{5469}
Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping of the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no perceptible motion save from her machinery.
Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those early hours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the sailors scouring the promenades. He made little acquaintance with his fellow-passengers. One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker lady whom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from the churning screws; but he did not quite get the words out. On the contrary he talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm near Boulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-five years out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in all its purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board. Now and then March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of the usual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business; and he philosophized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed so often without philosophy. He made desperate attempts at times to interest himself in the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the betting on the ship's wonderful run was continual.
He thought that people talked less and less as they drew nearer home; but on the last day out there was a sudden expansion, and some whom he had not spoken with voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, soft air was like midsummer the water rippled gently, without a swell, blue under the clear sky, and the ship left a wide track that was silver in the sun. There were more sail; the first and second class baggage was got up and piled along the steerage deck.
Some people dressed a little more than usual for the last dinner which was earlier than usual, so as to be out of the way against the arrival which had been variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty. An indescribable nervousness culminated with the appearance of the customs officers on board, who spread their papers on cleared spaces of the dining-tables, and summoned the passengers to declare that they had nothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves at the dock.
This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made her way up the Narrows, and into the North River, where the flare of lights from the crazy steeps and cliffs of architecture on the New York shore seemed a persistence of the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics. March blushed for the grotesque splendor of the spectacle, and was confounded to find some Englishmen admiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not the strong point of our race. His wife sat hand in hand with Miss Triscoe, and from time to time made him count the pieces of small baggage in the keeping of their steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a sarcastic calm.
The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways were lifted to her side; the passengers fumbled and stumbled down their incline, and at the bottom the Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of their son and daughter. They all began talking at once, and ignoring and trying to remember the Triscoes to whom the young Marches were presented. Bella did her best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered to get an inspector for the general at the same time as for his father. Then March, remorsefully remembered the Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that his son might get them an inspector too. He found the major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the major's lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran's paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government. When March's own inspector came he was as civil and lenient as our hateful law allows; when he had finished March tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to a just shame by his refusal of it. The bed-room steward keeping guard over the baggage helped put-it together after the search, and protested that March had feed him so handsomely that he would stay there with it as long as they wished. This partly restored March's self-respect, and he could share in General Triscoe's indignation with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay duty on his own purchases in excess of the hundred-dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing, and they jointly came far within the limit for two.
He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way to Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly arranged for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he was to follow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from the scene of the customs' havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from the victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him on the shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same old father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influences of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those good and decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the money paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through were not foul but merely mean.
The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would have been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up and down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.
The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an evening prolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that now they must really all go to bed. The children had both to recognize again and again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his father about the condition of 'Every Other Week'; Bella had to explain to her mother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to meet them with her, but was coming a week later to take her home, and then she would know the reason why they could not all, go back to Chicago with him: it was just the place for her father to live, for everybody to live. At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which she had maintained her position the night before; the travellers entered into a full expression of their joy at being home again; March asked what had become of that stray parrot which they had left in the tree-top the morning they started; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last Silver Wedding Journey she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all that she had been on the verge of nervous collapse when she reached the ship. They sat at table till she discovered that it was very nearly eleven o'clock, and said it was disgraceful.
Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought in to Tom. He glanced at it, and said to his father, “Oh, yes! This man has been haunting the office for the last three days. He's got to leave to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with him, I said he'd probably find you here this morning. But if you don't want to see him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose.”
He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gave it to his wife. “Perhaps I'd as well see him?”
“See him!” she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soul was centred. By an effort of self-control which no words can convey a just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with a laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.
The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard but shabby. He made an effort for dignity as well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologies for his persistency. But, he said, he was on his way West, and he was anxious to know whether there was any chance of his 'Kasper Hauler' paper being taken if he finished it up. March would have been a far harder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the suppliant before him. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words. Then Burnamy's dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thin overcoat affected March's imagination as something like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach of autumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin's wish to see him; and he promised to go round with him to the major's hotel before the Eltwins left town that afternoon.
While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street. At the first hint she gave of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men's love affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the two women together. This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals, with no sense of iteration for either of them, “I told her to come in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will. But if she doesn't, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either. At any rate I'm going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we'll see whether there's anything in that silly theory of your father's. I don't believe there is,” she said, to be on the safe side.
Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was not coming across to their house. As the girl persisted in coming and coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at the window and nodded, the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter, and drove her away to her own room, so that no society detail should hinder the divine chance. She went to the door herself when Agatha rang, and then she was going to open the way into the parlor where March was still closeted with Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known they were there. But a soberer second thought than this prevailed, and she told the girl who it was that was within and explained the accident of his presence. “I think,” she said nobly, “that you ought to have the chance of going away if you don't wish to meet him.”
The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs. March had noted in her from the first with regard to what she wanted to do, when Burnamy was in question, answered, “But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March.”
While they stood looking at each other, March came out to ask his wife if she would see Burnamy, and she permitted herself so much stratagem as to substitute Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subduing his proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake.
Half an hour later she thought it time to join the young people, urged largely by the frantic interest of her daughter. But she returned from the half-open door without entering. “I couldn't bring myself to break in on the poor things. They are standing at the window together looking over at St. George's.”
{5475}
Bella silently clasped her hands. March gave cynical laugh, and said, “Well we are in for it, my dear.” Then he added, “I hope they'll take us with them on their Silver Wedding Journey.”
Declare that they had nothing to declareDespair which any perfection inspiresDisingenuous, hypocritical passion of loveFundamentally incapable of taking anything seriouslyHeld aloof in a sarcastic calmIllusions: no marriage can be perfect without themMarried life: we expect too much of each otherNot do to be perfectly frank with one's own countryOffence which any difference of taste was apt to give himPassionate desire for excess in a bad thingPuddles of the paths were drying up with the hasteRace seemed so often without philosophySelf-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargainShe always came to his defence when he accused himself
Affected absence of mindAffectional habitAll the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest is littleAll luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickestAmericans are hungrier for royalty than anybody elseAmusing world, if you do not refuse to be amusedAnticipative homesicknessAnticipative reprisalAny sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out ofAppearance made him doubt their ability to pay so muchArtists never do anything like other peopleAs much of his story as he meant to tell without promptingAt heart every man is a smugglerBad wars, or what are comically called good warsBallast of her instinctive despondencyBe good, sweet man, and let who will be cleverBeautiful with the radiance of loving and being lovedBewildering labyrinth of errorBiggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelestBrag of his wife, as a good husband always doesBrown-stone frontsBut when we make that money here, no one loses itButtoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscienceCalm of those who have logic on their sideCivilly protested and consentedClinging persistence of such naturesColdly and inaccessibly vigilantCollective silence which passes for socialityComfort of the critical attitudeConscience weakens to the need that isn'tConsiderable comfort in holding him accountableCourage hadn't been put to the testCourtshipDeadly summer dayDeath is peace and pardonDeath is an exile that no remorse and no love can reachDecided not to let the facts betray themselves by chanceDeclare that they had nothing to declareDespair which any perfection inspiresDid not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized himDinner unites the idea of pleasure and dutyDisingenuous, hypocritical passion of loveDividend: It's a chicken before it's hatchedDoes any one deserve happinessDoes anything from without change us?Dog that had plainly made up his mind to go madEffort to get on common ground with an inferiorEurope, where society has them, as it were, in a translationEvil which will not let a man forgive his victimExplained perhaps too fullyExtract what consolation lurks in the irreparableFamily buryin' groundsFavorite stock of his go up and go down under the bettingFeeblest-minded are sure to lead the talkFeeling rather ashamed,—for he had laughed tooFeeling of contempt for his unambitious destinationFlavors not very sharply distinguished from one anotherFundamentally incapable of taking anything seriouslyFutility of travelGayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for itGlad; which considering, they ceased to beGot their laugh out of too many things in lifeGuilty rapture of a deliberate derelictionHad learned not to censure the irretrievableHad no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyanceHandsome pittanceHappiness is so unreasonableHappiness built upon and hedged about with miseryHe expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devicesHe buys my poverty and not my willHeadache darkens the universe while it lastsHeart that forgives but does not forgetHeld aloof in a sarcastic calmHelplessness begets a sense of irresponsibilityHelplessness accounts for many heroic facts in the worldHemmed round with this eternal darkness of deathHomage which those who have not pay to those who haveHonest selfishnessHopeful recklessnessHow much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressingHumanity may at last prevail over nationalityHurry up and git well—or somethingHypothetical difficultyI cannot endure this—this hopefulness of yoursI want to be sorry upon the easiest possible termsI supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintanceI'm not afraid—I'm awfully demoralizedIf you dread harm enough it is less likely to happenIgnorant of her ignoranceIllusions: no marriage can be perfect without themImpertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so muchIndispensableIndulge safely in the pleasures of autobiographyIntrepid fancy that they had confronted fateIt had come as all such calamities come, from nothingIt must be your despair that helps you to bear upIt don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the timeIt's the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn'tJesting mood in the face of all embarrassmentsJustice must be paid for at every step in fees and costsLess intrusive than if he had not been thereLess certain of everything that I used to be sure ofLife was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonousLife of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotonyLife has taught him to truckle and trickLong life of holidays which is happy marriageLove of justice hurry them into sympathy with violenceMade money and do not yet know that money has made themMadness of sight-seeing, which spoils travelMan's willingness to abide in the presentMarried life: we expect too much of each otherMarried the whole mystifying world of womankindMarried for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maidMarry for love two or three timesMonologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resignMuddy draught which impudently affected to be coffeeNervous woes of comfortable peopleNever-blooming shrubNever could have an emotion without desiring to analyze itNight so bad that it was worse than no night at allNo man deserves to suffer at the hands of anotherNo longer the gross appetite for noveltyNo right to burden our friends with our decisionsNot do to be perfectly frank with one's own countryNothing so apt to end in mutual dislike,—except gratitudeNothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young motherNovelists, who really have the charge of people's thinkingOblivion of sleepOffence which any difference of taste was apt to give himOnly so much clothing as the law compelledOnly one of them was to be desperate at a timeOur age caricatures our youthParkmanPassionate desire for excess in a bad thingPatience with mediocrity putting on the style of geniusPatronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign countryPeople that have convictions are difficultPerson talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn itPoverty as hopeless as any in the worldPrices fixed by his remorsePuddles of the paths were drying up with the hasteRace seemed so often without philosophyRecipes for dishes and diseasesReckless and culpable optimismReconciliation with death which nature brings to life at lastRejoice in everything that I haven't doneRejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriageRepeated the nothings they had said alreadyRespect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any senseSay when he is gone that the woman gets along better without himSeemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyedSeeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to himSelf-sufficiency, without its vulgaritySelf-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargainServant of those he lovedShe always came to his defence when he accused himselfShe cares for him: that she was so cold shows thatShe could bear his sympathy, but not its expressionShouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'—its inconvenienceSigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdomSo hard to give up doing anything we have meant to doSo old a world and groping stillSociety: All its favors are really bargainsSorry he hadn't asked more; that's human natureSuffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotismSuperstition that having and shining is the chief goodSuperstition of the romances that love is once for allThat isn't very old—or not so old as it used to beThe knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstancesThere is little proportion about either pain or pleasureThey were so near in age, though they were ten years apartThey can only do harm by an expression of sympathyTimidity of the elder in the presence of the younger manTo do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likesTook the world as she found it, and made the best of itTragical character of heatTravel, with all its annoyances and fatiguesTried to be homesick for them, but failedTurn to their children's opinion with deferenceTypical anything else, is pretty difficult to findUnfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fineUsed to having his decisions reached without his knowledgeVexed by a sense of his own pitifulnessVoice of the common imbecility and incoherenceVoting-cattle whom they bought and soldWages are the measure of necessity and not of meritWe get too much into the hands of other peopleWe don't seem so much our own propertyWeariness of buyingWhat we can be if we mustWhen you look it—live itWilful sufferersWillingness to find poetry in things around themWish we didn't always recognize the facts as we doWithout realizing his cruelty, treated as a childWoman harnessed with a dog to a cartWooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forestsWork he was so fond of and so weary ofWould sacrifice his best friend to a phrase