At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. “You think he’s behaved badly.”
“I think he’s behaved foolishly — youthfully. But I can understand how strongly he was tempted. He could say that he was not authorized to stop Stoller in his mad career.”
At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband’s arm.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said the general.
March added: “Since I saw him this morning, I’ve heard something that disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light. It’s something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy’s wickedness. He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I was cherishing in my bosom,” and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy’s injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions he had allowed him ignorantly to express.
The general grunted again. “Of course he had to refuse, and he has behaved like a gentleman so far. But that doesn’t justify him in having let Stoller get himself into the scrape.”
“No,” said March. “It’s a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.
And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller.”
Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. “I don’t, one bit. He was thoroughly selfish from first to last. He has got just what he deserved.”
“Ah, very likely,” said her husband. “The question is about Burnamy’s part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course.”
The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of no concern to him. “I believe,” he said, rising, “I’ll have a look at some of your papers,” and he went into the reading-room.
“Now,” said Mrs. March, “he will go home and poison that poor girl’s mind. And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against Burnamy.”
“Then why didn’t you do it yourself, my dear?” he teased; but he was really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as an ethical problem.
The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way down the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and reported Burnamy’s behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his making the best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad business.
“Now, you know all about it,” he said at the end, “and I leave the whole thing to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don’t know but I’d rather you’d satisfy yourself—”
“I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that way? I am satisfied now.”
XXXIX.
Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a good deal. He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March’s greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his opinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March’s opinions were whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from March that he was matching them with Kenby’s on some points, and suffering from their divergence. He came to join the sage in his early visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off together on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company. He was patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he learned to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March’s replies seemed to be mixed. He examined him upon many features of German civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him to be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy. March owned that the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of the women.
Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was troubled by his friend’s apparent acceptance of unjust things on their picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. “Ah, delightful!” March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.
“But don’t you think, Mr. March,” the boy ventured, “that the man had better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?”
“Well, I don’t know. There are more of them; and he wouldn’t be half so graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of their aching backs.” The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his shoulder as they walked on. “You find a lot of things in Europe that need putting right, don’t you, Rose?”
“Yes; I know it’s silly.”
“Well, I’m not sure. But I’m afraid it’s useless. You see, these old customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions. We think they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel and ugly they are; but probably they couldn’t. I’m afraid that the Emperor of Austria himself couldn’t change them, in his sovereign plenitude of power. The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he’s as much grounded in the conditions as any.” This was the serious way Rose felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to laugh when he went on. “The women have so much of the hard work to do, over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies. They couldn’t let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers’ horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin.”
If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for the boy’s confusion. She said the child adored him, and it was a sacrilege to play with his veneration. She always interfered to save him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of self-respect to side with the mocker. She understood this, and magnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should not trifle with Rose’s ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.
“Oh, I’m not his only ideal,” March protested. “He adores Kenby too, and every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby’s gospel.”
Mrs. March caught her breath. “Kenby! Do you really think, then, that she—”
“Oh, hold on, now! It isn’t a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don’t say Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father. I merely want you to understand that I’m the object of a divided worship, and that when I’m off duty as an ideal I don’t see why I shouldn’t have the fun of making Mrs. Adding laugh. You can’t pretend she isn’t wrapped up in the boy. You’ve said that yourself.”
“Yes, she’s wrapped up in him; she’d give her life for him; but she is so light. I didn’t suppose she was so light; but it’s borne in upon me more and more.”
They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance the Triscoes had fallen into. One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs. March’s room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers’ clubs from the neighboring towns. The spectacle prospered through its first half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able to lend even a bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming banners. Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a bower of leaves and petals, and they were a
ll gay with their club costumes and insignia. In the height of the display a sudden mountain shower gathered and broke upon them. They braved it till it became a drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to any shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways. The men used their greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made no appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if they expected nothing else.
Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted. “There’s your chance, Rose. Why don’t you go down and rebuke those fellows?”
Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly attacked her husband in his behalf. “Why don’t you go and rebuke them yourself?”
“Well, for one thing, there isn’t any conversation in my phrase-book Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in the Wet.” Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into going on. “For another thing, I think it’s very well for you ladies to realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of our civilization you are. It ought to make you grateful for your privileges.”
“There is something in that,” Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.
“Oh, there is no civilization but ours,” said Mrs. March, in a burst of vindictive patriotism. “I am more and more convinced of it the longer I stay in Europe.”
“Perhaps that’s why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the world,” said March.
The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills the Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began to play a pot pourri of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees below clapped and cheered.
“That was opportune of the band,” said March. “It must have been a telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director. But a pot pourri of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up here on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman. The only thing in this medley that’s the least characteristic or original is Dixie; and I’m glad the South has brought us back into the Union.”
“You don’t know one note from another, my dear,” said his wife.
“I know the ‘Washington Post.’”
“And don’t you call that American?”
“Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was
Portuguese.”
“Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe’s pessimism,” said Mrs. March; and she added: “But whether we have any national melodies or not, we don’t poke women out in the rain and keep them soaking!”
“No, we certainly don’t,” he assented, with such a well-studied effect of yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.
The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, “I hope Rose isn’t acting on my suggestion?”
“I hate to have you tease him, dearest,” his wife interposed.
“Oh, no,” the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh. “He’s too much afraid of lese-majesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn’t stand the sight. He’s queer.”
“He’s beautiful!” said Mrs. March.
“He’s good,” the mother admitted. “As good as the day’s long. He’s never given me a moment’s trouble — but he troubles me. If you can understand!”
“Oh, I do understand!” Mrs. March returned. “By his innocence, you mean. That is the worst of children. Their innocence breaks our hearts and makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things.”
“His innocence, yes,” pursued Mrs. Adding, “and his ideals.” She began to laugh again. “He may have gone off for a season of meditation and prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is turning that way a good deal lately. It’s only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor. You mustn’t be disappointed.”
“I shall be sorry,” said the editor. “But now that you mention it, I think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to periodical literature. I supposed he might simply have exhausted his questions — or my answers.”
“No; it goes deeper than that. I think it’s Europe that’s turned his mind in the direction of reform. At any rate he thinks now he will be a reformer.”
“Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I hope?”
“No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social. I don’t make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does. He tells me everything, and sometimes I don’t feel equal to it, spiritually or even intellectually.”
“Don’t laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!” Mrs. March entreated.
“Oh, he doesn’t mind my laughing,” said the mother, gayly. Rose came shyly back into the room, and she said, “Well, did you rebuke those bad bicyclers?” and she laughed again.
“They’re only a custom, too, Rose,”, said March, tenderly. “Like the man resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” the boy returned.
“They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century. That’s what we’re always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements.”
“There, doesn’t that console you?” asked his mother, and she took him away with her, laughing back from the door. “I don’t believe it does, a bit!”
“I don’t believe she understands the child,” said Mrs. March. “She is very light, don’t you think? I don’t know, after all, whether it wouldn’t be a good thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easygoing, and she will be sure to marry somebody.”
She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, “You might put these ideas to her.”
XL.
With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go. In the diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself. The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches’ way, or they fancied so; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.
It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him looking very obliquely into it at eight o’clock in the morning. The yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass was silvery gray with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer than they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of “Himbeeren! Himbeeren!” plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by the receding summer.
March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the ‘schone’ Lili brought them. Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed was a sacrifice in behalf of March’s inability.
Lili’s delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them. In this event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against their table, and say: “Oh, no. You stay a little. It is so nice.” One day after such an entreaty, she said, “The queen is here, this morning.”
Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. “The queen!”
“Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was saying she w
as a queen. She is there with her father.” She nodded in the direction of a distant corner, and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general. “She is not seeming so gayly as she was being.”
March smiled. “We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili. The summer is going.”
“But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?” the girl asked, resting her tray on the corner of the table.
“No, I’m afraid he won’t,” March returned sadly.
“He was very good. He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that Augusta did break when she was falling down. He was paying before he went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to pay.”
“Ah!” said March, and his wife said, “That was like him!” and she eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some pathetic facts about Augusta’s poverty and gratitude. “I think Miss Triscoe ought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!” she broke off. “Don’t look at him!” She set her husband the example of averting his face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table. “Ugh! I hope he won’t be able to find a single place.”
Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March’s face with grave sympathy. “He certainly doesn’t deserve one. Don’t let us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can.” They got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief which the ladies let drop from their laps.
“Have you been telling?” March asked his wife.
“Have I told you anything?” she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.
“Anything that you didn’t as good as know, already?”
“Not a syllable!” Mrs. Adding replied in high delight. “Come, Rose!”
“Well, I suppose there’s no use saying anything,” said March, after she left them.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 684
