Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 7

and a place for fire on rainy days."
They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do

not understand, in the foreign steamship offices. The clerk turned
unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in
German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no
part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker. A brief
drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the
Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if
they decided to take it at once.
They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the
Colmannia; it was within one of being the same number. It was so
providential, if it was providential at all, that they were both humbly
silent a moment; even Mrs. March was silent. In this supreme moment
she would not prompt her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from
his own free will that he said, "We will take it."
He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free; and
this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the events
before it. No event that followed affected it, though the day after they
had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once
been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He felt obliged
to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or
against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all
her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never prepared for in
women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.

V.
During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of
sailing it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had
never been so interesting. He had not easily reconciled himself to the
place after his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly
grandeur, to the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more
the careless good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling,
ungainly metropolis. There were happy moments when he felt a poetry
unintentional and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point
more favorable for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they
had a flat. Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across
them to the truncated towers of St. George's, and to the plain red-brick,
white- trimmed front of the Friends' Meeting House; he came and went
between his dwelling and his office through the two places that form

the square, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats
by one of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and
mothers of the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play. The
elders read their English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or
gossiped, or merely sat still and stared away the day's fatigue; while the
little ones raced in and out among them, crying and laughing,
quarrelling and kissing. Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught
her child from the brink of the basin; another taught hers to walk,
holding it tightly up behind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed
her baby to sleep.
While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the
Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had
brought their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but
as soon as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly
American. In like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed,
and they still pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable
illusion of it by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union
Square; but later when they began to be homesick for the American
scenes they had not yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the
strictly New York sunset they were bowed out into.
The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square.
They were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when
they were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side,
or down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains
silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of
pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and
civilities was lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and
burned for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a
conflagration as memorably and appealingly native as the