Wednesday, December 21st.—How different strangers often are from the first impression they make upon us. If we revealed ourselves upon first sight just as we really are in this democratic country, in which the poor are rich and the rich poor, according to the mutations of the markets, and where we can not always distinguish a Brahmin from a blowhard, we would be quickly divided into social castes, and would find new levels. Even in traditional monarchies a large proportion of the nobility are Brahmins by birth only. The fabric of society is woven out of lies, for lies are not words pronounced but impressions produced. In fact, all the world’s a lie, and men and women play their parts therein. The word falsehood is merely the name for a feminine fabric which conceals the hair that nature made to conceal the head. Our customs encourage false hoods, false hair, false teeth and false modesty, for who would marry a person without hood, hair, teeth or modesty? Better dead than without them. Better to have lived and lied than not to have lied at all.
All of the passengers of the S. S. Limón are first-class liars, I mean first-impression liars, like the rest of the world. I have constructed two descriptive columns to show the impression they produced upon me at the first meal and the facts as I have since learned them.
| First Impression. | Facts. |
| Captain is an Englishman. | Captain is a Canadian. |
| An Englishman and his wife traveling for pleasure, probably on their honeymoon. | Englishman with wife returning to Costa Rica, where he is in business. Married many years. |
| American army captain going to some post in the tropics with his wife. | Insurance agent and captain of militia going to Costa Rica to look after mining interests. Is president and organizer of the company. |
| Emaciated young man traveling for his health. Either a dyspeptic or consumptive. | Relative of insurance agent and secretary of mining company. Starved from overeating. |
| A Spaniard going to his tropical home with his daughter, a dark young lady. | An engineer with a Scotch brogue, superintending a new ice plant just put in the ship. No relation to dark young lady, who is the lady’s maid of the wife of the Englishman. |
We also have at the table a young American who is a clerk in the offices of the United Fruit Company at Port Limón, the second mate and the purser. The English couple and the insurance agent have been in the tropics before and have learned not to drink ship water or Central American water, and keep the two waiters busy bringing beer, wine, highballs, Apollinaris water and ginger ale, somewhat to the inconvenience of the rest of us who have to await the return of the waiters with these articles before we can be served with our food.
The Englishman sits in a corner of the smoking-room and smokes a pipe after each meal. While smoking these three pipefuls, which seem to be his daily allowance, he studies American history out of Winston Churchill’s novel, “The Crossing.” He is one of those practical Englishmen who believe that he who laughs last laughs best. He asked me this morning why the United States did not keep Cuba when she first had her; and I could not convince him that it was neither expedient nor honorable to annex the island at that time. In fact, before we got through with our discussion I felt like apologizing to him for our honorable action in the matter, for doing our duty as we saw it. The English believe in our duty as they see it. He considered our dealings with Cuba as a huge American joke, a subject for the pen of a Mark Twain or a W. W. Jacobs, and that a keener sense of humor would have saved us from the mistake.
Thursday, December 22nd.—We have three flesh and blood visible ladies aboard, and a stewardess. A stewardess usually passes for flesh and blood also. This one, however, is a sort of phantom lady who is always heard, but seldom seen. Until this morning she was nothing but a laugh. She had not, to my personal knowledge, been seen on deck. She, however, had frequently made herself known by her laugh which every once in a while would ring out, or rather up, from below like a chime of tiny bells started by the wind, and making melody because they couldn’t help it. When we feel well we are stirred up by the laugh and feel like joining in, but when the waves are swinging our heads around, it sounds unnatural and phantom-like, and strikes an unsympathetic chord in our pneumogastric nerve fibers. I had heard the laugh many times and had enjoyed it until this morning, when I was lying back in my steamer chair practicing Christian Science without any comfort. Every few moments the ship would give a lurch, and so nearly turn over that it seemed as if it could not right up, and the ladies would say o-oh! and the phantom laugh would be heard coming up from below. I took to shutting my dizzy eyes and saying mentally: “Go over, if you wish, old banana box! If only my stomach will keep right side out until we go down and I become unconscious!—Laugh on, young lady! It’s all right for an invisible stewardess who hasn’t any nerves in her stomach (if she has one) and nothing but haw-haws in her brain (if she has one) to laugh, for I can’t help it. But even Solomon said that there was a time to laugh and a time not to laugh.”
While I was thus moralizing the laugh suddenly appeared on deck in coiffe and corset, smiling and balancing airily while the ship tried to dump it overboard. It was a white-aproned, pink-skinned, flaxen-haired, pleb-featured apparition, as plump and un-phantom-like as flesh and blood with a cockney accent could be. It was searching for sick women, and immediately spied me. It stopped and said:
“’Ave you ’ad any breakfast, sir?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have had breakfast all of my life, thank you.”
“Won’t you ’ave a cup of beef tea, sir? It works like a charm.”