“Oh”—who can indicate exactly the sound of the English “Oh”—“Oh, there you are.” (His are always sounded like ah.) “Now let me tell you something. You are to dress for dinner. Ship etiquette requires it. You are to talk to the captain some—tell him how much you think of his ship, and so forth; and you are not to neglect the neighbor to your right at table. Ship etiquette, I believe, demands that you talk to your neighbor, at least at the captain’s table—that is the rule, I think. You are to take in Miss X. I am to take in Miss E.” Was it any wonder that my sea life was well-ordered and that my lines fell in pleasant places?
After dinner we adjourned to the ship’s drawing-room and there Miss X. fell to playing cards with Barfleur at first, afterwards with Mr. G., who came up and found us, thrusting his company upon us perforce. The man amused me, so typically aggressive, money-centered was he. However, not he so much as Miss X. and her mental and social attitude, commanded my attention. Her card playing and her boastful accounts of adventures at Ostend, Trouville, Nice, Monte Carlo and Aix-les-Bains indicated plainly the trend of her interests. She was all for the showy life that was to be found in these places—burning with a desire to glitter—not shine—in that half world of which she was a smart atom. Her conversation was at once showy, naïve, sophisticated and yet unschooled. I could see by Barfleur’s attentions to her, that aside from her crude Americanisms which ordinarily would have alienated him, he was interested in her beauty, her taste in dress, her love of a certain continental café life which encompassed a portion of his own interests. Both were looking forward to a fresh season of it—Barfleur with me—Miss X. with some one who was waiting for her in London.
I think I have indicated in one or two places in the preceding pages that Barfleur, being an Englishman of the artistic and intellectual classes, with considerable tradition behind him and all the feeling of the worth-whileness of social order that goes with class training, has a high respect for the conventions—or rather let me say appearances, for, though essentially democratic in spirit and loving America—its raw force—he still clings almost pathetically, I think, to that vast established order, which is England. It may be producing a dying condition of race, but still there is something exceedingly fine about it. Now one of the tenets of English social order is that, being a man you must be a gentleman, very courteous to the ladies, very observant of outward forms and appearances, very discreet in your approaches to the wickedness of the world—but nevertheless you may approach and much more, if you are cautious enough.
After dinner there was a concert. It was a dreary affair. When it was over, I started to go to bed but, it being warm and fresh, I stepped outside. The night was beautiful. There were no fellow passengers on the promenade. All had retired. The sky was magnificent for stars—Orion, the Pleiades, the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. I saw one star, off to my right as I stood at the prow under the bridge, which, owing to the soft, velvety darkness, cast a faint silvery glow on the water—just a trace. Think of it! One lone, silvery star over the great dark sea doing this. I stood at the prow and watched the boat speed on. I threw back my head and drank in the salt wind. I looked and listened. England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany—these were all coming to me mile by mile. As I stood there a bell over me struck eight times. Another farther off sounded the same number. Then a voice at the prow called, “All’s well,” and another aloft on that little eyrie called the crow’s nest, echoed it. “All’s well.” The second voice was weak and quavering. Something came up in my throat—a quick unbidden lump of emotion. Was it an echo of old journeys and old seas when life was not safe? When Columbus sailed into the unknown? And now this vast ship, eight hundred and eighty-two feet long, eighty-eight feet beam, with huge pits of engines and furnaces and polite, veneered first-cabin decks and passengers!
CHAPTER II
MISS X.
It was ten o’clock the next morning when I arose and looked at my watch. I thought it might be eight-thirty, or seven. The day was slightly gray with spray flying. There was a strong wind. The sea was really a boisterous thing, thrashing and heaving in hills and hollows. I was thinking of Kipling’s “White Horses” for a while. There were several things about this great ship which were unique. It was a beautiful thing all told—its long cherry-wood, paneled halls in the first-class section, its heavy porcelain baths, its dainty staterooms fitted with lamps, bureaus, writing-desks, washstands, closets and the like. I liked the idea of dressing for dinner and seeing everything quite stately and formal. The little be-buttoned call-boys in their tight-fitting blue suits amused me. And the bugler who bugled for dinner! That was a most musical sound he made, trilling in the various quarters gaily, as much as to say, “This is a very joyous event, ladies and gentlemen; we are all happy; come, come; it is a delightful feast.” I saw him one day in the lobby of C deck, his legs spread far apart, the bugle to his lips, no evidence of the rolling ship in his erectness, bugling heartily. It was like something out of an old medieval court or a play. Very nice and worth while.
Absolutely ignorant of this world of the sea, the social, domestic, culinary and other economies of a great ship like this interested me from the start. It impressed me no little that all the servants were English, and that they were, shall I say, polite?—well, if not that, non-aggressive. American servants—I could write a whole chapter on that, but we haven’t any servants in America. We don’t know how to be servants. It isn’t in us; it isn’t nice to be a servant; it isn’t democratic; and spiritually I don’t blame us. In America, with our turn for mechanics, we shall have to invent something which will do away with the need of servants. What it is to be, I haven’t the faintest idea at present.
Another thing that impressed and irritated me a little was the stolidity of the English countenance as I encountered it here on this ship. I didn’t know then whether it was accidental in this case, or national. There is a certain type of Englishman—the robust, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed Saxon—whom I cordially dislike, I think, speaking temperamentally and artistically. They are too solid, too rosy, too immobile as to their faces, and altogether too assured and stary. I don’t like them. They offend me. They thrust a silly race pride into my face, which isn’t necessary at all and which I always resent with a race pride of my own. It has even occurred to me at times that these temperamental race differences could be quickly adjusted only by an appeal to arms, which is sillier yet. But so goes life. It’s foolish on both sides, but I mention it for what it is worth.
After lunch, which was also breakfast with me, I went with the chief engineer through the engine-room. This was a pit eighty feet deep, forty feet wide and, perhaps, one hundred feet long, filled with machinery. What a strange world! I know absolutely nothing of machinery—not a single principle connected with it—and yet I am intensely interested. These boilers, pipes, funnels, pistons, gages, registers and bright-faced register boards speak of a vast technique which to me is tremendously impressive. I know scarcely anything of the history of mechanics, but I know what boilers and feed-pipes and escape-pipes are, and how complicated machinery is automatically oiled and reciprocated, and there my knowledge ends. All that I know about the rest is what the race knows. There are mechanical and electrical engineers. They devised the reciprocating engine for vessels and then the turbine. They have worked out the theory of electrical control and have installed vast systems with a wonderful economy as to power and space. This deep pit was like some vast, sad dream of a fevered mind. It clanked and rattled and hissed and squeaked with almost insane contrariety! There were narrow, steep, oil-stained stairs, very hot, or very cold and very slippery, that wound here and there in strange ways, and if you were not careful there were moving rods and wheels to strike you. You passed from bridge to bridge under whirling wheels, over clanking pistons; passed hot containers; passed cold ones. Here men were standing, blue-jumpered assistants in oil-stained caps and gloves—thin caps and thick gloves—watching the manœuvers of this vast network of steel, far from the passenger life of the vessel. Occasionally they touched something. They were down in the very heart or the bowels of this thing, away from the sound of the water; away partially from the heaviest motion of the ship; listening only to the clank, clank and whir, whir and hiss, hiss all day long. It is a metal world they live in, a hard, bright metal world. Everything is hard, everything fixed, everything regular. If they look up, behold a huge, complicated scaffolding of steel; noise and heat and regularity.