Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out. “Now, that is what I never can get used to in you, Basil, and I’ve tried to palliate it for twenty-seven years. You know you won’t look up that poor woman’s son! Why did you let her think you would?”
“How could I tell her I wouldn’t? Perhaps I shall.”
“No, no! You never will. I know you’re good and kind, and that’s why I can’t understand your being so cruel. When we get back, how will you ever find time to go over to Jersey City?”
He could not tell, but at last he said: “I’ll tell you what! You must keep me up to it. You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, and this will be such a pleasure!”
She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took his arm; and he began, from the example of this good mother, to philosophize the continuous simplicity and sanity of the people of Ansbach under all their civic changes. Saints and soldiers, knights and barons, margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone, and left their single-hearted, friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them. The people had suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and apparently prospered on under all governments and misgovernments. When the court was most French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must have remained immutably German, dull, and kind. After all, he said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the same.
“Yes, that is all very well,” she returned, “and you can theorize interestingly enough; but I’m afraid that poor mother, there, had no more reality for you than those people in the past. You appreciate her as a type, and you don’t care for her as a human being. You’re nothing but a dreamer, after all. I don’t blame you,” she went on. “It’s your temperament, and you can’t change, now.”
“I may change for the worse,” he threatened. “I think I have, already. I don’t believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back in wonder and admiration at myself. I’ve steadily lost touch with life since then. I’m a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and the good as I used to be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to be troubled at times, now, and once I never was. It never occurred to me then that the world wasn’t made to interest me, or at the best to instruct me, but it does, now, at times.”
She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best ground he could take with her. “I think you behaved very well with Burnamy. You did your duty then.”
“Did I? I’m not so sure. At any rate, it’s the last time I shall do it. I’ve served my term. I think I should tell him that he was all right in that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now.”
“Isn’t it strange,” she said, provisionally, “that we don’t come upon a trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?”
“Ah, you’ve been hoping he would turn up!”
“Yes. I don’t deny it. I feel very unhappy about him.”
“I don’t. He’s too much like me. He would have been quite capable of promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City. When I think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy.”
“I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he’s got rid of his highhotes,” said Mrs. March.
XLIX.
They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the comfort of having it nearly all to themselves. Prince Leopold had risen early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got away to the manoeuvres somewhere at six o’clock; the decorations had been removed, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the prince had rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks waddling about in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence of a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing till the hour of noon should sound. He sat there immovable, but at the last stroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the station.
The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the night before was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by its splendor. After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the prince might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at this modest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediate royalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he could not have done better than dine at the Golden Star. If he paid no more than two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as abundantly. The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread, March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting the bread of Carlsbad.
After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not so incomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served them in a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the time when it was a patrician mansion. The garden had roses in it and several sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries, currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all harmoniously contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where no one of the seasons can very well know itself from the others. It had not been raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that the shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in Germany, between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.
The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London. Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described Burnamy’s beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had been a woman, could not have failed to remember him. But he failed, with a real grief, apparently, and certainly a real politeness, to recall either his name or his person. The landlord was an intelligent, good-looking young fellow; he told them that he was lately married, and they liked him so much that they were sorry to see him afterwards privately boxing the ears of the piccolo, the waiter’s little understudy. Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not have witnessed his punishment; his being in a dress-coat seemed to make it also an indignity.
In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the old Orangery of the Schloss for a cup of tea, and found themselves in the company of several Ansbach ladies who had brought their work, in the evident habit of coming there every afternoon for their coffee and for a dish of gossip. They were kind, uncomely, motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed her hair at the table; and they all sat outside of the cafe with their feet on the borders of the puddles which had not dried up there in the shade of the building.
A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows of trees, stretched before them with the sunset light on it, and it was all very quiet and friendly. The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from some herb apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked like willow leaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove in each cup, and they sat contentedly over it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladies were, talking about. These had recognized the strangers for Americans, and one of them explained that Americans spoke the same language as the English and yet were not quite the same people.
“She differs from the girl in the book-store,” said March, translating to his wife. “Let us get away before she says that we are not so nice as the English,” and they made off toward the avenue of trees beyond the lawn.
There were a few people walking up and down in the alley, making the most of the moment of dry weather. They saluted one another like acquaintances, and three clean-shaven, walnut-faced old peasants bowed in response to March’s stare, with a self-respectful civility. They were yeomen of the region of Ansbach, where the country round about is dotted with their cottages, and not held in vast homeless tracts by the nobles as in North Germany.
The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March at breakfast, not without a certain tacit pride in it to the disadvantage of the Prussians, was at the sup
per table, and was disposed to more talk, which he managed in a stout, slow English of his own. He said he had never really spoken English with an English-speaking person before, or at all since he studied it in school at Munich.
“I should be afraid to put my school-boy German against your English,”
March said, and, when he had understood, the other laughed for pleasure,
and reported the compliment to his wife in their own parlance. “You
Germans certainly beat us in languages.”
“Oh, well,” he retaliated, “the Americans beat us in some other things,” and Mrs. March felt that this was but just; she would have liked to mention a few, but not ungraciously; she and the German lady kept smiling across the table, and trying detached vocables of their respective tongues upon each other.
The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but was in Ansbach on an affair of business; he asked March if he were not going to see the manoeuvres somewhere. Till now the manoeuvres had merely been the interesting background of their travel; but now, hearing that the Emperor of Germany, the King of Saxony, the Regent of Bavaria, and the King of Wurtemberg, the Grand-Dukes of Weimar and Baden, with visiting potentates of all sorts, and innumerable lesser highhotes, foreign and domestic, were to be present, Mrs. March resolved that they must go to at least one of the reviews.
“If you go to Frankfort, you can see the King of Italy too,” said the Bavarian, but he owned that they probably could not get into a hotel there, and he asked why they should not go to Wurzburg, where they could see all the sovereigns except the King of Italy.
“Wurzburg? Wurzburg?” March queried of his wife. “Where did we hear of that place?”
“Isn’t it where Burnamy said Mr. Stoller had left his daughters at school?”
“So it is! And is that on the way to the Rhine?” he asked the Bavarian.
“No, no! Wurzburg is on the Main, about five hours from Ansbach. And it is a very interesting place. It is where the good wine comes from.”
“Oh, yes,” said March, and in their rooms his wife got out all their guides and maps and began to inform herself and to inform him about Wurzburg. But first she said it was very cold and he must order some fire made in the tall German stove in their parlor. The maid who came said “Gleich,” but she did not come back, and about the time they were getting furious at her neglect, they began getting warm. He put his hand on the stove and found it hot; then he looked down for a door in the stove where he might shut a damper; there was no door.
“Good heavens!” he shouted. “It’s like something in a dream,” and he ran to pull the bell for help.
“No, no! Don’t ring! It will make us ridiculous. They’ll think Americans don’t know anything. There must be some way of dampening the stove; and if there isn’t, I’d rather suffocate than give myself away.” Mrs. March ran and opened the window, while her husband carefully examined the stove at every point, and explored the pipe for the damper in vain. “Can’t you find it?” The night wind came in raw and damp, and threatened to blow their lamp out, and she was obliged to shut the window.
“Not a sign of it. I will go down and ask the landlord in strict confidence how they dampen their stoves in Ansbach.”
“Well, if you must. It’s getting hotter every moment.” She followed him timorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp, turned low for the night.
He looked at his watch; it was eleven o’clock. “I’m afraid they’re all in bed.”
“Yes; you mustn’t go! We must try to find out for ourselves. What can that door be for?”
It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in the wall near their room, and it yielded to his pull. “Get a candle,” he whispered, and when she brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway.
“Oh, do you think you’d better?” she hesitated.
“You can come, too, if you’re afraid. You’ve always said you wanted to die with me.”
“Well. But you go first.”
He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway. “Just come in here, a moment.” She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half the height of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down where in one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in a grin of derision. This grin was the damper of their stove, and this was where the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive, and was still joyously chuckling to itself. “I think that Munich man was wrong. I don’t believe we beat the Germans in anything. There isn’t a hotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, and every one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to the convenience of kindling a fire in it.”
L.
After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a rainy morning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the long-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see the passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres. They were troops of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through the groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they took the steady downpour on their dripping helmets. Some of them were smoking, but none smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid on the sidewalk. An old officer halted his staff to scold a citizen who had given him a mistaken direction. The shame of the erring man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less, though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used them with equal scorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round on horseback behind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them amused himself by turning the silver bangles on his wrist.
Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridge spanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way to the market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St. Gumpertus. The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemed to be also a fair, with peasants’ clothes and local pottery for sale, as well as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old women squatting before them. It was all as picturesque as the markets used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back. Her laugh reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid. When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil the soldiering leaves them to.
He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the street under their windows. A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a corseted officer’s, from time to time came out of the house across the way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there. Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and disappeared with them in-doors. Once she paused from her work to joke with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.
“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. March. “I think it’s good exercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fat fellows at the window. I suppose she’ll saw the wood in the cellar, and then lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves’ dressing-rooms.”
“Don’t laugh! It’s too disgraceful.”
“Well, I don’t know! If you like, I’ll offer these gentlemen across the way your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller.”
“I wish you’d offer my opinion of them. They’ve been staring in here with an opera-glass.”
“Ah, that’s a different affair. There isn’t much going on in Ansbach, and they have to make the most of it.”
The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set at right angles with them, and nothing which
went on in the streets was lost. Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare moments they lay full of sun. At such times the Marches were puzzled by the sight of citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they had forgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the brief respites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to dry them; and some other sights remained baffling to the last. Once a man with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidly after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows; but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew. Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station: a young man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking old woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting question whether she was the young man’s servant in her best clothes, or merely his mother.
Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression of the courtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In the little ex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborly interest in the curiosity of strangers which endears Italian witness. The white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying “Gleich!” instead of “Subito!” The architecture of the houses was a party to the illusion. St. Johannis, like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sort of Teutonized renaissance.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 690
