Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  AT THE SIGN OF THE SAVAGE.

  As they bowled along in the deliberate German express train through the Black Forest, Colonel Kenton said he had only two things against the region: it was not black, and it was not a forest. He had all his life heard of the Black Forest, and he hoped he knew what it was. The inhabitants burned charcoal, high up the mountains, and carved toys in the winter when shut in by the heavy snows; they had Easter eggs all the year round, with overshot mill-wheels in the valleys, and cherry-trees all about, always full of blossoms or ripe fruit, just as you liked to think. They were very poor people, but very devout, and lived in little villages on a friendly intimacy with their cattle. The young women of these hamlets had each a long braid of yellow hair down her back, blue eyes, and a white bodice with a cat’s-cradle lacing behind; the men had bell-crowned hats and spindle-legs: they buttoned the breath out of their bodies with round pewter buttons on tight, short crimson waistcoats.

  “Now, here,” said the colonel, breathing on the window of the car and rubbing a little space clear of the frost, “I see nothing of the sort. Either I have been imposed upon by what I have heard of the Black Forest, or this is not the Black Forest. I’m inclined to believe that there is no Black Forest, and never was. There isn’t,” he added, looking again, so as not to speak hastily, “a charcoal-burner, or an Easter egg, or a cherry blossom, or a yellow braid, or a red waistcoat, to enliven the whole desolate landscape. What are we to think of it, Bessie?”

  Mrs. Kenton, who sat opposite, huddled in speechless comfort under her wraps and rugs, and was just trying to decide in her own mind whether it was more delicious to let her feet, now that they were thoroughly warm, rest upon the carpet-covered cylinder of hot water, or hover just a hair’s breadth above it without touching it, answered a little impatiently that she did not know. In ordinary circumstances she would not have been so short with the colonel’s nonsense. She thought that was the way all men talked when they got well acquainted with you; and, as coming from a sex incapable of seriousness, she could have excused it if it had not interrupted her in her solution of so nice a problem. Colonel Kenton, however, did not mind. He at once possessed himself of much more than his share of the cylinder, extorting a cry of indignation from his wife, who now saw herself reduced from a fastidious choice of luxuries to a mere vulgar strife for the necessaries of life, — a thing any woman abhors.

  “Well, well,” said the colonel, “keep your old hot-water bottle. If there was any other way of warming my feet, I wouldn’t touch it. It makes me sick to use it; I feel as if the doctor was going to order me some boneset tea. Give me a good red-hot patent car-heater, that smells enough of burning iron to make your head ache in a minute, and sets your car on fire as soon as it rolls over the embankment. That’s what I call comfort. A hot-water bottle shoved under your feet — I should suppose I was a woman, and a feeble one at that. I’ll tell you what I think about this Black Forest business, Bessie: I think it’s part of a system of deception that runs through the whole German character. I have heard the Germans praised for their sincerity and honesty, but I tell you they have got to work hard to convince me of it, from this out. I am on my guard. I am not going to be taken in any more.”

  It became the colonel’s pleasure to develop and exemplify this idea at all points of their progress through Germany. They were going to Italy, and as Mrs. Kenton had had enough of the sea in coming to Europe, they were going to Italy by the only all-rail route then existing, — from Paris to Vienna, and so down through the Simmering to Trieste and Venice. Wherever they stopped, whatever they did before reaching Vienna, Colonel Kenton chose to preserve his guarded attitude. “Ah, they pretend this is Stuttgart, do they?” he said on arriving at the Suabian capital. “A likely story! They pretended that was the Black Forest, you know, Bessie.” At Munich, “And this is Munich!” he sneered, whenever the conversation flagged during their sojourn. “It’s outrageous, the way they let these swindling little towns palm themselves off upon the traveller for cities he’s heard of. This place will be calling itself Berlin, next.” When his wife, guide-book in hand, was struggling to heat her admiration at some cold history of Kaulbach, and in her failure clinging fondly to the fact that Kaulbach had painted it, “Kaulbach!” the colonel would exclaim, and half close his eyes and slowly nod his head and smile. “What guide-book is that you’ve got, Bessie?” looking curiously at the volume he knew so well. “Oh! — Baedeker! And are you going to let a Black Forest Dutchman like Baedeker persuade you that this daub is by Kaulbach? Come! That’s a little too much!” He rejected the birthplaces of famous persons one and all; they could not drive through a street or into a park, whose claims to be this or that street or park he did not boldly dispute; and he visited a pitiless incredulity upon the dishes of the table d’hôte, concerning which he always answered his wife’s questions: “Oh, he says it’s beef,” or veal, or fowl, as the case might be; and though he never failed to relish his own dinner, strange fears began to affect the appetite of Mrs. Kenton. It happened that he never did come out with these sneers before other travellers, but his wife was always expecting him to do so, and afterwards portrayed herself as ready to scream, the whole time. She was not a nervous person, and regarding the colonel’s jokes as part of the matrimonial contract, she usually bore them, as I have hinted, with severe composure; accepting them all, good, bad, and indifferent, as something in the nature of man which she should understand better after they had been married longer. The present journey was made just after the close of the war; they had seen very little of each other while he was in the army, and it had something of the fresh interest of a bridal tour. But they sojourned only a day or two in the places between Strasburg and Vienna; it was very cold and very unpleasant getting about, and they instinctively felt what every wise traveller knows, that it is folly to be lingering in Germany when you can get into Italy; and so they hurried on.

  It was nine o’clock one night when they reached Salzburg; and when their baggage had been visited and their passports examined, they had still half an hour to wait before the train went on. They profited by the delay to consider what hotel they should stop at in Vienna, and they advised with their Bradshaw on the point. This railway guide gave in its laconic fashion several hotels, and specified the Kaiserin Elisabeth as one at which there was a table d’hôte, briefly explaining that at most hotels in Vienna there was none.

  “That settles it,” said Mrs. Kenton. “We will go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, of course. I’m sure I never want the bother of ordering dinner in English, let alone German, which never was meant for human beings to speak.”

  “It’s a language you can’t tell the truth in,” said the colonel thoughtfully. “You can’t call an open country an open country; you have to call it a Black Forest.” Mrs. Kenton sighed patiently. “But I don’t know about this Kaiserin Elisabeth business. How do we know that’s the real name of the hotel? How can we be sure that it isn’t an alias, an assumed name, trumped up for the occasion? I tell you, Bessie, we can’t be too cautious as long as we’re in this fatherland of lies. What guide-book is this? Baedeker? Oh! Bradshaw. Well, that’s some comfort. Bradshaw’s an Englishman, at least. If it had been Baedeker” —

  “Oh, Edward, Edward!” Mrs. Kenton burst out. “Will you never give that up? Here you’ve been harping on it for the last four days, and worrying my life out with it. I think it’s unkind. It’s perfectly bewildering me. I don’t know where or what I am, any more.” Some tears of vexation started to her eyes, at which Colonel Kenton put the shaggy arm of his overcoat round her, and gave her an honest hug.

  “Well,” he said, “I give it up, from this out. Though I shall always say that it was a joke that wore well. And I can tell you, Bessie, that it’s no small sacrifice to give up a joke that you’ve just got into prime working order, so that you can use it on almost anything that comes up. But that’s a thing that you can never understand. Let it all pass. We’ll go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and submit to any so
rt of imposition they’ve a mind to practise upon us. I shall not breathe freely, I suppose, till we get into Italy, where people mean what they say. Haw, haw, haw!” laughed the colonel, “honest Iago’s the man I’m after.”

  The doors of the waiting-room were thrown open, and cries of “Erste Klasse! Zweite Klasse! Dritte Klasse!” summoned the variously assorted passengers to carriages of their several degrees. The colonel lifted his little wife into a non-smoking first-class carriage, and established her against the cushioned barrier dividing the two seats, so that her feet could just reach the hot-water bottle, as he called it, and tucked her in and built her up so with wraps that she was a prodigy of comfort; and then folding about him the long fur-lined coat which she had bought him at Munich (in spite of his many protests that the fur was artificial), he sat down on the seat opposite, and proudly enjoyed the perfect content that beamed from Mrs. Kenton’s face, looking so small from her heap of luxurious coverings.

  “Well, Bessie, this would be very pleasant — if you could believe in it,” he said, as the train smoothly rolled out of the station. “But of course it can’t be genuine. There must be some dodge about it. I’ve no doubt you’ll begin to feel perfectly horrid, the first thing you know.”

  Mrs. Kenton let him go on, as he did at some length, and began to drowse, while he amused himself with a gross parody of things she had said during the past four days. In those years while their wedded bliss was yet practically new, Colonel Kenton found his wife an inexhaustible source of mental refreshment. He prized beyond measure the feminine inadequacy and excess of her sayings; he had stored away such a variety of these that he was able to talk her personal parlance for an hour together; indeed, he had learned the trick of inventing phrases so much in her manner that Mrs. Kenton never felt quite safe in disowning any monstrous thing attributed to her. Her drowse now became a little nap, and presently a delicious doze, in which she drifted far away from actual circumstance into a realm where she seemed to exist as a mere airy thought of her physical self; suddenly she lost this thought, and slept through all stops at stations and all changes of the hot-water cylinder, to renew which the guard, faithful to Colonel Kenton’s bribe, alone opened the door.

  “Wake up, Bessie!” she heard her husband saying. “We’re at Vienna.”

  It seemed very improbable, but she did not dispute it. “What time is it?” she asked, as she suffered herself to be lifted from the carriage into the keen air of the winter night.

  “Three o’clock,” said the colonel, hurrying her into the waiting-room, where she sat, still somewhat remote from herself but getting nearer and nearer, while he went off about the baggage. “Now, then!” he cried cheerfully when he returned; and he led his wife out and put her into a fiacre. The driver bent from his perch and arrested the colonel, as he was getting in after Mrs. Kenton, with words in themselves unintelligible, but so probably in demand for neglected instructions that the colonel said, “Oh! Kaiserin Elisabeth!” and again bowed his head towards the fiacre door, when the driver addressed further speech to him, so diffuse and so presumably unnecessary that Colonel Kenton merely repeated, with rising impatience, “Kaiserin Elisabeth, — Kaiserin Elisabeth, I tell you!” and getting in shut the fiacre door after him.

  The driver remained a moment in mumbled soliloquy; then he smacked his whip and drove rapidly away. They were aware of nothing outside but the starlit winter morning in unknown streets, till they plunged at last under an archway and drew up at a sort of lodge door, from which issued an example of the universal gold-cap-banded continental hotel portier, so like all others in Europe that it seemed idle for him to be leading an individual existence. He took the colonel’s passport and summoned a waiter, who went bowing before them up a staircase more or less grandiose, and led them to a pleasant chamber, whither he sent directly a woman servant. She bade them a hearty good morning in her tongue, and, kneeling down before the tall porcelain stove, kindled from her apronful of blocks and sticks a fire that soon penetrated the travellers with a rich comfort. It was of course too early yet to think of breakfast, but it was fortunately not too late to think of sleep. They were both very tired, and it was almost noon when they woke. The colonel had the fire rekindled, and he ordered breakfast to be served them in their room. “Beefsteak and coffee — here!” he said, pointing to the table; and as he made Mrs. Kenton snug near the stove he expatiated in her own terms upon the perfect loveliness of the whole affair, and the touch of nature that made coffee and beefsteak the same in every language. It seemed that the Kaiserin Elisabeth knew how to serve such a breakfast in faultless taste; and they sat long over it, in that sense of sovereign satisfaction which beefsteak and coffee in your own room can best give. At last the colonel rose briskly and announced the order of the day. They were to go here, they were to stop there; they were to see this, they were to do that.

  “Nothing of the kind,” said Mrs. Kenton. “I am not going out at all to-day. It’s too cold; and if we are to push on to Trieste to-morrow, I shall need the whole day to get a little rested. Besides, I have some jobs of mending to do that can’t be put off any longer.”

  The colonel listened with an air of joyous admiration. “Bessie,” said he, “this is inspiration. I don’t want to see their old town; and I shall ask nothing better than to spend the day with you here at our own fireside. You can sew, and I — I’ll read to you, Bessie!” This was a little too gross; even Mrs. Kenton laughed at this, the act of reading being so abhorrent to Colonel Kenton’s active temperament that he was notorious for his avoidance of all literature except newspapers. In about ten minutes, passed in an agreeable idealization of his purpose, which came in that time to include the perusal of all the books on Italy he had picked up on their journey, the colonel said he would go down and ask the portier if they had the New York papers.

  When he returned, somewhat disconsolate, to say they had not, and had apparently never heard of the Herald or Tribune, his wife smiled subtly: “Then I suppose you’ll have to go to the consul’s for them.”

  “Why, Bessie, it isn’t a thing I should have suggested; I can’t bear the thoughts of leaving you here alone; but as you say! No, I’ll tell you: I’ll not go for the New York papers, but I will just step round and call upon the representative of the country — pay my respects to him, you know — if you wish it. But I’d far rather spend the time here with you, Bessie, in our cosy little boudoir; I would, indeed.”

  Mrs. Kenton now laughed outright, and — it was a tremendous sarcasm for her — asked him if he were not afraid the example of the Black Forest was becoming infectious.

  “Oh, come now, Bessie; no joking,” pleaded the colonel, in mock distress. “I’ll tell you what, my dear, the head waiter here speaks English like a — an Ollendorff; and if you get to feeling a little lonesome while I’m out, you can just ring and order something from him, you know. It will cheer you up to hear the sound of your native tongue in a foreign land. But, pshaw! I sha’nt be gone a minute!”

  By this time the colonel had got on his overcoat and gloves, and had his hat in one hand, and was leaning over his wife, resting the other hand on the back of the chair in which she sat warming the toes of her slippers at the draft of the stove. She popped him a cheery little kiss on his mustache, and gave him a small push: “Stay as long as you like, Ned. I shall not be in the least lonesome. I shall do my mending, and then I shall take a nap, and by that time it will be dinner. You needn’t come back before dinner. What hour is the table d’hôte?”

  “Oh!” cried the colonel guiltily. “The fact is, I wasn’t going to tell you, I thought it would vex you so much: there is no table d’hôte here and never was. Bradshaw has been depraved by the moral atmosphere of Germany. I’d as soon trust Baedeker after this.”

  “Well, never mind,” said Mrs. Kenton. “We can tell them to bring us what they like for dinner, and we can have it whenever we like.”

  “Bessie!” exclaimed the colonel, “I have not done justice to you, and I supposed I
had. I knew how bright and beautiful you were, but I didn’t think you were so amiable. I didn’t, indeed. This is a real surprise,” he said, getting out at the door. He opened it to add that he would be back in an hour, and then he went his way, with the light heart of a husband who has a day to himself with his wife’s full approval.

  At the consulate a still greater surprise awaited Colonel Kenton. This was the consul himself, who proved to be an old companion-in-arms, and into whose awful presence the colonel was ushered by a Hausmeister in a cocked hat and a gold-braided uniform finer than that of all the American major-generals put together. The friends both shouted “Hollo!” and “You don’t say so!” and threw back their heads and laughed.

  “Why, didn’t you know I was here?” demanded the consul when the hard work of greeting was over. “I thought everybody knew that.”

  “Oh, I knew you were rusting out in some of these Dutch towns, but I never supposed it was Vienna. But that doesn’t make any difference, so long as you are here.” At this they smacked each other on the knees, and laughed again. That carried them by a very rough point in their astonishment, and they now composed themselves to the pleasure of telling each other how they happened to be then and there, with glances at their personal history when they were making it together in the field.