The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and
it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance
and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the
ice-closet. Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they
were aware of alien witnesses. They looked up as by a single impulse, and
saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down upon
their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with yet
hungrier eyes. A boy's nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the height of
the man's elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.
The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their
napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite
movements.
The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell. "I'm glad it
didn't begin with the Little Neck clams!"
"Probably they only let those people come for the dessert," March
suggested.
The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up
over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down. The young
bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked
severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a
scene. The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the port,
and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at
Burnamy.
The young fellow laughed. "I don't suppose there's anything to be done
about it, unless we pass out a plate."
Mr. Kenby shook his head. "It wouldn't do. We might send for the captain.
Or the chief steward."
The faces at the port vanished. At other ports profiles passed and
repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them,
but they paused no more.
The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated
nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made
such a cruel thing possible.
"Oh," he mocked, "they had probably had a good substantial meal of their
own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a
purely aesthetic treat. But supposing it wasn't, we're doing something
like it every day and every moment of our lives. The Norumbia is a piece
of the whole world's civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to
shore with unchanged classes, and conditions. A ship's merely a small
stage, where we're brought to close quarters with the daily drama of
humanity."
"Well, then," she protested, "I don't like being brought to close
quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it. And I don't
believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage
passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and
I'm sorry we came on the Norumbia."
"Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide anything," he began, and he was
going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they
fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept
out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed
in time.
"If there's anything worse, for pity's sake don't tell me," she
entreated, and he forebore.
He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in
it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and
more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out
of sight. He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used
to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty
of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases. He had lived a happy
life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet
if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been,
must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?
"Say something," said his wife. "What are you thinking about?"
"Oh, Burnamy," he answered, honestly enough.
"I was thinking about the children," she said. "I am glad Bella didn't
try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she
is getting to be very sensible. I hope Tom won't take the covers off the
furniture when he has the fellows in to see him."
"Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if
the moths eat up every stick of furniture."
"Yes, so do I. And of course you're wishing that you were there with
him!" March laughed guiltily. "Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for us
to start off alone for Europe, at our age."
"Nothing of the kind," he retorted in the necessity he perceived for
staying her drooping spirits. "I wouldn't be anywhere else on any
account. Isn't it perfectly delicious? It puts me in mind of that night
on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal. There was
the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn't a bit softer than this."
He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new
enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.
"Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again," she said, and
they talked a long time of the past.
All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of
the ship's course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.
In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that
her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that
soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the
Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.
Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much
freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go
below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with
some lady. She clutched her husband's arm and stayed him in rich
conjecture.
"Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?"
They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again. She was
tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.
"No; it's that pivotal girl," said March; and his wife said, "Well, I'm
glad he won't be put down by them."
In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed
on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, "I don't see
why you didn't tell me sooner, papa."
"It was such an unimportant matter that I didn't think to mention it. He
offered it, and I took it; that was all. What difference could it have
made to you?"
"None. But one doesn't like to do any one an injustice."
"I didn't know you were thinking anything about it."
"No, of course not."