 | Mrs. Skaggs's husbands, and other sketches |  |
“SEEING THE STEAMER OFF.”
I HAVE sometimes thought, while watching the
departure of an Eastern steamer, that the act
of parting from friends — so generally one of bitterness
and despondency — is made by an ingenious
Californian custom to yield a pleasurable excitement.
This luxury of leave-taking, in which most
Californians indulge, is often protracted to the
hauling in of the gang-plank. Those last words,
injunctions, promises, and embraces, which are
mournful and depressing perhaps in that privacy
demanded on other occasions, are here, by reason of
their very publicity, of an edifying and exhilarating
character. A parting kiss, blown from the deck
of a steamer into a miscellaneous crowd, of course
loses much of that sacred solemnity with which
foolish superstition is apt to invest it. A broadside
of endearing epithets, even when properly
aimed and apparently raking the whole wharf, is
apt to be impotent and harmless. A husband who
prefers to embrace his wife for the last time at the
door of her stateroom, and finds himself the centre
of an admiring group of unconcerned spectators,
of course feels himself lifted above any feeling
The mother, parting from her offspring,
should become a Roman matron under the like influences;
the lover who takes leave of his sweetheart
is not apt to mar the general hilarity by any
emotional folly. In fact, this system of delaying
our parting sentiments until the last moment —
this removal of domestic scenery and incident to
a public theatre — may be said to be worthy of a
stoical and democratic people, and is an event in
our lives which may be shared with the humblest
coal-passer or itinerant vender of oranges. It is
a return to that classic out-of-door experience and
mingling of public and domestic economy which
so ennobled the straight-nosed Athenian.
So universal is this desire to be present at the
departure of any steamer that, aside from the regular
crowd of loungers who make their appearance confessedly
only to look on, there are others who take
advantage of the slightest intimacy to go through
the leave-taking formula. People whom you have
quite forgotten, people to whom you have been
lately introduced, suddenly and unexpectedly make
their appearance and wring your hands with fervor.
The friend, long estranged, forgives you nobly at
the last moment, to take advantage of this glorious
opportunity of “seeing you off.” Your bootmaker,
tailor, and hatter — haply with no ulterior motives
and unaccompanied by official friends — visit you
your relatives and acquaintances from the
trunks on which they resolutely seat themselves,
up to the moment when the paddles are moving,
and you are haunted continually by an ill-defined
idea that they may be carried off, and foisted on
you — with the payment of their passage, which,
under the circumstances, you could not refuse —
for the rest of the voyage. Your friends will
make their appearance at the most inopportune
moments, and from the most unexpected places, —
dangling from hawsers, climbing up paddle-boxes,
and crawling through cabin windows at the imminent
peril of their lives. You are nervous and
crushed by this added weight of responsibility.
Should you be a stranger, you will find any
number of people on board, who will cheerfully
and at a venture take leave of you on the slightest
advances made on your part. A friend of mine
assures me that he once parted, with great enthusiasm
and cordiality, from a party of gentlemen,
to him personally unknown, who had apparently
mistaken his state-room. This party, — evidently
connected with some fire company, — on comparing
notes on the wharf, being somewhat dissatisfied
with the result of their performances, afterward
rendered my friend's position on the hurricane
deck one of extreme peril and inconvenience, by
reason of skilfully projected oranges and apples,
certainly something to interest us in the examination
of that cheerless damp closet, whose painted
wooden walls no furniture or company can make
habitable, wherein our friend is to spend so many
vapid days and restless nights. The sight of these
apartments, yclept state-rooms, — Heaven knows
why, except it be from their want of cosiness, —
is full of keen reminiscences to most Californians
who have not outgrown the memories of that
dreary interval when, in obedience to nature's wise
compensations, homesickness was blotted out by
sea-sickness, and both at last resolved into a chaotic
and distempered dream, whose details we now
recognize. The steamer chair that we used to drag
out upon the narrow strip of deck and doze in,
over the pages of a well-thumbed novel; the deck
itself, of afternoons, redolent with the skins of
oranges and bananas, of mornings, damp with
salt-water and mopping; the netted bulwark,
smelling of tar in the tropics, and fretted on the
weather side with little saline crystals; the villanously
compounded odors of victuals from the
pantry, and oil from the machinery; the young
lady that we used to flirt with, and with whom
we shared our last novel, adorned with marginal
annotations; our own chum; our own bore; the
man who was never sea-sick; the two events of
the day, breakfast and dinner, and the dreary interval
to trifling events and trifling people; the young
lady who kept a journal; the newspaper, published
on board, filled with mild pleasantries and impertinences,
elsewhere unendurable; the young lady
who sang; the wealthy passenger; the popular
passenger; the —
[Let us sit down for a moment until this qualmishness,
which these associations and some infectious
quality of the atmosphere seem to produce,
has passed away. What becomes of our steamer
friends? Why are we now so apathetic about
them? Why is it that we drift away from them
so unconcernedly, forgetting even their names and
faces? Why, when we do remember them, do we
look at them so suspiciously, with an undefined
idea that, in the unrestrained freedom of the voyage,
they became possessed of some confidence and
knowledge of our weaknesses that we never should
have imparted? Did we make any such confessions?
Perish the thought. The popular man,
however, is not now so popular. We have heard
finer voices than that of the young lady who sang
so sweetly. Our chum's fascinating qualities, somehow,
have deteriorated on land; so have those of
the fair young novel-reader, now the wife of an
honest miner in Virginia City.]
— The passenger who made so many trips, and
exhibited a reckless familiarity with the officers;
a few hours later so all-powerful and
important, — these are among the reminiscences
of most Californians, and these are to be remembered
among the experiences of our friend. Yet
he feels, as we all do, that his past experience will
be of profit to him, and has already the confident
air of an old voyager.
As you stand on the wharf again, and listen to
the cries of itinerant fruit venders, you wonder
why it is that grief at parting and the unpleasant
novelties of travel are supposed to be assuaged by
oranges and apples, even at ruinously low prices.
Perhaps it may be, figuratively, the last offering of
the fruitful earth, as the passenger commits himself
to the bosom of the sterile and unproductive
ocean. Even while the wheels are moving and the
lines are cast off, some hardy apple merchant,
mounted on the top of a pile, concludes a trade
with a steerage passenger, — twenty feet interposing
between buyer and seller, — and achieves,
under these difficulties, the delivery of his wares.
Handkerchiefs wave, hurried orders mingle with
parting blessings, and the steamer is “off.” As
you turn your face cityward, and glance hurriedly
around at the retreating crowd, you will see a
reflection of your own wistful face in theirs, and
read the solution of one of the problems which
perplex the California enthusiast. Before you lies
brisk, invigorating breezes, her bright, but unsympathetic
sunshine, her restless and energetic population;
behind you fades the recollection of
changeful, but honest skies; of extremes of heat
and cold, modified and made enjoyable through
social and physical laws, of pastoral landscapes, of
accessible Nature in her kindliest forms, of inherited
virtues, of long-tested customs and habits,
of old friends and old faces, — in a word —
of Home!
| Mrs. Skaggs's husbands, and other sketches | |