Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 6

wait for Monday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the
Colmannia would be gone before they could engage one.
From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left in town so late in
the season, she knew that the only place on any steamer where your
room ought to be was probably just where they could not get it. If you
went too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and people tramping up and
down on the promenade under your window kept you awake the whole
night; if you went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump in
your head the whole way over. If you went too far forward, you got the
pitching; if you went aft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of the
cooking. The only place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon on
the south side of the ship; it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and
you had the sun in your window all the way over. He asked her if he
must take their room there or nowhere, and she answered that he must
do his best, but that she would not be satisfied with any other place.
In his despair he went down to the steamer office, and took a room
which one of the clerks said was the best. When he got home, it
appeared from reference to the ship's plan that it was the very room his
wife had wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as if he had
used a wisdom beyond his sex in getting it.
He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady
came with her husband for an evening call, before going into the
country. At sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches' table, she
expressed the greatest wonder and delight that they were going to
Europe. They had supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she
said she had not heard a word of it; and she went on with some
felicitations which March found rather unduly filial. In getting a little
past the prime of life he did not like to be used with too great
consideration of his years, and he did not think that he and his wife

were so old that they need be treated as if they were going on a golden
wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts of impertinent prophecies
of their enjoying it so much and being so much the better for the little
outing! Under his breath, he confounded this lady for her impudence;
but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic
boat, because the Germans were always so careful of you. She made
her husband agree with her, and it came out that he had crossed several
times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia. He volunteered to say
that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did not have her nose
under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and the captain and
the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did call her unlucky.
"Unlucky?" Mrs. March echoed, faintly. "Why do they call her
unlucky?"
"Oh, I don't know. People will say anything about any boat. You know
she broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice."
Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she
parted gayly with this over-good young couple. As soon as they were
gone, March knew that she would say: "You must change that ticket,
my dear. We will go in the Norumbia."
"Suppose I can't get as good a room on the Norumbia?"
"Then we must stay."
In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at all,
she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question
them up about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard she
was called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her
history. They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly
patient of Mrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying
conviction of their insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms
were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to
looked through his passenger list with a shaking head. He was afraid
there was nothing they would like.
"But we would take anything," she entreated, and March smiled to
think of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever
dreamed of not going.
"We merely want the best," he put in. "One flight up, no noise or dust,
with sun in all the windows,