Their Silver Wedding Journey

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"No, thank you," said the elder, "I don't propose sitting up all night,
and you'll excuse me if I go to bed now. It's a little informal to leave
a guest--"

"You're not leaving a guest! I'm at home here. I'm staying in this hotel
too."

March said, "Oh!" and then he added abruptly, "Good-night," and went up
stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

"Whom were you talking with below?" asked Mrs. March through the door
opening into his room from hers.

"Burnamy," he answered from within. "He's staying in this house. He let
me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It's one of
those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in
great things."

"Oh! Then you've been telling him," she said, with a mental bound high
above and far beyond the point.

"Everything."

"About Stoller, too?"

"About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and
General Triscoe--and Agatha."

"Very well. That's what I call shabby. Don't ever talk to me again about
the inconsistencies of women. But now there's something perfectly
fearful."

"What is it?"

"A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find
rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn't well, and
they're coming. And I've telegraphed them to come here. Now what do you
say?"

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resign
herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider it
providential. This touched the lingering superstition in which she had
been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very
tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government of
the universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered that
they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that they
could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferior
degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in the
evening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to act
when she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly account for the
renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generally
worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered
smile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence. While they
talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with Miss
Triscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait over for
her and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, as
they had made all their plans. It was not easy, even in drama where one
has everything one's own way, to prove that she could not without impiety
so far interfere with the course of Providence as to prevent Miss
Triscoe's coming with her father to the same hotel where Burnamy was
staying. She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known he
was staying there when she telegraphed them where to come, and that in
the absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obliged
to suppose that his presence would be embarrassing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the town
and interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and as
soon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogether
from the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy.
They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with the
Triscoes in Wurzburg, and she said: "Did Mr. March tell you they were
coming here? Or, no! We hadn't heard then. Yes, they are coming
to-morrow. They may be going to stay some time. She talked of Weimar when
we first spoke of Germany on the ship." Burnamy said nothing, and she
suddenly added, with a sharp glance, "They wanted us to get them rooms,
and we advised their coming to this house." He started very
satisfactorily, and "Do you think they would be comfortable, here?" she
pursued.

"Oh, yes, very. They can have my room; it's southeast; I shall be going
into other quarters." She did not say anything; and "Mrs. March," he
began again, "what is the use of my beating about the bush? You must know
what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night--"

"No one ever told--"

"Well, you must have made a pretty good guess. But it was a failure. I
ought to have failed, and I did. She said that unless her father liked
it--And apparently he hasn't liked it." Burnamy smiled ruefully.

"How do you know? She didn't know where you were!"

"She could have got word to me if she had had good news for me. They've
forwarded other letters from Pupp's. But it's all right; I had no
business to go back to Carlsbad. Of course you didn't know I was in this
house when you told them to come; and I must clear out. I had better
clear out of Weimar, too."

"No, I don't think so; I have no right to pry into your affairs, but--"

"Oh, they're wide enough open!"

"And you may have changed your mind. I thought you might, when I saw you
yesterday at Belvedere--"

"I was only trying to make bad worse."

"Then I think the situation has changed entirely through what Mr. Stoller
said to Mr. March."

"I can't see how it has. I committed an act of shabby treachery, and I'm
as much to blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it."

"Did Mr. March say that to you?"

"No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn't answer it, and you can't.
You're very good, and very kind, but you can't answer it."

"I can answer it very well," she boasted, but she could find nothing
better to say than, "It's your duty to her to see her and let her know."

"Doesn't she know already?"

"She has a right to know it from you. I think you are morbid, Mr.
Burnamy. You know very well I didn't like your doing that to Mr. Stoller.
I didn't say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it enough
yourself. But I did like your owning up to it," and here Mrs. March
thought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again. "My husband
always says that if a person owns up to an error, fully and faithfully,
as you've always done, they make it the same in its consequences to them
as if it had never been done."

"Does Mr. March say that?" asked Burnamy with a relenting smile.

"Indeed he does!"

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

"And what about the consequences to the other fellow?"

"A woman," said Mrs. March, "has no concern with them. And besides, I
think you've done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the
consequences."

"I haven't done anything."

"No matter. You would if you could. I wonder," she broke off, to prevent
his persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way,
"what can be keeping Mr. March?"

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure of
sauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, and
looking at the pretty children going to school, with books under their
arms. It was the day for the schools to open after the long summer
vacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faces
which, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at least
touch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not the
Schiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one flight
up, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet. The
whole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room fronting
the street stands Schiller's writing-table, with his chair before it;
with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another corner, the
narrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the pillow frame a
picture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like his dead face
lying there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather touching, and the
place with its meagre appointments, as compared with the rich Goethe
house, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in which Schiller
is always falling into the second place. Whether it will be finally so
with him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and upon other
points eternity will not be interrogated. "The great, Goethe and the good
Schiller," they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was something good
in Goethe and something great, in Schiller.

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality before the world that he
did not heed the warning on the door of the pastry-shop near the Schiller
house, and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh paint on it.
He was then in such a state, that he could not bring his mind to bear
upon the question of which cakes his wife would probably prefer, and he
stood helplessly holding up his hand till the good woman behind the
counter discovered his plight, and uttered a loud cry of compassion. She
ran and got a wet napkin, which she rubbed with soap, and then she
instructed him by word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, and she did
not leave him till his rescue was complete. He let her choose a variety
of the cakes for him, and came away with a gay paper bag full of them,
and with the feeling that he had been in more intimate relations with the
life of Weimar than travellers are often privileged to be. He argued from
the instant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry woman a high grade of
culture in all classes; and he conceived the notion of pretending to Mrs.
March that he had got these cakes from, a descendant of Schiller.

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment in which she always,
after so many years' experience of his duplicity, believed anything he
told her. They dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Burnamy
came down to the station with them and was very comfortable to March in
helping him to get their tickets and their baggage registered. The train
which was to take them to Halle, where they were to change for Berlin,
was rather late, and they had but ten minutes after it came in before it
would start again. Mrs. March was watching impatiently at the window of
the waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear the platform and
allow the doors to be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned and ran
into the passage by which the new arrivals were pouring out toward the
superabundant omnibuses. March and Burnamy, who had been talking apart,
mechanically rushed after her and found her kissing Miss Triscoe and
shaking hands with the general amidst a tempest of questions and answers,
from which it appeared that the Triscoes had got tired of staying in
Wurzburg, and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner than they had
intended.

The general was rather much bundled up for a day which was mild for a
German summer day, and he coughed out an explanation that he had taken an
abominable cold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shaken it off yet.
He had a notion that change of air would be better for him; it could not
be worse.

He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather than inimical. While the
ladies were still talking eagerly together in proffer and acceptance of
Mrs. March's lamentations that she should be going away just as Miss
Triscoe was coming, he asked if the omnibus for their hotel was there. He
by no means resented Burnamy's assurance that it was, and he did not
refuse to let him order their baggage, little and large, loaded upon it.
By the time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had so far
detached themselves from each other that they could separate after one
more formal expression of regret and forgiveness. With a lament into
which she poured a world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenched
herself from the place, and suffered herself, to be pushed toward her
train. But with the last long look which she cast over her shoulder,
before she vanished into the waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe and
Burnamy transacting the elaborate politenesses of amiable strangers with
regard to the very small bag which the girl had in her hand. He succeeded
in relieving her of it; and then he led the way out of the station on the
left of the general, while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear.

LXIII.

From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. March tried for a
glimpse of the omnibus in which her proteges were now rolling away
together. As they were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which was
itself out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her seat
she treated the recent incident with a complexity and simultaneity of
which no report can give an idea. At the end one fatal conviction
remained: that in everything she had said she had failed to explain to
Miss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimar and how he happened to
be there with them in the station. She required March to say how she had
overlooked the very things which she ought to have mentioned first, and
which she had on the point of her tongue the whole time. She went over
the entire ground again to see if she could discover the reason why she
had made such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that she was led to
it by his rushing after her with Burnamy before she had had a chance to
say a word about him; of course she could not say anything in his
presence. This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation in the
fact that she had left them together without the least intention or
connivance, and now, no matter what happened, she could not accuse
herself, and he could not accuse her of match-making.

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great that he should not dream
of accusing her of anything except of regret that now she could never
claim the credit of bringing the lovers together under circumstances so
favorable. As soon as they were engaged they could join in renouncing her
with a good conscience, and they would probably make this the basis of
their efforts to propitiate the general.

She said she did not care, and with the mere removal of the lovers in
space, her interest in them began to abate. They began to be of a minor
importance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle, and in the
excitement of settling into the express from Frankfort there were moments
when they were altogether forgotten. The car was of almost American
length, and it ran with almost American smoothness; when the conductor
came and collected an extra fare for their seats, the Marches felt that
if the charge had been two dollars instead of two marks they would have
had every advantage of American travel.

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and now
sterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost to
its gates. The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs,
and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which put
our outdated depots to shame. The good 'traeger' who took possession of
them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky,
and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation. This
was a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so,
either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver and
his horses. The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest in the
world; at Berlin the horses look like old hair trunks and the drivers
like their moth-eaten contents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and their
approach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as the
ignoble avenue itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean,
tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees,
to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines of
shops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosity
of New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

"Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,
Under the Lindens?"

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be imagined
with its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the architecture of
Sixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that would be
the famous Unter den Linden, where she had so resolutely decided that
they would stay while in Berlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other because
it proved second-rate in everything but its charges. They ate a poorish
table d'hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart to get a
rise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which fed upon the
crumbs about their feet while they dined. Their English-speaking waiter
said that it was a very warm evening, and they never knew whether this
was because he was a humorist, or because he was lonely and wished to
talk, or because it really was a warm evening, for Berlin. When they had
finished, they went out and drove about the greater part of the evening
looking for another hotel, whose first requisite should be that it was
not on Unter den Linden. What mainly determined Mrs. March in favor of
the large, handsome, impersonal place they fixed upon was the fact that
it was equipped for steam-heating; what determined March was the fact
that it had a passenger-office where when he wished to leave, he could
buy his railroad tickets and have his baggage checked without the
maddening anxiety, of doing it at the station. But it was precisely in
these points that the hotel which admirably fulfilled its other functions
fell short. The weather made a succession of efforts throughout their
stay to clear up cold; it merely grew colder without clearing up, but
this seemed to offer no suggestion of steam for heating their bleak
apartment and the chilly corridors to the management. With the help of a
large lamp which they kept burning night and day they got the temperature
of their rooms up to sixty; there was neither stove nor fireplace, the
cold electric bulbs diffused a frosty glare; and in the vast, stately
dining-room with its vaulted roof, there was nothing to warm them but
their plates, and the handles of their knives and forks, which, by a
mysterious inspiration, were always hot. When they were ready to go,
March experienced from the apathy of the baggage clerk and the reluctance
of the porters a more piercing distress than any he had known at the
railroad stations; and one luckless valise which he ordered sent after
him by express reached his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with an
accumulation of charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits,
and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English
railroad hotels. They looked from their windows down into a gardened
square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of Berlin
and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind the cold
any more than the stone kings and generals. The aspect of this square,
like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of the
imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris. Even the
rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French
taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin. The suggestion of
Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic
which the city wears in its native air. The crowd lacks this as much as
the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the men
except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no style
such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets. The
Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the
little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is
ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there
is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in
New York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty
passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many
streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick
archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side
you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made to
serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebration
of the German triumph over France. Berlin has never the presence of a
great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence.
There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking
population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages. The
prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy
heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture. There
are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe
streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual
Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the
world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.
They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they
poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in
niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street
corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which
fails of any impression. If they were only furiously baroque they would
be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is a
self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic, more
noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass. This offensive
art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic spirit, and
bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in literature bears
to romance. It finds its apotheosis in the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I.,
a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering bronze, commemorating
the victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the war with the last French
Emperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the victors by its ugliness.
The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men and animals backs away from
the imperial palace, and saves itself too soon from plunging over the
border of a canal behind it, not far from Rauch's great statue of the
great Frederic. To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noble
work is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic
acting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned
and bewildered by its wild explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to the
imperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the obligation
to visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them. They entered the court
without opposition from the sentinel, and joined other strangers
straggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner of the
building, where after they had increased to some thirty, a custodian took
charge of them, and led them up a series of inclined plains of brick to
the state apartments. In the antechamber they found a provision of
immense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put on for their
passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy slippers were
designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and upon the mixed
company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree humiliating. The
women's skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the men were openly put
to shame, and they shuffled forward with their bodies at a convenient
incline like a company of snow-shoers. In the depths of his own abasement
March heard a female voice behind him sighing in American accents, "To
think I should be polishing up these imperial floors with my republican
feet!"

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his own
heart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in the
historical order of the family portraits recording the rise of the
Prussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors. He began to realize here
the fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is not
the effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity. There is
nothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodies
and proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of French
art it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pride
in the German triumph over the French in war. March found it tiresome
beyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense of
it with his felt shoes. "Well," he confided to his wife when they were
fairly out-of-doors, "if Prussia rose in the strength of silence, as
Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and tall
talk."

"Yes, isn't she!" Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire for
excess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerly
about her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which ought
to have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly because
the troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly more
in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington. Again the
German officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when she met
them on the side-walks. There were scarcely any of them, and perhaps that
might have been the reason why they were not more aggressive; but a whole
company of soldiers marching carelessly up to the palace from the
Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as our own militia
often puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as they looked
at her. She declared that personally there was nothing against the
Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and modest-looking men;
it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, that they,
began to bully and to brag.

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