Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waited politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his German.
“You’ll find,” he said, as they crossed the road again, “that it’s well to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be lagging along in my thirties if it hadn’t been for fooling, and here I am well on in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever.”
They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that morning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group of pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her breast, met them and bade them a ‘Guten Morgen’ of almost cheerful note, but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.
“Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some
American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them.”
“Oh, yes,” the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of the Marches; “I get you one.”
“You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn’t had one already.”
She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found. She had crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places. Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them, and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls were all from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for sometimes they paid for their places.
“What a mass of information!” said March. “How did you come by it?”
“Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe.”
“It’s not a bad habit, if one doesn’t carry it too far. How did Lili learn her English?”
“She takes lessons in the winter. She’s a perfect little electric motor.
I don’t believe any Yankee girl could equal her.”
“She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did. What astonishes one over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own level. And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to equal them in any other way. At Pupp’s, if we go to one end of the out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them. If we go to the other end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less than the least I give any three of the men waiters.”
“You ought to be ashamed of that,” said his wife.
“I’m not. I’m simply proud of your sex, my dear.”
“Women do nearly everything, here,” said Burnamy, impartially. “They built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the hods, and laid the stone.”
“That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn’t there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?”
“Well, I can’t say,” Burnamy hesitated.
The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill, sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the men with harlequin patches of light and shade. A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests. In her history there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullen young fellow . . . . Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.
“I don’t believe,” he said, “that I recognize-any celebrities here.”
“I’m sorry,” said March. “Mrs. March would have been glad of some Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere well-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness.”
“I’m satisfied with the picturesqueness,” said his wife. “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Burnamy.”
“Why can’t we have this sort of thing at home?”
“We’re getting something like it in the roof-gardens,” said March. “We couldn’t have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us. At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this. So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the mosquito-line into the night air. I haven’t seen a fly since I came to Europe. I really miss them; it makes me homesick.”
“There are plenty in Italy,” his wife suggested.
“We must get down there before we go home.”
“But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany? Why did no traveller ever put it in his book? When your stewardess said so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff.” He turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor: “Isn’t Lili rather long? I mean for such a very prompt person. Oh, no!”
But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted “Fraulein!” to Lili; with her hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the tables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, “In a minute!” and vanished in the crowd.
“Does that mean anything in particular? There’s really no hurry.”
“Oh, I think she’ll come now,” said Burnamy. March protested that he had only been amused at Lili’s delay; but his wife scolded him for his impatience; she begged Burnamy’s pardon, and repeated civilities passed between them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no one so eff
ective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.
“They all wear corsets,” Burnamy explained.
“How much you know already!” said Mrs. March. “I can see that Europe won’t be lost on you in anything. Oh, who’s that?” A lady whose costume expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. “She must be an American. Do you know who she is?”
“Yes.” He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once filled the newspapers.
Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies inspire. “What grace! Is she beautiful?”
“Very.” Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked March to look, but he refused.
“Those things are too squalid,” he said, and she liked him for saying it; she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.
One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl’s eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. “There! That is what I call tragedy,” said March. “She’ll have to pay for those things.”
“Oh, give her the money, dearest!”
“How can I?”
The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial breakfasts on two well-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy’s reproaches for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.
“I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American princess.”
Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of their compatriots as make them.
“Oh, come now, Lili!” said Burnamy. “We have queens in America, but nothing so low as princesses. This was a queen, wasn’t it?”
She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her. “All people say it is princess,” she insisted.
“Well, if she’s a princess we must look her up after breakfast,” said
Burnamy. “Where is she sitting?”
She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder, and her hireling trying to keep up with her.
“We’re all very proud of Lili’s having a hired man,” said Burnamy. “We think it reflects credit on her customers.”
March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an early-rising invalid. “What coffee!”
He drew a long sigh after the first draught.
“It’s said to be made of burnt figs,” said Burnamy, from the inexhaustible advantage of his few days’ priority in Carlsbad.
“Then let’s have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible. But why burnt figs? That seems one of those doubts which are much more difficult than faith.”
“It’s not only burnt figs,” said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, “if it is burnt figs, but it’s made after a formula invented by a consensus of physicians, and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carlsbad makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price.”
“You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves,” sighed March.
“Oh, I know a lot more things. Are you fond of fishing?”
“Not very.”
“You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught them.”
“I don’t see why that isn’t a good notion: the last thing I should want to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally acquainted with. Well, I’m never going away from Carlsbad. I don’t wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back.”
Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together about the place, and had given him to put in shape. It was run in the interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was ‘kurgemass’. He won such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to March, “But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal acquaintance, there’s a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you, and you know what you are eating.”
“Is it a municipal restaurant?”
“Semi-municipal,” said Burnamy, laughing.
“We’ll take Mrs. March,” said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt the limitations of a woman’s sense of humor, which always define themselves for men so unexpectedly.
He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the breakfasters. The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was lost in them. The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of “Fraulein! Fraulein!” that followed them. The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an hour before Burnamy caught Lili’s eye, and three times she promised to come and be paid before she came. Then she said, “It is so nice, when you stay a little,” and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was still in her place.
“Do go and see who it can be!” Mrs. March entreated. “We’ll wait here,” and he obeyed. “I am not sure that I like him,” she said, as soon as he was out of hearing. “I don’t know but he’s coarse, after all. Do you approve of his knowing so many people’s ‘taches’ already?”
“Would it be any better later?” he asked in tern. “He seemed to find you interested.”
“It’s very different with us; we’re not young,” she urged, only half seriously.
Her husband laughed. “I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!” he cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who was nodding to them from as far as she could see them. “This is the easy kind of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a novel.”
XXX.
Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. “Do you know I felt it must be you, all the time! When did you come? Where is your father? What hotel are you staying at?”
It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of the hotels on the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared that he wished to consult March’s doctor; not that there was anything the matter.
The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his fellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but he seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his hand, to have drunk it all. Was March going off on his forenoon tramp? He believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug, though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told the walks were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he thought Mrs. March would like it.
“I shall like your account of it,” she answered. “But I’ll walk back on a l
evel, if you please.”
“Oh, yes,” Miss Triscoe pleaded, “come with us!”
She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where the girl’s real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.
March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain. At first they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and less possible to include him in it. When it began to concern their common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.
“They’re so young in their thoughts,” said Burnamy, “and they seem as much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago. They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is now; don’t you think? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties.”
“Oh, yes, I can see that.”
“I don’t know why we shouldn’t be born older in each generation than people were in the last. Perhaps we are,” he suggested.
“I don’t know how you mean,” said the girl, keeping vigorously up with him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.
“I don’t believe I can quite make it out myself. But fancy a man that began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past experience of the whole race—”
“He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn’t he?”
“Rather monstrous, yes,” he owned, with a laugh. “But that’s where the psychological interest would come in.”
As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. “I suppose you’ve been writing all sorts of things since you came here.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 678