This black hotel of a ship, so vast, so graceful, now rocking gently in the enameled bay, was surrounded this hour by wheeling, squeaking gulls. I always like the squeak of a gull; it reminds me of a rusty car-wheel, and somehow it accords with a lone, rocky coast. Here they were, their little feet coral red, their beaks jade gray, their bodies snowy white or sober gray, wheeling and crying, “My heart remembers how.” I looked at them, and that old intense sensation of joy came back—the wish to fly, the wish to be young, the wish to be happy, the wish to be loved. I think my lips framed verses, and I thought that if nature, in her vast, sightless chemistry, would only give me something to feed this intense emotion to the full, I should welcome eternal sleep.
But my scene, beautiful as it was, was slipping away. One of the pretty steamers I had noted lying on the water some distance away was drawing alongside—to get mails, they said. There were hurrying and shuffling people on all the first-cabin decks.
Then the mail and trunks being off, and that boat having veered away, another and somewhat smaller one came alongside, and we first- and then the second-class passengers went aboard, and I watched the great ship growing less and less as we pulled away from it. It was immense from alongside, a vast skyscraper of a ship. At a hundred feet it seemed not so large, but exceedingly more graceful; at a thousand feet all its exquisite lines were perfect, its bulk not so great, but the pathos of its departing beauty wonderful; at two thousand feet it was still beautiful and large against the granite ring of the harbor; but, alas! it was moving. The captain was an almost indistinguishable spot upon the bridge. The stacks, in their way gorgeous, took on beautiful proportions. I thought, as we veered in near the pier and the ship turned within her length or thereabouts and steamed out, I had never seen a more beautiful sight. Her convoy of gulls was still about her. Her smoke-stacks flung back their graceful streamers. The propeller left a white trail of foam.
Just then the lighter bumped against the dock. I walked under a long, low train-shed covering four tracks, and then I saw my first English passenger-train. I didn’t like the looks of the cars. I can prove in a moment by any traveler that our trains are vastly more luxurious. I can see where there isn’t heat enough, and where one lavatory for men and women on any train, let alone a first-class one, is an abomination; but, still, and notwithstanding, I say the English railway service is better. Why? Because it’s more human; it’s more considerate. You aren’t driven and urged to step lively and called at in loud, harsh voices, and made to feel that you are being tolerated aboard something that was never made for you at all, but for the employees of the company.
Drawn by W. J. Glackens
“THE MAGNIFICENT WALL OF LOWER NEW YORK, SET LIKE A JEWEL IN A GREEN RING OF SEA-WATER”
But finally the train was started, and we were off. The track was not so wide as ours, if I am not mistaken, and the little freight-cars were positively ridiculous, mere wheelbarrows by comparison with the American type. As for the passenger-cars, when I came to examine them, they reminded me of some of our fine street-cars that run from, say, Schenectady to Gloversville. They were the first-class cars, too—the English Pullmans. The train started out briskly and you could feel that it did not have the powerful weight to it which the American train has. An American Pullman creaks significantly, just as a great ship does when it begins to move. An American engine begins to pull slowly because it has something to pull—like a team with a heavy load. I didn’t feel that I was in a train half so much as I did that I was in a string of baby-carriages.
As I think of it now, I can never be sufficiently grateful to G. for a certain affectionate, thoughtful, sympathetic regard for my every possible mood on this occasion. This was my first trip to this England of which of course he was intensely proud. He was so humanly anxious that I should not miss any of its charms or, if need be, defects. He wanted me to be able to judge it fairly and humanly and to see, as he phrased it, “the eventual result sieved through your temperament.” The soul of attention, the soul of courtesy, patient, long-suffering, humane, gentle, how I have tried the patience of that man at times! An iron mood he has on occasion; a stoic one always. Gentle, even, smiling, living a rule and a standard, every thought of him produces a grateful smile.
It was three-thirty when the train began to move, and from the lovely, misty sunshine of the morning the sky had become overcast with low, gray, almost black, rain-clouds. I looked at the hills and valleys. They told me we were in Wales. Curiously, as we sped along, first came Wordsworth into my mind, and then Thomas Hardy. I thought of Wordsworth first because these smooth, kempt hills, wet with the rain and static with deep, gray shadows, suggested him. England owes much to William Wordsworth, I think. So far as I can see, he epitomized in his verses this sweet, simple hominess that tugs at the heart-strings like some old call that one has heard before. My father was a German, my mother of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, and yet there is a pull here in this Shaksperian-Wordsworthian-Hardyesque world which is precisely like the call of a tender mother to a child. I can’t resist it. I love it. I love it so much that it even hurts me; and I am not English, but radically American.