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Gilbert Parker - "Pierre And His People, [Tales of the Far North], Volume 3."

Algernon Blackwood - "The Garden of Survival"

Samuel Pepys - "Diary of Samuel Pepys, Feb/Mar 1668/69"

George Barr McCutcheon - "The Day of the Dog"

Their Silver Wedding Journey

W >> William Dean Howells >> Their Silver Wedding Journey




He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did
not stop short of the purser's office. He made an excuse of getting
greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he
supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deck
changed for something a little less intimate with the sea. The purser was
not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wanted
something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on the
promenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundred
dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look at
it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with
himself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to ask
what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take
it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect
of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. He
was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there
might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once it
flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out
whether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took the
desperate step before him. He turned in half his course, and ran into a
lady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden with
wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself from
falling.

"Why, Mr. March!" she shrieked.

"Miss Triscoe!" he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with her
to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie
between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her
and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess
each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had
sorrowed over Mrs. March's sad state, and he had grieved to hear that her
father was going home because he was not at all well, before they found
the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grim
impatience for his daughter.

"But how is it you're not in the passenger-list?" he inquired of them
both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at the
last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were in
London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths.
Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy not
only from her company but from her conversation which mystified March
through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife. She was a girl who
had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously
written them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning her
betrothed that had almost positive quality. With his longing to try Miss
Triscoe upon Mrs. March's malady as a remedial agent, he had now the
desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe's mystery as a solvent. She
stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the
chair next her father. She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. March
to let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and he
hurried below.

"Did you get it?" asked his wife, without looking round, but not so
apathetically as before.

"Oh, yes. That's all right. But now, Isabel, there's something I've got
to tell you. You'd find it out, and you'd better know it at once."

She turned her face, and asked sternly, "What is it?"

Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, "Miss Triscoe is on board.
Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you."

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. "And Burnamy?"

"There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out,
spiritually. She didn't mention him, and I talked at least five minutes
with her."

"Hand me my dressing-sack," said Mrs. March, "and poke those things on
the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain
across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth. Put
my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the
brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that
your head has made. Now!"

"Then--then you will see her?"

"See her!"

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with
Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led the
way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basement
room.

"Oh, we're in the basement, too; it was all we could get," she said in
words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went
back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.

He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was
not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of
the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from
bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely
escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a
week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought
they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and
they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the
doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. "All Europe
is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter," he ended.

There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait
to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had
been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the
context, "It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most
devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about--Well it came to
nothing, after all; and I don't understand how, to this day. I doubt if
they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn't consulted in
the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these
trifling affairs, nowadays." He had married his daughter's mother in open
defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter's wilfulness
this fact had whitened into pious obedience. "I dare say I shall be told,
by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result."

A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General
Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy's final rejection than with
his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be
another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the
young man in the general's attitude. But the affair was altogether too
delicate for comment; the general's aristocratic frankness in dealing
with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in
any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, He
had always liked Burnamy, himself.

He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to
understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the
instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in
that business with that man--what was his name?

"Stoller?" March prompted. "I don't excuse him in that, but I don't blame
him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the
opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means
expunction, then I don't see why that offence hasn't been pretty well
wiped out.

"Those things are not so simple as they used to seem," said the general,
with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately
concern his own comfort or advantage.




LXXVI.

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing another
offence of Burnamy's.

"It wasn't," said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all the
minor facts to the heart of the matter, "that he hadn't a perfect right
to do it, if he thought I didn't care for him. I had refused him at
Carlsbad, and I had forbidden him to speak to me about--on the subject.
But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it. He ought to
have known that I couldn't accept him, on the spur of the moment, that
way; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace, before he
had done anything to justify himself. I couldn't have kept my
self-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he ought
to have seen it. Of course he said afterwards that he didn't see it. But
when--when I found out that SHE had been in Weimar, and all that time,
while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to see
him--let him know how I was really feeling--he was flirting with
that--that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determined
to put an end to everything. And that is what I did; and I shall always
think I--did right--and--"

The rest was lost in Agatha's handkerchief, which she put up to her eyes.
Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl's unoccupied hand
in her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past sufficiently
to allow her to be heard.

Then she said, "Men are very strange--the best of them. And from the very
fact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush into
a flirtation with somebody else."

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly
not been beautified by grief. "I didn't blame him for the flirting; or
not so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards. He ought to have
told me the very first instant we were engaged. But he didn't. He let it
go on, and if I hadn't happened on that bouquet I might never have known
anything about it. That is what I mean by--a false nature. I wouldn't
have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself--Oh, it was
too much!"

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She was perching on the
edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not
see, toward the sofa, "I'm afraid that's rather a hard seat for you.

"Oh, no, thank you! I'm perfectly comfortable--I like it--if you don't
mind?"

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay,
sighed and said, "They are not like us, and we cannot help it. They are
more temporizing."

"How do you mean?" Agatha unmasked again.

"They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time
to bring them right, or to come right of themselves."

"I don't think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!"
said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March's sincerity.

"Ah, that's just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and
I don't believe we could have lived through without it: we should have
quarrelled ourselves into the grave!"

"Mrs. March!"

"Yes, indeed. I don't mean that he would ever deceive me. But he would
let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without any
fuss."

"Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?"

"I'm afraid he would--if he thought it would come right. It used to be a
terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don't remember that
he means nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other day in
Ansbach--how long ago it seems!--he let a poor old woman give him her
son's address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look
him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her. I don't believe,
unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he'll
ever go near the man."

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, "That is a very different thing."

"It isn't a different kind of thing. And it shows what men are,--the
sweetest and best of them, that is. They are terribly apt to
be--easy-going."

"Then you think I was all wrong?" the girl asked in a tremor.

"No, indeed! You were right, because you really expected perfection of
him. You expected the ideal. And that's what makes all the trouble, in
married life: we expect too much of each other--we each expect more of
the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin over
again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of
being radiantly happy. But all this talking and all this writing about
love seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect, even at
our craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of them;
and they seem to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep on after
we are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take nice
things as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning! But we get
more and more greedy and exacting--"

"Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everything
after we were engaged?"

"No, I don't say that. But suppose he had put it off till you were
married?" Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, "Would it have been
so bad? Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the last
moment in his desperation was a very good joke. You would have understood
better just how it was, and it might even have made you fonder of him.
You might have seen that he had flirted with some one else because he was
so heart-broken about you."

"Then you believe that if I could have waited till--till--but when I had
found out, don't you see I couldn't wait? It would have been all very
well if I hadn't known it till then. But as I did know it. Don't you
see?"

"Yes, that certainly complicated it," Mrs. March admitted. "But I don't
think, if he'd been a false nature, he'd have owned up as he did. You
see, he didn't try to deny it; and that's a great point gained."

"Yes, that is true," said Agatha, with conviction. "I saw that
afterwards. But you don't think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or--or
hasty?"

"No, indeed! You couldn't have done differently under the circumstances.
You may be sure he felt that--he is so unselfish and generous--" Agatha
began to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand.
"And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do."

"No," the girl protested. "He can never forgive me; it's all over,
everything is over. It would make very little difference to me, what
happened now--if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything. But if I can
only believe I wasn't unjust--"

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behaved with absolute
impartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quite
irrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place had
nothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and all
should be made right between them. The fact that she did not know where
he was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with the
result; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself. She clinched
her argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off,
and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had to do was to keep
willing it, and waiting. There was something very mysterious in it.

"And how long was it till--" Agatha faltered.

"Well, in our ease it was two years."

"Oh!" said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to reassure her.

"But our case was very peculiar. I could see afterwards that it needn't
have been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that I
was in the wrong. I waited till we met."

"If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write," said Agatha. "I
shouldn't care what he thought of my doing it."

"Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong."

They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhausted
all the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those they
did not care for. At last the general said, "I'm afraid my daughter will
tire Mrs. March."

"Oh, I don't think she'll tire my wife. But do you want her?"

"Well, when you're going down."

"I think I'll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation," said
March, and he did so before he went below.

He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa.
"I thought I might as well go to lunch," she said, and then she told him
about Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort and
encourage the girl. "And now, dearest, I want you to find out where
Burnamy is, and give him a hint. You will, won't you! If you could have
seen how unhappy she was!"

"I don't think I should have cared, and I'm certainly not going to
meddle. I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he's
well rid of her. I can't imagine a broken engagement that would more
completely meet my approval. As the case stands, they have my blessing."

"Don't say that, dearest! You know you don't mean it."

"I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off. You've done all and more
than you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe. You've offered yourself up,
and you've offered me up--"

"No, no, Basil! I merely used you as an illustration of what men
were--the best of them."

"And I can't observe," he continued, "that any one else has been
considered in the matter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy's
flirtation? What is the matter with a little compassion for the pivotal
girl?"

"Now, you know you're not serious," said his wife; and though he would
not admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interest
which she took in the affair. There was no longer any question of
changing their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the excitement
she did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later after
dinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her
liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparative
study of the American swells, in the light of her late experience with
the German highhotes. It is true that none of the swells gave her the
opportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done.
They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she could
bear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal by
an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at the thought; but
she contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could give
points to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americans
did try to do a thing, they beat the world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they
were, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set;
she spoke of them as "rich people," and she seemed content to keep away
from them with Mrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major
Eltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe had
his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain
corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and mocked
their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and the
return of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the
general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into his
own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find how
much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. The
conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East
and the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his own
region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that he
should never go back to his native section. There was the comfort of kind
in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, which
March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrow
upon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man's habit of early rising, and they usually
found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee,
ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half
past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to
people of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction,
which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and he
asked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on the
Channel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, sodden
British bread, from the spirited and airy Continental tradition of coffee
and rolls.

The major confessed that he was no great hand to notice such things, and
he said he supposed that if the line had never lost a passenger, and got
you to New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased; he
surmised that if they could get their airing outside before they took
their coffee, it would give the coffee a chance to taste better; and this
was what they afterwards did. They met, well buttoned and well mined up,
on the promenade when it was yet so early that they were not at once sure
of each other in the twilight, and watched the morning planets pale east
and west before the sun rose. Sometimes there were no paling planets and
no rising sun, and a black sea, ridged with white, tossed under a low
dark sky with dim rifts.

One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenity and majesty which it
rarely has outside of the theatre. The dawn began over that sea which was
like the rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under long
mauve clouds bathed in solemn light. Above these, in the pale tender sky,
two silver stars hung, and the steamer's smoke drifted across them like a
thin dusky veil. To the right a bank of dun cloud began to burn crimson,
and to burn brighter till it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeous
rugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth of autumnal shrubs. The
whole eastern heaven softened and flushed through diaphanous mists; the
west remained a livid mystery. The eastern masses and flakes of cloud
began to kindle keenly; but the stars shone clearly, and then one star,
till the tawny pink hid it. All the zenith reddened, but still the sun
did not show except in the color of the brilliant clouds. At last the
lurid horizon began to burn like a flame-shot smoke, and a fiercely
bright disc edge pierced its level, and swiftly defined itself as the
sun's orb.

Many thoughts went through March's mind; some of them were sad, but in
some there was a touch of hopefulness. It might have been that beauty
which consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself, if no longer
young, a part of the young immortal frame of things. His state was
indefinable, but he longed to hint at it to his companion.

"Yes," said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh. "I feel as if I could walk out
through that brightness and find her. I reckon that such hopes wouldn't
be allowed to lie to us; that so many ages of men couldn't have fooled
themselves so. I'm glad I've seen this." He was silent and they both
remained watching the rising sun till they could not bear its splendor.
"Now," said the major, "it must be time for that mud, as you call it."
Over their coffee and crackers at the end of the table which they had to
themselves, he resumed. "I was thinking all the time--we seem to think
half a dozen things at once, and this was one of them--about a piece of
business I've got to settle when I reach home; and perhaps you can advise
me about it; you're an editor. I've got a newspaper on my hands; I reckon
it would be a pretty good thing, if it had a chance; but I don't know
what to do with it: I got it in trade with a fellow who has to go West
for his lungs, but he's staying till I get back. What's become of that
young chap--what's his name?--that went out with us?"

"Burnamy?" prompted March, rather breathlessly.

"Yes. Couldn't he take hold of it? I rather liked him. He's smart, isn't
he?"

"Very," said March. "But I don't know where he is. I don't know that he
would go into the country--. But he might, if--"

They entered provisionally into the case, and for argument's sake
supposed that Burnamy would take hold of the major's paper if he could be
got at. It really looked to March like a good chance for him, on Eltwin's
showing; but he was not confident of Burnamy's turning up very soon, and
he gave the major a pretty clear notion why, by entering into the young
fellow's history for the last three months.

"Isn't it the very irony of fate?" he said to his wife when he found her
in their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, and
reported the facts to her.

"Irony?" she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined or
desired. "Nothing of the kind. It's a leading, if ever there was one. It
will be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy. And out there she
can sit on her steps!"

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis of
Burnamy's reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and their
settlement in Major Eltwin's town under social conditions that implied a
habit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch. While he was
doing this she showered him with questions and conjectures and
requisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore saved
him from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide,
inquiry into Burnamy's whereabouts.

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