He evidently thought that I was reaching to get my card, because he snapped out, "I don't care who you are, you're a third-class passenger on this ship."
"Yes, purser," I said, "but this"—handing him my document—"will show you that while I am booked steerage, I paid for first; and couldn't arrangements be made for me to sleep in the steerage and eat at the first table? You know, purser, it's just a little rocky back there in the steerage—and you see I paid for first-cabin passage."
There is no doubt but what that fellow could read, but he seemed so horrified at a steerage passenger invading the holy precincts of first cabin that he wouldn't attempt to read anything that had been contaminated by being in the possession of a steerage passenger.
Anyway, he handed it back to me without reading it, with the remark: "I've only got your word for that."
"Um huh, purser," I said, "and when it comes to a plain statement of facts, my word is good for even more than that."
"You're a third-class passenger on this ship, and you'll have to eat third-class where you belong," and further conversation with me seemed to give him a pain.
After that unsatisfactory interview with the purser, the high and holy self-sacrificing sentiments that I had had just prior to my desire to try and shake that bunch of steerage passengers—that part of my better nature that made me feel for the misfortunes of my kind returned, and I went back to the steerage, "where I belonged," to share their lot—it was either that or jump overboard.
There was just one topic of conversation back in steerage—the rotten treatment we were getting; and it was the voice of our little democracy that we ought to try and do something. I told you in letter II that one can make better time getting acquainted on shipboard than anywhere else, but you may have missed that wheat grain of information in the surrounding chaff. But it is there, and already there were those aboard who had learned that I was doing newspaper work, so they wished the job of trying onto me.
"You're a third-class passenger on this ship"—and further conversation with me seemed to give him a pain