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Unknown - "The Bible, Douay Rheims, Book 38: Micheas"

Anthony Trollope - "George Walker At Suez"

Archbishop Wake - "Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Volume 2, The Protevanglion"

Georg Ebers - "An Egyptian Princess, Volume 10."

Their Silver Wedding Journey

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







LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Linden
almost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into with
them. It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to fact
and form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an English
dinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiter who
served it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligent
appreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectful
opinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held. After the manner
of strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting from
such of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and it
would really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with the
world at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and car
conductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers and
ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen; for by
these rather than by its society women and its statesmen and divines, is
it really judged in the books of travellers; some attention also should
be paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised. In the railroad
cafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches that if they
had not been people of great strength of character he would have undone
the favorable impression the soldiers and civilians of Berlin generally
had been at such pains to produce in them; and throughout the week of
early September which they passed there, it rained so much and so
bitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they might have come away
thinking it's the worst climate in the world, if it had not been for a
man whom they saw in one of the public gardens pouring a heavy stream
from his garden hose upon the shrubbery already soaked and shuddering in
the cold. But this convinced them that they were suffering from weather
and not from the climate, which must really be hot and dry; and they went
home to their hotel and sat contentedly down in a temperature of sixty
degrees. The weather, was not always so bad; one day it was dry cold
instead of wet cold, with rough, rusty clouds breaking a blue sky;
another day, up to eleven in the forenoon, it was like Indian summer;
then it changed to a harsh November air; and then it relented and ended
so mildly, that they hired chairs in the place before the imperial palace
for five pfennigs each, and sat watching the life before them. Motherly
women-folk were there knitting; two American girls in chairs near them
chatted together; some fine equipages, the only ones they saw in Berlin,
went by; a dog and a man (the wife who ought to have been in harness was
probably sick, and the poor fellow was forced to take her place) passed
dragging a cart; some schoolboys who had hung their satchels upon the low
railing were playing about the base of the statue of King William III. in
the joyous freedom of German childhood.

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine, but to the
Americans, who were Southern by virtue of their sky, the brightness had a
sense of lurking winter in it, such as they remembered feeling on a sunny
day in Quebec. The blue heaven looked sad; but they agreed that it fitly
roofed the bit of old feudal Berlin which forms the most ancient wing of
the Schloss. This was time-blackened and rude, but at least it did not
try to be French, and it overhung the Spree which winds through the city
and gives it the greatest charm it has. In fact Berlin, which is
otherwise so grandiose without grandeur and so severe without
impressiveness, is sympathetic wherever the Spree opens it to the sky.
The stream is spanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well be
unpicturesque, especially if they have statues to help them out. The
Spree abounds in bridges, and it has a charming habit of slow hay-laden
barges; at the landings of the little passenger-steamers which ply upon
it there are cafes and summer-gardens, and these even in the inclement
air of September suggested a friendly gayety.

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevated road in Berlin which
they made in an impassioned memory of the elevated road in New York. The
brick viaducts which carry this arch the Spree again and again in their
course through and around the city, but with never quite such spectacular
effects as our spidery tressels, achieve. The stations are pleasant,
sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, but have not the
comic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours, and are not so frequent. The road
is not so smooth, the cars not so smooth-running or so swift. On the
other hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are never
overcrowded. The line is at times above, at times below the houses, and
at times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs. The train
whirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old houses,
into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up without
order or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and along
the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided the
vacant lots. Everywhere the city was growing out over the country, in
blocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellow
brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburban
dwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went two
successive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has some
admirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but
on both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them.
The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him and
asked, "Wie gestern?" and from this he argued an affectionate constancy
in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of strangers.
At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized his signature
and remarked that it did not look like the signature in his letter of
credit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the moneyed classes of
Prussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind doubt by Hebrew
bankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews were politer than
the Christians in Germany. In starting for Potsdam he asked a traeger
where the Potsdam train was and the man said, "Dat train dare," and in
coming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and she thanked him
in English. From these incidents, both occurring the same day in the same
place, the inference of a widespread knowledge of our language in all
classes of the population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization in
the capital. He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainy
afternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of the
Thiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifference
to the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather. One evening at a
summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the 'Puppenfee' and the
operetta of 'Hansel and Gretel', he observed that the greater part of the
audience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and he
noted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number of
Americans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where they
mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of them
in the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came out,
confidently addressed him in English. But he took stock of his
impressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all, that
he could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of the
environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in the
Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they had
a great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds of
horsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near to
the popular life. They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society by
driving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautiful
houses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green park
from the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated and
delightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing but
their unsupported conjecture.




LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin. They
chose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandy
plains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills surrounding
Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick's sake,
and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waited
with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade before
they were led through Voltaire's room and Frederick's death chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Souci
even in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of the
great Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes of
their owners. The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as the
Germans conceived it. The gardened terrace from which the low, one-story
building, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into a
many-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally French
the colonnaded front opening to a perspective of artificial ruins, with
broken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against the
sky. Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and the
furnishing. At that time there, was in fact no other taste, and
Frederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved upon
French taste even in his intimate companionship. The droll story of his
coquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be his
guest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the very
air in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which they
parted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one side,
and with merciless mockery on the other. Voltaire was long ago revenged
upon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in their
comedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick's fame the trace of those
lacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is the
singular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one feels
there the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important to
mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of the
lovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wander
among the statues and the roses heavy with the shower. Then they walked
back to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses in
differing architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal of
beauty. It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococco
statues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials of
royalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh and
spirit of their visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and
before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they
dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick
built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved in
the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came to
his kingdom. It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on its
terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroque
allegories of all sorts: Everywhere the statues outnumbered the visitors,
who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally did not
mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in a
mildewed restaurant, where a compatriotic accent caught their ear in a
voice saying to the waiter, "We are in a hurry." They looked round and
saw that it proceeded from the pretty nose of a young American girl, who
sat with a party of young American girls at a neighboring table. Then
they perceived that all the people in that restaurant were Americans,
mostly young girls, who all looked as if they were in a hurry. But
neither their beauty nor their impatience had the least effect with the
waiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, and alarmed the Marches
with the misgiving that they should not have time for the final palace on
their list.

This was the palace where the father of Frederick, the mad old Frederick
William, brought up his children with that severity which Solomon urged
but probably did not practise. It is a vast place, but they had time for
it all, though the custodian made the most of them as the latest comers
of the day, and led them through it with a prolixity as great as their
waiter's. He was a most friendly custodian, and when he found that they
had some little notion of what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with his
patronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests. They saw
everything but the doorway where the faithful royal father used to lie in
wait for his children and beat them, princes and princesses alike, with
his knobby cane as they came through. They might have seen this doorway
without knowing it; but from the window overlooking the parade-ground
where his family watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic grenadiers, they
made sure of just such puddles as Frederick William forced his family to
sit with their feet in, while they dined alfresco on pork and cabbage;
and they visited the room of the Smoking Parliament where he ruled his
convives with a rod of iron, and made them the victims of his bad jokes.
The measuring-board against which he took the stature of his tall
grenadiers is there, and one room is devoted to those masterpieces which
he used to paint in the agonies of gout. His chef d'oeuvre contains a
figure with two left feet, and there seemed no reason why it might not.
have had three. In another room is a small statue of Carlyle, who did so
much to rehabilitate the house which the daughter of it, Wilhelmina, did
so much to demolish in the regard of men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there is a chamber where
Napoleon slept, which is not likely to be occupied soon by any other
self-invited guest of his nation. It is perhaps to keep the princes of
Europe humble that hardly a palace on the Continent is without the
chamber of this adventurer, who, till he stooped to be like them, was
easily their master. Another democracy had here recorded its invasion in
the American stoves which the custodian pointed out in the corridor when
Mrs. March, with as little delay as possible, had proclaimed their
country. The custodian professed an added respect for them from the fact,
and if he did not feel it, no doubt he merited the drink money which they
lavished on him at parting.

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when he let them out of his
carriage at the station, he excused the rainy day to them. He was a merry
fellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughed at the bad weather,
as if it had been a good joke on them.

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shone on the stems of the
pines on the way back to Berlin, contributed to the content in which they
reviewed their visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the place was perfectly
charming, and that it was incomparably expressive of kingly will and
pride. These had done there on the grand scale what all the German
princes and princelings had tried to do in imitation and emulation of
French splendor. In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a historical growth as
at Versailles, but was the effect of family genius, in which there was
often the curious fascination of insanity.

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of the
Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies,
personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are
gathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty line who
stand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate.
father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure,
terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears something of the
madness which showed in the life of the sire.

They went through many rooms in which the memorials of the kings and
queens, the emperors and empresses were carefully ordered, and felt no
kindness except before the relics relating to the Emperor Frederick and
his mother. In the presence of the greatest of the dynasty they
experienced a kind of terror which March expressed, when they were safely
away, in the confession of his joy that those people were dead.




LXVI.

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. March
had such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the orders
of an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went to
bed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and his
convalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not always
keep his temper. In the absence of actual offence, either from his
daughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form; it
centred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward Rose
Adding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in the
same measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part, directly
or indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold.

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he was
constantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that he
did not over-value Burnamy's sacrifice and devotion, and that it was not
an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about. In
giving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotel
altogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as great
vexation as he had accepted the room. He besought him not to go, but so
ungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for his
manner by the kindness of her own.

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were not
eager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she had
hitherto shared only with him. He was old, and certain luxuries had
become habits if not necessaries with him. Of course he did not say this
to himself; and still less did he say it to her. But he let her see that
he did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such close
relations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches
were somehow to blame for it. This made it impossible for her to write at
once to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that it
should not make her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoid him; she would
not let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she felt
his kindness and was glad of his help.

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as a
fellow-countryman would have been precious. He got them a doctor, against
General Triscoe's will; he went for his medicines; he lent him books and
papers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him. But with the girl he
attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing like
the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantage
in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep
he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room
of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: "I suppose
you must have been all over Weimar by this time."

"Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interesting
place. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left."

"And you enjoy that! I saw"--she added this with a little unnecessary
flush--"your poem in the paper you lent papa."

"I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't." He laughed,
and she said:

"You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place."

"It isn't lying about loose, exactly." Even in the serious and perplexing
situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with
her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace
conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of a more
fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater
world. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing them
between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return to
the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her ladylike
composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same
person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that
night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there had
been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave her
to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that
there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did
so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing
enough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg with
the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose's collapse, and of
his mother's flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was so
fortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of going to
Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strange
they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic
character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself
was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his
hopes. With a lover's indefinite power of blinding himself to what is
before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him,
more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for her
to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in the
little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always the
only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this
world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness of
their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. The
Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been
the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at
the station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on his
arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the
irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a zeal
that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in fact
preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August
knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable
English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general
gave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt to
encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in
the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of the
wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one day
suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened
hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a bench in
the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other frequenters
of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young strangers, so that
they would silently rise and leave it to them when they saw them coming.
Apparently they yielded not only to their right, but to a certain
authority which resides in lovers, and which all other men, and
especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is
difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which
Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar.
But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that
of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled
to say what it was. It was known that the gracious young lady's father,
who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact that
they were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever was
phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other's society.

If their free American association was indistinguishably like the peasant
informality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of Kenby and
Mrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not be fully
cognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing to prevent
it. His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he believed
himself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have had some
other physician if he had not found consolation in their difference of
opinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled to cherish for
the doctor in view of the man's complete ignorance of the case. In proof
of his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed some time after
the doctor said he might get up.

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