The Entire March Family Trilogy Part 90

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 pa.s.sengers there should be penned into a little s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 s.p.a.ce he had left, and looked up at a pa.s.senger 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 b.u.t.ton 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 gla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance of mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial pa.s.sion of both s.e.xes 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.

XII.

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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed, as if the steerage pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sing from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e with unchanged cla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sengers 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.