Their Silver Wedding Journey

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He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in
Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal
joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his
window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of
pathos in the line:

"Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!"

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of
youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places,
with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen
silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he
remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke
early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though young,
were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves
kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw the street
filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some
in uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps, loosely
straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make
out. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said that
these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres,
and who were now going home. He promised March a translation of the song,
but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-going
remained the more poetic with him because its utterance remained
inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering
about the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit by
the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to the
cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there
added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people of
Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it by
preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an
ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive
offerings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled
themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and
ragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red
guide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle in
a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own
ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar a
priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was
as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle's, or whether somewhere in it he
felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and
old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river,
which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough river
looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both
as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making. The summer
of life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better return to his
own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal
town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any
one. A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really
a wish to be at work again. He said he must keep this from his wife, who
seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned
to the hotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer.
They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf
they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March
would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, and
he was afterwards glad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up
behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition
which the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeated
agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much,
and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had
plundered them of.

"Now I see," said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, "how
fortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe we
were the instruments of justice."

"Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?" asked her husband.
"The landlord has his own arrangement with justice. When he overcharges
his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my clock."

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the
clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine
as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. The
smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not so
bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March liked
the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy
shores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that,
and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he
remembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began to
come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence,
assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid
from the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the color
of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not
gainsay the friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they
showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since
realized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held silently
apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who kept the
Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an
Englishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was
he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or
was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?
He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of the
boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offer
him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually lifted a
shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and that
he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the young
man's eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he felt
that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again.
March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin to
eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the baskets
they had brought with them, or from the boat's provision. But he
prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer, through all the events
of the voyage; and took March's mind off the scenery with a sudden wrench
when he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance. At
the table d'hote, which was served when the landscape began to be less
interesting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across the
table to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout the
different courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt the
young man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for the
semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that he was a
Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at last
cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their former
Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantled
the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps. The
scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there were
certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than they
remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem was
more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, though
there were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed as
good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of them had been
restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into
trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere
gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the
broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American
dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more,
does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on
the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which
might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still you
know," March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the
Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference.
Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to be
storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really
got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure."

"Well, we have got no denkmal, either," said his wife, meaning the
national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had
just passed, "and that is something in our favor."

"It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was," he returned.

"The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rode
aboard the boat."

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that. He yielded, and began
to praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled slopes
of the upper river. He said they put him in mind of orchards that he had
known in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of travel,
after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in finding
something familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of getting ashore with their
baggage and driving from the steamboat landing to the railroad station,
where they were to get their train for Dusseldorf an hour later. The
station swarmed with travellers eating and drinking and smoking; but they
escaped from it for a precious half of their golden hour, and gave the
time to the great cathedral, which was built, a thousand years ago, just
round the corner from the station, and is therefore very handy to it.
Since they saw the cathedral last it had been finished, and now under a
cloudless evening sky, it soared and swept upward like a pale flame.
Within it was a bit over-clean, a bit bare, but without it was one of the
great memories of the race, the record of a faith which wrought miracles
of beauty, at least, if not piety.

The train gave the Marches another, and last, view of it as they slowly
drew out of the city, and began to run through a level country walled
with far-off hills; past fields of buckwheat showing their stems like
coral under their black tops; past peasant houses changing their wonted
shape to taller and narrower forms; past sluggish streams from which the
mist rose and hung over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassy clear
till the manifold factory chimneys of Dusseldorf stained it with their
dun smoke.

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the town where Heinrich Heine
was born; but when they had eaten their supper in the capital little
hotel they found there, and went out for a stroll, they found nothing to
remind them of the factories, and much to make them think of the poet.
The moon, beautiful and perfect as a stage moon, came up over the
shoulder of a church as they passed down a long street which they had all
to themselves. Everybody seemed to have gone to bed, but at a certain
corner a girl opened a window above them, and looked out at the moon.

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalled garden facing
it, full of black depths of foliage. In the night March woke and saw the
moon standing over the garden, and silvering its leafy tops. This was
really as it should be in the town where the idolized poet of his youth
was born; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and who had once
seemed like a living friend; who had been witness of his first love, and
had helped him to speak it. His wife used to laugh at him for his
Heine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and she,
even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage. He thought long
thoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way, with
an ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his youth,
all ghosts together in the silvered shadow. The trees shuddered in the
night breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, sentimentalizing," he answered boldly.

"Well, you will be sick," she said, and he crept back into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement. But he woke early, as
an elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wife
still sleeping. He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the town
as he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity for
Heine's birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with his
waiter at breakfast. After all, was not it more important to know
something of the actual life of a simple common class of men than to
indulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount of
associations could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter said he was
a Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served a
year for nothing. Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he got
a pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as the
one mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid the
hotel two marks a day. March confided to him his secret trouble as to
tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a just tip
was.

He went to his banker's, and when he came back he found his wife with her
breakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine's birthplace
that she heard with indifference of his failure to get any letters. It
was too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed him her plan,
which she had been working out ever since she woke. It contained every
place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined not one should
escape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusing him of
having taken cold when he got up in the night, and acquitting him with
difficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a little fagged, and they
must have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little
Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way from
his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the outside
before they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the cleanest of
the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty. Below the
houses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is a butcher shop,
with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where the
Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker
displayed their signs.

But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked so
fresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it the
poet's birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by the
people who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, so
anomalously interested in the place. They dismounted, and crossed to the
butcher shop where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but could
not understand their wish to go up stairs. He did not try to prevent
them, however, and they climbed to the first floor above, where a placard
on the door declared it private and implored them not to knock. Was this
the outcome of the inmate's despair from the intrusion of other pilgrims
who had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms? They durst not knock and
ask so much, and they sadly descended to the ground-floor, where they
found a butcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence than the
butcher himself, who told them that the building in front was as new as
it looked, and the house where Heine was really born was the old house in
the rear. He showed them this house, across a little court patched with
mangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wished to visit it he led the
way. The place was strewn both underfoot and overhead with feathers; it
had once been all a garden out to the street, the boy said, but from
these feathers, as well as the odor which prevailed, and the anxious
behavior of a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was plain
that what remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard. There
was one well-grown tree, and the boy said it was of the poet's time; but
when he let them into the house, he became vague as to the room where
Heine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhere upstairs and
that it could not be seen. The room where they stood was the
frame-maker's shop, and they bought of him a small frame for a memorial.
They bought of the butcher's boy, not so commercially, a branch of lilac;
and they came away, thinking how much amused Heine himself would have
been with their visit; how sadly, how merrily he would have mocked at
their effort to revere his birthplace.

They were too old if not too wise to be daunted by their defeat, and they
drove next to the old court garden beside the Rhine where the poet says
he used to play with the little Veronika, and probably did not. At any
rate, the garden is gone; the Schloss was burned down long ago; and
nothing remains but a detached tower in which the good Elector Jan
Wilhelm, of Heine's time, amused himself with his many mechanical
inventions. The tower seemed to be in process of demolition, but an
intelligent workman who came down out of it, was interested in the
strangers' curiosity, and directed them to a place behind the Historical
Museum where they could find a bit of the old garden. It consisted of two
or three low trees, and under them the statue of the Elector by which
Heine sat with the little Veronika, if he really did. Afresh gale blowing
through the trees stirred the bushes that backed the statue, but not the
laurel wreathing the Elector's head, and meeting in a neat point over his
forehead. The laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the Elector, who
stands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and resting his baton
on the nose of a very small lion, who, in the exigencies of
foreshortening, obligingly goes to nothing but a tail under the Elector's
robe.

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so much that he raised an
equestrian statue to his own renown in the market-place, though he
modestly refused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to the
affection of his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomed wig,
mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as big round as a barrel, and
heavy enough to keep him from coming down on his fore legs as long as he
likes to hold them up. It was to this horse's back that Heine clambered
when a small boy, to see the French take formal possession of Dusseldorf;
and he clung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who had just abdicated,
while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the balcony of the
Rathhaus, and the Electoral arms were taken down from its doorway.

The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothic and French rococo as to
its architectural style, and is charming in its way, but the Marches were
in the market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine's boyhood. They
felt that he might have been the boy who stopped as he ran before them,
and smacked the stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an old
market-woman, and then dashed away before she could frame a protest
against the indignity. From this incident they philosophized that the
boys of Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century as they
were at the beginning; and they felt the fascination that such a
bounteous, unkempt old marketplace must have for the boys of any period.
There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the fruits
were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The
market-place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down
from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a
slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the rapid
current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over, while
a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw to open.

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy to grow up in, and how
many privileges it offered, how many dangers, how many chances for
hairbreadth escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushed
shrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Rhine with other boys; and
they easily found a leaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in the
Public Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his life and
saved the kitten's. They were not so sure of the avenue through which the
poet saw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white horse when
he took possession of the Elector's dominions. But if it was that where
the statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. comes riding on a horse led by two
Victories, both poet and hero are avenged there on the accomplished fact.
Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the badness of that foolish
denkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden Germany), and the memory
of the singer whom the Hohenzollern family pride forbids honor in his
native place, is immortal in its presence.

On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflections upon the open
neglect, throughout Germany, of the greatest German lyrist, by which the
poet might have profited if he had been present. He contended that it was
not altogether an effect of Hohenzollern pride, which could not suffer a
joke or two from the arch-humorist; but that Heine had said things of
Germany herself which Germans might well have found unpardonable. He
concluded that it would not do to be perfectly frank with one's own
country. Though, to be sure, there would always be the question whether
the Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in the Germany he loved so
tenderly and mocked so pitilessly. He had to own that if he were a negro
poet he would not feel bound to measure terms in speaking of America, and
he would not feel that his fame was in her keeping.

Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany and he accused her of
taking a shabby revenge, in trying to forget him; in the heat of his
resentment that there should be no record of Heine in the city where he
was born, March came near ignoring himself the fact that the poet
Freiligrath was also born there. As for the famous Dusseldorf school of
painting, which once filled the world with the worst art, he rejoiced
that it was now so dead, and he grudged the glance which the beauty of
the new Art Academy extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and is
so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that French
supremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates the
overthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on
horseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, which
the Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. It
is in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt
in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patriotic
monuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, which
these never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dying
warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts were
moved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, which
dropped into equivalent English verse in March's note-book:

Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous laurel;
Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone.

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of the
German soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war with
Austria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon
should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September mist,
which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches;
for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks are apt to
be in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, and
sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and said how much
seemed to be done in Germany for the people's comfort and pleasure. In
what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they
were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the children
seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things. The Marches
met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the
winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they found
them everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed subdued, and were
silent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of
Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old
couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each
other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were indeed
children of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossom
back into.

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