Their Silver Wedding Journey. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
his folly in repeating his poem to her.
“Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks.”
He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs. March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know just how much she thought of him as a writer? “Did she like the poem.”
Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's liking for Burnamy. “But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!” This was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his personal history. “And you didn't know any one when, you went up to Chicago from—”
“Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in the office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to let me try my hand. That was all I could ask.”
“Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.
“But women do!” Burnamy retorted. “There is a girl writing on the paper now—she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone—who came to Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made her way single-handed from interviewing up.”
“Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. “Is she nice?”
“She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of journalism that women do isn't the most dignified. And she's one of the best girls I know, with lots of sense.”
“It must be very interesting,” said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in the way she said it. “I suppose you're quite a little community by yourselves.”
“On the paper?”
“Yes.”
“Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't. There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you'd like to come out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do.”
“What's that?”
“Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette.”
He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, “Do women write it?”
He laughed reminiscently. “Well, not always. We had one man who used to do it beautifully—when he was sober. The department hasn't had any permanent head since.”
He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. “Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?”
“About one, I believe—there's a consensus of stewards to that effect, anyway.” After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?”
“We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet.”
“Are you going direct to Dresden?”
“I don't know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two.”
“I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that will get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow.”
“You're very kind. You've been very good already—to papa.” He protested that he had not been at all good. “But he's used to taking care of himself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!”
“So it is! How strange that seems! It's actually Europe. But as long as we're at sea, we can't realize it. Don't you hate to have experiences slip through your fingers?”
“I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're always other people's.”
This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth. He only suggested, “Well; sometimes they make other people have the experiences.”
Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left the question. “Do you understand German?”
“A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things.”
“I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany, I hear.”
“Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will you?”
She did not answer. “It must be rather late, isn't it?” she asked. He let her see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it's very late,” and led the way within. “I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!”
Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.
XVIII.
The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a moment.
In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give, anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.
After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied themselves at home again.
Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every one sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with the hand-baggage. “Is this Hoboken?” March murmured in his wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed action of the kinematograph.
On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing rain. Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather