“ ‘The dear young lady is quite right. We have a horrible slavery right here in New York, and we ought to make war on that as earnestly as we do on African slavery at the South. I’m trying to do it in the Try-bune’—that’s the way he pronounces the name of his paper—‘and I’m going to keep on trying.’
“That encouraged me, for I find myself more and more disposed to respect Mr. Greeley as I come to know him better. I don’t always agree with him. I sometimes think he is onesided in his views, and of course he is enormously self-conceited. But he is, at any rate, an honest man, and a brave and sincere one. He isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, any more than you are, and I like him for that. Another great editor whom I have met frequently, seems to me equally courageous, but far less conscientious. He is inclined to take what he calls ‘the newspaper view’ of things,—by which he means the view that appeals to the multitude for the moment, without much regard for any fixed principle. Socially he is a much more agreeable man than Mr. Greeley, but I don’t think him so trustworthy. Mr. Greeley impresses me as a man who may be enormously wrong-headed, under the influence of his prejudiced misconceptions, but who, wrong-headed or right-headed, will never consciously wrong others. If he had been born the master of a Virginia plantation he would have dealt with his negroes in the same spirit in which he has insisted upon giving to his fellow workers on the Tribune a share in the profits of their joint work. Mr. Greeley is odd, but I like him better than any editor I have met.”
So the girl went on, writing objectively and instinctively avoiding the subjective. But she did not always write so seriously. She had “caught the patter” of society and she often filled pages with a sparkling, piquant flippancy, which had for Arthur a meaning all its own.
XXX
AT SEA
THE voyage to Europe in 1860 was a much more serious undertaking than the like voyage is in our later time. It occupied a fortnight or three weeks, for one thing, where now a week is ample time for the passage. The steamers were small and uncomfortable—the very largest of them being only half the size of the very smallest now regarded as fit for passenger service. There was no promenade deck or hurricane deck then, above the main deck, which was open to the sky throughout its length and breadth, except for the interruption of one small deck house, covering the companion way, a ventilator pipe here and there, and perhaps a chicken coop to furnish emaciated and sea sick fowls for the table d’hôte. There was no ice machine on board, and no distilling apparatus for the production of fresh water. As a consequence, after two days out, the warm water which passengers must drink began to taste of the ancient wood of the water tanks; at the end of a week it became sickeningly foul; and before the end of the voyage it became so utterly undrinkable that the most aggressive teetotaler among the passengers was compelled to order wine for his dinner and to abstain from coffee at breakfast.
The passenger who did not grow seasick in those days was a rare exception to an otherwise universal rule, while, in our time, when the promenade deck is forty or fifty feet above the waves, and the passengers are abundantly supplied both with palatable food and with wholesome water, only those suffer with mal de mer who are bilious when they go on board, or who are beset by a senseless apprehension of the sea.
The passenger lists were small, too, even allowing for the diminutive size of the ships. One person crossed the ocean then where perhaps a hundred cross in our time.
There were perhaps twenty passengers in the cabin of the ship in which Dorothy sailed. By the second day out only two of the ship’s company appeared at meals or at all regularly took the air on deck. Dorothy was one of these two. The other she herself introduced, as it were, to Arthur, in a long, diary-like letter which she wrote on shipboard and mailed at Liverpool.
“I’m sitting on a great coil of rope, just behind the deck house,” she wrote, “where I am sheltered from the wind and where I can breathe my whole body full of the delicious sea air. The air is flavored with great quantities of the finest sunshine imaginable. Every now and then I lay my paper down, and a very nice old sailor comes and puts two big iron belaying pins on it, to keep it from blowing overboard while I go skipping like a ten-year-old girl up and down the broad, clean deck, and enjoying the mere being alive, just as I do on horseback in Virginia when the sun is rising on a perfect morning.
“I ought to be down stairs—no, I mustn’t say ‘down stairs,’ when I’m at sea, I must say ‘below.’ Well, I ought to be below ministering to Edmonia and her friend Mrs. Livingston,—or Mildred, as she insists on my calling her—both of whom are frightfully sick; but really and truly, Edmonia won’t let me. She fairly drove me out, half an hour ago. When I didn’t want to go she threatened to throw her shoes at my head, saying ‘You dear little idiot, go on deck and keep your sea-well on, if you can.’ And when I protested that she seemed very ill and that I hadn’t the heart to go on the beautiful deck and be happy in the delicious air and sunshine while she was suffering so, she said: ‘Oh, I’m always so for the first three or four days, and I’m best let alone. My temper is frightful when I’m seasick. That’s why I took separate staterooms for you and me. I don’t want you to find out what a horribly ill-tempered, ill-mannered woman I am when I’m seasick. How can I help it? I’ve got a mustard plaster on my back and two on my chest, and I’ve drunk half a bottle of that detestable stuff, champagne, and I’m really fighting mad. Go away, child, and let me fight it out with myself and the stewardesses. They don’t mind it, the dear good creatures. They’re used to it. I threw a coffee cup full of coffee all over one of them this morning because she presumed to insist upon my swallowing the horrible stuff, and she actually laughed, Dorothy. I couldn’t get up a quarrel with her no matter what I did, and so I tried my hand on the ship’s doctor. I don’t like him anyhow. He’s just the kind that would make love to me if he dared, and I don’t like men that do that.’ Then Edmonia added: ‘He wouldn’t quarrel at all. When I told him he was trying to poison me with bicarbonate of soda in my drinking water, he seriously assured me that bicarbonate of soda isn’t poisonous in the least degree, that it corrects acidity, and all that sort of thing. I gave him up as hopeless,—but remind me, Dorothy, that when we go ashore I must put half a dozen sovereigns into his hand—carefully wrapped up in paper, so that he shan’t even guess what they are—as his well earned fee for enduring my bad temper. But now, Dorothy, you see clearly that this ship doesn’t provide any proper person for me to quarrel with, and so I must fall back upon you, if you persist in staying here and arrogantly insulting me with your sublime superiority to seasickness. So get out of my room and stay out till I come on deck with my mind restored to a normal condition.’ I really think she meant it, and so I’m obeying her. And I should be very happy with the air and the sunshine and my dear old sailorman who tells me sailor stories and sings to me the very quaintest old sailor songs imaginable, if I could be sure that I’m doing right in being happy while Edmonia is so very miserable.