Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do or don’t do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it’s that? Is marriage such a very certain good?”

  “It isn’t all that it might be, but it’s all that there is. What would our lives have been without it?” she retorted.

  “Oh, we should have got on. It’s such a tremendous risk that we, ought to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don’t mind their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. I doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he hadn’t selected himself, and his daughter doesn’t strike me as a young lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her little charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You wouldn’t want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe’s money, even if she had money, and I doubt if she has much. It’s all very pretty to have a girl like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn’t altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in the very world she belongs to. I don’t think it’s for us to promote the affair.”

  “Well, perhaps you’re right,” she sighed. “I will let them alone from this out. Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very long.”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s any harm done yet,” said her husband, with a laugh.

  At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement; she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their chairs on deck.

  There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a remorseful pang. “Well,” she said, “I wish we were going to be in New York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg.”

  “Oh, no! Oh, no!” he protested. “Not so bad as that, my dear. This is the last night, and it’s hard to manage, as the last night always is. I suppose the last night on earth—”

  “Basil!” she implored.

  “Well, I won’t, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I’ve never seen a Dutch lugger, and—”

  She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by. They were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up into his face while he talked.

  “Now,” Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, “let us go instantly. I wouldn’t for worlds have them see us here when they get found again. They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that would spoil everything. Come!”

  XVII.

  Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss

  Triscoe’s prompting. He had not to wait long.

  “And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?”

  “Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public.”

  “How could you tell that they were-taking?”

  “They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them.”

  “And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?”

  “I don’t believe it was. The theory in the office was that he didn’t think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things into shape.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh — ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics. He owns shares in everything but the United States Senate — gas, electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers — and now he would like some Senate. That’s what I think.”

  She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father’s fiercest accusals of the country. “How fascinating it is!” she said, innocently.

  “And I suppose they all envy your coming out?”

  “In the office?”

  “Yes. I should envy, them — staying.”

  Burnamy laughed. “I don’t believe they envy me. It won’t be all roses for me — they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if it isn’t.” He remembered something one of his friends in the office had said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.

  She abruptly left the mere personal question. “And which would you rather write: poems or those kind of sketches?”

  “I don’t know,” said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms. “I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there are things you can’t say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse in college; but I didn’t have much luck with editors till Mr. March took this little piece for ‘Every Other Week’.”

  “Little? I thought it was a long poem!”

  Burnamy laughed at the notion. “It’s only eight lines.”

  “Oh!” said the girl. “What is it about?”

  He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in a person of his make. “I can repeat it if you won’t give me away to Mrs. March.”

  “Oh, no indeed!” He said the lines over to her very simply and well.

  “They are beautiful — beautiful!”

  “Do you think so?” he gasped, in his joy at her praise.

  “Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man — the only literary man — I ever talked with. They must go out — somewhere! Papa must meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I’m making the most of you.”

  “You can’t make too much of me, Miss Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

  She would not mind his mocking. “That day you spoke about ‘The Maiden Knight’, don’t you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that way. I didn’t know you were an author then.”

  “Well, I’m not much of an author now,” he said, cynically, to retrieve his folly in repeating his poem to her.

  “Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks.”

  He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; ‘Every Other Week’ was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs. March’s interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know just how much she thought of him as a writer? “Did she like the poem.”

  Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March’s liking for Burnamy. “But it wouldn’t do to tell you all she said!” This was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his personal history. “And you didn’t know any one when, you went up to Chicago from—”

  “Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn’t acquainted with any one in the office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to let me try my hand. That was all I could ask.”

  “Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A woman couldn’t have such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.

  “But women do!” Burnamy retorted. “There is a girl writing on the paper now — she’s going to do the literary notices while I’m gone — who came to Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who’s made her way single-handed from interviewing up.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. “Is she nice?”

/>   “She’s mighty clever, and she’s nice enough, too, though the kind of journalism that women do isn’t the most dignified. And she’s one of the best girls I know, with lots of sense.”

  “It must be very interesting,” said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in the way she said it. “I suppose you’re quite a little community by yourselves.”

  “On the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don’t. There’s quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you’d like to come out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhaps you could get the Woman’s Page to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette.”

  He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, “Do women write it?”

  He laughed reminiscently. “Well, not always. We had one man who used to do it beautifully — when he was sober. The department hasn’t had any permanent head since.”

  He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. “Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?”

  “About one, I believe — there’s a consensus of stewards to that effect, anyway.” After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?”

  “We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to

  Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet.”

  “Are you going direct to Dresden?”

  “I don’t know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two.”

  “I’ve got to go straight to Carlsbad. There’s a sleeping-car that will get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you’ll let me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow.”

  “You’re very kind. You’ve been very good already — to papa.” He protested that he had not been at all good. “But he’s used to taking care of himself on the other side. Oh, it’s this side, now!”

  “So it is! How strange that seems! It’s actually Europe. But as long as we’re at sea, we can’t realize it. Don’t you hate to have experiences slip through your fingers?”

  “I don’t know. A girl doesn’t have many experiences of her own; they’re always other people’s.”

  This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth. He only suggested, “Well; sometimes they make other people have the experiences.”

  Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left the question. “Do you understand German?”

  “A little. I studied it at college, and I’ve cultivated a sort of beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things.”

  “I can’t, except in French, and that’s worse than English, in Germany, I hear.”

  “Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will you?”

  She did not answer. “It must be rather late, isn’t it?” she asked. He let her see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it’s very late,” and led the way within. “I must look after my packing; papa’s always so prompt, and I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!”

  Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.

  XVIII.

  The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a moment.

  In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give, anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.

  After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied themselves at home again.

  Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every one sat down in some other’s chair. At last the trunks were all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with the hand-baggage. “Is this Hoboken?” March murmured in his wife’s ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed action of the kinematograph.

  On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing rain. Burnamy’s smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from Burnamy’s smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.

  Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh count that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble; their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have been very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room at the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee with unexpected cordiality.

  Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the restaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors — the shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars. Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, “Krahnay, Krahnay!” When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and shouted, “Crane! Crane!” and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry, “Kren! Kren!” But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.

  People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal of talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though voluble, w
ere unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual with these amiable people.

  Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife, and leaned over her son to ask, “Do you know what lese-majesty is? Rose is afraid I’ve committed it!”

  “No, I don’t,” said March. “But it’s the unpardonable sin. What have you been doing?”

  “I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he said at half past three, I said, ‘How tiresome!’ Rose says the railroads belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table, it’s constructive censure of the Emperor, and that’s lese-majesty.” She gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March’s face with an appealing smile.

  “Well, I don’t think you’ll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March. She’s been complaining of the coffee.”

  “Indeed I shall say what I like,” said Mrs. March. “I’m an American.”

  “Well, you’ll find you’re a German, if you like to say anything disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor’s railroad station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your account.”

  Mrs. Adding asked: “Then they won’t punish ladies? There, Rose! I’m safe, you see; and you’re still a minor, though you are so wise for your years.”

  She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.

  “I don’t know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,”, said Mrs. March. “And you’ve joined with her in her joking. Go and speak, to him!”

  The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. March overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man’s face. March tried to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: “Oh, yes. I understood that. But I got to thinking; and I don’t want my mother to take any risks.”