Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, isn’t it?” his wife asked.

  “Yes, that’s the worst of it. It shows how poverty-stricken life really is. We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be.”

  “I think we have been happy enough, and that we’ve had as much good as was wholesome for us,” she returned, hurt.

  “You’re always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will be personal, I’ll say that you’ve been as happy as you deserve, and got more good than you had any right to.”

  She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.

  He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternal accusation of his murderess. “It’s rather hard on her, that he should be having the last word, that way,” he said. “She was a woman, no matter what mistakes she had committed.”

  “That’s what I call ‘banale’,” said Mrs. March.

  “It is, rather,” he confessed. “It makes me feel as if I must go to see the house of Durer, after all.”

  “Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later.”

  It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Durer’s house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they reached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly have been different in Durer’s time. His dwelling, in no way impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous and cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer’s time to take themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.

  The Marches wrote their names in the visitors’ book, and paid the visitor’s fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a reproduction of one of Durer’s pictures; and then they came away, by no means dissatisfied with his house. By its association with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse than Ariosto’s house at Ferrara, or Petrarch’s at Arqua, or Michelangelo’s at Florence. “But what I admire,” he said, “is our futility in going to see it. We expected to surprise some quality of the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it; and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard to save his widow from coming to want.”

  “Who said she did that?”

  “A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was a

  God-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience.”

  “Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going.”

  “Yes; but I don’t like her laying her plans to survive him; though women always do that.”

  They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though they would rather have been alone. They lifted their eyes for their expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.

  The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter; March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived at the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time.

  She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; but she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No doubt she was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and she knew more, as the American wives of young American business men always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather than personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not get his feet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.

  XLVII.

  The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs. March, who said, as soon as they were gone, “I believe I would rather meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you could keep young by being with young people; but I don’t, now. There world is very different from ours. Our world doesn’t really exist any more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we needn’t realize it. Young people,” she went on, “are more practical-minded than we used to be; they’re quite as sentimental; but I don’t think they care so much for the higher things. They’re not so much brought up on poetry as we were,” she pursued. “That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our time; but now she didn’t know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred.” Her tone entreated him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them. “They couldn’t have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!”

  “I see what you mean. But do you think it’s as sacred to us as it would have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg.”

  “Oh, yes; so had I. We’re that modern, if we’re not so young as we were.”

  “We were very simple, in those days.”

  “Well, if we were simple, we knew it!”

  “Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at it.”

  “We had a good time.”

  “Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had not been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn’t eaten it.”

  “It would be mouldy, though.”

  “I wonder,” he said, recurring to the Lefferses; “how we really struck them.”

  “Well, I don’t believe they thought we ought to be travelling about alone, quite, at our age.”

  “Oh, not so bad as that!” After a moment he said, “I dare say they don’t go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did.”

  “Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got to Nuremberg: about his w
anting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by express that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again.” The elders looked at each other in the light of experience, and laughed. “Well,” she ended, “that’s one thing we’re through with. I suppose we’ve come to feel more alike than we used to.”

  “Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?”

  “Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her.” March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: “Well, they gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American philistinism. I don’t mind their thinking us queer; they must have thought Nuremberg was queer.”

  “Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We’re either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we’re ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be like us, and wouldn’t, for the world. The worst of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don’t, at the bottom of our hearts, believe we’re like that, when we meet. I suppose that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.”

  “I wonder,” said Mrs. March, “if she’s told him yet,” and March perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.

  “She’s had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her.”

  “Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in that way. I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have accepted him conditionally.”

  “Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?”

  “Stoller? No! To her father’s liking it.”

  “Ah, that’s quite as hard. What makes you think she accepted him at all?”

  “What do you think she was crying about?”

  “Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity. If she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about it.” Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to atone for his stupidity. “Perhaps she’s told him on the instalment plan. She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad. Poor old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could make things very smooth for us.”

  “Well, you needn’t flatter yourself that you’ll find him in Ansbach. I’m sure I don’t know where he is.”

  “You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask.”

  “I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me,” she said, with dignity.

  “Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her. I’ve asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the poste restante in Ansbach. Isn’t it good to see the crows again, after those ravens around Carlsbad?”

  She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the open window. The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground ready for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foraging parties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignant protest. She said, with a smile for the crows, “Yes. And I’m thankful that I’ve got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens,” she added in dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.

  “I’m thankful too, my dear. I’d much rather have things on my own. I’m more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you’re to blame.”

  They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied. It was only that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy’s furtive reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it, and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that might well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.

  She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than because the right time had come. She began as they sat at breakfast. “Papa, there is something that I have got to tell you. It is something that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because—”

  She hesitated for the reason, and “Well!” said her father, looking up at her from his second cup of coffee. “What is it?”

  Then she answered, “Mr. Burnamy has been here.”

  “In Carlsbad? When was he here?”

  “The night of the Emperor’s birthday. He came into the box when you were behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd.”

  “Well?”

  “I thought you ought to know. Mrs. March said I ought to tell you.”

  “Did she say you ought to wait a week?” He gave way to an irascibility which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, “Why did he come back?”

  “He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris.” The girl had the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge. She looked steadily at her father, and added: “He said he came back because he couldn’t help it. He — wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and Mr. Stoller. He wanted to come back and tell me — that.”

  Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave the word to him, now. He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with a mildness that seemed to surprise her, “Have you heard anything from him since?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must tell you about it.”

  The case was less simple than it would once have been for General Triscoe. There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put his paternal love and duty in a new light. He was no more explicit with himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very prosperously married. On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to extremes concerning him.

  “He was very anxious,” she went on, “that you should know just how it was. He thinks everything of your judgment and — and — opinion.” The general made a consenting noise in his throat. “He said that he did not wish me to ‘whitewash’ him to you. He didn’t think he had done right; he didn’t excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the stand-point of a gentleman.”

  The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, “How do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?”

  “I don’t believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March—”

  “Oh, Mrs. March!” the general snorted.

  “ — says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy does.”

  “I doubt it. At any rate, I understood March quite differently.”

  “She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr. Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse for what he had done before.” As she spoke on she had become more eager.

  “There’s something in that,” the general admitted, with a candor that he made the most of both to himself and to her. “But I should like to know what Stoller had to say of it all. Is there anything,” he inquired, “any reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?”

  “N — no. Only, I thought — He thinks so much of your opinion that — if—”

  “Oh, he can very well afford to wait. If he values my opinion so highly he can give me time to make up my mind.”

  “Of course—”

  “And I’m not responsible,” the general continued, significantly, “for the delay altogether. If you had told me this before — Now, I don’t know whether Stoller is still in town.”

  He wa
s not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with him. She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered him. If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could delay and make sure. The accepted theory of such matters is that people know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them. But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often act contrary to their convictions and impulses. If the statistics were accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.

  When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would step round to Pupp’s and see if Stoller were still there. But on the way he stepped up to Mrs. Adding’s hotel on the hill, and he came back, after an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rather casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before. By this time the fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.

  He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered that they had not. They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and then push on to Holland for Mr. March’s after-cure. There was no relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked whether he wished to send any word.