VII.

In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife’s anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats in the dining-saloon.  At first he had his ambition for the captain’s table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced Mrs. March that the captain’s table had become a superstition of the past, and conferred no special honor.  It proved in the event that the captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon among the passengers who paid least for their rooms.  But while the Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see what he had done for them.

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the oval openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up into the music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters.  The tables were brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marches thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to the last detail in blue and white violets.  The ports of the saloon were open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the tremor from her screws.  The sound of talking and laughing rose with the clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell of the coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses and carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joy of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair.  When the head steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they both made an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had been a company at some far-forgotten table d’hote in the later sixties.  The head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with “Bleace!” for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the equivalent of their native “Bitte!” Otherwise there was no reason to suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good half of the passengers.  The stewards looked English, however, in conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down.  He need not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or less nodded in return.