At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people at
the Marches' table did not renew the premature intimacy of their
breakfast talk. Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and
March went on deck without her. He began to walk to and from the barrier
between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and
musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent
and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary
betters of the saloon.
There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be
teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for a
little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work. They
gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and he
feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the
stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if
not just, then inevitable. He argued with them that the sort of barrier
which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, ran
invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before their
kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse the
fact he was defending. Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not
being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue? He
made them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole second
cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced. But
they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he
returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, and
strolled off toward the steerage.
There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a
little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck
at the bow. They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their
fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return
to their own. They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid
than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic
than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked
down at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the
lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they
writhed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, with
her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed
and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked
about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his
toothache-swollen face. The owner of the battery carried it away, and a
group of little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the
space he had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating
some plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table. He
began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.
An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, "I shouldn't
want a child of mine down there."
"No," March responded, "it isn't quite what one would choose for one's
own. It's astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the
case of others."
"I suppose it's something we'll have to get used to on the other side,"
suggested the stranger.
"Well," answered March, "you have some opportunities to get used to it on
this side, if you happen to live in New York," and he went on to speak of
the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he
lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or
money as this poverty of the steerage.
The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed. "I
don't believe I should like to live in New York, much," he said, and
March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live. It appeared
that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but
he said it suited him. He added that he had never expected to go to
Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought
he had better go out and try Carlsbad.
March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his
own case. The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if it
detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the
difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home. His heart
opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his
wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up.
When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him,
but that his name was Eltwin. He betrayed a simple wish to have March
realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard
to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he
knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.
He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went
down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of
affliction. "There are too many elderly invalids on this ship. I knock
against people of my own age everywhere. Why aren't your youthful lovers
more in evidence, my dear? I don't believe they are lovers, and I begin
to doubt if they're young even."
"It wasn't very satisfactory at lunch, certainly," she owned. "But I know
it will be different at dinner." She was putting herself together after a
nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before. "I want you
to look very nice, dear. Shall you dress for dinner?" she asked her
husband's image in the state-room glass which she was preoccupying.
"I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots," it answered.
"I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and
White Star boats, when it's good weather," she went on, placidly. "I
shouldn't want those people to think you were not up in the convenances."
They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March
flung out, "I shouldn't want them to think you weren't. There's such a
thing as overdoing."
She attacked him at another point. "What has annoyed you? What else have
you been doing?"
"Nothing. I've been reading most of the afternoon."
"The Maiden Knight?"
This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board. It was
just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal
wave. It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of mediaeval
life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for historical
romance, while it flattered woman's instinct of superiority by the
celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous and
wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.
March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, "I suppose you
didn't waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of 'Every
Other Week'?"
"Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair--for
advertising purposes, probably."
"Mr. Burnamy has another," she said. "I saw it sticking out of his pocket
this morning."
"Oh, yes. He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if it
had his poem in it. He's an ingenuous soul--in some ways."
"Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men
are going to dress, and let him know. He would never think of it
himself."
"Neither would I," said her husband.
"Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset," she sighed.
She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in
sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband
and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong. Every one talked; even the
father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March
could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she
spoke. She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father addressed
to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.