WHILE I was lying in my berth the fifth morning, I heard the room steward outside my door tell some one that he thought we reached Fishguard at one-thirty.
I packed my trunks, thinking of this big ship and the fact that my trip was over and that never again could I cross the Atlantic for the first time. A queer world this. We can only do any one thing significantly once. I remember when I first went to Chicago, I remember when I first went to St. Louis, I remember when I first went to New York. Other trips there were, but they are lost in vagueness. But the first time of any important thing sticks and lasts; it comes back at times and haunts you with its beauty and its sadness. You know so well you cannot do that any more; and, like a clock, it ticks and tells you that life is moving on. I shall never come to England any more for the first time. That is gone and done for—worse luck.
So I packed—will you believe it?—a little sadly. I think most of us are a little silly at times, only we are cautious enough to conceal it. There is in me the spirit of a lonely child somewhere and it clings pitifully to the hand of its big mama, Life, and cries when it is frightened; and then there is a coarse, vulgar exterior which fronts the world defiantly and bids all and sundry to go to the devil. It sneers and barks and jeers bitterly at times, and guffaws and cackles and has a joyous time laughing at the follies of others.
Then I went to hunt Barfleur to find out how I should do. How much was I to give the deck-steward; how much to the bath-steward; how much to the room-steward; how much to the dining-room steward; how much to “boots,” and so on.
“Look here!” observed that most efficient of all managerial souls that I have ever known. “I’ll tell you what you do. No—I’ll write it.” And he drew forth an ever ready envelope. “Deck-steward—so much,” it read, “Room steward—so much—” etc.
I went forthwith and paid them, relieving my soul of a great weight. Then I came on deck and found that I had forgotten to pack my ship blanket, and a steamer rug, which I forthwith went and packed. Then I discovered that I had no place for my derby hat save on my head, so I went back and packed my cap. Then I thought I had lost one of my brushes, which I hadn’t, though I did lose one of my stylo pencils. Finally I came on deck and sang coon songs with Miss X., sitting in our steamer chairs. The low shore of Ireland had come into view with two faint hills in the distance and these fascinated me. I thought I should have some slight emotion on seeing land again, but I didn’t. It was gray and misty at first, but presently the sun came out beautifully clear and the day was as warm as May in New York. I felt a sudden elation of spirits with the coming of the sun, and I began to think what a lovely time I was going to have in Europe.
Miss X. was a little more friendly this morning than heretofore. She was a tricky creature—coy, uncertain and hard to please. She liked me intellectually and thought I was able, but her physical and emotional predilections, so far as men are concerned, did not include me.
We rejoiced together singing, and then we fought. There is a directness between experienced intellects which waves aside all formalities. She had seen a lot of life; so had I.
She said she thought she would like to walk a little, and we strolled back along the heaving deck to the end of the first cabin section and then to the stern. When we reached there the sky was overcast again, for it was one of those changeable mornings which is now gray, now bright, now misty. Just now the heavens were black and lowering with soft, rain-charged clouds, like the wool of a smudgy sheep. The sea was a rich green in consequence—not a clear green, but a dark, muddy, oil-green. It rose and sank in its endless unrest and one or two boats appeared—a lightship, anchored out all alone against the lowering waste, and a small, black, passenger steamer going somewhere.
“I wish my path in life were as white as that and as straight,” observed Miss X., pointing to our white, propeller-churned wake which extended back for half a mile or more.
“Yes,” I observed, “you do and you don’t. You do, if it wouldn’t cost you trouble in the future—impose the straight and narrow, as it were.”
“Oh, you don’t know,” she exclaimed irritably, that ugly fighting light coming into her eyes, which I had seen there several times before. “You don’t know what my life has been. I haven’t been so bad. We all of us do the best we can. I have done the best I could, considering.”
“Yes, yes,” I observed, “you’re ambitious and alive and you’re seeking—Heaven knows what! You would be adorable with your pretty face and body if you were not so—so sophisticated. The trouble with you is—”
“Oh, look at that cute little boat out there!” She was talking of the lightship. “I always feel sorry for a poor little thing like that, set aside from the main tide of life and left lonely—with no one to care for it.”
“The trouble with you is,” I went on, seizing this new remark as an additional pretext for analysis, “you’re romantic, not sympathetic. You’re interested in that poor little lonely boat because its state is romantic; not pathetic. It may be pathetic, but that isn’t the point with you.”
“Well,” she said, “if you had had all the hard knocks I have had, you wouldn’t be sympathetic either. I’ve suffered, I have. My illusions have been killed dead.”
“Yes. Love is over with you. You can’t love any more. You can like to be loved, that’s all. If it were the other way about—”
I paused to think how really lovely she would be with her narrow lavender eyelids; her delicate, almost retroussé, little nose; her red cupid’s-bow mouth.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, with a gesture of almost religious adoration. “I cannot love any one person any more, but I can love love, and I do—all the delicate things it stands for.”
“Flowers,” I observed, “jewels, automobiles, hotel bills, fine dresses.”
“Oh, you’re brutal. I hate you. You’ve said the cruelest, meanest things that have ever been said to me.”
“But they’re so.”
“I don’t care. Why shouldn’t I be hard? Why shouldn’t I love to live and be loved? Look at my life. See what I’ve had.”
“You like me, in a way?” I suggested.
“I admire your intellect.”
“Quite so. And others receive the gifts of your personality.”
“I can’t help it. I can’t be mean to the man I’m with. He’s good to me. I won’t. I’d be sinning against the only conscience I have.”
“Then you have a conscience?”
“Oh, you go to the devil!”
But we didn’t separate by any means.
They were blowing a bugle for lunch when we came back, and down we went. Barfleur was already at table. The orchestra was playing Auld Lang Syne, Home Sweet Home, Dixie and the Suwannee River. It even played one of those delicious American rags which I love so much—the Oceana Roll. I felt a little lump in my throat at Auld Lang Syne and Dixie, and together Miss X. and I hummed the Oceana Roll as it was played. One of the girl passengers came about with a plate to obtain money for the members of the orchestra, and half-crowns were universally deposited. Then I started to eat my dessert; but Barfleur, who had hurried off, came back to interfere.
“Come, come!” (He was always most emphatic.) “You’re missing it all. We’re landing.”
I thought we were leaving at once. The eye behind the monocle was premonitory of some great loss to me. I hurried on deck—to thank his artistic and managerial instinct instantly I arrived there. Before me was Fishguard and the Welsh coast, and to my dying day I shall never forget it. Imagine, if you please, a land-locked harbor, as green as grass in this semi-cloudy, semi-gold-bathed afternoon, with a half-moon of granite scarp rising sheer and clear from the green waters to the low gray clouds overhead. On its top I could see fields laid out in pretty squares or oblongs, and at the bottom of what to me appeared to be the east end of the semi-circle, was a bit of gray scruff, which was the village no doubt. On the green water were several other boats—steamers, much smaller, with red stacks, black sides, white rails and funnels—bearing a family resemblance to the one we were on. There was a long pier extending out into the water from what I took to be the village and something farther inland that looked like a low shed.
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.
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, first, they said. There were hurrying and shuffling people on all the first cabin decks. Barfleur was forward looking after his luggage. The captain stood on the bridge in his great gold-braided blue overcoat. There were mail chutes being lowered from our giant vessel’s side, and bags and trunks and boxes and bales were then sent scuttling down. I saw dozens of uniformed men and scores of ununiformed laborers briskly handling these in the sunshine. My fellow passengers in their last hurrying hour interested me, for I knew I should see them no more; except one or two, perhaps.
While we were standing here I turned to watch an Englishman, tall, assured, stalky, stary. He had been soldiering about for some time, examining this, that and the other in his critical, dogmatic British way. He had leaned over the side and inspected the approaching lighters, he had stared critically and unpoetically at the gulls which were here now by hundreds, he had observed the landing toilet of the ladies, the material equipment of the various men, and was quite evidently satisfied that he himself was perfect, complete. He was aloof, chilly, decidedly forbidding and judicial.
Finally a cabin steward came hurrying out to him.
“Did you mean to leave the things you left in your room unpacked?” he asked. The Englishman started, stiffened, stared. I never saw a self-sufficient man so completely shaken out of his poise.
“Things in my room unpacked?” he echoed. “What room are you talking about? My word!”
“There are three drawers full of things in there, sir, unpacked, and they’re waiting for your luggage now, sir!”
“My word!” he repeated, grieved, angered, perplexed. “My word! I’m sure I packed everything. Three drawers full! My word!” He bustled off stiffly. The attendant hastened cheerfully after. It almost gave me a chill as I thought of his problem. And they hurry so at Fishguard. He was well paid out, as the English say, for being so stalky and superior.
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 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 against the granite ring of the harbor; but, alas, it was moving. The captain was an almost indistinguishable spot upon his 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. I asked some one: “When does she get to Liverpool?”
“At two in the morning.”
“And when do the balance of the passengers land?” (We had virtually emptied the first cabin.)
“At seven, I fancy.”
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—a semi-octagonal-looking affair—(the ends of the cars certainly looked as though they had started out to be octagonal) and there were little doors on the sides labeled “First,” “First,” “First.” On the side, at the top of the car, was a longer sign: “Cunard Ocean Special—London—Fishguard.”