“If it can be arranged,” I interpolated.
“It can be arranged,” he replied emphatically. “I will attend to the financial part, and arrange affairs with both an American and an English publisher.”
Sometimes life is very generous. It walks in and says, “Here, I want you to do a certain thing,” and it proceeds to arrange all your affairs for you. I felt curiously at this time as though I was on the edge of a great change. When one turns forty and faces one’s first transatlantic voyage, it is a more portentous event than when it comes at twenty.
I shall not soon forget reading in a morning paper, on the early ride downtown the day we sailed, of the suicide of a friend of mine, a brilliant man. He had fallen on hard lines, his wife had decided to desert him, he was badly in debt. I knew him well, I had known his erratic history. Here on this morning when I was sailing for Europe in the flush of a momentary literary victory, he was lying in death. It gave me pause. It brought to my mind the Latin phrase, “Memento mori.” I saw again, right in the heart of this hour of brightness, how grim life really is. Fate is kind or it is not. It puts you ahead or it does not. If it does not, nothing can save you. I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.
When I reached the ship, it was already a perfect morning in full glow. The sun was up, a host of gulls were on the wing, an air of delicious adventure enveloped the great liner’s dock at the foot of Thirteenth Street. Did ever a boy thrill over a ship as I over this monster of the seas?
In the first place, even at this early hour it was crowded with people. From the moment I came on board I was delighted by the eager, restless movement of the throng. The main deck was like the lobby of one of the great New York hotels at dinner-time. There was much call on the part of a company of dragooned ship-stewards to “keep moving, please,” and the enthusiasm of farewells and the inquiries after this person and that were delightful to hear. I encountered G. finally and exchanged greetings, and then perforce soon found myself taken in tow by him, for he obviously wanted to instruct me in all the details of this new world upon which I was now entering.
Shortly before sailing I had my first glimpse of a Miss B., as discreet and charming a bit of English femininity as one would care to set eyes upon. She was an English actress in whose comfortable transit G. was apparently seriously interested. Shortly afterward a Miss X. was introduced to him and to Miss B. by a third acquaintance of Miss B.’s, a Mr. K. I noticed Mr. K. strolling about the deck some time before I saw him conversing with Miss B., and later, for a moment, with G., K. interested me as a direct, self-satisfied, and aggressive type of the Hebrew race. I saw these women only for a moment at first, but they impressed me at once as rather attractive examples of the stage world.
It was nine o’clock, the hour of the ship’s sailing. I went forward to the prow. All the morning I had been particularly impressed with the cloud of gulls fluttering about the ship, but now the harbor, the magnificent wall of lower New York, set like a jewel in a green ring of sea-water, took my eye. When should I see it again? How soon should I be back? I stood there till the Mauretania fronted her prow outward to the broad Atlantic. Then I started to go below, but G. overtook me.
“Come up here,” he said.
We went to the boat-deck, where the towering red smoke-stacks were belching forth trailing clouds of smoke. I am quite sure that G., when he originally made his authoritative command that I come to England with him, was in no way satisfied that I would. It was a somewhat light venture on his part; but here I was. And now, having “let himself in” for this, as he would have phrased it, I could see that he was intensely interested in what Europe would do to me—and possibly in what I would do to Europe. Nevertheless, he had very little to say except to speak of the receding beauty of New York, to speculate as to my probable impressions of England and France, to congratulate himself that we were really under way. It was delightful.