Aspinwall! The cars stop; a black-and-tan battalion charge among us, offering to carry baggage. They pursue us to the gate of the P. M. S. S. depot; there they stop; we pass through one more cluster of orange, banana, and cigar selling women; we push and jam into the depot, show our tickets, and are on board the Ocean Queen. We are on the Atlantic side! It comes over us half in awe, half in wonder, that this boat will, if she do not reach the bottom first, carry us straight to a dock in New York. The anticipation of years is developing into tangibility.
We cross the Caribbean. It is a stormy sea. Our second day thereon was one of general nausea and depression. You have perhaps heard the air, “Sister, what are the wild waves saying?” On that black Friday many of our passengers seemed to be earnestly saying something over the Ocean Queen’s side to the “wild, wild waves.” The Grinder went down with the rest. I gazed triumphantly over his prostrate form laid out at full length on a cabin settee. Seward, Bancroft, politics, metaphysics, poetry, and philosophy were hushed at last. Both enthusiasm and patriotism find an uneasy perch on a nauseated stomach.
But steam has not robbed navigation of all its romance. We find some poetry in smoke, smoke stacks, pipes, funnels, and paddles, as well as in the “bellying sails” and the “white-winged messengers of commerce.” I have a sort of worship for our ponderous walking-beam, which swings its many tons of iron upon its axis as lightly as a lady’s parasol held ’twixt thumb and finger. It is an embodiment of strength, grace, and faithfulness. Night and day, mid rain and sunshine, be the sea smooth or tempestuous, still that giant arm is at its work, not swerving the fractional part of an inch from its appointed sphere of revolution. It is no dead metallic thing: it is a something rejoicing in power and use. It crunches the ocean ’neath its wheels with that pride and pleasure of power which a strong man feels when he fights his way through some ignoble crowd. The milder powers of upper air more feebly impel yon ship; in our hold are the powers of earth, the gnomes and goblins, the subjects of Pluto and Vulcan, begrimed with soot and sweat, and the elements for millions and millions of years imprisoned in the coal are being steadily set free. Every shovelful generates a monster born of flame. As he flies sighing and groaning through the wide-mouthed smokestack into the upper air, he gives our hull a parting shove forward.
A death in the steerage—a passenger taken on board sick at Aspinwall. All day long an inanimate shape wrapped in the American flag lies near the gangway. At four P.M. an assemblage from cabin and steerage gather with uncovered heads. The surgeon reads the service for the dead; a plank is lifted up; with a last shrill whirl that which was once a man is shot into the blue waters; in an instant it is out of sight and far behind, and we retire to our state-rooms, thinking and solemnly wondering about that body sinking, sinking, sinking in the depths of the Caribbean; of the sea monsters that curiously approach and examine it; of the gradual decay of the corpse’s canvas envelope; and far into the night, as the Ocean Queen shoots ahead, our thoughts wander back in the blackness to the buried yet unburied dead.
The Torrid Zone is no more. This morning a blast from the north sweeps down upon us. Cold, brassy clouds are in the sky; the ocean’s blue has turned to a dark, angry brown, flecked with white caps and swept by blasts fresh from the home of the northern floe and iceberg. The majority of the passengers gather about the cabin-registers, like the house-flies benumbed by the first cold snap of autumn in our northern kitchens. Light coats, pumps and other summer apparel have given way to heavy boots, over-coats, fur caps and pea-jackets. A home look settles on the faces of the North Americans. They snuff their native atmosphere: they feel its bracing influence. But the tawny-skinned Central Americans who have gradually accumulated on board from the Pacific ports and Aspinwall, settle inactively into corners or remain ensconced in their berths. The air which kindles our energies wilts theirs. The hurricane-deck is shorn of its awnings. Only a few old “shell-back” passengers maintain their place upon it, and yet five days ago we sat there in midsummer moonlit evenings.
We are now about one hundred miles from Cape Hatteras. Old Mr. Poddle and his wife are travelling for pleasure. Came to California by rail, concluded to return by the Isthmus. Ever since we started Cape Hatteras has loomed up fearfully in their imaginations. Old Mr. Poddle looks knowingly at passing vessels through his field-glass, but doesn’t know a fore-and-aft schooner from a man-of-war. Mrs. Poddle once a day inquires if there’s any danger. Mr. Poddle does not talk so much, but evidently in private meditates largely on hurricanes, gales, cyclones, sinking and burning vessels. Last night we came in the neighborhood of the Gulf Stream. There were flashes of lightning, “mare’s tails” in the sky, a freshening breeze and an increasing sea. About eleven old Mr. Poddle came on deck. Mrs. Poddle, haunted by Hatteras, had sent him out to see if “there was any danger;” for it is evident that Mrs. Poddle is dictatress of the domestic empire. Mr. Poddle ascended to the hurricane-deck, looked nervously to leeward, and just then an old passenger salt standing by, who had during the entire passage comprehended and enjoyed the Poddletonian dreads, remarked, “This is nothing to what we shall have by morning.” This shot sent Poddle below. This morning at breakfast the pair looked harassed and fatigued.
The great question now agitating the mind of this floating community is, “Shall we reach the New York pier at the foot of Canal street by Saturday noon?” If we do, there is for us all long life, prosperity and happiness: if we do not, it is desolation and misery. For Monday is New Year’s Day. On Sunday we may not be able to leave the city: to be forced to stay in New York over Sunday is a dreadful thought for solitary contemplation. We study and turn it over in our minds for hours as we pace the deck. We live over and over again the land-journey to our hearthstones at Boston, Syracuse, and Cincinnati. We meet in thought our long-expectant relatives, so that at last our air-castles become stale and monotonous, and we fear that the reality may be robbed of half its anticipated pleasure from being so often lived over in imagination.
Nine o’clock, Friday evening. The excitement increases. Barnegat Light is in sight. Half the cabin passengers are up all night, indulging in unprofitable talk and weariness, merely because we are so near home. Four o’clock, and the faithful engine stops, the cable rattles overboard, and everything is still. We are at anchor off Staten Island. By the first laggard streak of winter’s dawn I am on the hurricane-deck. I am curious to see my native North. It comes by degrees out of the cold blue fog on either side of the bay. Miles of houses, spotted with patches of bushy-looking woodland—bushy in appearance to a Californian, whose oaks grow large and widely apart from each other, as in an English park. There comes a shrieking and groaning and bellowing of steam-whistles from the monster city nine miles away. Soon we weigh anchor and move up toward it. Tugs dart fiercely about, or laboriously puff with heavilyladen vessels in tow. Stately ocean steamers surge past, outward bound. We become a mere fragment of the mass of floating life. We near the foot of Canal street. There is a great deal of shouting and bawling and counter-shouting and counter-bawling, with expectant faces on the wharf, and recognitions from shore to steamer and from steamer to shore. The young woman who flirted so ardently with the young Californian turns out to be married, and that business-looking, middle-aged man on the pier is her husband. Well, I never! Why, you are slow, my friend, says inward reflection. You are not versed in the customs of the East. At last the gangway plank is flung out. We walk on shore. It is now eighteen years since that little floating world society cemented by a month’s association scattered forever from each other’s sight at the Canal street pier.
THE WHITE CROSS LIBRARY