Their Silver Wedding Journey. William Dean Howells

      II.

      When he got home from the 'Every Other Week' office, the afternoon of that talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife at Fulkerson's notion of a Sabbatical year. She did not think it was so very droll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now the authority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish of absurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which had been his right before.

      He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been working to the surface of his thought. “We could call it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round to all the old places, and see them in the reflected light of the past.”

      “Oh, we could!” she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicate responsibility of persuading her that he was joking.

      He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson's absurdity. “It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical year—a good deal after date. But I suppose that would make it all the more silvery.”

      She faltered in her elation. “Didn't you say a Sabbatical year yourself?” she demanded.

      “Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression.”

      “And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression too!”

      “It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it. Don't you suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves just as we were when we first met there?”

      “No; I don't believe now that you care anything about it.”

      “Well, it couldn't be done, anyway; so that doesn't matter.”

      “It could be done, if you were a mind to think so. And it would be the greatest inspiration to you. You are always longing for some chance to do original work, to get away from your editing, but you've let the time slip by without really trying to do anything; I don't call those little studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won't take the chance that's almost forcing itself upon you. You could write an original book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some love in.”

      “Oh, that's the stalest kind of thing!”

      “Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view. You could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it humorously—of course it is ridiculous—and do something entirely fresh.”

      “It wouldn't work. It would be carrying water on both shoulders. The fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the love and the humor wouldn't mingle any more than oil and vinegar.”

      “Well, and what is better than a salad?”

      “But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on.” She was silent, and he yielded to another fancy. “We might imagine coming upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them—a wedding journey 'en partie carree'.”

      “Something like that. I call it a very poetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

      “It isn't so bad,” he admitted. “How young we were, in those days!”

      “Too young to know what a good time we were having,” she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect. “I don't feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple. I would like to go, just to make sure that I had been.” He was smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, “What is it?”

      “Nothing. I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who actually hadn't been before—carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way.”

      She shook her head. “You couldn't! They've all been!”

      “All but about sixty or seventy millions,” said March.

      “Well, those are just the millions you don't know, and couldn't imagine.”

      “I'm not so sure of that.”

      “And even if you could imagine them, you couldn't make them interesting. All the interesting ones have been, anyway.”

      “Some of the uninteresting ones too. I used, to meet some of that sort over there. I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn't been.”

      “Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it.”

      “It might be a good thing,” he mused, “to take a couple who had passed their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time. I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations. I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience. We needn't go abroad to manage that. I think it would be rather nice.”

      “I don't think it would be nice in the least,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don't want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all.”

      “Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey.”

      “I see. You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it.”

      She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really silent. He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor. He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused. When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented to go.

      III.

      He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken. To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible thread of association which drew him.

      The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the outward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted as only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed steward ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the ladies' parlor and music-room. March made his wife observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large march-panes in the roof. She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like serving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter'; when they went ashore she challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.

      “She has only one fault,” he assented. “She's a ship.”

      “Yes,” said his wife, “and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I decide.”

      Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take, and not whether they should take any. He explained, at first gently and afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to cross the Atlantic in.