Their Silver Wedding Journey

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"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.

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