Their Silver Wedding Journey

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August was much helped and encouraged throughout by the friendly
intelligence of the gracious Fraulein, who smiled radiantly in clearing
up one dim point after another, and who now and then supplied the English
analogues which he sought in his effort to render his German more
luminous.

At the end she returned to the work of packing, in which she directed
him, and sometimes assisted him with her own hands, having put the
bouquet on the mantel to leave herself free. She took it up again and
carried it into her own room, when she went with August to summon her
father back to his. She bade August say to the young Herr, if he saw him,
that she was going to sup with her father, and August gave her message to
Burnamy, whom he met on the stairs coming down as he was going up with
their tray.

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that evening Burnamy was less
able than usual to bear her absence in the hotel dining-room, and he went
up to a cafe in the town for his supper. He did not stay long, and when
he returned his heart gave a joyful lift at sight of Agatha looking out
from her balcony, as if she were looking for him. He made her a gay
flourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she came down to meet him at
the hotel door. She had her hat on and jacket over one arm and she joined
him at once for the farewell walk he proposed in what they had agreed to
call their garden.

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reached the place where
they always sat, she shifted her jacket to the other arm and uncovered
the hand in which she had been carrying the withered bouquet. "Here is
something I found in your closet, when I was getting papa's things out."

"Why, what is it?" he asked innocently, as he took it from her.

"A bouquet, apparently," she answered, as he drew the long ribbons
through his fingers, and looked at the flowers curiously, with his head
aslant.

"Where did you get it?"

"On the shelf."

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a long sigh, as of final
recollection, "Oh, yes," and then he said nothing; and they did not sit
down, but stood looking at each other.

"Was it something you got for me, and forgot to give me?" she asked in a
voice which would not have misled a woman, but which did its work with
the young man.

He laughed and said, "Well, hardly! The general has been in the room ever
since you came."

"Oh, yes. Then perhaps somebody left it there before you had the room?"

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, "No, I flung it up there I
had forgotten all about it."

"And you wish me to forget about it, too?" Agatha asked in a gayety of
tone that still deceived him.

"It would only be fair. You made me," he rejoined, and there was
something so charming in his words and way, that she would have been glad
to do it.

But she governed herself against the temptation and said, "Women are not
good at forgetting, at least till they know what."

"Oh, I'll tell you, if you want to know," he said with a laugh, and at
the words she--sank provisionally in their accustomed seat. He sat down
beside her, but not so near as usual, and he waited so long before he
began that it seemed as if he had forgotten again. "Why, it's nothing.
Miss Etkins and her mother were here before you came, and this is a
bouquet that I meant to give her at the train when she left. But I
decided I wouldn't, and I threw it onto the shelf in the closet."

"May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquet to her at the train?"

"Well, she and her mother--I had been with them a good deal, and I
thought it would be civil."

"And why did you decide not to be civil?"

"I didn't want it to look like more than civility."

"Were they here long?"

"About a week. They left just after the Marches came."

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted. She sat reclined in
the corner of the seat, with her head drooping. After an interval which
was long to Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the third finger of
her left hand, absently, as if she did not know what she was doing; but
when she had got it off she held it towards Burnamy and said quietly, "I
think you had better have this again," and then she rose and moved slowly
and weakly away.

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and he stood a moment
bewildered; then he pressed after her.

"Agatha, do you--you don't mean--"

"Yes," she said, without looking round at his face, which she knew was
close to her shoulder. "It's over. It isn't what you've done. It's what
you are. I believed in you, in spite of what you did to that man--and
your coming back when you said you wouldn't--and--But I see now that what
you did was you; it was your nature; and I can't believe in you any
more."

"Agatha!" he implored. "You're not going to be so unjust! There was
nothing between you and me when that girl was here! I had a right to--"

"Not if you really cared for me! Do you think I would have flirted with
any one so soon, if I had cared for you as you pretended you did for me
that night in Carlsbad? Oh, I don't say you're false. But you're
fickle--"

"But I'm not fickle! From the first moment I saw you, I never cared for
any one but you!"

"You have strange ways of showing your devotion. Well, say you are not
fickle. Say, that I'm fickle. I am. I have changed my mind. I see that it
would never do. I leave you free to follow all the turning and twisting
of your fancy." She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she gave him
no chance to get out the words that seemed to choke him. She began to
run, but at the door of the hotel she stopped and waited till he came
stupidly up. "I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy. I beg you will not see
me again, if you can help it before we go to-morrow. My father and I are
indebted to you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn't take any more
trouble on our account. August can see us off in the morning."

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while he was yet struggling
with his doubt of the reality of what had all so swiftly happened.

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change in the status to which
he had reconciled himself with so much difficulty, when he came down to
get into the omnibus for the train. Till then he had been too proud to
ask what had become of Burnamy, though he had wondered, but now he looked
about and said impatiently, "I hope that young man isn't going to keep us
waiting."

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but she said firmly, "He
isn't going, papa. I will tell you in the train. August will see to the
tickets and the baggage."

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-class compartment
to themselves. But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha's
confidences to her father were not full. She told her father that her
engagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very wrong
in Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy together.
As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty in
accepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealed
strongly to his contrary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly from his
sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to new
conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from an
engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, "I hope you're
not making a mistake."

"Oh, no," she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of
sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the
Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the
Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they
remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at
Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who
kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that
she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding
journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it
would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do
in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of the
same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe
as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape. One gray
little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval
walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more. There
was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog
began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersing
the cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the Russischer
Hof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shivering
in all their wraps till breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored the
portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all the
electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree.
Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed each
other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while the
summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted.
They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over their
breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interest
in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel. They were
fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and they
were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire. Many of
them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls running
before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processions
have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxiety
a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before
the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to
the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the
morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet.
What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an old
town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town,
handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets,
apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course
Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing
absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive
characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight. Some
sort of monument to the national victory over France there must have
been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record
of itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware of gardened
squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic
edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the state
builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal
corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to the
Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at their
public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the most
plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay their
devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house they
revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter of
credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius of
Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled himself
by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. March
for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds'
birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born. The
public is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly place
they were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in the
Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar,
which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote. They wondered,
as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean little
court, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to that
understanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, had
meant to be inevitable. Then they became part of some such sight-seeing
retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar,
and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow
sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in
a certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both the
Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separate
house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or
yard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms. The
chief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the most
important is the little chamber in the third story where the poet first
opened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and
which, dying, he implored to be with him more. It is as large as his
death-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down
into the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for
the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet
square. In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is
fairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look
from the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt.
So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such
things go, it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and
well-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family
which Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial
quality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic's
breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer,
the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once
was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their
coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was still
so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze
of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer,
the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where the
German emperors were elected for so many centuries. As soon as an emperor
was chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of his
predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself
to the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in the
sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers
could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of
the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they
were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty
of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked
in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a
half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing
in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost,
and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this
cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other
fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the
easier part she had chosen. His only definite impression at the cathedral
seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he
had seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object of
interest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs.
March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadth
of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of the
morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of many
Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves to
learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it was
so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with its
bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They liked the
market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full of
fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because
there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedeker
that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the
marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews
had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They were
almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in
Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race,
prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner
so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and
electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran
Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. It
grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whom
March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when the
guard came, without asking their leave. Then the climate proved much
colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, and
would not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, or
the hills far off. He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as it
had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, "She may be
another Baroness!" At first he did not know what she meant, then he
remembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorly
enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife was
practising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and giving
her a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose. She failed to
profit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeable
woman, of no more perceptible distinction than their other
fellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (they
resolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he was
no other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way to
Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and
flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wet
sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminably
to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomer
and cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part of
the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, than even
Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like that, with double
rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign of
Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restriction
against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred. Otherwise they had to
confess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more proper
and dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America.
To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years'
start; but all the same the fact galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their
hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to
Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something
tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with
its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the
spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the
river's brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold
braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to
his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain have
had them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very
slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower,
and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of the
serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All these
retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove,
without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms,
and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant, not
because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of
wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange
demand.

"What!" she cried. "A fire in September!"

"Yes," March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by
the exigency, "yes, if September is cold."

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or
liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a
word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and in
less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least
sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. March
made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said she
would have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a supper
of chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when they
supped in her aunt's parlor there all those years ago. He wished to
compute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and he
went down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he found
himself alone with a young English couple and their little boy. They were
friendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable,
apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said he
had contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he was going to
Holland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which March
expected to find there. He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of
faith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of the
dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the court
without, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till the
little English boy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March's spirits certainly did not rise
when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at
another table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he had
met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the
elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the
younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed
to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct
and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style
bragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeable
fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had
become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one only
the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in his scorn
of the German landscape, the German weather, the German government, the
German railway management, and then turned out an American of German
birth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort when he went back to
her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she had discovered
standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was a French clock,
of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the first Empire, and it
looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon occupied Mayence early
in the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her conscience where,
in its danger from the heat of the stove, it rested with the weight of
the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled. She wondered that no one
had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and she required her husband
to remove it at once from the top of the stove to the mantel under the
mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a clock. He said nothing
could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began to fall all apart, like
a clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble base dropped-off; its
pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side. While Mrs. March
lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it together before any
one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new place. Then they both
breathed freer, and returned to sit down before the stove. But at the
same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined on the lacquered top,
the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would see it in the morning;
she would notice the removal of the clock, and would make a merit of
reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord, and in the end they would
be mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer this wrong they agreed to
restore it to its place, and, let it go to destruction upon its own
terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went to
bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

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