In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightway to her berth
when she got on board the Cupania, and to her husband's admiration she
remained there till the day before they reached New York. Her theory was
that the complete rest would do more than anything else to calm her
shaken nerves; and she did not admit into her calculations the chances of
adverse weather which March would not suggest as probable in the last
week in September. The event justified her unconscious faith. The ship's
run was of unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of unparalled
smoothness. For days the sea was as sleek as oil; the racks were never on
the tables once; the voyage was of the sort which those who make it no
more believe in at the time than those whom they afterwards weary in
boasting of it.
The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not show the slightest
curiosity to know who her fellow-passengers were. She said that she
wished to be let perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for this
reason she forbade March to bring her a list of the passengers till after
they had left Queenstown lest it should be too exciting. He did not take
the trouble to look it up, therefore; and the first night out he saw no
one whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at breakfast he found
himself to his great satisfaction at the same table with the Eltwins.
They were so much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin took part in the
talk, and told him how they had spent the time of her husband's rigorous
after-cure in Switzerland, and now he was going home much better than
they had expected. She said they had rather thought of spending the
winter in Europe, but had given it up because they were both a little
homesick. March confessed that this was exactly the case with his wife
and himself; and he had to add that Mrs. March was not very well
otherwise, and he should be glad to be at home on her account. The
recurrence of the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin's habitual gloom, and
Mrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subject of their return for inquiry
into Mrs. March's condition; her interest did not so far overcome her
shyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her; and March found that
the fact of the Eltwins' presence on board did not agitate his wife. It
seemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hoped he would see all he
could of the poor old things. She asked if he had met any one else he
knew, and he was able to tell her that there seemed to be a good many
swells on board, and this cheered her very much, though he did not know
them; she liked to be near the rose, though it was not a flower that she
really cared for.
She did not ask who the swells were, and March took no trouble to find
out. He took no trouble to get a passenger-list, and he had the more
trouble when he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished, as
they have a habit of doing, after the first day; the one that he made
interest for with the head steward was a second-hand copy, and had no one
he knew in it but the Eltwins. The social solitude, however, was rather
favorable to certain other impressions. There seemed even more elderly
people than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmosphere was gray and
sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward voyage;
there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men who were
going seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for the
coming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke. They had eaten their
cake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in the
digestion. They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown
summer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was to him. He hated to
be of their dreary company, but spiritually he knew that he was of it;
and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger passengers. Some
matrons who went about clad in furs amused him, for they must have been
unpleasantly warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope of
being able to tell the customs inspector with a good conscience that the
things had been worn, would have sustained one lady draped from head to
foot in Astrakhan.
They were all getting themselves ready for the fray or the play of the
coming winter; but there seemed nothing joyous in the preparation. There
were many young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there were not
many young men, and such as there were kept to the smoking-room. There
was no sign of flirtation among them; he would have given much for a
moment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she could have brightened
those gloomy surfaces with her impartial lamp. March wished that he could
have brought some report from the outer world to cheer his wife, as he
descended to their state-room. They had taken what they could get at the
eleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in the
Norumbia. It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room. It was
on the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there had
been any sun it could not have got into their window, which was half the
time under water. The green waves, laced with foam, hissed as they ran
across the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned like the
wind in a gable.
He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, and
looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he was
going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, "Are we
going down?"
"Not that I know of," he answered with a gayety he did not feel. "But
I'll ask the head steward."
She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingers
convulsively. "If I'm never any better, you will always remember this
happy, summer, won't you? Oh, it's been such a happy summer! It has been
one long joy, one continued triumph! But it was too late; we were too
old; and it's broken me."
The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would
have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray
inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their
barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence. He
ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, "Don't you
think I'd better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?"
She suddenly turned and faced him. "The doctor! Why, I'm not sick, Basil!
If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something to
stop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyed
window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me."
She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes,
while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed
to open and shut like a weary eye.
"Oh, go away!" she implored. "I shall be better presently, but if you
stand there like that--Go and see if you can't get some other room, where
I needn't feel as if I were drowning, all the way over."
He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did
not stop short of the purser's office. He made an excuse of getting
greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he
supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deck
changed for something a little less intimate with the sea. The purser was
not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wanted
something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on the
promenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundred
dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look at
it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with
himself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to ask
what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take
it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect
of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. He
was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there
might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once it
flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out
whether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took the
desperate step before him. He turned in half his course, and ran into a
lady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden with
wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself from
falling.
"Why, Mr. March!" she shrieked.
"Miss Triscoe!" he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with her
to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie
between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her
and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess
each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had
sorrowed over Mrs. March's sad state, and he had grieved to hear that her
father was going home because he was not at all well, before they found
the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grim
impatience for his daughter.
"But how is it you're not in the passenger-list?" he inquired of them
both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at the
last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were in
London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths.
Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy not
only from her company but from her conversation which mystified March
through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife. She was a girl who
had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously
written them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning her
betrothed that had almost positive quality. With his longing to try Miss
Triscoe upon Mrs. March's malady as a remedial agent, he had now the
desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe's mystery as a solvent. She
stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the
chair next her father. She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. March
to let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and he
hurried below.
"Did you get it?" asked his wife, without looking round, but not so
apathetically as before.
"Oh, yes. That's all right. But now, Isabel, there's something I've got
to tell you. You'd find it out, and you'd better know it at once."