Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within. The lady spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, “No, I don’t suppose you could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer.”
She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a moment at the threshold. She looked round over her shoulder and discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage. She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape; with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood staring into the doorway of his room.
He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast. He begged his pardon, as he entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him. “I’m afraid I left my things all over the place, when I got up this morning.”
The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the way over. “You slept on board, then,” he suggested, arresting himself with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain pocket of his steamer bag.
“Oh, yes,” Burnamy laughed, nervously: “I came near oversleeping, and getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself, and so—”
He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye. He would have liked to offer his lower berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it. He noticed that as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a weary easing of his person from one limb to the other. He stooped to pull his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.
“Let me get that out for you!” He caught it up and put it on the sofa under the port. “Is that where you want it?”
“Why, yes,” the other assented. “You’re very good,” and as he took out his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the intimacies of the situation. “Have you arranged with the bath-steward yet? It’s such a full boat.”
“No, I haven’t,” said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then he had not known that there was a bath-steward. “Shall I get him for you?”
“No; no. Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you.”
Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse for lingering. In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth. He went away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag, he said, abruptly: “Mr. Triscoe, I wish you’d take the lower berth. I got it at the eleventh hour by some fellow’s giving it up, and it isn’t as if I’d bargained for it a month ago.”
The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy fancied suspicion and even resentment. But he said, after the moment of reflection which he gave himself, “Why, thank you, if you don’t mind, really.”
“Not at all!” cried the young man. “I should like the upper berth better.
We’ll, have the steward change the sheets.”
“Oh, I’ll see that he does that,” said Mr. Triscoe. “I couldn’t allow you to take any trouble about it.” He now looked as if he wished Burnamy would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.
X.
In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which he believed would take his listener’s intelligent fancy, and he stopped so long before he had tired him that March said he would like to introduce him to his wife. He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his own youth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to the young fellow’s advantage. But they were both from the middle West; in their native accent and their local tradition they were the same; they were the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in their literary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions.
Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would be delighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March said she was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and asked him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite. Without giving him time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father had left in charge of ‘Every Other Week’ for the few months they were to be gone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago. She made him sit down by her in March’s chair, and before he left them March heard him magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do something more for the magazine soon. He sauntered away and did not know how quickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush which became him in her eyes:
“Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell you about, if you will let me.”
“Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy,” she began, but she saw that he did not wish her to continue.
“Because,” he went on, “it’s a little matter that I shouldn’t like to go wrong in.”
He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to her father, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth. He said he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid they might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it.
“I see,” said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, “She looks like rather a proud girl.”
“Yes,” the young fellow sighed.
“She is very charming,” she continued, thoughtfully, but not so judicially.
“Well,” Burnamy owned, “that is certainly one of the complications,” and they laughed together.
She stopped herself after saying, “I see what you mean,” and suggested,
“I think I should be guided by circumstances. It needn’t be done at once,
I suppose.”
“Well,” Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh of embarrassment, “I’ve done it already.”
“Oh! Then it wasn’t my advice, exactly, that you wanted.”
“No!”
“And how did he take it?”
“He said he should be glad to make the exchange if I really didn’t mind.” Burnamy had risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay. She merely said:
“Oh, well, I’m glad it turned out so nicely.”
“I’m so glad you think it was the thing to do.” He managed to laugh again, but he could not hide from her that he was not feeling altogether satisfied. “Would you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him?” he asked, as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.
“Do, please!” she entreated, and it seemed to her that he had hardly left her when her husband came up. “Why, where in the world did he find you so soon?”
“Did you send him for me? I was just hanging round for him to go.” March sank into the chair at her side. “Well, is he going to marry her?”
“Oh, you may laugh! But there is something very exciting!” She told him what had happened, and of her belief that Burnamy’s handsome behavior had somehow not been met in kind.
March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh. “It seems to me that this Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was entitled to. Why shouldn’t he have offered him the lower berth? And why shouldn’t the old gentleman have taken it just as he did? Did you want him to make a counteroffer of his daughter’s hand? If he does, I hope Mr. Burnamy won’t come for your advice till after he’s accepted her.”
“He wasn’t very candid. I hoped you would speak about that. Don’t you think it was rather natural, though?”
“For him, very likely. But I think you would call it sinuous in some one you hadn’t ta
ken a fancy to.”
“No, no. I wish to be just. I don’t see how he could have come straight at it. And he did own up at last.” She asked him what Burnamy had done for the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem, yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it had temperament.
“He has temperament, too,” she commented, and she had made him tell her everything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, before she let the talk turn to other things.
The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; the steamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them with an effect of long habit. Those who would be walking up and down had begun their walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room; ladies who were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the music-room. Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the rail, and the promenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or work slowly round them. Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss parties at another were forming among the young people. It was as lively and it was as dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea. It was not the least cooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.
In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly. The deck-steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and he had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch sounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from winding it. His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity, and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.
XI.
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 ce
lebration 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 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.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 668
