Their Silver Wedding Journey

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"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."

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