By the time we had reached the Island of St. Thomas they had all begun to find themselves as well as one another. It was evident that, unconsciously, little groups were forming; that certain people would ask to be put in the same carriage with certain others; and I think a native drink called a “rum swizzle,” of which almost everybody, “just to see what it was like,” partook during the day, did not in any way retard the growing acquaintanceships. By the time we arrived at Bahia, our first stopping-place in Brazil, the little groups had more or less assumed their final form. It was a beautiful example of birds of a feather doing just what we have always been told they do. The young girls came together, one could clearly see, chiefly because they all seemed to be engaged in the manufacture of silk neckties; four or five middle-aged ladies found the knitting of fluffy white shawls a convenient and congenial ice-pick; similarity of business interests, past or present, was of course instrumental among many of the men. Books, and there was on board an inexhaustible supply of them, were a tremendous factor in the cementing of friendly relations. By merely glancing at a book some one seemed to be enjoying you usually could tell whether or not you could have anything in common. Anybody perusing one of your favorite volumes offered an excuse for stopping and chatting. The insatiable players of bridge were, from the first, so many magnets and poles.
Not among the least important of the passengers were Elizabeth and Peter, the ship’s cats. Peter, to the sorrow of the officers who adored him, apparently found friends on the dock at Buenos Aires and disembarked, but Elizabeth, for family reasons, remained with us. She distinguished herself in various ways and on various occasions, three of them being really notable. One night at about two in the morning (always a somewhat Hibernian method of expression) she entered in the dark the deck stateroom of an excitable man of fifty. A steward sent to find her also entered and, in his search, crawled half way under the bed. The excitable man of fifty hearing, or perhaps feeling, some one under his bed and fearing thieves, leaped to the floor, dragged the steward out and heroically struggled with him. As the steward spoke no English and the man no German, this duel in the dark continued until the strangulated cries of the former and the appeals for help of the latter brought pretty much every one on that deck to the scene and made it possible to throw some light, electric light, on it. In the meanwhile Elizabeth had strolled away to the cabin of a lady from Argentina, where she proceeded to have five kittens. Then at Pernambuco fifty-six of the passengers rushed ashore and returned, each with a large green parrot. Of course most of them got loose in a few days but were allowed to go pigeon-toeing all over the deck until it was discovered that Elizabeth had quietly chewed the heads off three.
In addition to the parrots and hundreds of other tropical birds, the monkeys, the marmosets and the leopards that the passengers in afterwards to be regretted moments of enthusiasm acquired, the super-alimentated German indulged himself to the extent of a boa constrictor. The first time he went down to feed it, the playful little creature wound itself about his waist in several coils and was beginning to constrict in the most successful fashion, when the man’s shrieks brought four sailors to the rescue. It took the strength of all of them to untie the knot, so to speak, and had the reptile been able to find anything around which to twist its tail there would have been for the rest of the voyage a vacant seat opposite me at table. Oh, yes, we had some very agreeable fellow passengers.
It was the parrots, I think, that first caused dissension among them. To get loose was to get mixed, and it was a wise owner who knew his own bird, although, unfortunately for the ship’s peace, many thought they did. There were claims and counterclaims.
“My parrot had a tail,” exclaimed one woman with angry, flashing eyes to another.
“This beastly thing has just bitten my thumb,” declared a second; “my own bird never bites. They have made a mistake and I shall complain about it to the company.” Still another aggrieved one, who had views different from those of the committee chosen to draw up certain resolutions, let it be known that if they did not end by regarding the matter from her point of view she would write to the company saying that the ship was dirty and that the officers had been drinking heavily from beginning to end, which was not only absolutely false but had no relation to the matter in question. It was all very absurd but it also meant that, toward the end of three months on one ship, nerves will be nerves. There were a good many “coolnesses” toward the last, and in the smoking room some angry and bitter words, but on the whole, when we, our parrots and our other “unknown birds of brilliant plumage,” filed down the gang plank at Hoboken we were a tolerably good-natured crowd.
Will any of the little groups ever meet again? I often wonder. It seems like something that happened a century ago in a tropical dream.