Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, now, what are you going to do the rest of the day?” asked the consul at last, with a look at his watch. “As I understand it, you ‘re going to spend it with me, somehow. The question is, how would you like to spend it?”

  “This is a handsome offer, Davis; but I don’t see how I’m to manage exactly,” replied the colonel, for the first time distinctly recalling the memory of Mrs. Kenton. “My wife wouldn’t know what had become of me, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, she would,” retorted the consul, with a bachelor’s ignorant ease of mind on a point of that kind. “We’ll go round and take her with us.”

  The colonel gravely shook his head. “She wouldn’t go, old fellow. She’s in for a day’s rest and odd jobs. I’ll tell you what, I’ll just drop round and let her know I’ve found you, and then come back again. You’ll dine with us, won’t you?” Colonel Kenton had not always found old comradeship a bond between Mrs. Kenton and his friends, but he believed he could safely chance it with Davis, whom she had always rather liked, — with such small regard as a lady’s devotion to her husband leaves her for his friends.

  “Oh, I’ll dine with you fast enough,” said his friend. “But why don’t you send a note to Mrs. Kenton to say that we’ll be round together, and save yourself the bother? Did you come here alone?”

  “Bless your heart, no! I forgot him. The poor devil’s out there, cooling his heels on your stairs all this time. I came with a complete guide to Vienna. Can’t you let him in out of the weather a minute?”

  “We’ll have him in, so that he can take your note back; but he doesn’t expect to be decently treated: they don’t, here. You just sit down and write it,” said the consul, pushing the colonel into his own chair before his desk; and when the colonel had superscribed his note, he called in the Lohndiener, — patient, hat in hand, — and, “Where are you stopping?” he asked the colonel.

  “Oh, I forgot that. At the Kaiserin Elisabeth. I’ll just write it” —

  “Never mind; we’ll tell him where to take it. See here,” added the consul in a serviceable Viennese German of his own construction. “Take this to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, quick;” and as the man looked up in a dull surprise, “Do you hear? The Kaiserin Elisabeth!”

  “I don’t know what it is about that hotel,” said the colonel, when the man had meekly bowed himself away, with a hat that swept the ground in honor of a handsome drink-money; “but the mention of it always seems to awaken some sort of reluctance in the minds of the lower classes. Our driver wanted to enter into conversation with me about it this morning at three o’clock, and I had to be pretty short with him. If you don’t know the language, it isn’t so difficult to be short in German as I’ve heard. And another curious thing is that Bradshaw says the Kaiserin Elisabeth has a table d’hôte, and the head-waiter says she hasn’t, and never did have.”

  “Oh, you can’t trust anybody in Europe,” said the consul sententiously. “I’d leave Bradshaw and the waiter to fight it out among themselves. We’ll get back in time to order a dinner; it’s always better, and then we can dine alone, and have a good time.”

  “They couldn’t keep us from having a good time at a table d’hôte, even. But I don’t mind.”

  By this time they had got on their hats and coats and sallied forth. They first went to a café and had some of that famous Viennese coffee; and then they went to the imperial and municipal arsenals, and viewed those collections of historical bricabrac, including the head of the unhappy Turkish general who was strangled by his sovereign because he failed to take Vienna in 1683. This from familiarity had no longer any effect upon the consul, but it gave Colonel Kenton prolonged pause. “I should have preferred a subordinate position in the sultan’s army, I believe,” he said. “Why, Davis, what a museum we could have had out of the Army of the Potomac alone, if Lincoln had been as particular as that sultan!”

  From the arsenals they went to visit the parade-ground of the garrison, and came in time to see a manœuvre of the troops, at which they looked with the frank respect and reserved superiority with which our veterans seem to regard the military of Europe. Then they walked about and noted the principal monuments of the city, and strolled along the promenades and looked at the handsome officers and the beautiful women. Colonel Kenton admired the life and the gay movement everywhere; since leaving Paris he had seen nothing so much like New York. But he did not like their shovelling up the snow into carts everywhere and dumping all that fine sleighing into the Danube. “By the way,” said his friend, “let’s go over into Leopoldstadt, and see if we can’t scare up a sleigh for a little turn in the suburbs.”

  “It’s getting late, isn’t it?” asked the colonel.

  “Not so late as it looks. You know we haven’t the high American sun, here.”

  Colonel Kenton was having such a good time that he felt no trouble about his wife, sitting over her mending in the Kaiserin Elisabeth; and he yielded joyfully, thinking how much she would like to hear about the suburbs of Vienna: a husband will go through almost any pleasure in order to give his wife an entertaining account of it afterwards; besides, a bachelor companionship is confusing: it makes many things appear right and feasible which are perhaps not so. It was not till their driver, who had turned out of the beaten track into a wayside drift to make room for another vehicle, attempted to regain the road by too abrupt a movement, and the shafts of their sledge responded with a loud crick-crack, that Colonel Kenton perceived the error into which he had suffered himself to be led. At three miles’ distance from the city, and with the winter twilight beginning to fall, he felt the pang of a sudden remorse. It grew sorer with every homeward step and with each successive failure to secure a conveyance for their return. In fine, they trudged back to Leopoldstadt, where an absurd series of discomfitures awaited them in their attempts to get a fiacre over into the main city. They visited all the stands known to the consul, and then they were obliged to walk. But they were not tired, and they made their distance so quickly that Colonel Kenton’s spirits rose again. He was able for the first time to smile at their misadventure, and some misgivings as to how Mrs. Kenton might stand affected towards a guest under the circumstances yielded to the thought of how he should make her laugh at them both. “Good old Davis!” mused the colonel, and affectionately linked his arm through that of his friend; and they stamped through the brilliantly lighted streets gay with uniforms and the picturesque costumes with which the Levant at Vienna encounters the London and Paris fashions. Suddenly the consul arrested their movement. “Didn’t you say you were stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth?”

  “Why, yes; certainly.”

  “Well, it’s just around the corner, here.” The consul turned him about, and in another minute they walked under an archway into a court-yard, and were met by the portier at the door of his room with an inquiring obeisance.

  Colonel Kenton started. The cap and the cap-band were the same, and it was to all intents and purposes the same portier who had bowed him away in the morning; but the face was different. On noting this fact Colonel Kenton observed so general a change in the appointments and even architecture of the place that, “Old fellow,” he said to the consul, “you’ve made a little mistake; this isn’t the Kaiserin Elisabeth.”

  The consul referred the matter to the portier. Perfectly; that was the Kaiserin Elisabeth. “Well, then,” said the colonel, “tell him to have us shown to my room.” The portier discovered a certain embarrassment when the colonel’s pleasure was made known to him, and ventured something in reply which made the consul smile.

  “Look here, Kenton,” he said, “you’ve made a little mistake, this time. You’re not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth!”

  “Oh, pshaw! Come now! Don’t bring the consular dignity so low as to enter into a practical joke with a hotel porter. It won’t do. We got into Vienna this morning at three, and drove straight to the Kaiserin Elisabeth. We had a room and fire, and breakfast about noon. Tell him who I am, and what I say.”


  The consul did so, the portier slowly and respectfully shaking his head at every point. When it came to the name, he turned to his books, and shook his head yet more impressively. Then he took down a letter, spelled its address, and handed it to the colonel; it was his own note to Mrs. Kenton. That quite crushed him. He looked at it in a dull, mechanical way, and nodded his head with compressed lips. Then he scanned the portier, and glanced round once more at the bedevilled architecture. “Well,” said he, at last, “there’s a mistake somewhere. Unless there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths — . Davis, ask him if there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths.”

  The consul compassionately put the question, received with something like grief by the portier. Impossible!

  “Then I’m not stopping at either of them,” continued the colonel. “So far, so good, — if you want to call it good. The question is now, if I’m not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth,” he demanded, with sudden heat, and raising his voice, “how the devil did I get there?”

  The consul at this broke into a fit of laughter so violent that the portier retired a pace or two from these maniacs, and took up a safe position within his doorway. “You didn’t — you didn’t — get there!” shrieked the consul. “That’s what made the whole trouble. You — you meant well, but you got somewhere else.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped the tears from his eyes.

  The colonel did not laugh; he had no real pleasure in the joke. On the contrary, he treated it as a serious business. “Very well,” said he, “it will be proved next that I never told that driver to take me to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, as it appears that I never got there and am not stopping there. Will you be good enough to tell me,” he asked, with polished sarcasm, “where I am stopping, and why, and how?’

  “I wish with all my heart I could,” gasped his friend, catching his breath, “but I can’t, and the only way is to go round to the principal hotels till we hit the right one. It won’t take long. Come!” He passed his arm through that of the colonel, and made an explanation to the portier, as if accounting for the vagaries of some harmless eccentric he had in charge. Then he pulled his friend gently away, who yielded after a survey of the portier and the court-yard with a frown in which an indignant sense of injury quite eclipsed his former bewilderment. He had still this defiant air when they came to the next hotel, and used the portier with so much severity on finding that he was not stopping there, either, that the consul was obliged to protest: “If you behave in that way, Kenton, I won’t go with you. The man’s perfectly innocent of your stopping at the wrong place; and some of these hotel people know me, and I won’t stand your bullying them. And I tell you what: you’ve got to let me have my laugh out, too. You know the thing’s perfectly ridiculous, and there’s no use putting any other face on it.” The consul did not wait for leave to have his laugh out, but had it out in a series of furious gusts. At last the colonel himself joined him ruefully.

  “Of course,” said he, “I know I’m an ass, and I wouldn’t mind it on my own account. I would as soon roam round after that hotel the rest of the night as not, but I can’t help feeling anxious about my wife. I’m afraid she’ll be getting very uneasy at my being gone so long. She’s all alone, there, wherever it is, and—”

  “Well, but she’s got your note. She’ll understand—”

  “What a fool you are, Davis! There’s my note!” cried the colonel, opening his fist and showing a very small wad of paper in his palm. “She’d have got my note if she’d been at the Kaiserin Elisabeth; but she’s no more there than I am.”

  “Oh!” said his friend, sobered at this. “To be sure! Well?”

  “Well, it’s no use trying to tell a man like you; but I suppose that she’s simply distracted by this time. You don’t know what a woman is, and how she can suffer about a little matter when she gives her mind to it.”

  “Oh!” said the consul again, very contritely. “I’m very sorry I laughed; but” — here he looked into the colonel’s gloomy face with a countenance contorted with agony— “this only makes it the more ridiculous, you know;” and he reeled away, drunk with the mirth which filled him from head to foot. But he repented again, and with a superhuman effort so far subdued his transports as merely to quake internally, and tremble all over, as he led the way to the next hotel, arm in arm with the bewildered and embittered colonel. He encouraged the latter with much genuine sympathy, and observed a proper decorum in his interviews with one portier after another, formulating the colonel’s story very neatly, and explaining at the close that this American Herr, who had arrived at Vienna before daylight and directed his driver to take him to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and had left his hotel at one o’clock in the belief that it was the Kaiserin Elisabeth, felt now an added eagerness to know what his hotel really was from the circumstance that his wife was there quite alone and in probable distress at his long absence. At first Colonel Kenton took a lively interest in this statement of his case, and prompted the consul with various remarks and sub-statements; he was grateful for the compassion generally shown him by the portiers, and he strove with himself to give some account of the exterior and locality of his mysterious hotel. But the fact was that he had not so much as looked behind him when he quitted it, and knew nothing about its appearance; and gradually the reiteration of the points of his misadventure to one portier after another began to be as “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” His personation of an American Herr in great trouble of mind was an entire failure, except as illustrating the national apathy of countenance when under the influence of strong emotion. He ceased to take part in the consul’s efforts in his behalf; the whole abominable affair seemed as far beyond his forecast or endeavor as some result of malign enchantment, and there was no such thing as carrying off the tragedy with self-respect. Distressing as it was, there could be no question but it was entirely ridiculous; he hung his head with shame before the portiers at being a party to it; he no longer felt like resenting Davis’s amusement; he only wondered that he could keep his face in relating the idiotic mischance. Each successive failure to discover his lodging confirmed him in his humiliation and despair. Very likely there was a way out of the difficulty, but he did not know it. He became at last almost an indifferent spectator of the consul’s perseverance. He began to look back with incredulity at the period of his life passed before entering the fatal fiacre that morning. He received the final portier’s rejection with something like a personal derision.

  “That’s the last place I can think of,” said the consul, wiping his brow as they emerged from the court-yard, for he had grown very warm with walking so much.

  “Oh, all right,” said the colonel languidly.

  “But we won’t give it up. Let’s go in here and get some coffee, and think it over a bit.” They were near one of the principal cafés, which was full of people smoking, and drinking the Viennese mélange out of tumblers.

  “By all means,” assented Colonel Kenton with inconsequent courtliness, “think it over. It’s all that’s left us.”

  Matters did not look so dark, quite, after a tumbler of coffee with milk, but they did not continue to brighten so much as they ought with the cigars. “Now let us go through the facts of the case,” said the consul, and the colonel wearily reproduced his original narrative with every possible circumstance. “But you know all about it,” he concluded. “I don’t see any end of it. I don’t see but I’m to spend the rest of my life in hunting up a hotel that professes to be the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and isn’t. I never knew anything like it.”

  “It certainly has the charm of novelty,” gloomily assented the consul: it must be owned that his gloom was a respectful feint. “I have heard of men running away from their hotels, but I never did hear of a hotel running away from a man before now. Yes — hold on! I have, too. Aladdin’s palace — and with Mrs. Aladdin in it, at that! It’s a parallel case.” Here he abandoned himself as usual, while Colonel Kenton viewed his mirth with a dreary grin. When he at last caught his breath, “I
beg your pardon, I do, indeed,” the consul implored. “I know just how you feel, but of course it’s coming out right. We’ve been to all the hotels I know of, but there must be others. We’ll get some more names and start at once; and if the genie has dropped your hotel anywhere this side of Africa we shall find it. If the worst comes to the worst, you can stay at my house to-night and start new to-m — Oh, I forgot! — Mrs. Kenton! Really, the whole thing is such an amusing muddle that I can’t seem to get over it.” He looked at Kenton with tears in his eyes, but contained himself and decorously summoned a waiter, who brought him whatever corresponds to a city directory in Vienna. “There!” he said, when he had copied into his note-book a number of addresses, “I don’t think your hotel will escape us this time;” and discharging his account he led the way to the door, Colonel Kenton listlessly following.

  The wretched husband was now suffering all the anguish of a just remorse, and the heartlessness of his behavior in going off upon his own pleasure the whole afternoon and leaving his wife alone in a strange hotel to pass the time as she might was no less a poignant reproach, because it seemed so inconceivable in connection with what he had always taken to be the kindness and unselfishness of his character. We all know the sensation; and I know none, on the whole, so disagreeable, so little flattering, so persistent when once it has established itself in the ill-doer’s consciousness. To find out that you are not so good or generous or magnanimous as you thought is, next to having other people find it out, probably the unfriendliest discovery that can be made. But I suppose it has its uses. Colonel Kenton now saw the unhandsomeness of his leaving his wife at all, and he beheld in its true light his shabbiness in not going back to tell her he had found his old friend and was to bring him to dinner. The Lohndiener would of course have taken him straight to his hotel, and he would have been spared this shameful exposure, which, he knew well enough, Davis would never forget, but would tell all his life with an ever-increasing garniture of fiction. He cursed his weakness in allowing himself to dawdle about those arsenals and that parade-ground, and to be so far misguided by a hardened bachelor as to admire certain yellow-haired German and black-haired Hungarian women on the promenade; when he came to think of going out in that sledge, it was with anathema maranatha. He groaned in spirit, but he owned that he was rightly punished, though it seemed hard that his wife should be punished too. And then he went on miserably to figure first her slight surprise at his being gone so long; then her vague uneasiness and her conjectures; then her dawning apprehensions and her helplessness; her probable sending to the consulate to find out what had become of him; her dismay at learning nothing of him there; her waiting and waiting in wild dismay as the moments and hours went by; her frenzied running to the door at every step and her despair when it proved not his. He had seen her suffering from less causes. And where was she? In what low, shabby tavern had he left her? He choked with rage and grief, and could hardly speak to the gentleman, a naturalized fellow-citizen of Vienna, to whom he found the consul introducing him.