don’t ask you for your confidence, and you know that I’ve never sought to control you.”

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently or provisionally, “No.”

“And I don’t seek to do so now.  If you have nothing that you wish to tell me—”

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had not heard him, “Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?”

“I will lie down when I feel like it,” he answered.  “Send August with the supper; he can look after me.”

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she left him without apparent grievance, saying quietly, “I will send August.”

LXVII.

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy.  She asked August, when she gave him her father’s order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room, where, when it came, she remained thinking so long that it was rather tepid by the time she drank it.

Then she went to her window, and looked out, first above and next below.  Above, the moon was hanging over the gardened hollow before the Museum with the airy lightness of an American moon.  Below was Burnamy behind the tubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair against the house wall, with the spark of his cigar fainting and flashing like an American firefly.  Agatha went down to the door, after a little delay, and seemed surprised to find him there; at least she said, “Oh!” in a tone of surprise.

Burnamy stood up, and answered, “Nice night.”

“Beautiful!” she breathed.  “I didn’t suppose the sky in Germany could ever be so clear.”

“It seems to be doing its best.”

“The flowers over there look like ghosts in the light,” she said dreamily.

“They’re not.  Don’t you want to get your hat and wrap, and go over and expose the fraud?”

“Oh,” she answered, as if it were merely a question of the hat and wrap, “I have them.”

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while, long enough to have ascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, if they had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat, they sat down, and she said, “I don’t know that I’ve seen the moon so clear since we left Carlsbad.”  At the last word his heart gave a jump that seemed to lodge it in his throat and kept him from speaking, so that she could resume without interruption, “I’ve got something of yours, that you left at the Posthof.  The girl that broke the dishes found it, and Lili gave it to Mrs. March for you.”  This did not account for Agatha’s having the thing, whatever it was; but when she took a handkerchief from her belt, and put out her hand with it toward him, he seemed to find that her having it had necessarily followed.  He tried to take it from her, but his own hand trembled so that it clung to hers, and he gasped, “Can’t you say now, what you wouldn’t say then?”

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore; but she apparently felt it in her turn as he had felt it in his.  She whispered back, “Yes,” and then she could not get out anything more till she entreated in a half-stifled voice, “Oh, don’t!”

“No, no!” he panted.  “I won’t—I oughtn’t to have done it—I beg your pardon—I oughtn’t to have spoken,—even—I—”

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulous fashion, but still between laughing and crying, “I meant to make you.  And now, if you’re ever sorry, or I’m ever too topping about anything, you can be perfectly free to say that you’d never have spoken if you hadn’t seen that I wanted you to.”

“But I didn’t see any such thing,” he protested.  “I spoke because I couldn’t help it any longer.”

She laughed triumphantly.  “Of course you think so!  And that shows that you are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing.  But I am going to have the credit of it.  I knew that you were holding back because you were too proud, or thought you hadn’t the right, or something.  Weren’t you?” She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge:  “If you pretend, that you weren’t I shall never forgive you!”

“But I was!  Of course I was.  I was afraid—”

“Isn’t that what I said?” She triumphed over him with another laugh, and cowered a little closer to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible knowledge for all future time.  Out of the sweet and dear delight of this encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present distinctness.  One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her.  Another point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller.  With further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to Mr. March.  Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that obscure passage of his life.  He preferred to put the question by, and perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to the fact that they were now each other’s forever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father.  At her mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his arm to the hands which she had clasped within it.  “He has always appreciated you,” she said courageously, “and I know he will see it in the right light.”

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

“No, I will see him,” she said, “I wish to see him first; he will expect it of me.  We had better go in, now,” she added, but neither made any motion for the present to do so.  On the contrary, they walked in the other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in going to her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressure under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her ways and Burnamy’s parted.  She went into her own room, and softly opened the door into her father’s and listened.

“Well?” he said in a sort of challenging voice.

“Have you been asleep?” she asked.

“I’ve just blown out my light.  What has kept you?”

She did not reply categorically.  Standing there in the sheltering dark, she said, “Papa, I wasn’t very candid with you, this afternoon.  I am engaged to Mr. Burnamy.”

“Light the candle,” said her father.  “Or no,” he added before she could do so.  “Is it quite settled?”

“Quite,” she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt.  “That is, as far as it can be, without you.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Agatha,” said the general.  “And let me try to get to sleep.  You know I don’t like it, and you know I can’t help it.”

“Yes,” the girl assented.

“Then go to bed,” said the general concisely.

Agatha did not obey her father.  She thought she ought to kiss him, but she decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him a tender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself into her own room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the moonlight, with a smile that never left her lips.

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the coming day, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not much greater than some moths, moving before her window.  She pulled the valves open and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling from above.  She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the great central truth of the universe:

“I love you.  L. J. B.”

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

“So do I. Don’t be silly.  A. T.”

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch.  She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutter down from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep.

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, at breakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier.  Of the three involved in the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respited from it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the young people.  They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, if bringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formality of asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through was unpleasant, but after all it was a formality.  Agatha told him everything that had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not that cordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly not hopelessly discouraging.

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general’s tray before going up to his room.  The young fellow did not feel more at his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted upon the weather between them.

“I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy,” said General Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, “and I suppose you know why you have come.”  The words certainly opened the way for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had abundant time to add, “I don’t pretend that this event is unexpected, but I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish you to marry my daughter.  I take it for granted that you are attached to each other, and we won’t waste time on that point.  Not to beat about the bush, on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting her are.  How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

“Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?”

“I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a publisher.”  The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy’s mind.

“Eighteen hundred.  What did you get for your poem in March’s book?”

“That’s a very trifling matter:  fifteen dollars.”

“And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?”

“Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses.  But I wouldn’t take that, General Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his ‘lit de justice’, passed this point in silence.  “Have you any one dependent on you?”

“My mother; I take care of my mother,” answered Burnamy, proudly.

“Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?”

“I have none.”

“Then you don’t expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon her means.”

“I expect to do nothing of the kind!” cried Burnamy.  “I should be ashamed—I should feel disgraced—I should—I don’t ask you—I don’t ask her till I have the means to support her—”

“If you were very fortunate,” continued the general, unmoved by the young fellow’s pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived upon his wife’s means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter’s, “if you went back to Stoller—”

“I wouldn’t go back to him.  I don’t say he’s knowingly a rascal, but he’s ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me.  I behaved badly to him, and I’d give anything to undo the wrong I let him do himself; but I’ll never go back to him.”

“If you went back, on your old salary,” the general persisted pitilessly, “you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up to twenty-five hundred a year.”

“Yes—”

“And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the scale she is used to?  I don’t speak of your mother, who has the first claim upon you.”

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the question was of Stoller, began to sink.

The general went on.  “You ask me to give you my daughter when you haven’t money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a stranger—”

“Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe,” Burnamy protested.  “You have known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago will tell you—”

“A stranger, and worse than a stranger,” the general continued, so pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy.  “It isn’t a question of liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so do the Marches; so does everybody who has met you.  I like you myself.  You’ve done me personally a thousand kindnesses.  But I know very little of you, in spite of our three months’ acquaintance; and that little is—But you shall judge for yourself!  You were in the confidential employ of a man who trusted you, and you let him betray himself.”

“I did.  I don’t excuse it.  The thought of it burns like fire.  But it wasn’t done maliciously; it wasn’t done falsely; it was done inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable.  But it wasn’t; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and I didn’t!  I can never outlive that.”

“I know,” said the general relentlessly, “that you have never attempted any defence.  That has been to your credit with me.  It inclined me to overlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you told her you would never see her again.  What did you expect me to think, after that, of your coming back to see her?  Or didn’t you expect me to know it?”

“I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you.  But I don’t excuse that, either.  It was acting a lie to come back.  All I can say is that I had to see her again for one last time.”

“And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourself to her.”

“I couldn’t help doing that.”

“I don’t say you could.  I don’t judge the facts at all.  I leave them altogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought to say to such a man as you have shown yourself.”

“No, I will say.”  The door into the adjoining room was flung open, and Agatha flashed in from it.

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face.  “Have you been listening?” he asked.

“I have been hearing—”

“Oh!” As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged.

“I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room.  I couldn’t help hearing; and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on, after all you’ve said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than he deserved.”

“That doesn’t justify me,” Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost as severely as she—had dealt with her father.

“Yes, it does!  It justifies you perfectly!  And his wanting you to falsify the whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you.”

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to the other.

“And besides, if it didn’t justify you, what you have done yourself would; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the same as if you hadn’t done it, as far as you are concerned; and that is all I care for.”  Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heard something like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and she flushed a little as she added tremulously, “And I should never, never blame you for it, after that; it’s only trying to wriggle out of things which I despise, and you’ve never done that.  And he simply had to come back,” she turned to her father, “and tell me himself just how it was.  And you said yourself, papa—or the same as said—that he had no right to suppose I was interested in his affairs unless he—unless—And I should never have forgiven him, if he hadn’t told me then that he that he had come back because he—felt the way he did.  I consider that that exonerated him for breaking his word, completely.  If he hadn’t broken his word I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and—and strangely.  And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably, so delicately, that I don’t believe he would ever have said anything again—if I hadn’t fairly forced him.  Yes!  Yes, I did!” she cried at a movement of remonstrance from Burnamy.  “And I shall always be proud of you for it.”  Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted his eyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where Burnamy stood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike impetuosity.  “And as for the rest,” she declared, “everything I have is his; just as everything of his would be mine if I had nothing.  Or if he wishes to take me without anything, then he can have me so, and I sha’n’t be afraid but we can get along somehow.”  She added, “I have managed without a maid, ever since I left home, and poverty has no terrors for me!”

LXVIII.

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldiers learn.  He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character, and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiable that they supplied good-humor for all.  They flaunted their rapture in her father’s face as little as they could, but he may have found their serene satisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to bear as a more boisterous happiness would have been.

It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America, and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employment in New York.  She was much surer than he that this could be done with perfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was not to be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his living; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be no talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time.  It included complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocal analyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes, ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses, eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some account of their several friends.

In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of what they had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at every instant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistent anxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of their leaving Weimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should spend a month before sailing for New York.  Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved, of trying for something there on the New York-Paris Chronicle; and if he got it they might not go home at once.  His gains from that paper had eked out his copyright from his book, and had almost paid his expenses in getting the material which he had contributed to it.  They were not so great, however, but that his gold reserve was reduced to less than a hundred dollars, counting the silver coinages which had remained to him in crossing and recrossing frontiers.  He was at times dimly conscious of his finances, but he buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatible with his status as Agatha’s betrothed, if not unworthy of his character as a lover in the abstract.

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in the garden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important that when it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy’s umbrella, and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings even to let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father’s packing.  Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the whole afternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain in undisturbed possession of his room as long as possible.

What chiefly remained to be put into the general’s trunk were his coats and trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, and carefully folded and packed them.  Then, to make sure that nothing had been forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, and stood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks.

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to be something in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved to be a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue satin ribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a yard, was of entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it had lain.

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examined it near to, and then at arm’s length.  August stood by with a pair of the general’s trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agatha absently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in his eyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the withered bouquet.  Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers, which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in the closet.  At August’s smile it became something else.  Still she asked lightly enough, “Was ist loss, August?”

His smile deepened and broadened.  “Fur die Andere,” he explained.

Agatha demanded in English, “What do you mean by feardy ondery?”

“Oddaw lehdy.”

“Other lady?” August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closed the door into her own room, where the general had been put for the time so as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down with her hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands.  “Now, August,” she said very calmly, “I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mir sagen—what other lady—wass andere Dame—these flowers belonged to—diese Blumen gehorte zu.  Verstehen Sie?”

August nodded brightly, and with German carefully adjusted to Agatha’s capacity, and with now and then a word or phrase of English, he conveyed that before she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had been in Weimar another American Fraulein with her Frau Mother; they had not indeed staid in that hotel, but had several times supped there with the young Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room before her Herr Father.  The young Herr had been much about with these American Damen, driving and walking with them, and sometimes dining or supping with them at their hotel, The Elephant.  August had sometimes carried notes to them from the young Herr, and he had gone for the bouquet which the gracious Fraulein was holding, on the morning of the day that the American Damen left by the train for Hanover.

August was much helped and encouraged throughout by the friendly intelligence of the gracious Fraulein, who smiled radiantly in clearing up one dim point after another, and who now and then supplied the English analogues which he sought in his effort to render his German more luminous.

At the end she returned to the work of packing, in which she directed him, and sometimes assisted him with her own hands, having put the bouquet on the mantel to leave herself free.  She took it up again and carried it into her own room, when she went with August to summon her father back to his.  She bade August say to the young Herr, if he saw him, that she was going to sup with her father, and August gave her message to Burnamy, whom he met on the stairs coming down as he was going up with their tray.

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that evening Burnamy was less able than usual to bear her absence in the hotel dining-room, and he went up to a cafe in the town for his supper.  He did not stay long, and when he returned his heart gave a joyful lift at sight of Agatha looking out from her balcony, as if she were looking for him.  He made her a gay flourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she came down to meet him at the hotel door.  She had her hat on and jacket over one arm and she joined him at once for the farewell walk he proposed in what they had agreed to call their garden.

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reached the place where they always sat, she shifted her jacket to the other arm and uncovered the hand in which she had been carrying the withered bouquet.  “Here is something I found in your closet, when I was getting papa’s things out.”

“Why, what is it?” he asked innocently, as he took it from her.

“A bouquet, apparently,” she answered, as he drew the long ribbons through his fingers, and looked at the flowers curiously, with his head aslant.

“Where did you get it?”

“On the shelf.”

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a long sigh, as of final recollection, “Oh, yes,” and then he said nothing; and they did not sit down, but stood looking at each other.

“Was it something you got for me, and forgot to give me?” she asked in a voice which would not have misled a woman, but which did its work with the young man.

He laughed and said, “Well, hardly!  The general has been in the room ever since you came.”

“Oh, yes.  Then perhaps somebody left it there before you had the room?”

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, “No, I flung it up there I had forgotten all about it.”

“And you wish me to forget about it, too?” Agatha asked in a gayety of tone that still deceived him.

“It would only be fair.  You made me,” he rejoined, and there was something so charming in his words and way, that she would have been glad to do it.

But she governed herself against the temptation and said, “Women are not good at forgetting, at least till they know what.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you, if you want to know,” he said with a laugh, and at the words she—sank provisionally in their accustomed seat.  He sat down beside her, but not so near as usual, and he waited so long before he began that it seemed as if he had forgotten again.  “Why, it’s nothing.  Miss Etkins and her mother were here before you came, and this is a bouquet that I meant to give her at the train when she left.  But I decided I wouldn’t, and I threw it onto the shelf in the closet.”

“May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquet to her at the train?”

“Well, she and her mother—I had been with them a good deal, and I thought it would be civil.”

“And why did you decide not to be civil?”

“I didn’t want it to look like more than civility.”

“Were they here long?”

“About a week.  They left just after the Marches came.”

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted.  She sat reclined in the corner of the seat, with her head drooping.  After an interval which was long to Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the third finger of her left hand, absently, as if she did not know what she was doing; but when she had got it off she held it towards Burnamy and said quietly, “I think you had better have this again,” and then she rose and moved slowly and weakly away.

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and he stood a moment bewildered; then he pressed after her.

“Agatha, do you—you don’t mean—”

“Yes,” she said, without looking round at his face, which she knew was close to her shoulder.  “It’s over.  It isn’t what you’ve done.  It’s what you are.  I believed in you, in spite of what you did to that man—and your coming back when you said you wouldn’t—and—But I see now that what you did was you; it was your nature; and I can’t believe in you any more.”

“Agatha!” he implored.  “You’re not going to be so unjust!  There was nothing between you and me when that girl was here!  I had a right to—”

“Not if you really cared for me!  Do you think I would have flirted with any one so soon, if I had cared for you as you pretended you did for me that night in Carlsbad?  Oh, I don’t say you’re false.  But you’re fickle—”

“But I’m not fickle!  From the first moment I saw you, I never cared for any one but you!”

“You have strange ways of showing your devotion.  Well, say you are not fickle.  Say, that I’m fickle.  I am.  I have changed my mind.  I see that it would never do.  I leave you free to follow all the turning and twisting of your fancy.”  She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she gave him no chance to get out the words that seemed to choke him.  She began to run, but at the door of the hotel she stopped and waited till he came stupidly up.  “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy.  I beg you will not see me again, if you can help it before we go to-morrow.  My father and I are indebted to you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn’t take any more trouble on our account.  August can see us off in the morning.”

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while he was yet struggling with his doubt of the reality of what had all so swiftly happened.

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change in the status to which he had reconciled himself with so much difficulty, when he came down to get into the omnibus for the train.  Till then he had been too proud to ask what had become of Burnamy, though he had wondered, but now he looked about and said impatiently, “I hope that young man isn’t going to keep us waiting.”

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but she said firmly, “He isn’t going, papa.  I will tell you in the train.  August will see to the tickets and the baggage.”

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-class compartment to themselves.  But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha’s confidences to her father were not full.  She told her father that her engagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very wrong in Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy together.  As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty in accepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealed strongly to his contrary-mindedness.  Partly from this, partly from his sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to new conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from an engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, “I hope you’re not making a mistake.”

“Oh, no,” she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born.  Without this Mrs. March, who kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do in sleeping-cars everywhere.  March dressed and went out for a cup of the same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape.  One gray little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more.  There was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog began to lift from the low hills.  Then the sun rose without dispersing the cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the Russischer Hof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shivering in all their wraps till breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored the portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all the electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree.  Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed each other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while the summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted.  They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over their breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interest in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel.  They were fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and they were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire.  Many of them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls running before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processions have for children everywhere.  But their passage filled with cruel anxiety a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet.  What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an old town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town, handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets, apparently overbuilt.  The modern architectural taste was of course Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight.  Some sort of monument to the national victory over France there must have been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record of itself in the travellers’ consciousness.  They were aware of gardened squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the state builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America.  They went to the Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at their public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the most plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay their devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house they revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter of credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius of Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds.  But he consoled himself by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. March for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds’ birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born.  The public is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly place they were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in the Rothschild house.  Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar, which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote.  They wondered, as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean little court, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to that understanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, had meant to be inevitable.  Then they became part of some such sight-seeing retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow sight-seers.  They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in a certain prescient classicism of the house.  It somehow recalled both the Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy.  It is a separate house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or yard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms.  The chief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the most important is the little chamber in the third story where the poet first opened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and which, dying, he implored to be with him more.  It is as large as his death-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down into the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet square.  In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is fairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look from the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt.  So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such things go, it is not a little.  The house is that of a prosperous and well-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family which Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial quality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic’s breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer, the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible.  It was still so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer, the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where the German emperors were elected for so many centuries.  As soon as an emperor was chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of his predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself to the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in the sun.  The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold.  Then she abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her.  He returned shivering, after a half-hour’s absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost, and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the easier part she had chosen.  His only definite impression at the cathedral seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he had seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object of interest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadth of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of the morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of many Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves to learn.  They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it was so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with its bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns.  They liked the market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full of fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because there was scarcely any shade at all in it.  They read from their Baedeker that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since.  They were almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in Frankfort.  These, both of the English and American branches of the race, prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate.  It grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whom March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when the guard came, without asking their leave.  Then the climate proved much colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, and would not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, or the hills far off.  He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as it had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, “She may be another Baroness!” At first he did not know what she meant, then he remembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorly enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife was practising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and giving her a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose.  She failed to profit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeable woman, of no more perceptible distinction than their other fellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (they resolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he was no other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way to Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wet sunset.  When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminably to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomer and cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part of the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, than even Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.  It was planted, like that, with double rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign of Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restriction against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred.  Otherwise they had to confess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more proper and dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America.  To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years’ start; but all the same the fact galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something tangible.  There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the river’s brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain have had them take.  But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower, and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of the serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage.  All these retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove, without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms, and sent back a pretty young girl to do it.  She came indignant, not because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange demand.

“What!” she cried.  “A fire in September!”

“Yes,” March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by the exigency, “yes, if September is cold.”

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and in less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher.  Mrs. March made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said she would have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a supper of chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when they supped in her aunt’s parlor there all those years ago.  He wished to compute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and he went down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he found himself alone with a young English couple and their little boy.  They were friendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable, apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said he had contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg.  March said he was going to Holland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which March expected to find there.  He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of faith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of the dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the court without, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till the little English boy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March’s spirits certainly did not rise when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at another table.  He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he had met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the younger.  The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style bragging Americans whom he no longer saw.  He asked of an agreeable fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one only the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in his scorn of the German landscape, the German weather, the German government, the German railway management, and then turned out an American of German birth!  March found his wife in great bodily comfort when he went back to her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she had discovered standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove.  It was a French clock, of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the first Empire, and it looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon occupied Mayence early in the century.  But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her conscience where, in its danger from the heat of the stove, it rested with the weight of the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled.  She wondered that no one had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and she required her husband to remove it at once from the top of the stove to the mantel under the mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a clock.  He said nothing could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began to fall all apart, like a clock in the house of the Hoodoo.  Its marble base dropped-off; its pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side.  While Mrs. March lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it together before any one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new place.  Then they both breathed freer, and returned to sit down before the stove.  But at the same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined on the lacquered top, the basal form of the clock.  The chambermaid would see it in the morning; she would notice the removal of the clock, and would make a merit of reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord, and in the end they would be mulcted of its value.  Rather than suffer this wrong they agreed to restore it to its place, and, let it go to destruction upon its own terms.  March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went to bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his window.  One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of pathos in the line:

“Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!”

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of youth parted and departed.  Who were they, and in what different places, with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen silent for evermore?  It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke early to other voices under his window.  But now the voices, though young, were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves kept time with their singing.  He drew his curtain and saw the street filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some in uniform and some in civil dress with students’ caps, loosely straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make out.  At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said that these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres, and who were now going home.  He promised March a translation of the song, but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-going remained the more poetic with him because its utterance remained inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering about the little city alone.  His wife said she was tired and would sit by the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in.  He went to the cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people of Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout.  They proved it by preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive offerings.  A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and ragged.  Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red guide-books, and studied the objects of interest.  A resplendent beadle in a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver.  At the high altar a priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle’s, or whether somewhere in it he felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river, which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges.  The rough river looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making.  The summer of life as well as the summer of that year was past.  Better return to his own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any one.  A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really a wish to be at work again.  He said he must keep this from his wife, who seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned to the hotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer.  They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America?  But he forbore, and he was afterwards glad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition which the landlord practised upon them.  After a distinct and repeated agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much, and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had plundered them of.

“Now I see,” said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, “how fortunate it was that we baked his clock.  You may laugh, but I believe we were the instruments of justice.”

“Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?” asked her husband.  “The landlord has his own arrangement with justice.  When he overcharges his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my clock.”

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks.  The smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not so bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March liked the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy shores.  It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that, and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he remembered it blue and clear.  A friendly German, of those who began to come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence, assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid from the unusual rains.  March had his own belief that whatever the color of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not gainsay the friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since realized itself, in their behavior toward one another.  They held silently apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who kept the Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an Englishman.  His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?  He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of the boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offer him one of their superabundant wraps.  At times March actually lifted a shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and that he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the young man’s eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he felt that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again.  March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin to eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the baskets they had brought with them, or from the boat’s provision.  But he prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer, through all the events of the voyage; and took March’s mind off the scenery with a sudden wrench when he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance.  At the table d’hote, which was served when the landscape began to be less interesting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across the table to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout the different courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt the young man’s chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for the semi-civilization of the management.  At such times he knew that he was a Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at last cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their former Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantled the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps.  The scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there were certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than they remembered.  The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem was more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, though there were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed as good as those of the theatre.  Here and there some of them had been restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into trade.  Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more, does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

‘Solo sitting by the shores of old romance’

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded.  “Still, still you know,” March argued, “this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.  Besides, the Rhine doesn’t set up to be sublime; it only means to be storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it.  And then we have really got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure.”

“Well, we have got no denkmal, either,” said his wife, meaning the national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had just passed, “and that is something in our favor.”

“It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was,” he returned.

“The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rode aboard the boat.”

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that.  He yielded, and began to praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled slopes of the upper river.  He said they put him in mind of orchards that he had known in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of travel, after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in finding something familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of getting ashore with their baggage and driving from the steamboat landing to the railroad station, where they were to get their train for Dusseldorf an hour later.  The station swarmed with travellers eating and drinking and smoking; but they escaped from it for a precious half of their golden hour, and gave the time to the great cathedral, which was built, a thousand years ago, just round the corner from the station, and is therefore very handy to it.  Since they saw the cathedral last it had been finished, and now under a cloudless evening sky, it soared and swept upward like a pale flame.  Within it was a bit over-clean, a bit bare, but without it was one of the great memories of the race, the record of a faith which wrought miracles of beauty, at least, if not piety.

The train gave the Marches another, and last, view of it as they slowly drew out of the city, and began to run through a level country walled with far-off hills; past fields of buckwheat showing their stems like coral under their black tops; past peasant houses changing their wonted shape to taller and narrower forms; past sluggish streams from which the mist rose and hung over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassy clear till the manifold factory chimneys of Dusseldorf stained it with their dun smoke.

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the town where Heinrich Heine was born; but when they had eaten their supper in the capital little hotel they found there, and went out for a stroll, they found nothing to remind them of the factories, and much to make them think of the poet.  The moon, beautiful and perfect as a stage moon, came up over the shoulder of a church as they passed down a long street which they had all to themselves.  Everybody seemed to have gone to bed, but at a certain corner a girl opened a window above them, and looked out at the moon.

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalled garden facing it, full of black depths of foliage.  In the night March woke and saw the moon standing over the garden, and silvering its leafy tops.  This was really as it should be in the town where the idolized poet of his youth was born; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and who had once seemed like a living friend; who had been witness of his first love, and had helped him to speak it.  His wife used to laugh at him for his Heine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and she, even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage.  He thought long thoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way, with an ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his youth, all ghosts together in the silvered shadow.  The trees shuddered in the night breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, “What are you doing?”

“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.”

LXXII.

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.”

March laughed.  “Ideal!  What is ideal?”

“Going home!” she said with such passion that he had not the heart to point out that they were merely returning to their old duties, cares and pains, with the worn-out illusion that these would be altogether different when they took them up again.

LXXIII.

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightway to her berth when she got on board the Cupania, and to her husband’s admiration she remained there till the day before they reached New York.  Her theory was that the complete rest would do more than anything else to calm her shaken nerves; and she did not admit into her calculations the chances of adverse weather which March would not suggest as probable in the last week in September.  The event justified her unconscious faith.  The ship’s run was of unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of unparalled smoothness.  For days the sea was as sleek as oil; the racks were never on the tables once; the voyage was of the sort which those who make it no more believe in at the time than those whom they afterwards weary in boasting of it.

The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not show the slightest curiosity to know who her fellow-passengers were.  She said that she wished to be let perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for this reason she forbade March to bring her a list of the passengers till after they had left Queenstown lest it should be too exciting.  He did not take the trouble to look it up, therefore; and the first night out he saw no one whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at breakfast he found himself to his great satisfaction at the same table with the Eltwins.  They were so much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin took part in the talk, and told him how they had spent the time of her husband’s rigorous after-cure in Switzerland, and now he was going home much better than they had expected.  She said they had rather thought of spending the winter in Europe, but had given it up because they were both a little homesick.  March confessed that this was exactly the case with his wife and himself; and he had to add that Mrs. March was not very well otherwise, and he should be glad to be at home on her account.  The recurrence of the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin’s habitual gloom, and Mrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subject of their return for inquiry into Mrs. March’s condition; her interest did not so far overcome her shyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her; and March found that the fact of the Eltwins’ presence on board did not agitate his wife.  It seemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hoped he would see all he could of the poor old things.  She asked if he had met any one else he knew, and he was able to tell her that there seemed to be a good many swells on board, and this cheered her very much, though he did not know them; she liked to be near the rose, though it was not a flower that she really cared for.

She did not ask who the swells were, and March took no trouble to find out.  He took no trouble to get a passenger-list, and he had the more trouble when he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished, as they have a habit of doing, after the first day; the one that he made interest for with the head steward was a second-hand copy, and had no one he knew in it but the Eltwins.  The social solitude, however, was rather favorable to certain other impressions.  There seemed even more elderly people than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmosphere was gray and sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward voyage; there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men who were going seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for the coming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke.  They had eaten their cake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in the digestion.  They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown summer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was to him.  He hated to be of their dreary company, but spiritually he knew that he was of it; and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger passengers.  Some matrons who went about clad in furs amused him, for they must have been unpleasantly warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope of being able to tell the customs inspector with a good conscience that the things had been worn, would have sustained one lady draped from head to foot in Astrakhan.

They were all getting themselves ready for the fray or the play of the coming winter; but there seemed nothing joyous in the preparation.  There were many young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there were not many young men, and such as there were kept to the smoking-room.  There was no sign of flirtation among them; he would have given much for a moment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she could have brightened those gloomy surfaces with her impartial lamp.  March wished that he could have brought some report from the outer world to cheer his wife, as he descended to their state-room.  They had taken what they could get at the eleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in the Norumbia.  It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room.  It was on the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there had been any sun it could not have got into their window, which was half the time under water.  The green waves, laced with foam, hissed as they ran across the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned like the wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, and looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he was going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, “Are we going down?”

“Not that I know of,” he answered with a gayety he did not feel.  “But I’ll ask the head steward.”

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingers convulsively.  “If I’m never any better, you will always remember this happy, summer, won’t you?  Oh, it’s been such a happy summer!  It has been one long joy, one continued triumph!  But it was too late; we were too old; and it’s broken me.”

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence.  He ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, “Don’t you think I’d better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?”

She suddenly turned and faced him.  “The doctor!  Why, I’m not sick, Basil!  If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something to stop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyed window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me.”

She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed to open and shut like a weary eye.

“Oh, go away!” she implored.  “I shall be better presently, but if you stand there like that—Go and see if you can’t get some other room, where I needn’t feel as if I were drowning, all the way over.”

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did not stop short of the purser’s office.  He made an excuse of getting greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deck changed for something a little less intimate with the sea.  The purser was not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wanted something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on the promenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundred dollars.  March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look at it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her.  She would be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves.  He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking.  All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took the desperate step before him.  He turned in half his course, and ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself from falling.

“Why, Mr. March!” she shrieked.

“Miss Triscoe!” he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with her to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie between them till she began to pick them up herself.  Then he joined her and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat.  She had sorrowed over Mrs. March’s sad state, and he had grieved to hear that her father was going home because he was not at all well, before they found the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grim impatience for his daughter.

“But how is it you’re not in the passenger-list?” he inquired of them both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at the last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list.  They were in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths.  Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy not only from her company but from her conversation which mystified March through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife.  She was a girl who had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously written them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning her betrothed that had almost positive quality.  With his longing to try Miss Triscoe upon Mrs. March’s malady as a remedial agent, he had now the desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe’s mystery as a solvent.  She stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the chair next her father.  She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. March to let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and he hurried below.

“Did you get it?” asked his wife, without looking round, but not so apathetically as before.

“Oh, yes.  That’s all right.  But now, Isabel, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.  You’d find it out, and you’d better know it at once.”

She turned her face, and asked sternly, “What is it?”

Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, “Miss Triscoe is on board.
Miss Triscoe-and-her-father.  She wishes to come down and see you.”

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape.  “And Burnamy?”

“There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out, spiritually.  She didn’t mention him, and I talked at least five minutes with her.”

“Hand me my dressing-sack,” said Mrs. March, “and poke those things on the sofa under the berth.  Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain across that hideous window.  Stop!  Throw those towels into your berth.  Put my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door.  Slip the brushes into that other bag.  Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that your head has made.  Now!”

“Then—then you will see her?”

“See her!”

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity.  He remembered, as he led the way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basement room.

“Oh, we’re in the basement, too; it was all we could get,” she said in words that ended within the state-room he opened to her.  Then he went back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.

He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving.  He reminded March of the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from bad to worse with him.  At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely escaped from it with his life.  Then they had tried Schevleningen for a week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought they might find them, the Marches.  The air had been poison to him, and they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home.  “All Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter,” he ended.

There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the context, “It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most devilish way.  Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about—Well it came to nothing, after all; and I don’t understand how, to this day.  I doubt if they do.  It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose.  I wasn’t consulted in the matter either way.  It appears that parents are not consulted in these trifling affairs, nowadays.”  He had married his daughter’s mother in open defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter’s wilfulness this fact had whitened into pious obedience.  “I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result.”

A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy’s final rejection than with his acceptance.  If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the young man in the general’s attitude.  But the affair was altogether too delicate for comment; the general’s aristocratic frankness in dealing with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in any case March did not see how he could touch it.  He could only say, He had always liked Burnamy, himself.

He had his good qualities, the general owned.  He did not profess to understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the instincts of a gentleman.  He had nothing to say against him, unless in that business with that man—what was his name?

“Stoller?” March prompted.  “I don’t excuse him in that, but I don’t blame him so much, either.  If punishment means atonement, he had the opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means expunction, then I don’t see why that offence hasn’t been pretty well wiped out.

“Those things are not so simple as they used to seem,” said the general, with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately concern his own comfort or advantage.

LXXVI.

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing another offence of Burnamy’s.

“It wasn’t,” said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all the minor facts to the heart of the matter, “that he hadn’t a perfect right to do it, if he thought I didn’t care for him.  I had refused him at Carlsbad, and I had forbidden him to speak to me about—on the subject.  But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it.  He ought to have known that I couldn’t accept him, on the spur of the moment, that way; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace, before he had done anything to justify himself.  I couldn’t have kept my self-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he ought to have seen it.  Of course he said afterwards that he didn’t see it.  But when—when I found out that she had been in Weimar, and all that time, while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to see him—let him know how I was really feeling—he was flirting with that—that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determined to put an end to everything.  And that is what I did; and I shall always think I—did right—and—”

The rest was lost in Agatha’s handkerchief, which she put up to her eyes.  Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl’s unoccupied hand in her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past sufficiently to allow her to be heard.

Then she said, “Men are very strange—the best of them.  And from the very fact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush into a flirtation with somebody else.”

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly not been beautified by grief.  “I didn’t blame him for the flirting; or not so much.  It was his keeping it from me afterwards.  He ought to have told me the very first instant we were engaged.  But he didn’t.  He let it go on, and if I hadn’t happened on that bouquet I might never have known anything about it.  That is what I mean by—a false nature.  I wouldn’t have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself—Oh, it was too much!”

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again.  She was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not see, toward the sofa, “I’m afraid that’s rather a hard seat for you.

“Oh, no, thank you!  I’m perfectly comfortable—I like it—if you don’t mind?”

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay, sighed and said, “They are not like us, and we cannot help it.  They are more temporizing.”

“How do you mean?” Agatha unmasked again.

“They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time to bring them right, or to come right of themselves.”

“I don’t think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!” said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March’s sincerity.

“Ah, that’s just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and I don’t believe we could have lived through without it:  we should have quarrelled ourselves into the grave!”

“Mrs. March!”

“Yes, indeed.  I don’t mean that he would ever deceive me.  But he would let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without any fuss.”

“Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?”

“I’m afraid he would—if he thought it would come right.  It used to be a terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don’t remember that he means nothing but good and kindness by it.  Only the other day in Ansbach—how long ago it seems!—he let a poor old woman give him her son’s address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her.  I don’t believe, unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he’ll ever go near the man.”

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, “That is a very different thing.”

“It isn’t a different kind of thing.  And it shows what men are,—the sweetest and best of them, that is.  They are terribly apt to be—easy-going.”

“Then you think I was all wrong?” the girl asked in a tremor.

“No, indeed!  You were right, because you really expected perfection of him.  You expected the ideal.  And that’s what makes all the trouble, in married life:  we expect too much of each other—we each expect more of the other than we are willing to give or can give.  If I had to begin over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of being radiantly happy.  But all this talking and all this writing about love seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect, even at our craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of them; and they seem to expect it of us, poor things!  If we could keep on after we are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take nice things as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning!  But we get more and more greedy and exacting—”

“Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everything after we were engaged?”

“No, I don’t say that.  But suppose he had put it off till you were married?” Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, “Would it have been so bad?  Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the last moment in his desperation was a very good joke.  You would have understood better just how it was, and it might even have made you fonder of him.  You might have seen that he had flirted with some one else because he was so heart-broken about you.”

“Then you believe that if I could have waited till—till—but when I had found out, don’t you see I couldn’t wait?  It would have been all very well if I hadn’t known it till then.  But as I did know it.  Don’t you see?”

“Yes, that certainly complicated it,” Mrs. March admitted.  “But I don’t think, if he’d been a false nature, he’d have owned up as he did.  You see, he didn’t try to deny it; and that’s a great point gained.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Agatha, with conviction.  “I saw that afterwards.  But you don’t think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or—or hasty?”

“No, indeed!  You couldn’t have done differently under the circumstances.  You may be sure he felt that—he is so unselfish and generous—” Agatha began to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand.  “And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do.”

“No,” the girl protested.  “He can never forgive me; it’s all over, everything is over.  It would make very little difference to me, what happened now—if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything.  But if I can only believe I wasn’t unjust—”

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behaved with absolute impartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quite irrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place had nothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and all should be made right between them.  The fact that she did not know where he was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with the result; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself.  She clinched her argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off, and that it had simply renewed itself.  All you had to do was to keep willing it, and waiting.  There was something very mysterious in it.

“And how long was it till—” Agatha faltered.

“Well, in our ease it was two years.”

“Oh!” said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to reassure her.

“But our case was very peculiar.  I could see afterwards that it needn’t have been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that I was in the wrong.  I waited till we met.”

“If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write,” said Agatha.  “I shouldn’t care what he thought of my doing it.”

“Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong.”

They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhausted all the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those they did not care for.  At last the general said, “I’m afraid my daughter will tire Mrs. March.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’ll tire my wife.  But do you want her?”

“Well, when you’re going down.”

“I think I’ll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation,” said March, and he did so before he went below.

He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa.  “I thought I might as well go to lunch,” she said, and then she told him about Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort and encourage the girl.  “And now, dearest, I want you to find out where Burnamy is, and give him a hint.  You will, won’t you!  If you could have seen how unhappy she was!”

“I don’t think I should have cared, and I’m certainly not going to meddle.  I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he’s well rid of her.  I can’t imagine a broken engagement that would more completely meet my approval.  As the case stands, they have my blessing.”

“Don’t say that, dearest!  You know you don’t mean it.”

“I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off.  You’ve done all and more than you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe.  You’ve offered yourself up, and you’ve offered me up—”

“No, no, Basil!  I merely used you as an illustration of what men were—the best of them.”

“And I can’t observe,” he continued, “that any one else has been considered in the matter.  Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy’s flirtation?  What is the matter with a little compassion for the pivotal girl?”

“Now, you know you’re not serious,” said his wife; and though he would not admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interest which she took in the affair.  There was no longer any question of changing their state-room.  Under the tonic influence of the excitement she did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later after dinner than he could have advised.  She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparative study of the American swells, in the light of her late experience with the German highhotes.  It is true that none of the swells gave her the opportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done.  They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she could bear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal by an outlay of six hundred dollars.  She now shuddered at the thought; but she contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could give points to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americans did try to do a thing, they beat the world.  Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke of them as “rich people,” and she seemed content to keep away from them with Mrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin.  General Triscoe had his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and mocked their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and the return of the King.  March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into his own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find how much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known.  The conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East and the farther West.  The picture that the major drew of them in his own region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that he should never go back to his native section.  There was the comfort of kind in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, which March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrow upon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man’s habit of early rising, and they usually found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to people of their habits.  March admired the vileness of the decoction, which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and he asked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on the Channel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, sodden British bread, from the spirited and airy Continental tradition of coffee and rolls.

The major confessed that he was no great hand to notice such things, and he said he supposed that if the line had never lost a passenger, and got you to New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased; he surmised that if they could get their airing outside before they took their coffee, it would give the coffee a chance to taste better; and this was what they afterwards did.  They met, well buttoned and well mined up, on the promenade when it was yet so early that they were not at once sure of each other in the twilight, and watched the morning planets pale east and west before the sun rose.  Sometimes there were no paling planets and no rising sun, and a black sea, ridged with white, tossed under a low dark sky with dim rifts.

One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenity and majesty which it rarely has outside of the theatre.  The dawn began over that sea which was like the rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under long mauve clouds bathed in solemn light.  Above these, in the pale tender sky, two silver stars hung, and the steamer’s smoke drifted across them like a thin dusky veil.  To the right a bank of dun cloud began to burn crimson, and to burn brighter till it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeous rugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth of autumnal shrubs.  The whole eastern heaven softened and flushed through diaphanous mists; the west remained a livid mystery.  The eastern masses and flakes of cloud began to kindle keenly; but the stars shone clearly, and then one star, till the tawny pink hid it.  All the zenith reddened, but still the sun did not show except in the color of the brilliant clouds.  At last the lurid horizon began to burn like a flame-shot smoke, and a fiercely bright disc edge pierced its level, and swiftly defined itself as the sun’s orb.

Many thoughts went through March’s mind; some of them were sad, but in some there was a touch of hopefulness.  It might have been that beauty which consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself, if no longer young, a part of the young immortal frame of things.  His state was indefinable, but he longed to hint at it to his companion.

“Yes,” said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh.  “I feel as if I could walk out through that brightness and find her.  I reckon that such hopes wouldn’t be allowed to lie to us; that so many ages of men couldn’t have fooled themselves so.  I’m glad I’ve seen this.”  He was silent and they both remained watching the rising sun till they could not bear its splendor.  “Now,” said the major, “it must be time for that mud, as you call it.”  Over their coffee and crackers at the end of the table which they had to themselves, he resumed.  “I was thinking all the time—we seem to think half a dozen things at once, and this was one of them—about a piece of business I’ve got to settle when I reach home; and perhaps you can advise me about it; you’re an editor.  I’ve got a newspaper on my hands; I reckon it would be a pretty good thing, if it had a chance; but I don’t know what to do with it:  I got it in trade with a fellow who has to go West for his lungs, but he’s staying till I get back.  What’s become of that young chap—what’s his name?—that went out with us?”

“Burnamy?” prompted March, rather breathlessly.

“Yes.  Couldn’t he take hold of it?  I rather liked him.  He’s smart, isn’t he?”

“Very,” said March.  “But I don’t know where he is.  I don’t know that he would go into the country—.  But he might, if—”

They entered provisionally into the case, and for argument’s sake supposed that Burnamy would take hold of the major’s paper if he could be got at.  It really looked to March like a good chance for him, on Eltwin’s showing; but he was not confident of Burnamy’s turning up very soon, and he gave the major a pretty clear notion why, by entering into the young fellow’s history for the last three months.

“Isn’t it the very irony of fate?” he said to his wife when he found her in their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, and reported the facts to her.

“Irony?” she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined or desired.  “Nothing of the kind.  It’s a leading, if ever there was one.  It will be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy.  And out there she can sit on her steps!”

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis of Burnamy’s reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and their settlement in Major Eltwin’s town under social conditions that implied a habit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch.  While he was doing this she showered him with questions and conjectures and requisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore saved him from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide, inquiry into Burnamy’s whereabouts.

The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin got out, and found the second-cabin passengers free of the first-cabin promenade at an hour when their superiors were not using it.  As he watched these inferiors, decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying their privilege with a furtive air, and with stolen glances at him, he asked himself in what sort he was their superior, till the inquiry grew painful.  Then he rose from his chair, and made his way to the place where the material barrier between them was lifted, and interested himself in a few of them who seemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on the terms made.  A figure seized his attention with a sudden fascination of conjecture and rejection:  the figure of a tall young man who came out on the promenade and without looking round, walked swiftly away to the bow of the ship, and stood there, looking down at the water in an attitude which was bewilderingly familiar.  His movement, his posture, his dress, even, was that of Burnamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure, felt a sickening repulsion in the notion of his presence.  It would have been such a cheap performance on the part of life, which has all sorts of chances at command, and need not descend to the poor tricks of second-rate fiction; and he accused Burnamy of a complicity in the bad taste of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if it were really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of the Triscoes as he himself had done.  He had probably got out of money and had hurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin fare on the first boat back.  Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blame for such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he wished to turn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it.  He kept moving toward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces’ distance the young man whirled about and showed him the face of a stranger.

March made some witless remark on the rapid course of the ship as it cut its way through the water of the bow; the stranger answered with a strong Lancashire accent; and in the talk which followed, he said he was going out to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New Bedford, and he seemed hopeful of some advice or information from March; then he said he must go and try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean his wife, and he hurried down to his own, to whom he related his hair-breadth escape from Burnamy.

“I don’t call it an escape at all!” she declared.  “I call it the greatest possible misfortune.  If it had been Burnamy we could have brought them together at once, just when she has seen so clearly that she was in the wrong, and is feeling all broken up.  There wouldn’t have been any difficulty about his being in the second-cabin.  We could have contrived to have them meet somehow.  If the worst came to the worst you could have lent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the first-cabin.”

“I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him,” said March, “and then he could have eaten with the swells.”

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before the stewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling that if it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would really have been Burnamy.

LXXV.

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping of the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no perceptible motion save from her machinery.

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those early hours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the sailors scouring the promenades.  He made little acquaintance with his fellow-passengers.  One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker lady whom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from the churning screws; but he did not quite get the words out.  On the contrary he talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm near Boulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-five years out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in all its purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board.  Now and then March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of the usual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business; and he philosophized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed so often without philosophy.  He made desperate attempts at times to interest himself in the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the betting on the ship’s wonderful run was continual.

He thought that people talked less and less as they drew nearer home; but on the last day out there was a sudden expansion, and some whom he had not spoken with voluntarily addressed him.  The sweet, soft air was like midsummer the water rippled gently, without a swell, blue under the clear sky, and the ship left a wide track that was silver in the sun.  There were more sail; the first and second class baggage was got up and piled along the steerage deck.

Some people dressed a little more than usual for the last dinner which was earlier than usual, so as to be out of the way against the arrival which had been variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty.  An indescribable nervousness culminated with the appearance of the customs officers on board, who spread their papers on cleared spaces of the dining-tables, and summoned the passengers to declare that they had nothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves at the dock.

This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made her way up the Narrows, and into the North River, where the flare of lights from the crazy steeps and cliffs of architecture on the New York shore seemed a persistence of the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics.  March blushed for the grotesque splendor of the spectacle, and was confounded to find some Englishmen admiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not the strong point of our race.  His wife sat hand in hand with Miss Triscoe, and from time to time made him count the pieces of small baggage in the keeping of their steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a sarcastic calm.

The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways were lifted to her side; the passengers fumbled and stumbled down their incline, and at the bottom the Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of their son and daughter.  They all began talking at once, and ignoring and trying to remember the Triscoes to whom the young Marches were presented.  Bella did her best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered to get an inspector for the general at the same time as for his father.  Then March, remorsefully remembered the Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that his son might get them an inspector too.  He found the major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into one:  the official who received the declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the major’s lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran’s paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government.  When March’s own inspector came he was as civil and lenient as our hateful law allows; when he had finished March tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to a just shame by his refusal of it.  The bed-room steward keeping guard over the baggage helped put-it together after the search, and protested that March had feed him so handsomely that he would stay there with it as long as they wished.  This partly restored March’s self-respect, and he could share in General Triscoe’s indignation with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay duty on his own purchases in excess of the hundred-dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing, and they jointly came far within the limit for two.

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way to Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly arranged for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he was to follow with his son on foot and by car.  They got away from the scene of the customs’ havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from the victorious army searching for the wounded.  His son clapped him on the shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same old father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influences of the New York ugliness would permit.  It was still in those good and decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the money paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through were not foul but merely mean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would have been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up and down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.

The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an evening prolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that now they must really all go to bed.  The children had both to recognize again and again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his father about the condition of ‘Every Other Week’; Bella had to explain to her mother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to meet them with her, but was coming a week later to take her home, and then she would know the reason why they could not all, go back to Chicago with him:  it was just the place for her father to live, for everybody to live.  At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which she had maintained her position the night before; the travellers entered into a full expression of their joy at being home again; March asked what had become of that stray parrot which they had left in the tree-top the morning they started; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last Silver Wedding Journey she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all that she had been on the verge of nervous collapse when she reached the ship.  They sat at table till she discovered that it was very nearly eleven o’clock, and said it was disgraceful.

Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought in to Tom.  He glanced at it, and said to his father, “Oh, yes!  This man has been haunting the office for the last three days.  He’s got to leave to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with him, I said he’d probably find you here this morning.  But if you don’t want to see him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose.”

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gave it to his wife.  “Perhaps I’d as well see him?”

“See him!” she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soul was centred.  By an effort of self-control which no words can convey a just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with a laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard but shabby.  He made an effort for dignity as well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologies for his persistency.  But, he said, he was on his way West, and he was anxious to know whether there was any chance of his ‘Kasper Hauler’ paper being taken if he finished it up.  March would have been a far harder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the suppliant before him.  He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words.  Then Burnamy’s dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago.  His straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thin overcoat affected March’s imagination as something like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach of autumn.  He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin’s wish to see him; and he promised to go round with him to the major’s hotel before the Eltwins left town that afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street.  At the first hint she gave of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men’s love affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the two women together.  This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals, with no sense of iteration for either of them, “I told her to come in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will.  But if she doesn’t, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either.  At any rate I’m going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we’ll see whether there’s anything in that silly theory of your father’s.  I don’t believe there is,” she said, to be on the safe side.

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was not coming across to their house.  As the girl persisted in coming and coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at the window and nodded, the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter, and drove her away to her own room, so that no society detail should hinder the divine chance.  She went to the door herself when Agatha rang, and then she was going to open the way into the parlor where March was still closeted with Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known they were there.  But a soberer second thought than this prevailed, and she told the girl who it was that was within and explained the accident of his presence.  “I think,” she said nobly, “that you ought to have the chance of going away if you don’t wish to meet him.”

The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs. March had noted in her from the first with regard to what she wanted to do, when Burnamy was in question, answered, “But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March.”

While they stood looking at each other, March came out to ask his wife if she would see Burnamy, and she permitted herself so much stratagem as to substitute Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subduing his proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake.

Half an hour later she thought it time to join the young people, urged largely by the frantic interest of her daughter.  But she returned from the half-open door without entering.  “I couldn’t bring myself to break in on the poor things.  They are standing at the window together looking over at St. George’s.”

Bella silently clasped her hands.  March gave cynical laugh, and said, “Well we are in for it, my dear.”  Then he added, “I hope they’ll take us with them on their Silver Wedding Journey.”

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Declare that they had nothing to declare
Despair which any perfection inspires
Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love
Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously
Held aloof in a sarcastic calm
Illusions:  no marriage can be perfect without them
Married life:  we expect too much of each other
Not do to be perfectly frank with one’s own country
Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him
Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing
Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste
Race seemed so often without philosophy
Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain
She always came to his defence when he accused himself

PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE TRILOGY:

Affected absence of mind
Affectional habit
All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest is little
All luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest
Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else
Amusing world, if you do not refuse to be amused
Anticipative homesickness
Anticipative reprisal
Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of
Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much
Artists never do anything like other people
As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting
At heart every man is a smuggler
Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars
Ballast of her instinctive despondency
Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever
Beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved
Bewildering labyrinth of error
Biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest
Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
Brown-stone fronts
But when we make that money here, no one loses it
Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
Calm of those who have logic on their side
Civilly protested and consented
Clinging persistence of such natures
Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant
Collective silence which passes for sociality
Comfort of the critical attitude
Conscience weakens to the need that isn’t
Considerable comfort in holding him accountable
Courage hadn’t been put to the test
Courtship
Deadly summer day
Death is peace and pardon
Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach
Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance
Declare that they had nothing to declare
Despair which any perfection inspires
Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him
Dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty
Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love
Dividend:  It’s a chicken before it’s hatched
Does any one deserve happiness
Does anything from without change us?
Dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad
Effort to get on common ground with an inferior
Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation
Evil which will not let a man forgive his victim
Explained perhaps too fully
Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable
Family buryin’ grounds
Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting
Feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk
Feeling rather ashamed,—for he had laughed too
Feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination
Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another
Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously
Futility of travel
Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it
Glad; which considering, they ceased to be
Got their laugh out of too many things in life
Guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction
Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
Handsome pittance
Happiness is so unreasonable
Happiness built upon and hedged about with misery
He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices
He buys my poverty and not my will
Headache darkens the universe while it lasts
Heart that forgives but does not forget
Held aloof in a sarcastic calm
Helplessness begets a sense of irresponsibility
Helplessness accounts for many heroic facts in the world
Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death
Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
Honest selfishness
Hopeful recklessness
How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing
Humanity may at last prevail over nationality
Hurry up and git well—or something
Hypothetical difficulty
I cannot endure this—this hopefulness of yours
I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms
I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife’s acquaintance
I’m not afraid—I’m awfully demoralized
If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen
Ignorant of her ignorance
Illusions:  no marriage can be perfect without them
Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much
Indispensable
Indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography
Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate
It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing
It must be your despair that helps you to bear up
It don’t do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
It ’s the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn’t
Jesting mood in the face of all embarrassments
Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
Less intrusive than if he had not been there
Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of
Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous
Life of the ship, like the life of the sea:  a sodden monotony
Life has taught him to truckle and trick
Long life of holidays which is happy marriage
Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence
Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel
Man’s willingness to abide in the present
Married life:  we expect too much of each other
Married the whole mystifying world of womankind
Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid
Marry for love two or three times
Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign
Muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee
Nervous woes of comfortable people
Never-blooming shrub
Never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it
Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all
No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another
No longer the gross appetite for novelty
No right to burden our friends with our decisions
Not do to be perfectly frank with one’s own country
Nothing so apt to end in mutual dislike,—except gratitude
Nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it’s a young mother
Novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking
Oblivion of sleep
Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him
Only so much clothing as the law compelled
Only one of them was to be desperate at a time
Our age caricatures our youth
Parkman
Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing
Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
Patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country
People that have convictions are difficult
Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
Prices fixed by his remorse
Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste
Race seemed so often without philosophy
Recipes for dishes and diseases
Reckless and culpable optimism
Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last
Rejoice in everything that I haven’t done
Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage
Repeated the nothings they had said already
Respect for your mind, but she don’t think you’ve got any sense
Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
Seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed
Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him
Self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity
Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain
Servant of those he loved
She always came to his defence when he accused himself
She cares for him:  that she was so cold shows that
She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression
Shouldn’t ca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’—its inconvenience
Sigh with which ladies recognize one another’s martyrdom
So hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do
So old a world and groping still
Society:  All its favors are really bargains
Sorry he hadn’t asked more; that’s human nature
Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism
Superstition that having and shining is the chief good
Superstition of the romances that love is once for all
That isn’t very old—or not so old as it used to be
The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances
There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure
They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart
They can only do harm by an expression of sympathy
Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes
Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it
Tragical character of heat
Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
Tried to be homesick for them, but failed
Turn to their children’s opinion with deference
Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine
Used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge
Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness
Voice of the common imbecility and incoherence
Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold
Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
We get too much into the hands of other people
We don’t seem so much our own property
Weariness of buying
What we can be if we must
When you look it—live it
Wilful sufferers
Willingness to find poetry in things around them
Wish we didn’t always recognize the facts as we do
Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart
Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests
Work he was so fond of and so weary of
Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase

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