 | III.
THE NIGHT BOAT. Their wedding journey |  |
3. III.
THE NIGHT BOAT.
There is little
proportion
about either
pain or pleasure:
a headache
darkens
the universe
while it lasts,
a cup of tea
really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable
consolations. Therefore I do not think it trivial or
untrue to say that there is for the moment nothing
more satisfactory in life than to have bought your
ticket on the night boat up the Hudson and secured
your state-room key an hour or two before departure,
and some time even before the pressure at the clerk's
office has begun. In the transaction with this castellated
baron, you have of course been treated with
haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your self-respect
swells with a sense of having escaped positive
insult; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket
against its gutta-percha number, and you walk up
two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas and
chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic
chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristocratic
gloom of the yellow waiters. Your own state-room
as you enter it from time to time is an ever-new
surprise of splendors, a magnificent effect of
amplitude, of mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains,
and of marble topped wash-stand. In the mere wantonness
of an unalloyed prosperity you say to the
saffron nobleman nearest your door, “Bring me a
pitcher of ice-water, quick, please!” and you do
not find the half-hour that he is gone very long.
If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much
pleasure from these things, then imagine the infinite
comfort of our wedding-journeyers, transported from
Broadway on that pitiless afternoon to the shelter
and the quiet of that absurdly palatial steamboat.
It was not yet crowded, and by the river-side there
was almost a freshness in the air. They disposed
of their troubling bags and packages; they complimented
the ridiculous princeliness of their state-room,
and then they betook themselves to the
sheltered space aft of the saloon, where they sat
down for the tranquiller observance of the wharf
and whatever should come to be seen by them.
Like all people who have just escaped with their
lives from some menacing calamity, they were very
philosophical in spirit; and having got aboard of
their own motion, and being neither of them apparently
through, were of a light, conversational temper.
“What an amusingly superb affair!” Basil cried
as they glanced through an open window down the
long vista of the saloon. “Good heavens! Isabel,
does it take all this to get us plain republicans to
Albany in comfort and safety, or are we really a
nation of princes in disguise? Well, I shall never
be satisfied with less hereafter,” he added. “I am
spoilt for ordinary paint and upholstery from this
hour; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and a humble
three-story swell-front up at the South End is no
longer the place for me. Dearest,
“`Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,'
but spend our lives in perpetual trips up and down
the Hudson.”
To which not very costly banter Isabel responded
in kind, and rapidly sketched the life they could
lead aboard. Since they could not help it, they
mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval
between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous
splendor, accommodates our democratic ménage to
the taste of the richest and most extravagant plebeian
amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger
and oppression as little as he minds money, so long
as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is this
ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the
steamboat berth into which he gets with his pantaloons
an exploding boiler at any moment; it is he who
will have for supper that overgrown and shapeless
dinner in the lower saloon, and will not let any one
else buy tea or toast for a less sum than he pays for
his surfeit; it is he who perpetuates the insolence
of the clerk and the reluctance of the waiters; it is
he, in fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with
his womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning
where Basil and Isabel sit. Personally, he is not
so bad; he is good-looking, like all of us; he is
better dressed than most of us; he behaves himself
quietly, if not easily; and no lord so loathes a
scene. Next year he is going to Europe, where he
will not show to so much advantage as here; but for
the present it would be hard to say in what way he
is vulgar, and perhaps vulgarity is not so common
a thing after all.
It was something besides the river that made
the air so much more sufferable than it had been.
Over the city, since our friends had come aboard the
boat, a black cloud had gathered and now hung low
upon it, while the wind from the face of the water
took the dust in the neighboring streets, and frolicked
it about the house-tops, and in the faces of the
arriving passengers, who, as the moment of departure
drew near, appeared in constantly increasing
numbers and in greater variety, with not only the
trepidation of going upon them, but also with the
electrical excitement people feel before a tempest.
from moment to moment by lightning, and claps of
deafening thunder broke from it. At last the long
endurance of the day was spent, and out of its convulsion
burst floods of rain, again and again sweeping
the promenade-deck where the people sat, and
driving them disconsolate into the saloon. The air
was darkened as by night, and with many regrets
for the vanishing prospect, mingled with a sense of
relief from the heat, our friends felt the boat tremble
away from her moorings and set forth upon her
trip.
“Ah! if we had only taken the day boat!”
moaned Isabel. “Now, we shall see nothing of the
river landscape, and we shall never be able to put
ourselves down when we long for Europe, by declaring
that the scenery of the Hudson is much finer
than that of the Rhine.”
Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured
couple, that they would be just even to the elements,
which had by no means been generous to them;
and they owned that if so noble a storm had celebrated
their departure upon some storied river from
some more romantic port than New York, they
would have thought it an admirable thing. Even
whilst they contented themselves, the storm passed,
and left a veiled and humid sky overhead, that gave
a charming softness to the scene on which their eyes
fell when they came out of the saloon again, and
took their places with a largely increased companionship
on the deck.
They had already reached that part of the river
where the uplands begin, and their course was between
stately walls of rocky steepness, or wooded
slopes, or grassy hollows, the scene forever losing
and taking grand and lovely shape. Wreaths of
mist hung about the tops of the loftier headlands,
and long shadows draped their sides. As the night
grew, lights twinkled from a lonely house here and
there in the valleys; a swarm of lamps showed a
town where it lay upon the lap or at the foot of the
hills. Behind them stretched the great gray river,
haunted with many sails; now a group of canal-boats
grappled together, and having an air of coziness
in their adventure upon this strange current
out of their own sluggish waters, drifted out of
making a laborious show of keeping up was passed,
and reluctantly fell behind; along the water's edge
rattled and hooted the frequent trains. They could
not tell at any time what part of the river they
were on, and they could not, if they would, have
made its beauty a matter of conscientious observation;
but all the more, therefore, they deeply enjoyed
it without reference to time or place. They
felt some natural pain when they thought that they
might unwittingly pass the scenes that Irving has
made part of the common dream-land, and they
would fain have seen the lighted windows of the
house out of which a cheerful ray has penetrated to
so many hearts; but being sure of nothing, as they
were, they had the comfort of finding the Tappan
Zee in every expanse of the river, and of discovering
Sunny-Side on every pleasant slope. By virtue
of this helplessness, the Hudson, without ceasing to
be the Hudson, became from moment to moment all
fair and stately streams upon which they had voyaged
or read of voyaging, from the Nile to the Mississippi.
There is no other travel like river travel;
it is the perfection of movement, and one might
well desire never to arrive at one's destination.
The abundance of room, the free, pure air, the constant
delight of the eyes in the changing landscape,
the soft tremor of the boat, so steady upon her keel,
the variety of the little world on board, — all form
a charm which no good heart in a sound body can
in contiguous chairs, they purred in flattery of their
kindly fate, imagining different pleasures, certainly,
but none greater, and tasting to its subtlest flavor
the happiness conscious of itself.
Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so interesting
to them in this objective light, that they had little
desire to turn from its contemplation to the people
around them; and when at last they did so, it was
still with lingering glances of self-recognition and
enjoyment. They divined rightly that one of the
main conditions of their present felicity was the fact
that they seen so much of time and of the world,
that they had no longer any desire to take beholding
eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure,
and they understood that their prosperous love accounted
as much as years and travel for this result.
If they had had a loftier opinion of themselves,
their indifference to others might have made them
offensive; but with their modest estimate of their
own value in the world, they could have all the
comfort of self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity.
“O yes!” said Basil, in answer to some apostrophe
to their bliss from Isabel, “it 's the greatest
imaginable satisfaction to have lived past certain
things. I always knew that I was not a very handsome
or otherwise captivating person, but I can remember
years — now blessedly remote — when I
never could see a young girl without hoping she
would mistake me for something of that sort. I
which had escaped my own analysis, would have
an effect upon her. I dare say all young men are
so. I used to live for the possible interest I might
inspire in your sex, Isabel. They controlled my
movements, my attitudes; they forbade me repose;
and yet I believe I was no ass, but a tolerably
sensible fellow. Blessed be marriage, I am
free at last! All the loveliness that exists outside
of you, dearest, — and it 's mighty little, — is mere
pageant to me; and I thank Heaven that I can
meet the most stylish girl now upon the broad
level of our common humanity. Besides, it seems
to me that our experience of life has quieted us in
many other ways. What a luxury it is to sit here,
and reflect that we do not want any of these people
to suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful,
or well dressed, and do not care to show off in any
sort of way before them!”
This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just
sense of their contrast to the group of people nearest
them, — a young man of the second or third
quality and two young girls. The eldest of these
was carrying on a vivacious flirtation with the
young man, who was apparently an acquaintance
of brief standing; the other was scarcely more than
a child, and sat somewhat abashed at the sparkle
of the colloquy. They were conjecturally sisters
going home from some visit, and not skilled in the
world, but of a certain repute in their country
presently gave himself out as one who, in pursuit
of trade for the dry-goods house he represented,
had travelled many thousands of miles in all parts
of the country. The encounter was visibly that
kind of adventure which both would treasure up
for future celebration to their different friends; and
it had a brilliancy and interest which they could
not even now consent to keep to themselves. They
talked to each other and at all the company within
hearing, and exchanged curt speeches which had
for them all the sensation of repartee.
Young Man. They say that beauty unadorned
is adorned the most.
Young Woman (bridling, and twitching her head
from side to side, in the high excitement of the
dialogue). Flattery is out of place.
Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don't
believe me, you ask your mother when you get
home.
(Titter from the younger sister.)
Young Woman (scornfully). Umph! my mother
has no control over me!
Young Man. Nobody else has, either, I should
say. (Admiringly.)
Young Woman. Yes, you've told the truth for
once, for a wonder. I'm able to take care of myself,
— perfectly. (Almost hoarse with a sense of
sarcastic performance.)
Young Man. “Whole team and big dog under
the wagon,” as they say out West.
Young Woman. Better a big dog than a puppy,
any day.
(Giggles and horror from the younger sister, sensation
the young woman that she drops the key of her
state-room from her hand. They both stoop, and
a jocose scuffle for it ensues, after which the talk
takes an autobiographical turn on the part of the
young man, and drops into an unintelligible murmur.
Ah! poor Real Life, which I love, can I
make others share the delight I find in thy foolish
and insipid face?)
Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one
young and the other old, talking of some business
out of which the latter had retired. The younger
had been asked his opinion upon some point, and
he was expanding with a flattered consciousness of
the elder's perception of his importance, and toadying
to him with the pleasure which all young men
feel in winning the favor of seniors in their vocation.
“Well, as I was a-say'n', Isaac don't seem
to haf no natcheral pent for the glothing business.
Man gomes in and wands a goat,” — he seemed to
be speaking of a garment and not a domestic animal,
— “Isaac'll zell him the goat he wands him
to puy, and he'll make him believe it 's the goat
he was a lookin' for. Well, now, that 's well
enough as far as it goes; but you know and I
know, Mr. Rosenthal, that that 's no way to do
business. A man gan't zugzeed that goes upon
that brincible. Id 's wrong. Id 's easy enough to
make a man puy the goat you want him to, if he
wands a goat, but the thing is to make him puy
no goat at all. You've asked me what I thought
and I've dold you. Isaac'll never zugzeed in the
redail glothing-business in the world!”
“Well,” sighed the elder, who filled his arm-chair
quite full, and quivered with a comfortable
jelly-like tremor in it, at every pulsation of the engine,
“I was afraid of something of the kind. As
you say, Benjamin, he don't seem to have no pent
for it. And yet I proughd him up to the business;
I drained him to it, myself.”
Besides these talkers, there were scattered singly,
or grouped about in twos and threes and fours, the
various people one encounters on a Hudson River
boat, who are on the whole different from the passengers
on other rivers, though they all have features
in common. There was that man of the sudden
gains, who has already been typified; and
there was also the smoother rich man of inherited
wealth, from whom you can somehow know the
former so readily. They were each attended by
their several retinues of womankind, the daughters
all much alike, but the mothers somewhat different.
They were going to Saratoga, where perhaps
the exigencies of fashion would bring them acquainted,
and where the blue blood of a quarter of
a century would be kind to the yesterday's fluid of
warmer hue. There was something pleasanter in
the face of the hereditary aristocrat, but not so
strong, nor, altogether, so admirable; particularly
in the world, no great culture, no political influence,
no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary
force, nothing but a social set, an alien club-life, a
tradition of dining. We live in a true fairy-land
after all, where the hoarded treasure turns to a
heap of dry leaves. The almighty dollar defeats
itself, and finally buys nothing that a man cares to
have. The very highest pleasure that such an
American's money can purchase is exile, and to
this rich man doubtless Europe is a twice-told tale.
Let us clap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and
be glad.
We can be as glad, apparently, and with the
same reason as the poorly dressed young man standing
near beside the guard, whose face Basil and
Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concerning
whom, they romanced that he was going home,
wherever his home was, with the manuscript of a
rejected book in his pocket. They imagined him
no great things of a poet, to be sure, but his pensive
face claimed delicate feeling for him, and a
graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously
caught flavors of Tennyson and Browning
in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morris;
for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods
and heroes of the nineteenth century, that he was
now carrying back from New York with him?
Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-accepted
disappointments a moving little picture
kindness and unkindness he had been put to shame
by publishers, and how, descending from his high
hopes of a book, he had tried to sell to the magazines
some of the shorter pieces out of the “And
other Poems” which were to have filled up the
volume. “He 's going back rather stunned and
bewildered; but it 's something to have tasted the
city, and its bitter may turn to sweet on his palate,
at last, till he finds himself longing for the tumult
that he abhors now. Poor fellow! one compassionate
cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to
lunch, being struck, as we are, with something fine
in his face. I hope he 's got somebody who believes
in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more comfortable,
for the present, if he went over the railing
there.”
So the play of which they were both actors and
spectators went on about them. Like all passages
of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery, with a
bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest,
now a latent tragedy folded in the disguises of
comedy. All the elements, indeed, of either were
at work there, and this was but one brief scene of
the immense complex drama which was to proceed
so variously in such different times and places, and
to have its dênouement only in eternity. The contrasts
were sharp: each group had its travesty in
some other; the talk of one seemed the rude
burlesque, the bitter satire of the next; but of all
two women, who sat in the midst of the company,
yet were somehow distinct from the rest. One
wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other
was dressed in bridal white, and they were both
alike awful in their mockery of guiltless sorrow and
guiltless joy. They were not old, but the soul of
youth was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces,
and ruin ancient as sin looked from their eyes;
their talk and laughter seemed the echo of an innumerable
multitude of the lost haunting the world
in every land and time, each solitary forever, yet
all bound together in the unity of an imperishable
slavery and shame.
What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters!
Let us be glad the night drops her curtain
upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the
other actors from our view.
Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel
now slowly moved, there were numbers of people
lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes of
talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were
others reading “Lothair,” a new book in the remote
epoch of which I write, and a very fashionable book
indeed. There was in the air that odor of paint
and carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass
drops of the chandeliers ticked softly against each
other, as the vessel shook with her respiration, like
a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious feeling
of coziness and security to our travellers.
A few hours later they struggled awake at the
sharp sound of the pilot's bell signaling the engineer
to slow the boat. There was a moment of
perfect silence; then all the drops of the chandeliers
in the saloon clashed musically together; then
fell another silence; and at last came wild cries for
help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses.
“Send out a boat!” “There was a woman aboard
that steamboat!” “Lower your boats!” “Run a
craft right down, with your big boat!” “Send
out a boat and pick up the crew!” The cries rose
and sank, and finally ceased; through the lattice
of the state-room window some lights shone faintly
on the water at a distance.
“Wait here, Isabel!” said her husband. “We've
run down a boat. We don't seem hurt; but I'll
go see. I'll be back in a minute.”
Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a
world wildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it was
the fashion for ladies to wear their hair down their
backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to
speak to each other without introduction. The
place with which she had felt so familiar a little
while before was now utterly estranged. There
was no motion of the boat, and in the momentary
suspense a quiet prevailed, in which those grotesque
shapes of disarray crept noiselessly round whispering
panic-stricken conjectures. There was no rushing
to and fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there
was not a man to be seen, for apparently they had
A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it
was such a topsy-turvy world that it would have
seemed only another dream-land, but that it was
marked for reality by one signal fact. With the
rest appeared the woman in bridal white and the
woman in widow's black, and there, amidst the
fright that made all others friends, and for aught
that most knew, in the presence of death itself, these
two moved together shunned and friendless.
Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had become
known to Isabel and the rest that their own
steamer had suffered no harm, but that she had
struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of
canal-boats, from which those alarming cries and
curses had come. The steamer was now lying by
for the small boats she had sent out to pick up the
crew of the sunken vessel.
“Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chandeliers,”
said one of the ladies. “Is it such a very
slight matter to run down another boat and sink
it?”
She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered
lightly, “I don't think you ladies ought to have
been disturbed at all. In running over a common
tow-boat on a perfectly clear night like this there
should have been no noise and no perceptible jar.
They manage better on the Mississippi, and both
boats often go down without waking the lightest
sleeper on board.”
The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of
humor, listened with undisguised displeasure to this
speech. It dispersed them, in fact; some turned
away to bivouac for the rest of the night upon the
arm-chairs and sofas, while others returned to their
rooms. With the latter went Isabel. “Lock me
in, Basil,” she said, with a bold meekness, “and if
anything more happens don't wake me till the last
moment.” It was hard to part from him, but she
felt that his vigil would somehow be useful to the
boat, and she confidingly fell into a sleep that
lasted till daylight.
Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly
devolved so great a responsibility, went forward
to the promenade in front of the saloon, in hopes
of learning something more of the catastrophe from
the people whom he had already found gathered
there.
A large part of the passengers were still there,
seated or standing about in earnest colloquy. They
were in that mood which follows great excitement,
and in which the feeblest-minded are sure to lead
the talk. At such times one feels that a sensible
frame of mind is unsympathetic, and if expressed,
unpopular, or perhaps not quite safe; and
Basil, warned by his fate with the ladies, listened
gravely to the voice of the common imbecility and
incoherence.
The principal speaker was a tall person, wearing
a silk travelling-cap. He had a face of stupid
formally trying to put at his ease, and hopelessly
confusing the loutish youth before him. “You say
you saw the whole accident, and you're probably
the only passenger that did see it. You'll be the
most important witness at the trial,” he added, as
if there would ever be any trial about it. “Now,
how did the tow-boat hit us?”
“Well, she came bows on.”
“Ah! bows on,” repeated the other, with great
satisfaction; and a little murmur of “Bows on!”
ran round the listening circle.
“That is,” added the witness, “it seemed as if
we struck her amidships, and cut her in two, and
sunk her.”
“Just so,” continued the examiner, accepting
the explanation, “bows on. Now I want to ask
if you saw our captain or any of the crew about?”
“Not a soul,” said the witness, with the solemnity
of a man already on oath.
“That'll do,” exclaimed the other. “This
gentleman's experience coincides exactly with my
own. I didn't see the collision, but I did see the
cloud of steam from the sinking boat, and I saw her
go down. There wasn't an officer to be found
anywhere on board our boat. I looked about for
the captain and the mate myself, and couldn't find
either of them high or low.”
“The officers ought all to have been sitting here
on the promenade deck,” suggested one ironical
spirit in the crowd, but no one noticed him.
The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap now
took a chair, and a number of sympathetic listeners
drew their chairs about him, and then began an
interchange of experience, in which each related to
the last particular all that he felt, thought, and
said, and, if married, what his wife felt, thought,
and said, at the moment of the calamity. They
turned the disaster over and over in their talk, and
rolled it under their tongues. Then they reverted
to former accidents in which they had been concerned;
and the silk-capped gentleman told, to the
common admiration, of a fearful escape of his, on
the Erie Road, from being thrown down a steep
embankment fifty feet high by a piece of rock that
had fallen on the track. “Now just see, gentlemen,
what a little thing, humanly speaking, life depends
upon. If that old woman had been able to
sleep, and hadn't sent that boy down to warn the
train, we should have run into the rock and been
dashed to pieces. The passengers made up a purse
for the boy, and I wrote a full account of it to the
papers.”
“Well,” said one of the group, a man in a hard
hat, “I never lie down on a steamboat or a railroad
train. I want to be ready for whatever happens.”
The others looked at this speaker with interest,
as one who had invented a safe method of travel.
“I happened to be up to-night, but I almost always
undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my
own house,” said the gentleman of the silk cap.
way.”
The champions of the rival systems debated their
merits with suavity and mutual respect, but they
met with scornful silence a compromising spirit who
held that it was better to throw off your coat and
boots, but keep your pantaloons on. Meanwhile,
the steamer was hanging idle upon the current,
against which it now and then stirred a careless
wheel, still waiting for the return of the small
boats. Thin gray clouds, through rifts of which a
star sparkled keenly here and there, veiled the
heavens; shadowy bluffs loomed up on either
hand; in a hollow on the left twinkled a drowsy
little town; a beautiful stillness lay on all.
After an hour's interval a shout was heard from
far down the river; then later the plash of oars;
then a cry hailing the approaching boats, and the
answer, “All safe!” Presently the boats had
come alongside, and the passengers crowded down
to the guard to learn the details of the search.
Basil heard a hollow, moaning, gurgling sound,
regular as that of the machinery, for some note of
which he mistook it. “Clear the gangway there!”
shouted a gruff voice; “man scalded here!” And
a burden was carried by from which fluttered, with
its terrible regularity, that utterance of mortal anguish.
Basil went again to the forward promenade, and
sat down to see the morning come.
The boat swiftly ascended the current, and presently
the steeper shores were left behind and the
banks fell away in long upward sloping fields, with
farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visible
in the generous expanses. By and by they
passed a fisherman drawing his nets, and bending
from his boat, there near Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque
immortal attitudes of Raphael's Galilean
fisherman; and now a flush mounted the pale face
of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the
dawn there came, more to the sight than any other
sense, a vague menace of heat. But as yet the
air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil
bathed his weariness in it, thinking with a certain
luxurious compassion of the scalded man, and how
he was to fare that day. This poor wretch seemed
of another order of beings, as the calamitous always
seem to the happy, and Basil's pity was quite an
abstraction; which, again, amused and shocked
him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of
sorrow a little more earnestly as the lot of all men,
and not merely of an alien creature here and there.
He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to the
disaster of the night, and to realize himself suddenly
bereft of her who so filled his life. He bade his
soul remember that, in the security of sleep, Death
had passed them both so close that his presence
might well have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg
that grazes the ship in the night freezes all the air
about it. But it was quite idle: where love was,
the burden that he would have laid upon them;
his revery reflected with delicious caprice the looks,
the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore
him far away from the sad images that he had invited
to mirror themselves in it.
| III.
THE NIGHT BOAT. Their wedding journey | |