Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 8

colors of the
sunset.
The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar
enough in our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets
their vitreous pink. A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat,
and in the long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels.
But at last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week
before the Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and
breathless nights, which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of

escape, and made the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no
care for either shore.

VI.
Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had
scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath
of its morning air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone; he
had broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of
sight. But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his
consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted
environment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation
with the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of the
trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it
clung. Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of
reading the reporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he
should not see.
The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast,
which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in
summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June. The
illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the
apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual.
The heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon
before, and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to
transport to Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a
neighboring livery- stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver
they knew by name.
March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that
you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were
starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but
somehow it was not the consolation he had expected. He knew, of
course, that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail
in the Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night
before, and sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and
noises of the dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table,
and smoothly bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to
the very foot of the gangway at the ship's side, all in the cool of the
early morning. But though he had now the cool of the early morning on

these conditions, there was by no means enough of it.
The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of
another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and
that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively,
in a fashion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son that she
did not want him to come and see them off. Of, her daughter's coming
all the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that
if he did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if
they were not going.
"Don't you want to go?" March asked with an obscure resentment.
"I don't want to seem to go," she said, with the calm of those who have
logic on their side.
As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her
satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the
ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed
her son to come. She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed
to the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that
choked the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and
landings, she said it more than once to her husband.
She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with
friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such
refuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed
and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way. She
pitied these in their