Their Silver Wedding Journey

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as
wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they
were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There
area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which
approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque
style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and
sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that
there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior came
together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had
felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was,
unimpeachably perfect in its way, "Just," March murmured to his wife, "as
the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century
was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is to find
the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder how much
the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo, too! Look
at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What magnificent
swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get
behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the
baroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though. But how you
long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth."

"I don't," she whispered back. "I'm perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I like
to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic
I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I am
consistent."

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the
way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of
Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for
Longfellow's. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is
outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows,
which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by a
broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the
Meistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as
Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to
themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded
beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the
four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her
husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded
amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. "You are
right! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can't enjoy Gothic here any
more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg."

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit
the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the
heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were
jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for
the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time
for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way
the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the
German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of
their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one
was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their
system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and
yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups
representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood
each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the
vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a
pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and
clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never
meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountain
near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould,
and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of
spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from
the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little
company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the square
without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people
in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts
and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the
Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city's past seemed to
culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

"Why didn't we have something like all this on our first wedding
journey?" she sighed at last. "To think of our battening from Boston to
Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester
and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!"

"Niagara wasn't so bad," he said, "and I will never go back on Quebec."

"Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and
Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a
compensation for our lost youth. But I can't enjoy it as I could when I
was young. It's wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and
Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them."

"They wouldn't care for it," he replied, and upon a daring impulse he
added, "Kenby and Mrs. Adding might." If she took this suggestion in good
part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

"Don't speak of them! They're in just that besotted early middle-age when
life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no
future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.
Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes." She
rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive
fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded
terrace in the background which had tempted her.

"It isn't so bad, being elderly," he said. "By that time we have
accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations. We
have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where we
are at."

"I don't mind being elderly. The world's just as amusing as ever, and
lots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It's the getting more than
elderly; it's the getting old; and then--"

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he
said, "Perhaps there's something else, something better--somewhere."

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure
in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued
fountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat little
urchin-groups on the stone coping. "I don't want cherubs, when I can have
these putti. And those old prince-bishops didn't, either!"

"I don't suppose they kept a New England conscience," he said, with a
vague smile. "It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo."

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court
ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and
shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in
gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of
despair which any perfection inspires. They said how feminine it was, how
exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had
purified and left eternally charming. They remembered their Ruskinian
youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it;
and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly
admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that
time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once
influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously
found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a
rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity. The vast superb palace of the
prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns,
imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb
amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively as
this exquisite work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in its
aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew
were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which it
seemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said. "Or
iron-mongery," he corrected himself upon reflection.

LIV.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests, but he remembered
him again when he called a carriage, and ordered it driven to their
hotel. It was the hour of the German mid-day table d'hote, and they would
be sure to meet him there. The question now was how March should own his
presence in time to prevent his wife from showing her ignorance of it to
Kenby himself, and he was still turning the question hopelessly over in
his mind when the sight of the hotel seemed to remind her of a fact which
she announced.

"Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I am not going to sit through a
long table d'hote. I want you to send me up a simple beefsteak and a cup
of tea to our rooms; and I don't want you to come near for hours; because
I intend to take a whole afternoon nap. You can keep all the maps and
plans, and guides, and you had better go and see what the Volksfest is
like; it will give you some notion of the part the people are really
taking in all this official celebration, and you know I don't care. Don't
come up after dinner to see how I am getting along; I shall get along;
and if you should happen to wake me after I had dropped off--"

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at the reading-room window,
waiting for the dinner hour, and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs.
March as they passed up the corridor. But she looked so tired that he had
decided to spare her till she came down to dinner; and as he sat with
March at their soup, he asked if she were not well.

March explained, and he provisionally invented some regrets from her that
she should not see Kenby till supper.

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wurzburg wines for their
mutual consolation in her absence, and in the friendliness which its
promoted they agreed to spend the afternoon together. No man is so
inveterate a husband as not to take kindly an occasional release to
bachelor companionship, and before the dinner was over they agreed that
they would go to the Volksfest, and get some notion of the popular life
and amusements of Wurzburg, which was one of the few places where Kenby
had never been before; and they agreed that they would walk.

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, past a barrack full of
soldiers. They met detachments of soldiers everywhere, infantry,
artillery, cavalry.

"This is going to be a great show," Kenby said, meaning the manoeuvres,
and he added, as if now he had kept away from the subject long enough and
had a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, "I should like to have
Rose see it, and get his impressions."

"I've an idea he wouldn't approve of it. His mother says his mind is
turning more and more to philanthropy."

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of Mrs. Adding. "It's one
of the prettiest things to see how she understands Rose. It's charming to
see them together. She wouldn't have half the attraction without him."

"Oh, yes," March assented. He had often wondered how a man wishing to
marry a widow managed with the idea of her children by another marriage;
but if Kenby was honest; it was much simpler than he had supposed. He
could not say this to him, however, and in a certain embarrassment he had
with the conjecture in his presence he attempted a diversion. "We're
promised something at the Volksfest which will be a great novelty to us
as Americans. Our driver told us this morning that one of the houses
there was built entirely of wood."

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest, this civil feature of the
great military event at hand, which the Marches had found largely set
forth in the programme of the parade, did not fully keep the glowing
promises made for it; in fact it could not easily have done so. It was in
a pleasant neighborhood of new villas such as form the modern quarter of
every German city, and the Volksfest was even more unfinished than its
environment. It was not yet enclosed by the fence which was to hide its
wonders from the non-paying public, but March and Kenby went in through
an archway where the gate-money was as effectually collected from them as
if they were barred every other entrance.

The wooden building was easily distinguishable from the other edifices
because these were tents and booths still less substantial. They did not
make out its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds,
four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, and the rest were devoted
to amusements of the usual country-fair type. Apparently they had little
attraction for country people. The Americans met few peasants in the
grounds, and neither at the Edison kinematograph, where they refreshed
their patriotism with some scenes of their native life, nor at the little
theatre where they saw the sports of the arena revived, in the wrestle of
a woman with a bear, did any of the people except tradesmen and artisans
seem to be taking part in the festival expression of the popular
pleasure.

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether by slight, or by main
strength, or by a previous understanding with him, was a slender
creature, pathetically small and not altogether plain; and March as they
walked away lapsed into a pensive muse upon her strange employ. He
wondered how she came to take it up, and whether she began with the bear
when they were both very young, and she could easily throw him.

"Well, women have a great deal more strength than we suppose," Kenby
began with a philosophical air that gave March the hope of some rational
conversation. Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a doting smile
came into his face. "When we went through the Dresden gallery together,
Rose and I were perfectly used up at the end of an hour, but his mother
kept on as long as there was anything to see, and came away as fresh as a
peach."

Then March saw that it was useless to expect anything different from him,
and he let him talk on about Mrs. Adding all the rest of the way back to
the hotel. Kenby seemed only to have begun when they reached the door,
and wanted to continue the subject in the reading-room.

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had got through the
afternoon, and he escaped to her. He would have told her now that Kenby
was in the house, but he was really so sick of the fact himself that he
could not speak of it at once, and he let her go on celebrating all she
had seen from the window since she had waked from her long nap. She said
she could never be glad enough that they had come just at that time.
Soldiers had been going by the whole afternoon, and that made it so
feudal.

"Yes," he assented. "But aren't you coming up to the station with me to
see the Prince-Regent arrive? He's due at seven, you know."

"I declare I had forgotten all about it. No, I'm not equal to it. You
must go; you can tell me everything; be sure to notice how the Princess
Maria looks; the last of the Stuarts, you know; and some people consider
her the rightful Queen of England; and I'll have the supper ordered, and
we can go down as soon as you've got back."

LV.

March felt rather shabby stealing away without Kenby; but he had really
had as much of Mrs. Adding as he could stand, for one day, and he was
even beginning to get sick of Rose. Besides, he had not sent back a line
for 'Every Other Week' yet, and he had made up his mind to write a sketch
of the manoeuvres. To this end he wished to receive an impression of the
Prince-Regent's arrival which should not be blurred or clouded by other
interests. His wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, and would
have helped him out with his observations, but Kenby would have got in
the way, and would have clogged the movement of his fancy in assigning
the facts to the parts he would like them to play in the sketch.

At least he made some such excuses to himself as he hurried along toward
the Kaiserstrasse. The draught of universal interest in that direction
had left the other streets almost deserted, but as he approached the
thoroughfare he found all the ways blocked, and the horse-cars,
ordinarily so furiously headlong, arrested by the multiple ranks of
spectators on the sidewalks. The avenue leading from the railway station
to the palace was decorated with flags and garlands, and planted with the
stems of young firs and birches. The doorways were crowded, and the
windows dense with eager faces peering out of the draped bunting. The
carriageway was kept clear by mild policemen who now and then allowed one
of the crowd to cross it.

The crowd was made up mostly of women and boys, and when March joined
them, they had already been waiting an hour for the sight of the princes
who were to bless them with a vision of the faery race which kings always
are to common men. He thought the people looked dull, and therefore able
to bear the strain of expectation with patience better than a livelier
race. They relieved it by no attempt at joking; here and there a dim
smile dawned on a weary face, but it seemed an effect of amiability
rather than humor. There was so little of this, or else it was so well
bridled by the solemnity of the occasion, that not a man, woman, or child
laughed when a bareheaded maid-servant broke through the lines and ran
down between them with a life-size plaster bust of the Emperor William in
her arms: she carried it like an overgrown infant, and in alarm at her
conspicuous part she cast frightened looks from side to side without
arousing any sort of notice. Undeterred by her failure, a young dog,
parted from his owner, and seeking him in the crowd, pursued his search
in a wild flight down the guarded roadway with an air of anxiety that in
America would have won him thunders of applause, and all sorts of kindly
encouragements to greater speed. But this German crowd witnessed his
progress apparently without interest, and without a sign of pleasure.
They were there to see the Prince-Regent arrive, and they did not suffer
themselves to be distracted by any preliminary excitement. Suddenly the
indefinable emotion which expresses the fulfilment of expectation in a
waiting crowd passed through the multitude, and before he realized it
March was looking into the friendly gray-bearded face of the
Prince-Regent, for the moment that his carriage allowed in passing. This
came first preceded by four outriders, and followed by other simple
equipages of Bavarian blue, full of highnesses of all grades. Beside the
Regent sat his daughter-in-law, the Princess Maria, her silvered hair
framing a face as plain and good as the Regent's, if not so intelligent.

He, in virtue of having been born in Wurzburg, is officially supposed to
be specially beloved by his fellow townsmen; and they now testified their
affection as he whirled through their ranks, bowing right and left, by
what passes in Germany for a cheer. It is the word Hoch, groaned forth
from abdominal depths, and dismally prolonged in a hollow roar like that
which the mob makes behind the scenes at the theatre before bursting in
visible tumult on the stage. Then the crowd dispersed, and March came
away wondering why such a kindly-looking Prince-Regent should not have
given them a little longer sight of himself; after they had waited so
patiently for hours to see him. But doubtless in those countries, he
concluded, the art of keeping the sovereign precious by suffering him to
be rarely and briefly seen is wisely studied.

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby's presence; and he did so as
soon as he sat down to supper with his wife. "I ought to have told you
the first thing after breakfast. But when I found you in that mood of
having the place all to ourselves, I put it off."

"You took terrible chances, my dear," she said, gravely.

"And I have been terribly punished. You've no idea how much Kenby has
talked to me about Mrs. Adding!"

She broke out laughing. "Well, perhaps you've suffered enough. But you
can see now, can't you, that it would have been awful if I had met him,
and let out that I didn't know he was here?"

"Terrible. But if I had told, it would have spoiled the whole morning for
you; you couldn't have thought of anything else."

"Oh, I don't know," she said, airily. "What should you think if I told
you I had known he was here ever since last night?" She went on in
delight at the start he gave. "I saw him come into the hotel while you
were gone for the guide-books, and I determined to keep it from you as
long as I could; I knew it would worry you. We've both been very nice;
and I forgive you," she hurried on, "because I've really got something to
tell you."

"Don't tell me that Burnamy is here!"

"Don't jump to conclusions! No, Burnamy isn't here, poor fellow! And
don't suppose that I'm guilty of concealment because I haven't told you
before. I was just thinking whether I wouldn't spare you till morning,
but now I shall let you take the brunt of it. Mrs. Adding and Rose are
here." She gave the fact time to sink in, and then she added, "And Miss
Triscoe and her father are here."

"What is the matter with Major Eltwin and his wife being here, too? Are
they in our hotel?"

"No, they are not. They came to look for rooms while you were off waiting
for the Prince-Regent, and I saw them. They intended to go to Frankfort
for the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was not even standing-room
there, and so the general telegraphed to the Spanischer Hof, and they all
came here. As it is, he will have to room with Rose, and Agatha and Mrs.
Adding will room together. I didn't think Agatha was looking very well;
she looked unhappy; I don't believe she's heard, from Burnamy yet; I
hadn't a chance to ask her. And there's something else that I'm afraid
will fairly make you sick."

"Oh, no; go on. I don't think anything can do that, after an afternoon of
Kenby's confidences."

"It's worse than Kenby," she said with a sigh. "You know I told you at
Carlsbad I thought that ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs.
Adding."

"Kenby? Why of co--"

"Don't be stupid, my dear! No, not Kenby: General Triscoe. I wish you
could have been here to see him paying her all sort; of silly attentions,
and hear him making her compliments."

"Thank you. I think I'm just as well without it. Did she pay him silly
attentions and compliments, too?"

"That's the only thing that can make me forgive her for his wanting her.
She was keeping him at arm's-length the whole time, and she was doing it
so as not to make him contemptible before his daughter."

"It must have been hard. And Rose?"

"Rose didn't seem very well. He looks thin and pale; but he's sweeter
than ever. She's certainly commoner clay than Rose. No, I won't say that!
It's really nothing but General Triscoe's being an old goose about her
that makes her seem so, and it isn't fair."

March went down to his coffee in the morning with the delicate duty of
telling Kenby that Mrs. Adding was in town. Kenby seemed to think it
quite natural she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at all
strange that she should come to them with General Triscoe and his
daughter. He asked if March would not go with him to call upon her after
breakfast, and as this was in the line of his own instructions from Mrs.
March, he went.

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that was
not merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general's behavior
toward her. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in a
guise of sisterly affection for each other. At the most the general
showed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under any
conditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other awake
a good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call out. He
joked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on a comradery
with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by contrast with
the pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting. There was a certain
question in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby to
account for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security so
tacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife had
said; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reported
this, she lost her patience with him. In a girl, she said, plainness was
unhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look an
inch below the surface: She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heard
from Burnamy since the Emperor's birthday; that she was at swords'-points
with her father, and so desperate that she did not care what became of
her.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34