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William Wood - "The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf"

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Their Silver Wedding Journey

W >> William Dean Howells >> Their Silver Wedding Journey




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?"

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