BOOK V
CIBOLA AND QUIVIRA
CHAPTER XV PANAMA TO NEW YORK
I sailed to New York from Colon on one of those transports designed for the use of Canal employees. When the berths are not all taken by officials and their wives the remainder are sold to the general traveling public. The distance of the voyage in nautical miles is 1974, in dollars it is a hundred, and in time it is six days. The accommodation is one class only, with no steerage passengers.
It meant six more lazy days similar to those spent sailing from New Orleans. The passengers seemed merrier going to New York than the others did coming home. Most of them had the money for a good time in their pockets, but the others had spent theirs and were sobered.
There is little that need be said of the voyage. Though late in September it was sultry and breezeless. We kept expecting a coolness and a change, but it was not until the fifth day that the North touched us, and that was a day of packing, of coming out in "shore clothes," of putting on unsuspected overcoats and bowler hats. The ship's company changed itself from white-clad Central Americans into somber New Yorkers. The sky itself grew overcast. More serious expressions crept into people's faces as late next afternoon we steamed up the Hudson into the presence of Manhattan, grand and gray.
I had promised to meet Wilfrid Ewart in New York and return South with him to Santa Fe; he would buy a horse and ride with us, study the Mexican Border, and write; I would spend some time there before going on to Mexico. During the last few years he and I had been something like inseparables—at least in London. I knew, as I waited in the harbor, that he was there somewhere in the great city. I knew also that my friend Vachel Lindsay was there, and it was a special pleasure to think of meeting both friends. The three of us had sat at a table in a café in Regent Street late one night two years before, and the project of Ewart's going to America had been mooted. Lindsay drew a map of the United States upon the table and marked Santa Fe on it and then drew radii from it. "A mud house and a pony are all you want, and you will see America," said the poet. Paradoxically enough, he asserted that America could be studied to better advantage in her deserts than in her cities.