"He was rather pathetic, my dear," said March, in the discomfort he knew his wife must be feeling as well as himself. "How odd to have the lid lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the witch"s caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!
And how hard to have our tariff reach out and s.n.a.t.c.h the bread from the mouths of those poor gla.s.s-workers!"
"I thought that was hard," she sighed. "It must have been his bread, too."
"Let"s hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose," he added, dreamily, "that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern activities. The Italians didn"t repel us by a.s.suming to be of our epoch in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive memories. I wonder if they"re still as charming."
"Oh, no," she returned, "nothing is as charming as it used to be. And now we need the charm more than ever."
He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were to take turns in cheering each other up. "Well, perhaps we don"t deserve it. And I"m not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were young. We"ve got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now. They made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.
Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die? We"ve got that to consider." He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a phrase.
They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope of intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impa.s.sibly dripping from their glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms. But he could not feel that these things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered his retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief book-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he wanted, and more local histories than he should ever read. He made a last effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerk if there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, and the clerk said there was not one.
He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make his meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to listen to them. She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through. The bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as little, but delicately blond. Nature had admirably mated them, and if art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride"s mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly.
Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyes without protest. But later, when they met the lovers in the street, walking arm in arm, with the bride"s mother behind them gloating upon their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed of such folly. She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest thing in life.
"Well, isn"t it?" his wife asked.
"Yes, that"s the worst of it. It shows how poverty-stricken life really is. We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be."
"I think we have been happy enough, and that we"ve had as much good as was wholesome for us," she returned, hurt.
"You"re always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will be personal, I"ll say that you"ve been as happy as you deserve, and got more good than you had any right to."
She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.
He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternal accusation of his murderess. "It"s rather hard on her, that he should be having the last word, that way," he said. "She was a woman, no matter what mistakes she had committed."
"That"s what I call "ba.n.a.le"," said Mrs. March.
"It is, rather," he confessed. "It makes me feel as if I must go to see the house of Durer, after all."
"Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later."
It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Durer"s house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they reached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly have been different in Durer"s time. His dwelling, in no way impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous and cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer"s time to take themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.
The Marches wrote their names in the visitors" book, and paid the visitor"s fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a reproduction of one of Durer"s pictures; and then they came away, by no means dissatisfied with his house. By its a.s.sociation with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse than Ariosto"s house at Ferrara, or Petrarch"s at Arqua, or Michelangelo"s at Florence. "But what I admire," he said, "is our futility in going to see it. We expected to surprise some quality of the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it; and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard to save his widow from coming to want."
"Who said she did that?"
"A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was a G.o.d-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience."
"Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going."
"Yes; but I don"t like her laying her plans to survive him; though women always do that."
They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though they would rather have been alone. They lifted their eyes for their expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.
The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter; March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of pa.s.sengers mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived at the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time.
She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; but she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No doubt she was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and she knew more, as the American wives of young American business men always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather than personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not get his feet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.
XLVII.
The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs.
March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would rather meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you could keep young by being with young people; but I don"t, now. There world is very different from ours. Our world doesn"t really exist any more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we needn"t realize it. Young people,"
she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to be; they"re quite as sentimental; but I don"t think they care so much for the higher things. They"re not so much brought up on poetry as we were," she pursued. "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our time; but now she didn"t know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred." Her tone entreated him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them. "They couldn"t have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that gra.s.sy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!"
"I see what you mean. But do you think it"s as sacred to us as it would have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."
"Oh, yes; so had I. We"re that modern, if we"re not so young as we were."
"We were very simple, in those days."
"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"
"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at it."
"We had a good time."
"Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had not been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn"t eaten it."
"It would be mouldy, though."
"I wonder," he said, recurring to the Lefferses; "how we really struck them."
"Well, I don"t believe they thought we ought to be travelling about alone, quite, at our age."
"Oh, not so bad as that!" After a moment he said, "I dare say they don"t go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did."
"Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got to Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by express that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again." The elders looked at each other in the light of experience, and laughed. "Well," she ended, "that"s one thing we"re through with. I suppose we"ve come to feel more alike than we used to."
"Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?"
"Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her." March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: "Well, they gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American philistinism. I don"t mind their thinking us queer; they must have thought Nuremberg was queer."
"Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We"re either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we"re ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be like us, and wouldn"t, for the world. The worst of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don"t, at the bottom of our hearts, believe we"re like that, when we meet. I suppose that arrogant old a.s.s of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard."
"I wonder," said Mrs. March, "if she"s told him yet," and March perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.
"She"s had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her."
"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in that way. I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have accepted him conditionally."
"Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?"