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Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1."

Joanna H. Mathews - "Bessie Bradford's Prize"

Georg Ebers - "Arachne, Volume 7."

Captain Ralph Bonehill - "Guns And Snowshoes"

Their Silver Wedding Journey

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




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:

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