Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “She had guessed everything, without my telling her,” said his wife.

  “About Stoller?”

  “Well-no. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was about

  Burnamy and Agatha that she knew. She saw it from the first.”

  “I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old

  Kenby.”

  “I’m not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If she doesn’t, she oughtn’t to let him write to her. Aren’t you going over to speak to the Triscoes?”

  “No, certainly not. I’m going back to the hotel. There ought to be some steamer letters this morning. Here we are, worrying about these strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children on the other side of the ocean.”

  “I worry about them, too,” said the mother, fondly. “Though there is nothing to worry about,” she added.

  “It’s our duty to worry,” he insisted.

  At the hotel the portier gave them four letters. There was one from each of their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness of Chicago as a summer city (“You would think she was born out there!” sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in spite of the heat they were having (“And just think how cool it is here!” his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of ‘Every Other Week’. There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy’s editorial instinct, and ironically proposing March’s resignation in his favor.

  “I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not,” said Mrs.

  March, proudly. “What does ‘Burnamy say?”

  “How do you know it’s from him?”

  “Because you’ve been keeping your hand on it! Give it here.”

  “When I’ve read it.”

  The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use it in ‘Every Other Week’. He had come upon a book about that hapless foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically. Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place. He thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.

  “And, not a word — not a syllable — about Miss Triscoe!” cried Mrs. March.

  “Shall you take his paper?”

  “It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn’t it?”

  They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter, or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his parting interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his remorse for letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he could celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was glad he had been able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their merciful conjectures. He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart. If he had been older, he might not have taken it.

  XLI.

  The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian summer. For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.

  The day was important as the last of March’s cure, and its pleasures began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness with the Eltwins. He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet, sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin said that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.

  “Well,” he apologized, “we’re all that’s left, and I suppose we like to keep together.” He paused, and at the look in March’s face he suddenly went on. “I haven’t been well for three or four years; but I always fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to. I said I couldn’t leave home; and, I don’t suppose I ever should. But my home left me.”

  As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal her withered hand into his.

  “We’d had a large family, but they’d all died off, with one thing or another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemed perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it. It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so we’re here.” His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, “I don’t know what it is always makes me want to kick that man.”

  The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was well, and Major Eltwin better. He did not notice their replies, but said to March, “The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp’s readingroom, to go with them to the Posthof for breakfast.”

  “Aren’t you going, too?” asked March.

  “No, thank you,” said the general, as if it were much finer not; “I shall breakfast at our pension.” He strolled off with the air of a man who has done more than his duty.

  “I don’t suppose I ought to feel that way,” said Eltwin, with a remorse which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife’s hand had prompted in him. “I reckon he means well.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” March said, with a candor he could not wholly excuse.

  On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real pathos as these poor old people’s; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he could not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse her on the way from Pupp’s, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe Sans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to breakfast. She said, “Poor Mr. March!” and laughed inattentively; when he went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation between Pupp’s and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife frowned at him.

  The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved.

  At the Posthof the ‘schone’ Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of July. She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a sunny spot in the gallery. “You are tired of Carlsbad?” she said caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.

  “Not of the Posthof,” said the girl, listlessly.

  “Posthof, and very little Lili?” She showed, with one forefinger on another, how very little she was.

  Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with abrupt seriousness, “Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table, and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I have scolded her, and I have made her give it to me.”

  She took from under her apron a man’s handkerchief, which she offered to

  Mrs. March. It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.

  But, “Whose can it be?” they asked each other.

  “Why, Burnamy’s,” said Marc
h; and Lili’s eyes danced. “Give it here!”

  His wife caught it farther away. “No, I’m going to see whose it is, first; if it’s his, I’ll send it to him myself.”

  She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

  Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and was holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now rose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was too quick for her.

  “Oh, let me carry them for you!” she entreated, and after a tender struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not the kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.

  Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited the girl’s advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it in every case, with Miss Triscoe’s eager approval. In the Stadt Park they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.

  When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been sitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no one more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat brims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, “Something left lying,” passed on.

  They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March’s sandals and of Burnamy’s handkerchief.

  “Oh, I put it in one of the toes!” she lamented, and she fled back to their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the public security, and putting a baby in its nurse’s arms into such doubts of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughed breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. “That comes of having no pocket; I didn’t suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn’t it absurd?”

  “It’s one of those things,” Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards, “that they can always laugh over together.”

  “They? And what about Burnamy’s behavior to Stoller?”

  “Oh, I don’t call that anything but what will come right. Of course he can make it up to him somehow. And I regard his refusal to do wrong when Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence.”

  “Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you. My only hope is that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa’s poison will neutralize yours somehow.”

  XLII.

  One of the pleasantest incidents of March’s sojourn in Carlsbad was his introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived of him as a brother artist. This led to much bowing and smiling from the manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have ended, and still been far beyond his desert. He had not thought of going to the opera on the Emperor’s birthnight, but after dinner a box came from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in decency accept so great a favor. At the same time she argued that they could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty and distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe and her father.

  “And why not Major Eltwin and his wife? Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?”

  She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came. The foyer of the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with whose side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could. At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon the honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august. The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded to an artist’s impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him the pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; he bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while her husband was gone.

  She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone, and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest with him. On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in their young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect. “I wish we were going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the whole situation. Do you think we have made a mistake in having the Triscoes?”

  “We!” he retorted. “Oh, that’s good! I’m going to shirk him, when it comes to going behind the scenes.”

  “No, no, dearest,” she entreated. “Snubbing will only make it worse. We must stand it to the bitter end, now.”

  The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then the curtain fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General Triscoe and his daughter came in.

  Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to her hospitality. She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted full. Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face. The girl’s eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side to side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it. Her father, in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civil occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance; and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other, till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act at least.

  The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who, ‘als Gast’ from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it. She merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.

  “That is grand, isn’t it?” said March, following one of the tremendous strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages. “It’s fine to see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all those steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundless fields of cabbage. But it’s rather pathetic.”

  “It’s disgusting,” said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s amusing. Do you suppose we shall see her when we go behind, March?”

  He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they hurried to the rear door of the theatre. It was slightly ajar, and they pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age a
nd nation, and began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders. With their rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.

  “This is rather weird,” said March, faltering at the sight. “I wonder if we might ask these young ladies where to go?” General Triscoe made no answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business. The voice belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the young ladies.

  March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and wished to find his room.

  The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it. He pressed down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to force them back to the door. The mild nature of the editor might have yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was roused. He shrugged the gendarme’s hand from his shoulder, and with a voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the devil he meant. The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the general’s tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs. From time to time March interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants. They grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to him. But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain. In the lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing could have been more honorable than their dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who had received them so stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.