“You think it’s different with the mass?”
“You know it is. Never mind”—she made a little impatient move of the head as though to free her brain from some thorny contact—“I’ve had my time of trying to help the rest. From this on I have just one object. I’ve made up my mind to put up with any and everything till I’ve bought my freedom. That’s why I’m here.”
“How long will it take you to buy freedom?” asked Hildegarde.
Mrs. Locke clasped one hand over the other on the railing of the ship and leaned her chin down on the whitened knuckles. She fixed her steady eyes upon the wave-fretted, glaucous-looking waste, less like water than like vast fields of molten lead, falling into furrows, forever shifting and forever shaped anew. “I say to myself that if I slave and rough it for five years more, I shall be able to buy a little home in the country and know some peace before I die.”
It seemed a gray existence, and Hildegarde, with the hopeful self-sufficiency of happy youth, felt in her heart that the woman must somehow be to blame. Men were not always or usually what Mrs. Locke gave out. Even in the crush at the wharf, though the rougher people had pushed and jostled and sworn, nobody had tried to break Hildegarde’s arm. Mrs. Blumpitty had roughed it, but she didn’t complain of men, though Blumpitty must be a trial. No, poor Mis’ Bumble Bee, on her pallet of straw in the corner of the deck, was by the side of this other woman an enviable object even in the worst weather, and the statement may stand although it lack its true significance to that portion of mankind which happened not to be in the North Pacific or the Bering Sea in the first June of this century. Even when the weather was not doing anything spectacular, the dank chill was of the sort that searched the marrow. The fogs penetrated tweed and mackinaw and even leather, till people’s apparel wilted, and conducing less to warmth than shivering, clung to their figures as clammily as a half-dried bathing dress. The rugs and “robes” and wraps weighed each a ton—the very bedclothes seemed never to be dry. Day and night the fog-horn hooted, or, when the all-enveloping grayness lifted for a little, it was only to loosen the great rains, as if most mighty Jupiter Pluvius, thinking to use the ship for his tub, had pulled the shower-bath string just above it, discharging a waterspout over the Los Angeles. And after that, sleet, mist drizzle, and fog again.
Every man on board began to suffer visibly and audibly from the national complaint. In vain they hawked and spat and trumpeted; the great American Cold had them by the nose. All they could do in their misery was to reduce companionway and deck to a condition best left undescribed. But it was this more than any other thing that made the heart of the unhappy Hildegarde to falter and grow faint.
There were moments when, too chilled to sit still, worn out with tramping up and down, wet, and yet more miserable by reason of certain sights and sounds, she, nevertheless, rather than face the greater horror below, would stay on deck all day, wondering a little sometimes that she could suffer so much acute physical misery and yet not rue her coming. For even now, the moment she envisaged a possible escape—a passing yacht that should take her luxuriously home, or any pleasant miracle of rescue—she discovered that come what would, she was not only bound to keep on, but as determined to see it through as she had been that night of Louis’s return, when, innocent of most that it implied, she had said she would go and bring her father home.
In the carrying out of her resolution there was nothing, as yet, to be afraid of in the sense she vaguely had supposed her brothers and Louis Cheviot to mean, but of sheer physical wretchedness and soul-sickness, enough and to spare for the chastening of any spirit.
There had been a good deal of heavy drinking in the last day or two. As for Curlyhead’s father, he seemed never to be sober, and yet he had wits enough left, as well as cash, to bear a hand in endless games of poker. At first there had been little card-playing. But now, as people began to grow used to the motion, they crawled out of their berths to look at the world from the upper-deck, shiver and go below. Down there, what was there to do but the one thing? If you played once, you played every day, and all day, and more than half the night. People who couldn’t as yet sit at the table to eat, sat there between meals breakfasting, dining, supping off “chips” and bits of pasteboard—not missing fleshpots, since always a jackpot graced the board. There were those who grudged the meal hours. Glowering upon the people who used the tables for mere eating, they stood about impatient till a place was cleared and the real business of poker might begin.
The same thing went on straight through the ship. According to the giant, they were as hard at it in the second-class as they were in the first, and on down as far as the horrible berths went, wherever men could get a board or a barrel-head, there they were with cards in their hands.