VI.

Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had

scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath

of its morning air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone; he had

broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of

sight. But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his

consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted

environment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation with

the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of the

trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung.

Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of reading the

reporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he should not see.

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast,

which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in

summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June. The

illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the

apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual. The

heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before,

and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to

Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring

livery-stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by

name.

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that

you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were

starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but

somehow it was not the consolation he had expected. He knew, of course,

that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the

Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and

sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the

dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothly

bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot of

the gangway at the ship's side, all in the cool of the early morning. But

though he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions,

there was by no means enough of it.

The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of

another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and

that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively,

in a fashion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son that she

did not want him to come and see them off. Of, her daughter's coming all

the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if he

did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they were

not going.

"Don't you want to go?" March asked with an obscure resentment.

"I don't want to seem to go," she said, with the calm of those who have

logic on their side.

As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her

satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the

ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed her

son to come. She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed to

the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that choked

the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and landings, she

said it more than once to her husband.

She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with

friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such

refuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed

and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way. She

pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not

lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who

broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young

men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see

them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and

shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some girls,

of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry, or

at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the

cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had

sent them flowers. Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets

hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and

card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up. Others, had

got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of

long-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the

men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins. In the midst

of the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and knees, and

bewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered them with

questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled

about in their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidly

smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set

with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on

shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises

midway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probably

not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or even

for their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girl

twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it. He turned from

it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was laughing at his

shoulder. He said that he had to come down with a good-by letter from his

sister, which he made an excuse for following them; but he had always

meant to see them off, he owned. The letter had just come with a special

delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent another good-by

letter with some flowers on board. Mrs. March scolded at them both, but

with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting which he

thought he had put from him, March went on taking note, as with alien

senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on together, and

repeated the nothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where

some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically

with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia. The

mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs,

and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and

discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in

the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and

arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries

leading, fore and aft, into the ship. Bareheaded, blue-jacketed,

brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with

their hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran

before them into the different depths and heights where they hid these

burdens, and then ran back for more. Some of the passengers followed them

and made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of

them remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and

out of the doors of the promenades.

The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf,

with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the

ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh

hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent reason why it

should all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began to

be warnings that were almost threats of the end. The ship's whistle

sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humbly

entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to

Europe. They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she was

sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason.

He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last charges

about 'Every Other Week'.

Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arriving

passengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks of

baggage swung more swiftly into the air. A bell rang, and there rose

women's cries, "Oh, that is the shore-bell!" and men's protests, "It is

only the first bell!" More and more began to descend the gangways, fore

and aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard.

March tried not to be nervous about his son's lingering; he was ashamed

of his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, "Better be off, Tom."

His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried to

Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as if

there had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him and

would not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last by

pushing him into the gangway with her own hands: he nodded and waved his

hat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd.

Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors began

to undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship's side; files of men

on the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their

approach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomime

forbade some belated leavetakers to ascend. These stood aside, exchanging

bows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach; they all tried

to make one another hear some last words. The moment came when the saloon

gangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the section of the

bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on this side of the

world. An indefinable impulse communicated itself to the steamer: while

it still seemed motionless it moved. The thick spread of faces on the

wharf, which had looked at times like some sort of strange flowers in a

level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the air above them was

filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds rising

from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that they

did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said

that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she

was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that

he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to

have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an

impressionistic study. As the ship swung free of the shed and got into

the stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain moment, all was still

New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and monstrous

shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at sea and

on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the

deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the

best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily

verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores,

while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and

as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.

A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying

down the promenade from the steerage. "Capitan! Capitan! There is a

woman!" he shouted in nondescript English. "She must go hout! She must go

hout!" Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command and seemed

to penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with a sort of

majestic relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it;

the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled

safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved

seaward again.

"What is it? Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of their

common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the

tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three

little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some

friends on board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even

before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought

sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have

escaped danger. She would not hear any excuse for her. "Her children

oughtn't to have been out of her mind for an instant."

"Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?" March asked.