XVIII.

The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and
disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the
shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went
and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no
longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a
moment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below
had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered
with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the
bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the
corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people
who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give,
anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give
the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby
brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head
steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering
him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an
officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music,
which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on
the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer
cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle
much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been
for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied
themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where
the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their
hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that
people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge
them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer
of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every
one sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were all on the
tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with
the hand-baggage. "Is this Hoboken?" March murmured in his wife's ear,
with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed
action of the kinematograph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunio