“As for Mildred—Mrs. Livingston—she lies white-faced and helpless in her bunk—there, I got the sailor term right that time at the first effort—while her husband simply sleeps and moans on the sofa. The doctor says they are ‘progressing very satisfactorily’ and so I am taking his advice and letting them alone. But why anybody should be seasick, how anybody can be sick at sea, I simply cannot understand. The ship’s doctor tried to explain it to me this morning, but he forgot his explanation. He—well, never mind. He ought to have a wife with a plantation or something of that sort, so that his abilities might have an opportunity. I don’t think much of his abilities, and I don’t like him half as well as I do my old sailor. He is going to tell me—the old sailor, I mean and not the doctor—all about his life history tonight. We are to have a moon, you know, and, as he’s on the ‘port watch,’ whatever that may mean, he’s going to come on deck and tell me all about himself. I’ll tell you about it in tomorrow’s instalment of this rambling letter.”
On the following day, or perhaps a day later even than that, Dorothy wrote:
“This is another day. I don’t just know what day. You know they keep changing the clock at sea, and I’ve got mixed up. Edmonia still throws shoes and medicine bottles and coffee cups at me whenever I thrust my head inside the portière of her stateroom, and Mildred, though she has sufficiently recovered to come on deck, lies helpless in a deck chair which my sailor has ‘made fast’—you see I’m getting to be an expert in nautical terms—to a mast or a spar or something, and when I speak to her, says, ‘Go away, child, and be happy in the midst of human misery, if you can. Let me alone.’ When I ask her concerning her husband she answers: ‘I suppose he’s comfortable in his misery. At any rate, he has two bottles of champagne by his side, and he is swearing most hopefully. I always know he is getting over it when he begins to swear in real earnest, and with a certain discretion in the choice of his oaths. Now, run away, you ridiculously well girl or I’ll begin to borrow from Rex’s vituperative vocabulary.’ Rex is her husband you know.
“The sailor’s story didn’t amount to anything, so I’ll not bother you with a repetition of it.”
[As a strictly confidential communication, not to be mentioned to anybody, the author so far intrudes upon attention at this point, as to report that the sailorman, at the end of his picturesque and imaginative narrative, professed a self-sacrificing willingness to abandon the delights of a sea-faring existence, and to content himself thereafter with the homelier and less romantic duties of master of Pocahontas plantation. Dorothy, in continuing her letter, was quite naturally reticent upon this point. But she went on liking that old sailorman, in whose devotion to her comfort on deck nothing seemed to make the slightest difference. Perhaps this chronic mariner already had ‘a wife in every port’ and was only ‘keeping his hand in’ at courtship. At any rate after duly disciplining him, Dorothy went on liking him and accepting his manifold, sailorly attentions. Ah, these women! How very human they are in face of all their airs and pretensions!]
It was a day later that Dorothy wrote:
“There is a very extraordinary lady on board, and I have become acquainted with her, in a way. I didn’t see her at all during the first day out. As she tells me she is never seasick, I suppose she kept her cabin for some other reason. At any rate the first time I met her was on the morning of that second day out, when I was skipping about the deck and making believe that I was little Dorothy again—little ten-year-old Dorothy, who didn’t care if people were seeing her when she skipped. The captain saw me first. He’s a dear old fellow with a big beard and nine children and a nice little baby at home. And, think of it, the people that hire him to run their ship won’t let him bring his wife on board or any of his children on any account! That isn’t quite correct either, for two voyages ago it was the twenty-first anniversary of his marriage, and when he asked permission to bring his wife and baby with him on his trip to New York and back, just to celebrate, you see, the company gave permission without any hesitation. But when he came on board, he found another captain in command for that one trip, and himself only a passenger. That’s because the company don’t want a captain’s attention distracted, and I suppose a new baby whom he had never seen before would have distracted him a great deal. Anyhow that’s the way it was and the only reason the captain told me about it was that I asked him why he didn’t have his wife and children on board with him always. But I set out to tell you about the lady. After the captain had ‘captured’ me, as he put it, and had taken me up on the bridge, and had shown me how to take an observation and how to steer—he let me steer all by myself for more than a mile and I didn’t run the ship into anything, perhaps because there wasn’t anything within five hundred miles to run into—I went down on deck again, hoping that maybe Diana had got well enough to come out, but she hadn’t. She isn’t violently ill, but she’s the most entirely, hopelessly, seasick person I’ve seen yet. She—well, never mind. She’ll get well again, and in the meanwhile I must tell you about the lady. She spoke to me kindly and said:
“ ‘As you and I seem to be the only well passengers on board, I think I’m entitled to a sea acquaintance with you, Miss Dorothy. You know sea acquaintances carry no obligations with them beyond the voyage, and so no matter how chummy we may become out here on the ocean you needn’t even bow to me if we meet again on shore.’ She seemed so altogether nice that I told her I wouldn’t have a mere sea acquaintance with her, but would get acquainted with her ‘for truly,’ as the children say. She seemed glad when I said that, and we talked for two hours or more, after which we went to luncheon and sat side by side—as everybody else is seasick we had the table all to ourselves and didn’t need to mind whose chairs we sat in.
“Well, she is a strangely fascinating person, and the more I know of her the more she fascinates me. Sometimes she seems as young as I myself am; sometimes she seems very old. She is tall and what I call willowy. That is to say she bends as easily in any direction as a willow wand could, and with as much of grace. Indeed grace is her dominant characteristic, as I discovered when she danced a Spanish fandango to my playing—just all to ourselves you know, behind the deck house. She knows everybody worth knowing, too—all the editors and artists and actors and singers and pianists and people in society that I have met, and a great many others that I haven’t met at all. And she really does know them, too, for one day in her cabin I saw a great album of hers, and when she saw I was interested in it she bade me take it on deck, saying that perhaps it might amuse me during the hour she must give to sleep. And when I read it, I found it full of charming things in prose and verse, all addressed to her, and all signed by great people, or nearly all. She told me afterwards that she valued the other things most—the things signed by people whose names meant nothing to me. ‘For those,’ she said, ‘are my real friends. The rest—well, no matter. They are professionals, and they do such things well.’ I don’t just know what she meant by that, but I have a suspicion that she loves truth better than anything else, and that she doesn’t think distinguished people always tell the truth when they write in albums. At any rate when I asked her if I might write and sign a little sentiment in her album, she said, with more of emotion than the occasion seemed to call for: ‘Not in that book, my child! Not as a tag to all those people. If you will write me three or four lines of your own on a simple sheet of paper and sign it, I’ll have it sumptuously bound when I get to Paris, in a book all to itself, and nobody else shall ever write a line to go with it while I live.’
“Wasn’t it curious? And especially when you reflect how many distinguished people she knows! But she brought me a sheet of very fine paper that afternoon, and said: ‘I don’t want you to write now. I don’t want you to write till our voyage is nearly over. Then I want you to write the truth as to your feeling for me. No matter what it is, I want it to be the truth, so that I may keep it always.’ I took the sheet and wrote on it, ‘I wish you were my mother.’ That was the truth. I do wish every hour that this woman were my mother. But she refused to read what I had written, saying: ‘I will keep it, child, unread until the end of the voyage. Then I’ll give it back to you if you wish, and you shall write again whatever you are prompted to write, be it this or something quite different.’