LX.
All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common to them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors in them one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palaces themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of the average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.
As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was Goethe’s friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringing Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story of that great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as a palace can.
There are certain Poets’ Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian things. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country; they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At best it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority, the make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful and ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue each other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show of equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a free republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he was one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no sign, and the poet’s friendship with the prince has passed smoothly into history as one of the things that might really be. They worked and played together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, each on his own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not being there which probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity.
A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table where they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by the consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were children. The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which are still mouldering there.
This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe, although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. It seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but they enabled her to verify with the custodian’s help certain royal intermarriages which she had been in doubt about before.
Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over, scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays.
The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines and clipped trees which formed the coulisses. There was a grassy space for the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicircular gradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honored spectators sat. Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and if ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, it must have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the drama is native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air of modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact. It would be difficult to be Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining, but March held that with Goethe’s help it might have been done at Weimar, and his wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theater that the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put together a sheaf of the flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs. March for a souvenir.
They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from another eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below. In a moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spirits sank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had not asked for coffee. Most of the people about them were taking beer, including the pretty girls of a young ladies’ school, who were there with their books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers, apparently for the afternoon.
Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their books or their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she followed the glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a table somewhat obliquely to the left. These were apparently a mother and daughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back to Mrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them. They were both smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself from the waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if to make sure that every one saw her smiling.
Mrs. March felt her husband’s gaze following her own, and she had just time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, “Good gracious! It’s the pivotal girl!”
At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man, who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out of the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs. March could almost have touched him.
She had just strength to say, “Well, my dear! That was the cut direct.”
She said this in order to have her husband reassure her. “Nonsense! He never saw us. Why didn’t you speak to him?”
“Speak to him? I never shall speak to him again. No! This is the last of Mr. Burnamy for me. I shouldn’t have minded his not recognizing us, for, as you say, I don’t believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that’s all I wish to know of him. Don’t you try to look him up, Basil! I’m glad-yes, I’m glad he doesn’t know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves to suffer, and I hope he’ll keep on suffering: You were quite right, my dear — and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don’t call it more than instinct) — not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don’t want you ever should.”
She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him impatiently to their carriage.
At last he got a chance to say, “I don’t think I can quite promise that; my mind’s been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall tell him.”
“What! After you’ve seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then, you won’t, my dear; that’s all! He’s behaving very basely to Agatha.”
> “What’s his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my duty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to his behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as you know, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused him outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible conditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don’t blame him.”
“Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!” cried Mrs. March.
“Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with one pretty girl from another. It’s what men have been doing from the beginning of time.”
“Oh, I dare say!”
“Men,” he went on, “are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly. They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had him first; and I’m all for her.”
LXI.
Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself. While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless of her rights came with it. He had done his best to make her think him in love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise to write to him from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished still less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that she had not promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to such fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentment with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.
It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing over the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the multitude of Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at the ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of the floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charming even to Burnamy’s lack-lustre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafe with a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he supped there, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged and brayed round him unheeded.
Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, “May I sit at your table?” and he saw an ironical face looking down on him. “There doesn’t seem any other place.”
“Why, Mr. March!” Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him, but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last, just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.
March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament of lanterns. “This is pretty,” he said, “mighty pretty. I shall make Mrs. March sorry for not coming, when I go back.”
“Is Mrs. March — she is — with you — in Weimar?” Burnamy asked stupidly.
March forbore to take advantage of him. “Oh, yes. We saw you out at Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant not to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little flights.”
“I never dreamed of your being there — I never saw—” Burnamy began.
“Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was looking very pretty. Have you been here some time?”
“Not long. A week or so. I’ve been at the parade at Wurzburg.”
“At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is! We were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was a great crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?” A waiter had come up, and was standing at March’s elbow. “I suppose I mustn’t sit here without ordering something?”
“White wine and selters,” said Burnamy vaguely.
“The very thing! Why didn’t I think of it? It’s a divine drink: it satisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home, in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen ‘Every Other Week’ lately?”
“No,” said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.
“We’ve just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in it that I rather like.” March laughed to see the young fellow’s face light up with joyful consciousness. “Come round to my hotel, after you’re tired here, and I’ll let you see it. There’s no hurry. Did you notice the little children with their lanterns, as you came along? It’s the gentlest effect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French themselves couldn’t have minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day of their disaster. You ought to get something out of that, and I’ve got a subject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He and his mother were at Wurzburg; I’m sorry to say the poor little chap didn’t seem very well. They’ve gone to Holland for the sea air.” March had been talking for quantity in compassion of the embarrassment in which Burnamy seemed bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the young fellow merely because he liked him. So far as he could make out, Burnamy had been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they had met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logically defended to Mrs. March that he resumed. “We found another friend of yours in Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller.”
“Mr. Stoller?” Burnamy faintly echoed.
“Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres; and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the parade with his family but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death of General Triscoe.”
Again Burnamy echoed him. “General Triscoe?”
“Ah, yes: I didn’t tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had come on with Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby — you remember Kenby, On the Norumbia? — Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party; and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him and his girls.”
Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He did not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “I have a message for you from Mr. Stoller.”
“For me?” Burnamy gasped.
“I’ve been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn’t expected to see you. But it’s simply this: he wants you to know — and he seemed to want me to know — that he doesn’t hold you accountable in the way he did. He’s thought it all over, and he’s decided that he had no right to expect you to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of knowledge. As he said, he doesn’t
choose to plead the baby act. He says that you’re all right, and your place on the paper is open to you.”
Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for instant response. “I think he’s wrong,” he said, so harshly that the people at the next table looked round. “His feeling as he does has nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn’t let me out.”
March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, “I think you’re quite right, as to that. But there’s such a thing as forgiveness, you know. It doesn’t change the nature of what you’ve done; but as far as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it.”
“Yes, I understand that. But I can’t accept his forgiveness if I hate him.”
“But perhaps you won’t always hate him. Some day you may have a chance to do him a good turn. It’s rather banale; but there doesn’t seem any other way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to get that poem?”
When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had stood talking.
“No, thank you,” said the elder, “I don’t propose sitting up all night, and you’ll excuse me if I go to bed now. It’s a little informal to leave a guest—”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 697
