XIII.

The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say they

have never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days out

neither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy when

the ship would be in. There was only a day or two when it could really be

called rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemed

wilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the

stairs-landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifying

the monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed without

noticing them.

The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened, but the leaden

sea lay level as before. The sun shone in the afternoon; with the sunset

the fog came thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the night;

from the dense folds of the mist answering noises called back to her.

Just before dark two men in a dory shouted up to her close under her

bows, and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of

fishing-schooners were seen, and their bells pealed; once loud cries from

a vessel near at hand made themselves heard. Some people in the

dining-saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes,

and the card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the

fog without.

The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if

icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her. In the ranks of

steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the

music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of

steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed

about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in

vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters

there.

By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could

keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they

found beyond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the first days

out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on

board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to

sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched

canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards

across the bow end to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and the

sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee

promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in

their poor variety. Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails

set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of the

ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against the

horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight. A few tramp

steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were

overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her

rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the

people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her. One day

a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of the

promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste;

a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsily

from wave to wave. The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the

artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid and

cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and

where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent

under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling

spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted

canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage.

Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher

weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds

broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim

evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the

ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and

shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through every

change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the

pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in a

course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from

her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge

of the sea.

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony,

with certain events which were part of the monotony. In the morning the

little steward's bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half

an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had

been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards. Then they went on

deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down,

or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and

ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their

cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or

the music-room. At eleven o'clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch

with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at

one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted

themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their

berths or chairs. They did the same things in the afternoon that they had

done in the forenoon; and at four o'clock the deck-stewards came round

with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again to the

music of the band. There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and after

dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills and

toast. At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the

smoking-rooms.

There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness

to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places: a whiff of

whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the

odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the

engine-room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the

dining-saloon.

The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous. The

walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware that

there was no refuge if they got tired of one another. The flirting

itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the

pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.

There seemed to be very little of it. There were not many young people on

board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls. The young men were

mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among the

steamer chairs. It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in the

steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion. The

passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to it

unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along the

rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in

his berth with a book under the convenient electric light. He was safe

there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to

fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic

particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship's

run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of

the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward

vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves. He did not

meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them

served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and

then rather obtruded upon the public. There were people whom he

encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he

never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark

whom he never met by day. But none of these were people of the great

world. Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers,

whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom

of the saloon promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from

a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never

been to Europe. But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of

withholding him from March's advances. Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw

off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became

frankly bride and groom. They seldom talked with any one else, except at

table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces;

they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them

both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other's

hands under it.

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was

straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must

have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just

how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what

had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy,

and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland,

after the summer's travel, and settling down with him at school there.

She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called

him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the

first grade in his quality of editor of 'Every Other Week', but as a sage

of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel

upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in

contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the

poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in 'Every Other

Week', and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let

the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any

author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy

confessed to have had. They were so near in age, though they were ten

years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others

much more his seniors. He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he

valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March

upon Kenby's practice of always taking up the language of the country he

visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher

opinion of him from March's approval.

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he

supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get

him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured

out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had

written and what he meant to write. When he passed them where they sat

together, March heard the young fellow's perpetually recurring I, I, I,

my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under

the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal

girl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to him, in which a less penetrating

scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal. It was only at

table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break

in the reserve of the father and daughter. The signs of this were so fine

that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity. But at

breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of people

accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the Marches, and

began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March of 'Every

Other Week', which he seemed to know of in its relation to him; and the

young girl addressed herself to Mrs. March's motherly sense not the less

acceptably because indirectly. She spoke of going out with her father for

an indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish than hers, and she made

some inquiries about places in Germany; they had never been in Germany.

They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of Dresden with its American

colony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs. March know anything about

Weimar?

Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace in

Germany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was going

with her husband. She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the

tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl's style was of New York rather than

of Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place. Mrs. March began

to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and to

class them. She had decided from the first that they were society people,

but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells whom she

had met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of holding

themselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a right to

do that if they chose.

When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on between

these and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs.

March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which

March knew he should not be able to postpone.

He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not at

once accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of an

advance from them because of their neutral literary quality, through

which they were of no social world, but potentially common to any. Later

she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what she

wanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl's toward

finding out something about Burnamy.

The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his round

with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring

corner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to have

her advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her. The girl took

March's vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she

continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip. Mrs. March

did the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doing

it, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her a

hundredth bow with a hundredth smile. He perceived that she wished to get

rid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief.

"May I take yours too?" he said very passively to Miss Triscoe.

"You are very good." she answered, and gave it.

Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, "Do you know Mr. Burnamy, Miss

Triscoe?" The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to

make talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March. The

pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment of

isolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, and

hurried off to join her.

Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her

father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might

easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in

Miss Triscoe's mind.

"Then you don't feel that it was a very distinct success?" her husband

asked on his return.

"Not on the surface," she said.

"Better let ill enough alone," he advised.

She did not heed him. "All the same she cares for him. The very fact that

she was so cold shows that."

"And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?"

"If she wants it to."