Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 9

affliction, which she perceived that they could not
lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who
broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young
men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men
see them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming
and shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some
girls, of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves
merry, or at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking
at the cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one
had sent them flowers. Others whom young men had brought bunches
of violets hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and
handkerchiefs and card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking
them up. Others, had got places in the music-room, and sat there with
open boxes of long- stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the

faces of the men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins.
In the midst of the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and
knees, and bewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered
them with questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably
stifled about in their thick uniforms.
Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidly
smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly
set with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to
friends on shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in
louder noises midway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying;
they were probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin
passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the
face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not
seen it. He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was
laughing at his shoulder. He said that he had to come down with a
good- by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following
them; but he had always meant to see them off, he owned. The letter
had just come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that
she had sent another good-by letter with some flowers on board. Mrs.
March scolded at them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the
renewed stress of parting which he thought he had put from him, March
went on taking note, as with alien senses, of the scene before him,
while they all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had
said already.
A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where
some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically
with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia.
The mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of
the roofs, and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and
carts, and discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and
were lost in the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents,
becoming clogged and arrested from time to time, and then beginning
to move again.
The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries
leading, fore and aft, into the ship. Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-
buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with their
hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran before

them into the different depths and heights where they hid these burdens,
and then ran back for more. Some of the passengers followed them and
made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of them
remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and
out of the doors of the promenades.
The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the
wharf, with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw
of the ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with
harsh hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent
reason why it should all or any of it end, but there came a moment
when there began to be warnings that were almost threats of the end.
The ship's whistle sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs.
March humbly entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or
else be carried to Europe. They disputed whether that was the last
signal or not; she was sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was
moved against his reason. He affected to talk calmly with his son, and
gave him some last charges about 'Every Other Week'.
Some people now interrupted their