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James M. Barrie - "What Every Woman Knows"

Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts - "Fifteen Years With The Outcast"

Gilbert Parker - "Pierre And His People, [Tales of the Far North], Volume 3."

George Meredith - "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, v5"

Their Silver Wedding Journey

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




Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things without his wife,
and partly because he was now very hungry, March turned from them and got
back to his hotel, where she was looking out for him from their open
window. She had the air of being long domesticated there, as she laughed
down at seeing him come; and the continued brilliancy of the weather
added to the illusion of home.

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America; the sun in that
gardened hollow before the museum was already hot enough to make him glad
of the shelter of the hotel. The summer seemed to have come back to
oblige them, and when they learned that they were to see Weimar in a
festive mood because this was Sedan Day, their curiosity, if not their
sympathy, accepted the chance gratefully. But they were almost moved to
wish that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that all the
public carriages were engaged, and they must have one from a stable if
they wished to drive after breakfast. Still it was offered them for such
a modest number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly and
conversable, that they assented to the course of history, and were more
and more reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducal park
beside the waters of the classic Ilm.

The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and in
places clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color. They
flow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows,
where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport
joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is
in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the
earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure
if not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noble
finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not
for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from
it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set
apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old
World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick
ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude
of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the
leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainly
created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty had
graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the
companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying first
to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it second to
the cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever the prince
in Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the city;
the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest hospitality. The
travellers remembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducal park,
that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young,
when he too was beautiful and young, and took her home to be his love, to
the just and lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who was even less
reconciled when, after eighteen years of due reflection, the love of
Goethe and Christiane became their marriage. They, wondered just where it
was he saw the young girl coming to meet him as the Grand-Duke's minister
with an office-seeking petition from her brother, Goethe's brother
author, long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of "Rinaldo
Rinaldini."

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for that
rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as their
sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau von
Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottage to suppose
that there his love-life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resented
the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all, she
removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost
indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers
of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going to
marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is
almost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances
the Grand-Duke's godfatherhood, or Goethe's open constancy to Christiane,
or the tardy consecration of their union after the French sack of,
Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him from the rudeness of the
marauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were no degrees in
such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as people have
tried to think, in their deference to Goethe's greatness. But certainly
the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of world-wide
renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for he could not
have been proof against the censorious public opinion of Weimar, or the
yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead
embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. The
trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it, and
about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the sweet
lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered a
parting nosegay for her visitors. The few small livingrooms were above
the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion;
in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with
him on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the front
stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which he
might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the proud
little palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and memorials of
him. His library, his study, his study table, with everything on it just
as he left it when

"Cadde la stanca mana"

are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which he
gasped for "more light" at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms are
full of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which he
did so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waning
leaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly,
faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more and
more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings,
gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness, the
universal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but not in his
contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less keenly personal, less
intimate than the simple garden-house, or else, with the great troop of
people going through it, and the custodians lecturing in various voices
and languages to the attendant groups, the Marches had it less to
themselves, and so imagined him less in it.




LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common to
them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors in
them one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palaces
themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of the
average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to
have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are
ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little
delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at
Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was
Goethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least
in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother
had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of
Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringing
Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story of that
great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as a
palace can.

There are certain Poets' Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe,
Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke
used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it
where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and
sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes
they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian
things. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very
nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever
was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and
then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country;
they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of
the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At best
it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority, the
make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful and
ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue each
other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show of
equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a free
republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he was
one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the
impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no sign,
and the poet's friendship with the prince has passed smoothly into
history as one of the things that might really be. They worked and played
together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, each on his
own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not being there which
probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity.

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery
beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table
where they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by the
consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was
charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted
before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the
custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the
German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were
children. The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered
wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which
are still mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking
Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where
the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe,
although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. It
seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole
connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew
whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but they
enabled her to verify with the custodian's help certain royal
intermarriages which she had been in doubt about before.

Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a
portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over,
scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the
open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays.

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines
and clipped trees which formed the coulisses. There was a grassy space
for the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicircular
gradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honored
spectators sat. Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts of
Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and if
ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, it
must have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the drama
is native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air of
modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact. It would be difficult to
be Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining, but
March held that with Goethe's help it might have been done at Weimar, and
his wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theater
that the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put together a sheaf of
the flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs. March for a
souvenir.

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from another
eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below. In
a moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spirits
sank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had not
asked for coffee. Most of the people about them were taking beer,
including the pretty girls of a young ladies' school, who were there with
their books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers,
apparently for the afternoon.

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their books
or their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she followed
the glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a table
somewhat obliquely to the left. These were apparently a mother and
daughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back to
Mrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them. They were both
smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself from
the waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if to make
sure that every one saw her smiling.

Mrs. March felt her husband's gaze following her own, and she had just
time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of
astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, "Good gracious!
It's the pivotal girl!"

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man,
who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out of
the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs.
March could almost have touched him.

She had just strength to say, "Well, my dear! That was the cut direct."

She said this in order to have her husband reassure her. "Nonsense! He
never saw us. Why didn't you speak to him?"

"Speak to him? I never shall speak to him again. No! This is the last of
Mr. Burnamy for me. I shouldn't have minded his not recognizing us, for,
as you say, I don't believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a
girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that's all I wish
to know of him. Don't you try to look him up, Basil! I'm glad-yes, I'm
glad he doesn't know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves
to suffer, and I hope he'll keep on suffering: You were quite right, my
dear--and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don't call
it more than instinct)--not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don't
want you ever should."

She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that
she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him
impatiently to their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, "I don't think I can quite promise that;
my mind's been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall tell
him."

"What! After you've seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then,
you won't, my dear; that's all! He's behaving very basely to Agatha."

"What's his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my
duty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to his
behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as you
know, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused him
outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible
conditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don't
blame him."

"Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!" cried Mrs. March.

"Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy,
or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning
and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say
it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with
the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with
one pretty girl from another. It's what men have been doing from the
beginning of time."

"Oh, I dare say!"

"Men," he went on, "are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.
They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any
girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made
them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely
amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I
think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had
him first; and I'm all for her."




LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the
train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and
strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself.
While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by
which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for
mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and
ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain
which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her
folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless of
her rights came with it. He had done his best to make her think him in
love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be such
an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise to write to him
from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished still
less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that she had not
promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to such
fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with
Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentment
with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl
unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the
holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with
all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary
excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a
paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the
night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing over
the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the multitude
of Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at the
ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of the
floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charming
even to Burnamy's lack-lustre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafe
with a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he supped
there, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged and
brayed round him unheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, "May I
sit at your table?" and he saw an ironical face looking down on him.
"There doesn't seem any other place."

"Why, Mr. March!" Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him,
but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this
faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last,
just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced
round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament
of lanterns. "This is pretty," he said, "mighty pretty. I shall make Mrs.
March sorry for not coming, when I go back."

"Is Mrs. March--she is--with you--in Weimar?" Burnamy asked stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him. "Oh, yes. We saw you out at
Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant
not to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little
flights."

"I never dreamed of your being there--I never saw--" Burnamy began.

"Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was looking
very pretty. Have you been here some time?"

"Not long. A week or so. I've been at the parade at Wurzburg."

"At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is! We
were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was a
great crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?" A waiter
had come up, and was standing at March's elbow. "I suppose I mustn't sit
here without ordering something?"

"White wine and selters," said Burnamy vaguely.

"The very thing! Why didn't I think of it? It's a divine drink: it
satisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home,
in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen 'Every Other Week'
lately?"

"No," said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.

"We've just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in it
that I rather like." March laughed to see the young fellow's face light
up with joyful consciousness. "Come round to my hotel, after you're tired
here, and I'll let you see it. There's no hurry. Did you notice the
little children with their lanterns, as you came along? It's the gentlest
effect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French themselves couldn't
have minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day of
their disaster. You ought to get something out of that, and I've got a
subject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He and his mother were at
Wurzburg; I'm sorry to say the poor little chap didn't seem very well.
They've gone to Holland for the sea air." March had been talking for
quantity in compassion of the embarrassment in which Burnamy seemed
bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the young
fellow merely because he liked him. So far as he could make out, Burnamy
had been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they
had met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logically
defended to Mrs. March that he resumed. "We found another friend of yours
in Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller."

"Mr. Stoller?" Burnamy faintly echoed.

"Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres;
and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the parade with his
family but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death of General
Triscoe."

Again Burnamy echoed him. "General Triscoe?"

"Ah, yes: I didn't tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had come on
with Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby--you remember Kenby, On the
Norumbia?--Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party;
and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him and
his girls."

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He did
not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having
told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on
recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals,
that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. "I have a message for
you from Mr. Stoller."

"For me?" Burnamy gasped.

"I've been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn't expected to see
you. But it's simply this: he wants you to know--and he seemed to want me
to know--that he doesn't hold you accountable in the way he did. He's
thought it all over, and he's decided that he had no right to expect you
to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of
knowledge. As he said, he doesn't choose to plead the baby act. He says
that you're all right, and your place on the paper is open to you."

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for
instant response. "I think he's wrong," he said, so harshly that the
people at the next table looked round. "His feeling as he does has
nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn't let me out."

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, "I think
you're quite right, as to that. But there's such a thing as forgiveness,
you know. It doesn't change the nature of what you've done; but as far as
the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it."

"Yes, I understand that. But I can't accept his forgiveness if I hate
him."

"But perhaps you won't always hate him. Some day you may have a chance to
do him a good turn. It's rather banale; but there doesn't seem any other
way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to get
that poem?"

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put
it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some
coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had
stood talking.

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