It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade. Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three or four deep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps. The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to go wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March's wing.
Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing in the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained talking and laughing till the music began again.
“Don't you want to try it?” he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.
“Isn't it rather—public?” she asked back.
Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.
“Perhaps it is rather obvious,” he said, and he made a long glide over the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment her hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each other within the circle.
“How well she dances!” said Miss Triscoe.
“Do you think so? She looks as if she had been wound up and set going.”
“She's very graceful,” the girl persisted.
The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of passengers on all steamers. There were recitations in English and German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever more piano performance. Most of those who took part were of the race gifted in art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its fathers counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme, with an audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.
Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment. She hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.
The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the pretty harbor of Plymouth. In the cool early light the town lay distinct along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls dividing the green fields. The very iron-clads in the harbor close at hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the sunrise had not quite faded. The breath of the land came freshly out over the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices on the tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the ship's side. A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage they formed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out for the shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they left clustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. and Mrs. Leffers bade March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee with them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.
The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated; these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed at others. The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohio friend and his wife. He tried to engage them in the tally which began to be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held aloof.
Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent is apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some meagre New York stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.
“I always have to get used to it over again,” said Kenby. “This is the twentieth time I have been across, and I'm just as much astonished as I was the first, to find out that they don't want to know anything about us here.”
“Oh,” said March, “curiosity and the weather both come from the west. San Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago about New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels the other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave.”
“Ah, but London doesn't care a rap about Vienna,” said Kenby.
“Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own side. It isn't an infallible analogy.”
Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the discussion. He gulped it, and broke out. “Why should they care about us, anyway?”
March lightly ventured, “Oh, men and brothers, you know.”
“That isn't sufficient ground. The Chinese are men and brothers; so are the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're not impatient for the latest news about them. It's civilization that interests civilization.”
“I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?” Burnamy put in, with a smile.
“Do you think we are civilized?” retorted the other.
“We have that superstition in Chicago,” said Burnamy. He added, still smiling, “About the New-Yorkers, I mean.”
“You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed. New York is an anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees.”
“Oh, I don't think you can say that,” Kenby cheerfully protested, “since the Reformers came in. Look at our streets!”
“Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals. But how long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?”
“Oh, never in the world!” said the optimistic head of the table.
“I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one of the things that help to establish Tammanys with us. You will see our Tammany in power after the next election.” Kenby laughed in a large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other's flame. “New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it's morally a frontier mining-town. Socially it's—” He stopped as if he could not say what.
“I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa,” said his daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about it.
Her father went on as if he had not heard her. “It's as vulgar and crude as money can make it. Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there's enough, it counts for everything. In less than a year you'll have Tammany in power; it won't be more than a year till you'll have it in society.”
“Oh no! Oh no!” came from Kenby. He did not care much for society, but he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the amenities.
“Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?” asked March in the pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh.
“There's no reason why it shouldn't be. Society is as bad as all the rest of it. And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially, the whole country wishes to be and tries to be.”
There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could find just the terms of refutation.
“Well,” said Kenby at last, “it's a good thing there are so many lines to Europe. We've still got the right to emigrate.”
“Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers for exercising a man's right to live where he chooses. And there is no country in Europe—except Turkey, or Spain—that isn't a better home for an honest man than the United States.”
The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to speak. Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe's eye, and said, slowly and distinctly: “I don't know just what reason you have to feel as you do about the country. I feel differently about it myself—perhaps because I fought for it.”
At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubted its validity.
Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a violent impulse upon it. He said, coldly, “I was speaking from that stand-point.”
The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though he had put himself in the wrong. His old hand trembled beside his plate, and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife was sharing his pain and shame.
Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in Cuxhaven. Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line before, and asked several questions. Her father did not speak again, and after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Eltwin rose at the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke another defeat, in some way.
Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, “I think I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon.”
March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside to let the two men come together.
“That is all right, Colonel—”
“Major,” Eltwin conscientiously interposed.
“Major,” Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand which had been tremulously rising toward him. “There can't be any doubt of what we did, no matter what we've got.”
“No, no!” said the other, eagerly. “That was what I meant, sir. I don't think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the country has a right to think what he pleases about it.”
Triscoe said, “That is all right, my dear sir. May I ask your regiment?”
The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife of the one and the daughter of the other. They saw the young girl making some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.
“That was rather fine, my dear,” said Mrs. March.
“Well, I don't know. It was a little too dramatic, wasn't it? It wasn't what I should have expected of real life.”
“Oh, you spoil everything! If that's the spirit you're going through Europe in!”
“It isn't. As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform.”
That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom able to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union. Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied motives which impelled men at that time; but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man of property and a man of family, in doing so. His family had improved as time passed, and it was now so old that back of his grandfather it was lost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired from the sea and become a merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his son established himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-trader whose social position was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to realize just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery was; it heightened the effect of his pose.
He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted Brigadier-General at the close. With this honor, and with the wound which caused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was not long in going to pieces in his hands. Then the young couple went to live in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died when the child was ten years old. A little later his father-in-law died, and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a right to expect.
The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the Republic as they had been under the Second Empire. He was still willing to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be used on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his provision-man was sent to Congress instead. Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.
One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had no duties, but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian. Her character was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for the summer.
The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at Berne. Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without it. He was really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved it. His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.
His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children. She did not think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father. She said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed to have everything there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs. Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.
Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one of the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where the Norumbia was to land again. The young people talked across Mrs. March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all the nicer not to know just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.
Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea. There had been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they shrank from forming others. Then the charm of the idle, eventless life grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable end.
Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles. Burnamy and Miss Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated to have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the hold.
They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water. At Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French fortifications much more on show than the English had been. Nothing marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. The elder couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and, leave the young people unmoved.
Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship. Burnamy was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact. Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an intolerable resignation to the girl's absence.
“Yes,” said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, “that terrible patience of youth!”
“Patience? Folly! Stupidity! They ought to be together every instant! Do they suppose that life is full of such chances? Do they think that fate has nothing to do but—”
She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, “Hang round and wait on them?”
“Yes! It's their one chance in a life-time, probably.”
“Then you've quite decided that they're in love?” He sank comfortably back, and put up his weary legs on the chair's extension with the conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.
“I've decided that they're intensely interested in each other.”
“Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do or don't do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it's that? Is marriage such a very certain good?”
“It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is. What would our lives have been without it?” she retorted.
“Oh, we should have got on. It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don't mind their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. I doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he hadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a young lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her little charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You wouldn't want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had money, and I doubt if she has much. It's all very pretty to have a girl like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn't altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in the very world she belongs to. I don't think it's for us to promote the affair.”
“Well, perhaps you're right,” she sighed. “I will let them alone from this out. Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very long.”
“Oh, I don't think there's any harm done yet,” said her husband, with a laugh.
At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement; she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their chairs on deck.
There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a remorseful pang. “Well,” she said, “I wish we were going to be in New York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” he protested. “Not so bad as that, my dear. This is the last night, and it's hard to manage, as the last night always is. I suppose the last night on earth—”
“Basil!” she implored.
“Well, I won't, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I've never seen a Dutch lugger, and—”
She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by. They were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up into his face while he talked.
“Now,” Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, “let us go instantly. I wouldn't for worlds have them see us here when they get found again. They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that would spoil everything. Come!”
Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss Triscoe's prompting. He had not to wait long.
“And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?”
“Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public.”
“How could you tell that they were-taking?”
“They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them.”
“And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?”
“I don't believe it was. The theory in the office was that he didn't think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things into shape.”
“What things?”
“Oh—ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics. He owns shares in everything but the United States Senate—gas, electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers—and now he would like some Senate. That's what I think.”
She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercest accusals of the country. “How fascinating it is!” she said, innocently.
“And I suppose they all envy your coming out?”
“In the office?”
“Yes. I should envy, them—staying.”
Burnamy laughed. “I don't believe they envy me. It won't be all roses for me—they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if it isn't.” He remembered something one of his friends in the office had said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.
She abruptly left the mere personal question. “And which would you rather write: poems or those kind of sketches?”
“I don't know,” said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms. “I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there are things you can't say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse in college; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March took this little piece for 'Every Other Week'.”
“Little? I thought it was a long poem!”
Burnamy laughed at the notion. “It's only eight lines.”
“Oh!” said the girl. “What is it about?”
He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in a person of his make. “I can repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs. March.”
“Oh, no indeed! He said the lines over to her very simply and well. They are beautiful—beautiful!”
“Do you think so?” he gasped, in his joy at her praise.
“Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man—the only literary man—I ever talked with. They must go out—somewhere! Papa must meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I'm making the most of you.”
“You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe,” said Burnamy.
She would not mind his mocking. “That day you spoke about 'The Maiden Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that way. I didn't know you were an author then.”
“Well, I'm not much of an author now,” he said, cynically, to retrieve his folly in repeating his poem to her.
“Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks.”
He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs. March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know just how much she thought of him as a writer? “Did she like the poem.”
Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's liking for Burnamy. “But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!” This was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his personal history. “And you didn't know any one when, you went up to Chicago from—”
“Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in the office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to let me try my hand. That was all I could ask.”
“Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.
“But women do!” Burnamy retorted. “There is a girl writing on the paper now—she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone—who came to Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made her way single-handed from interviewing up.”
“Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. “Is she nice?”
“She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of journalism that women do isn't the most dignified. And she's one of the best girls I know, with lots of sense.”
“It must be very interesting,” said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in the way she said it. “I suppose you're quite a little community by yourselves.”
“On the paper?”
“Yes.”
“Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't. There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you'd like to come out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do.”
“What's that?”
“Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette.”
He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, “Do women write it?”
He laughed reminiscently. “Well, not always. We had one man who used to do it beautifully—when he was sober. The department hasn't had any permanent head since.”
He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. “Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?”
“About one, I believe—there's a consensus of stewards to that effect, anyway.” After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?”
“We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet.”
“Are you going direct to Dresden?”
“I don't know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two.”
“I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that will get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow.”
“You're very kind. You've been very good already—to papa.” He protested that he had not been at all good. “But he's used to taking care of himself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!”
“So it is! How strange that seems! It's actually Europe. But as long as we're at sea, we can't realize it. Don't you hate to have experiences slip through your fingers?”
“I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're always other people's.”
This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth. He only suggested, “Well; sometimes they make other people have the experiences.”
Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left the question. “Do you understand German?”
“A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things.”
“I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany, I hear.”
“Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will you?”
She did not answer. “It must be rather late, isn't it?” she asked. He let her see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it's very late,” and led the way within. “I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!”
Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.
The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a moment.
In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give, anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.
After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied themselves at home again.
Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every one sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with the hand-baggage. “Is this Hoboken?” March murmured in his wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed action of the kinematograph.
On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing rain. Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.
Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh count that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble; their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have been very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room at the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee with unexpected cordiality.
Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the restaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors—the shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars. Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, “Krahnay, Krahnay!” When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and shouted, “Crane! Crane!” and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry, “Kren! Kren!” But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.
People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal of talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual with these amiable people.
Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife, and leaned over her son to ask, “Do you know what lese-majesty is? Rose is afraid I've committed it!”
“No, I don't,” said March. “But it's the unpardonable sin. What have you been doing?”
“I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he said at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the railroads belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table, it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's lese-majesty.” She gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's face with an appealing smile.
“Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March. She's been complaining of the coffee.”
“Indeed I shall say what I like,” said Mrs. March. “I'm an American.”
“Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anything disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's railroad station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your account.”
Mrs. Adding asked: “Then they won't punish ladies? There, Rose! I'm safe, you see; and you're still a minor, though you are so wise for your years.”
She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.
“I don't know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,”, said Mrs. March. “And you've joined with her in her joking. Go and speak, to him!”
The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. March overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face. March tried to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: “Oh, yes. I understood that. But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother to take any risks.”
“I don't believe she will, really, Rose. But I'll speak to her, and tell her she can't be too cautious.”
“Not now, please!” the boy entreated.
“Well, I'll find another chance,” March assented. He looked round and caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her father appeared not to see March. “It's all right, with Rose,” he said, when he sat down again by his wife; “but I guess it's all over with Burnamy,” and he told her what he had seen. “Do you think it came to any displeasure between them last night? Do you suppose he offered himself, and she—”
“What nonsense!” said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace. “It's her father who's keeping her away from him.”
“I shouldn't mind that. He's keeping her away from us, too.” But at that moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came over to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to Dresden that evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other on the train or in Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.
“They're Goths,” he said of the Germans. “I could hardly get that stupid brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch.”
On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow asked if he could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe he did not seem in a hurry.
March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, “Yes, you can see that as far as they're concerned.”
“It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these affairs,” he said. “How simple it would be if there were no parties to them but the lovers! But nature is always insisting upon fathers and mothers, and families on both sides.”