Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 5

made her realize the horror of it so
much that she was glad to give it up. She gave it up, with the best
feeling; all that she would ask of him was that he should never mention
Europe to her again. She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if
such a ship as the Colmannia did not make him want to go.
At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well.
He had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a
Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he
had persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards
that he would not go abroad on any account. It was by a psychological
juggle which some men will understand that he allowed himself the
next day to get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office;
he also got a plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so
that they might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from
all the facts.

IV.
From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because
so perfectly tacit.
They began to amass maps and guides. She got a Baedeker for Austria
and he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least

use there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information. He
got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German. He used to read
German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic
poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held
imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and
tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those
poets for a whole generation. He perceived, of course, that unless the
barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the
author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on
with them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil
his pleasure in it. In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized
how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly,
had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.
Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place
for it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining
the respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia. She carried on
her researches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences
were alone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she
valued them equally at first or second hand. She heard of ladies who
would not cross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for
months to get a room on her; she talked with ladies who said that
nothing would induce them to cross in her. There were ladies who said
she had twice the motion that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from
her twin screws was frightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats,
and it did not affect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia
was a twin-screw boat too. It was repeated to her in the third or fourth
degree of hear- say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect
as that on the Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line
assured her that the table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the
table of the French boats. To the best of the belief of lady witnesses
still living who had friends on board, the Colmannia had once got
aground, and the Norumbia had once had her bridge carried off by a
tidal wave; or it might be the Colmannia; they promised to ask and let
her know. Their lightest word availed with her against the most solemn
assurances of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who might be all very
well on land, but in navigation were not to be trusted; they would say
anything from a reckless and culpable optimism. She obliged March all

the same to ask among them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity
when he came home saying that one man had told him you could have
played croquet on the deck of the Colmannia the whole way over when
he crossed, and another that he never saw the racks on in three passages
he had made in the Norumbia.
The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, but
when they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs.
March liked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly