Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and gone, and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and kingdoms enough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated by the presence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony, grand-ducal Baden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates among those who speak the beautiful language of the Ja.

  But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supreme place which they had at once taken in Mrs. March’s fancy. The potentates were all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops had built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to come down from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city, and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had come up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after year, in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the most sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally in Wurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched in a period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modern Protestantism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are now of the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to the Catholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to the baroque.

  As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very well with but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymaking known outside of the colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch. The prince-bishops had their finger in everybody’s pie, and they portioned out the cakes and ale, which were made according to formulas of their own. The distractions were all of a religious character; churches, convents, monasteries, abounded; ecclesiastical processions and solemnities were the spectacles that edified if they did not amuse the devout population.

  It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all this spiritual severity that one of the greatest modern scientific discoveries should have been made in Wurzburg, and that the Roentgen rays should now be giving her name a splendor destined to eclipse the glories of her past.

  Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so; or at least that the name of Roentgen would ever lend more lustre to his city than that of Longfellow’s Walther von der Vogelweide. She was no less surprised than pleased to realize that this friend of the birds was a Wurzburger, and she said that their first pilgrimage in the morning should be to the church where he lies buried.

  LIII.

  March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned, and left her to have her coffee in her room. He got a pleasant table in the gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape, though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain, had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light. The waiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with a card which he insisted was for March. It was not till he put on his glasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all to agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

  “Well,” he said, “why wasn’t this card sent up last night?”

  The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card, after asking March’s nationality, and was then breakfasting in the next room. March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, and Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him.

  “I thought it must be you,” he called out, joyfully, as they struck their extended hands together, “but so many people look alike, nowadays, that I don’t trust my eyes any more.”

  Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsic and partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty German. As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slipped down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres. He added that he supposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quite unembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without heeding March’s answer, he laughed and added: “Of course, I know she must have told Mrs. March all about it.”

  March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife’s absence he felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit.

  “I don’t give it up, you know,” Kenby went on, with perfect ease. “I’m not a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old.”

  “At my age I don’t,” March put in, and they roared together, in men’s security from the encroachments of time.

  “But she happens to be the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to marry, for more than a few days at a stretch. You know how it is with us.”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” said March, and they shouted again.

  “We’re in love, and we’re out of love, twenty times. But this isn’t a mere fancy; it’s a conviction. And there’s no reason why she shouldn’t marry me.”

  March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby. “You mean the boy,” he said. “Well, I like Rose,” and now March really felt swept from his feet. “She doesn’t deny that she likes me, but she seems to think that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, it will only give me to him. As for devoting her whole life to him, she couldn’t do a worse thing for him. What the boy needs is a man’s care, and a man’s will — Good heavens! You don’t think I could ever be unkind to the little soul?” Kenby threw himself forward over the table.

  “My dear fellow!” March protested.

  “I’d rather cut off my right hand!” Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then he said, with a humorous drop: “The fact is, I don’t believe I should want her so much if I couldn’t have Rose too. I want to have them both. So far, I’ve only got no for an answer; but I’m not going to keep it. I had a letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and—”

  The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver, which March knew must be from his wife. “What is keeping you so?” she wrote. “I am all ready.” “It’s from Mrs. March,” he explained to Kenby. “I am going out with her on some errands. I’m awfully glad to see you again. We must talk it all over, and you must — you mustn’t — Mrs. March will want to see you later — I — Are you in the hotel?”

  “Oh yes. I’ll see you at the one-o’clock table d’hote, I suppose.”

  March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he should tell his wife at once of Kenby’s presence, or leave her free for the pleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe and acceptable form. She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps and umbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

  “Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them. This is to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance to bother; the more strangers the better. Wurzburg is richer than anything I imagined. I’ve looked it all up; I’ve got the plan of the city, so that we can easily find the way. We’ll walk first, and take carriages whenever we get tired. We’ll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp of rococo to begin with; there wasn’t half enough of it at Ansbach. Isn’t it strange how we’ve come round to it?”

  She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obediently imbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel and courtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him in devout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the rococo.

  “What biddable little things we were!” she went on, while March was struggling to keep Kenby in the background of his consciousness. “The rococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we were pinning our faith to pointed arches; and yet I suppose we were perfectly sincere. Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!” They were now making their way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the street leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the door of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; her body twisting to show the sculptor’s mastery of anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays.
In fact, the Virgin’s whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in her arms. “Isn’t she delightful?”

  “I see what you mean,” said March, with a dubious glance at the statue, “but I’m not sure, now, that I wouldn’t like something quieter in my Madonnas.”

  The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with the cathedral ending the prospective, was full of the holiday so near at hand. The narrow sidewalks were thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and up the middle of the street detachments of military came and went, halting the little horse-cars and the huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed to have the sole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jingling or thundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselves round the corners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flattening themselves like posters against the house walls. There were peasants, men and women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country life had kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were citizens in the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were soldiers of all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time there were pretty young girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare arms gloved to the elbows, who were following a holiday custom of the place in going about the streets in ball costume. The shop windows were filled with portraits of the Emperor and the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies of his family; the German and Bavarian colors draped the facades of the houses and festooned the fantastic Madonnas posing above so many portals. The modern patriotism included the ancient piety without disturbing it; the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovereignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

  The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior came together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was, unimpeachably perfect in its way, “Just,” March murmured to his wife, “as the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is to find the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder how much the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo, too! Look at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What magnificent swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the baroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though. But how you long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth.”

  “I don’t,” she whispered back. “I’m perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I like to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I am consistent.”

  She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for Longfellow’s. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows, which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by a broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the Meistersinger’s feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

  She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. “You are right! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can’t enjoy Gothic here any more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg.”

  Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountain near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould, and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the square without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the Proserpine.

  It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city’s past seemed to culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

  “Why didn’t we have something like all this on our first wedding journey?” she sighed at last. “To think of our battening from Boston to Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!”

  “Niagara wasn’t so bad,” he said, “and I will never go back on Quebec.”

  “Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a compensation for our lost youth. But I can’t enjoy it as I could when I was young. It’s wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them.”

  “They wouldn’t care for it,” he replied, and upon a daring impulse he added, “Kenby and Mrs. Adding might.” If she took this suggestion in good part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

  “Don’t speak of them! They’re in just that besotted early middle-age when life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence. Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes.” She rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded terrace in the background which had tempted her.

  “It isn’t so bad, being elderly,” he said. “By that time we have accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations. We have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where we are at.”

  “I don’t mind being elderly. The world’s just as amusing as ever, and lots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It’s the getting more than elderly; it’s the getting old; and then—”

  They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he said, “Perhaps there’s something else, something better — somewh
ere.”

  They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued fountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat little urchin-groups on the stone coping. “I don’t want cherubs, when I can have these putti. And those old prince-bishops didn’t, either!”