“I have been thinking this thing over and I have stopped the reading of newspapers. For I find that they deal in the same way with everything else – except politics, perhaps, and, of course, I know nothing of politics. I read a criticism of a concert the other day in which a singer was – well, never mind the details. The man that wrote that criticism didn’t hear the concert at all, as he confessed to me. He was attending another theatre at the time. Yet he assumed to criticise a singer to her detriment, utterly ignoring the fact that she has her living to make by singing and that his criticism might seriously affect her prospects. He laughed the matter off, and when I seemed disturbed about it he said: ‘For your sake, Miss South, I’ll make amends. She sings again tomorrow, and while I shall not be able to hear her, I’ll give her such a laudation as shall warm the cockles of her heart and make her manager mightily glad. You’ll forgive me, then, for censuring her yesterday, I’m sure.’ I’m afraid I misbehaved myself then. I told him I shouldn’t read his article, that I hated lies and shams and false pretences, and that I didn’t consider his articles worth reading because they had no truth or honesty behind them. It was dreadfully rude, I know, and yet I’m not sorry for it. For it seemed to make an impression on him. He told me that he only needed some such influence as mine to give him a conscience in his work, and he actually asked me to marry him! Think of the absurdity of it! I told him I wasn’t thinking of marrying anybody – that I was barely seventeen, that – oh, well, I dismissed the poor fellow as gently as I could.”
But while the proposal of marriage by the newspaper man, and several other such solicitations which followed it, struck Dorothy at first as absurdities, they wrought a marked change in her mental attitude. Two at least of these proposals were inspired by higher considerations than those of the plantation which Dorothy represented, and were pressed with fervor and tenderness by men quite worthy to aspire to Dorothy’s hand. These were men of substance and character, in whose minds the fascination which the Virginia girl unwittingly exercised over everybody with whom she came into contact – men and women alike – had quickly ripened into a strong and enduring passion. Dorothy suffered much in rejecting such suits as theirs, but she learned something of herself in the process. She for the first time realized that she was a woman and that she had actually entered upon that career of womanhood which had before seemed so far away in the future that thoughts of it had never before caused her to blush and tremble as they did now.
These things set her thinking, and in her thinking she half realized her own state of mind. She began dimly to understand the change that had come over her attitude and feeling towards Arthur Brent. She would not let herself believe that she loved him as a woman loves but one man while she lives; but she admitted to herself that she might come to love him in that way if he should ever ask her to do so with the tenderness and manifest sincerity which these others had shown. But of that she permitted herself to entertain no hope and even no thought. His letters to her, indeed, seemed to put that possibility out of the question. For at this time Arthur held himself under severe restraint. He was determined that he should not in any remotest way take advantage of his position with respect to Dorothy, or use his influence over her as a means of winning her. He knew now his own condition of mind and soul in all its fulness. He was conscious now that the light of his life lay in the hope of some day winning Dorothy’s love and making her all and altogether his own. But he was more than ever determined, as he formulated the thought in his own mind, to give Dorothy a chance, to take no advantage of her, to leave her free to make choice for herself. It was his fixed determination, should she come back heart whole from this journey, to woo her with all the fervor of his soul; but the more determined he became in this resolution, the more resolutely did he guard his written words against the possibility that they might reveal aught of this to her. “If she ever comes to love me as my wife,” he resolved, “it shall be only after she has had full opportunity to make another choice.”
Accordingly his letters to her continued to concern themselves with intellectual and other external things. He wrote her half a ream of comment upon Darwin’s book, taking up for discussion every marginal note she had made concerning it. But that part of his letter was as coldly intellectual as any of their horseback conversations had been. In all the intimate parts of that and his other letters, he wrote only as one might to a sympathetic friend, as he might have written to Edmonia, for example. He even took half unconscious pains to emphasize the fatherly character of his relations with her, lest they assume some other aspect to her apprehension.
On her side Dorothy began now to write outside of herself, as it were. She described to him all her new gowns and bonnets, laughing at the confusion of mind in which a study of such details must involve him. In her childlike loyalty she told him of the wooings that so distressed her, but she did so quite as she might have written to him of the loves of Juliet and Ophelia and the Lady of Lyons. For the rest she wrote objectively now, in the main, and speculatively concerning certain of those social problems in which she knew him to be profoundly interested, and which she was somewhat studying now, because of the interest they had for him.
The word “slumming” had not been invented at that time by the insolence that does the thing it means. But Dorothy, chiefly under the guidance of her friends among the newspaper men, went to see how the abjectly poor of a great city lived, and she wrote long letters of comment to Arthur in which she told him how great and distressing the revelation was, and how she honored his desire to do something for the amelioration of these people’s lives. “Your aspiration is indeed a noble one,” she wrote in one of her letters; “the life you proposed to yourself, and from which you were diverted by your inheritance of a plantation, is the very greatest, the very noblest that any man could lead. I once thought you were doing even better in the care you are taking of the negroes at Wyanoke and Pocahontas, and in your efforts ultimately to set them free. But that was when I did not know. I know now, in part at least, and I understand your feeling in the matter as I never could have done had I not seen for myself.
“People here sometimes say things to me that hurt. But I am ready with my answer now. One woman – very intellectual, but a cat – asked me yesterday how I could bear to hold negroes in slavery, and to buy fine gowns with the proceeds of their toil. I told her frankly that I didn’t like it, but that I couldn’t help it, and in reply to her singularly ignorant inquiries as to why I didn’t end the wrong or at least my participation in it, I explained some difficulties to her that she had never taken the trouble to ask about. I told her how hard you were working to discharge the debts of your estate in order that you might send your negroes to the west to be free, and that you might yourself return to New York to do what you could for the immeasurably worse slaves here. She caught at my phrase and challenged it. I told her what I meant, and as it happened to be in a company of highly intellectual people, I suppose I ought not to have talked so much, but somehow they seemed to want to hear. I said:
“ ‘In Virginia I always visit every sick person on the plantation every day. We send for a doctor in every case, and we women sit up night after night to nurse every one that needs it. We provide proper food for the sick and the convalescent from our own tables. We take care of the old and decrepit, and of all the children. From birth to death they know that they will be abundantly provided for. What poor family around the Five Points has any such assurance? Who provides doctors and medicine and dainties for them when they are ill? Who cares for their children? Who assures them, in childhood and in old age, of as abundant a supply of food and clothing, and as good a roof, as we give to the negroes? I go every morning, as I just now said, to see every sick or afflicted negro on my own plantation and on that of my guardian. How often have you gone to the region of the Five Points to minister to those who are ill and suffering and perhaps starving there?’
“ ‘Oh, that is all cared for by the charitable organizations’ she said, ‘and by the city missionaries.’
“ ‘Is it?’ I answered. ‘I do not find it so. I have emptied my purse a dozen times in an effort to get a doctor for a very ill person here, and to buy the medicines he prescribed, and to provide food for starving ones. And then, next day I have found that the sick have died because the well did not know how to cook the food I had provided, or how to follow the doctor’s directions in the giving of medicine. I tell you these poor people are immeasurably worse off than any negro slave at the South is, or ever was. So far as I can learn there is no working population in the world that gets half so much of comfort and care and reward of every sort for its labor, as the negroes of Virginia get.’
“Then the woman broke out. She said: ‘You are dressed in a superb satin’ – it was at a social function – ‘and every dollar of its cost was earned by a negro slave on your plantation.’ I answered, ‘You are equally well dressed. Will you tell me who earned the money that paid for your satin gown?’ Then, Cousin Arthur, I lost my temper and my manners. I told her that while we in Virginia profited by the labor of our negroes, we gave them, as the reward of their labor, every desire of their hearts and, besides that, an assurance of support in absolute comfort for their old age, and for their children; while the laboring class in New York, from whose labor she profited, and whose toil purchased her gown, had nobody to care for them in infancy or old age, in poverty and illness and suffering. ‘It is all wrong on both sides,’ I said. ‘The toilers ought to have the full fruits of their toil in both cases. The luxury of the rich is a robbery of the poor always and everywhere. There ought not to be any such thing anywhere. The woman who made your underclothing was robbed when you bought it at the price you did. You wronged and defrauded the silk spinners and weavers and the sewing women when you bought your gown. Worse than that; you have among you men who have accumulated great fortunes in manufactures and commerce. How did they do it? Was it not in commerce by paying the producers for their products less than they were worth? Was it not in manufactures by paying men and women and children less than they have earned? Was not the great Astor estate based upon a shrewd robbery of the Indian trappers and hunters? And has it not been swelled to its present proportions by the growth of a city to whose growth the Astors have never contributed a single dollar? Isn’t the whole thing a wrong and a robbery? Isn’t the “Song of the Shirt” a reflection of truth? Isn’t there slavery in New York as actually as in Virginia, and isn’t it infinitely more cruel?’
“Then the woman shifted her ground. ‘But at least our laborers are free,’ she said. ‘Are they?’ I answered. ‘Are they free to determine for whom they will work or at what wages? Cannot their masters, who are their employers, discharge them at will, when they get old or feeble or otherwise incompetent, and leave them to starve? No master of a Virginia plantation can do that. His neighbors would actually lynch him should he turn a decrepit old negro out to die or even should he deny to him the abundant food and clothing and housing that he gives to the able-bodied negroes who make crops. And,’ I added, for I was excited, ‘this cruelty is not confined to what are ordinarily called the laboring classes. I know a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who has worked for years to build up the fortunes of his employers. He has had what is regarded as a very high salary. But being a man of generous mind he has spent his money freely in educating the ten or a dozen sons and daughters of his less fortunate brother. He is growing old now. He has earned for his master, a thousand dollars for every dollar of salary that he ever received just as all his fellow workers in the business have done. But he is growing old now, and under the strain of night and day work, he has acquired the habit of drinking too much. He hasn’t a thousand dollars in the world as his reward for helping to make this other man, his master, absurdly, iniquitously rich. Yet in his age and infirmity, the other man, luxuriating in his palatial summer home which is only one of the many palaces that other men’s toil late into the night has provided for him, decides that the old servitor is no longer worth his salary, and decrees his discharge. Is there anything so cruel as that in negro slavery? Is that man half so well off as my negro mammy, who has a house of her own and all the food and clothes she wants at the age of eighty, and who could have the service of a dozen negro attendants for the mere asking?’
“Now, Cousin Arthur, please don’t misunderstand me. Even what I have seen at the Five Points doesn’t tempt me to believe in slavery. I want of all things to see that exterminated. But, really and truly, I find an immeasurably worse slavery here in New York than I ever saw in Virginia, and I want to see it all abolished together, not merely the best and kindliest and most humane part of it. I want to see the time when every human being who works shall enjoy the full results of his work; when no man shall be any other man’s master; when no man shall grow rich by pocketing the proceeds of any other man’s genius or industry. I said all this to that woman, and she replied: ‘You are obviously a pestilent socialist. You are as bad as Fourier and Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley.’ That was very rude of her, seeing that Mr. Greeley was present, but I’ve noticed that the people who most highly pride themselves on good manners are often rude and inconsiderate of others to a degree that would not be tolerated in Virginia society – except perhaps from Mr. Madison Peyton. By the way, Mr. Jefferson Peyton was present, and to my regret he said some things in defence of slavery which I could not at all approve. Mr. Greeley interrupted him to say something like this:
“ ‘The dear young lady is quite right. We have a horrible slavery right here in New York, and we ought to make war on that as earnestly as we do on African slavery at the South. I’m trying to do it in the Try-bune’ – that’s the way he pronounces the name of his paper – ‘and I’m going to keep on trying.’
“That encouraged me, for I find myself more and more disposed to respect Mr. Greeley as I come to know him better. I don’t always agree with him. I sometimes think he is onesided in his views, and of course he is enormously self-conceited. But he is, at any rate, an honest man, and a brave and sincere one. He isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, any more than you are, and I like him for that. Another great editor whom I have met frequently, seems to me equally courageous, but far less conscientious. He is inclined to take what he calls ‘the newspaper view’ of things, – by which he means the view that appeals to the multitude for the moment, without much regard for any fixed principle. Socially he is a much more agreeable man than Mr. Greeley, but I don’t think him so trustworthy. Mr. Greeley impresses me as a man who may be enormously wrong-headed, under the influence of his prejudiced misconceptions, but who, wrong-headed or right-headed, will never consciously wrong others. If he had been born the master of a Virginia plantation he would have dealt with his negroes in the same spirit in which he has insisted upon giving to his fellow workers on the Tribune a share in the profits of their joint work. Mr. Greeley is odd, but I like him better than any editor I have met.”
So the girl went on, writing objectively and instinctively avoiding the subjective. But she did not always write so seriously. She had “caught the patter” of society and she often filled pages with a sparkling, piquant flippancy, which had for Arthur a meaning all its own.
XXX
AT SEA
T HE voyage to Europe in 1860 was a much more serious undertaking than the like voyage is in our later time. It occupied a fortnight or three weeks, for one thing, where now a week is ample time for the passage. The steamers were small and uncomfortable – the very largest of them being only half the size of the very smallest now regarded as fit for passenger service. There was no promenade deck or hurricane deck then, above the main deck, which was open to the sky throughout its length and breadth, except for the interruption of one small deck house, covering the companion way, a ventilator pipe here and there, and perhaps a chicken coop to furnish emaciated and sea sick fowls for the table d’hôte. There was no ice machine on board, and no distilling apparatus for the production of fresh water. As a consequence, after two days out, the warm water which passengers must drink began to taste of the ancient wood of the water tanks; at the end of a week it became sickeningly foul; and before the end of the voyage it became so utterly undrinkable that the most aggressive teetotaler among the passengers was compelled to order wine for his dinner and to abstain from coffee at breakfast.
The passenger who did not grow seasick in those days was a rare exception to an otherwise universal rule, while, in our time, when the promenade deck is forty or fifty feet above the waves, and the passengers are abundantly supplied both with palatable food and with wholesome water, only those suffer with mal de mer who are bilious when they go on board, or who are beset by a senseless apprehension of the sea.
The passenger lists were small, too, even allowing for the diminutive size of the ships. One person crossed the ocean then where perhaps a hundred cross in our time.
There were perhaps twenty passengers in the cabin of the ship in which Dorothy sailed. By the second day out only two of the ship’s company appeared at meals or at all regularly took the air on deck. Dorothy was one of these two. The other she herself introduced, as it were, to Arthur, in a long, diary-like letter which she wrote on shipboard and mailed at Liverpool.
“I’m sitting on a great coil of rope, just behind the deck house,” she wrote, “where I am sheltered from the wind and where I can breathe my whole body full of the delicious sea air. The air is flavored with great quantities of the finest sunshine imaginable. Every now and then I lay my paper down, and a very nice old sailor comes and puts two big iron belaying pins on it, to keep it from blowing overboard while I go skipping like a ten-year-old girl up and down the broad, clean deck, and enjoying the mere being alive, just as I do on horseback in Virginia when the sun is rising on a perfect morning.
“I ought to be down stairs – no, I mustn’t say ‘down stairs,’ when I’m at sea, I must say ‘below.’ Well, I ought to be below ministering to Edmonia and her friend Mrs. Livingston, – or Mildred, as she insists on my calling her – both of whom are frightfully sick; but really and truly, Edmonia won’t let me. She fairly drove me out, half an hour ago. When I didn’t want to go she threatened to throw her shoes at my head, saying ‘You dear little idiot, go on deck and keep your sea-well on, if you can.’ And when I protested that she seemed very ill and that I hadn’t the heart to go on the beautiful deck and be happy in the delicious air and sunshine while she was suffering so, she said: ‘Oh, I’m always so for the first three or four days, and I’m best let alone. My temper is frightful when I’m seasick. That’s why I took separate staterooms for you and me. I don’t want you to find out what a horribly ill-tempered, ill-mannered woman I am when I’m seasick. How can I help it? I’ve got a mustard plaster on my back and two on my chest, and I’ve drunk half a bottle of that detestable stuff, champagne, and I’m really fighting mad. Go away, child, and let me fight it out with myself and the stewardesses. They don’t mind it, the dear good creatures. They’re used to it. I threw a coffee cup full of coffee all over one of them this morning because she presumed to insist upon my swallowing the horrible stuff, and she actually laughed, Dorothy. I couldn’t get up a quarrel with her no matter what I did, and so I tried my hand on the ship’s doctor. I don’t like him anyhow. He’s just the kind that would make love to me if he dared, and I don’t like men that do that.’ Then Edmonia added: ‘He wouldn’t quarrel at all. When I told him he was trying to poison me with bicarbonate of soda in my drinking water, he seriously assured me that bicarbonate of soda isn’t poisonous in the least degree, that it corrects acidity, and all that sort of thing. I gave him up as hopeless, – but remind me, Dorothy, that when we go ashore I must put half a dozen sovereigns into his hand – carefully wrapped up in paper, so that he shan’t even guess what they are – as his well earned fee for enduring my bad temper. But now, Dorothy, you see clearly that this ship doesn’t provide any proper person for me to quarrel with, and so I must fall back upon you, if you persist in staying here and arrogantly insulting me with your sublime superiority to seasickness. So get out of my room and stay out till I come on deck with my mind restored to a normal condition.’ I really think she meant it, and so I’m obeying her. And I should be very happy with the air and the sunshine and my dear old sailorman who tells me sailor stories and sings to me the very quaintest old sailor songs imaginable, if I could be sure that I’m doing right in being happy while Edmonia is so very miserable.
“As for Mildred – Mrs. Livingston – she lies white-faced and helpless in her bunk – there, I got the sailor term right that time at the first effort – while her husband simply sleeps and moans on the sofa. The doctor says they are ‘progressing very satisfactorily’ and so I am taking his advice and letting them alone. But why anybody should be seasick, how anybody can be sick at sea, I simply cannot understand. The ship’s doctor tried to explain it to me this morning, but he forgot his explanation. He – well, never mind. He ought to have a wife with a plantation or something of that sort, so that his abilities might have an opportunity. I don’t think much of his abilities, and I don’t like him half as well as I do my old sailor. He is going to tell me – the old sailor, I mean and not the doctor – all about his life history tonight. We are to have a moon, you know, and, as he’s on the ‘port watch,’ whatever that may mean, he’s going to come on deck and tell me all about himself. I’ll tell you about it in tomorrow’s instalment of this rambling letter.”
On the following day, or perhaps a day later even than that, Dorothy wrote:
“This is another day. I don’t just know what day. You know they keep changing the clock at sea, and I’ve got mixed up. Edmonia still throws shoes and medicine bottles and coffee cups at me whenever I thrust my head inside the portière of her stateroom, and Mildred, though she has sufficiently recovered to come on deck, lies helpless in a deck chair which my sailor has ‘made fast’ – you see I’m getting to be an expert in nautical terms – to a mast or a spar or something, and when I speak to her, says, ‘Go away, child, and be happy in the midst of human misery, if you can. Let me alone.’ When I ask her concerning her husband she answers: ‘I suppose he’s comfortable in his misery. At any rate, he has two bottles of champagne by his side, and he is swearing most hopefully. I always know he is getting over it when he begins to swear in real earnest, and with a certain discretion in the choice of his oaths. Now, run away, you ridiculously well girl or I’ll begin to borrow from Rex’s vituperative vocabulary.’ Rex is her husband you know.
“The sailor’s story didn’t amount to anything, so I’ll not bother you with a repetition of it.”
[As a strictly confidential communication, not to be mentioned to anybody, the author so far intrudes upon attention at this point, as to report that the sailorman, at the end of his picturesque and imaginative narrative, professed a self-sacrificing willingness to abandon the delights of a sea-faring existence, and to content himself thereafter with the homelier and less romantic duties of master of Pocahontas plantation. Dorothy, in continuing her letter, was quite naturally reticent upon this point. But she went on liking that old sailorman, in whose devotion to her comfort on deck nothing seemed to make the slightest difference. Perhaps this chronic mariner already had ‘a wife in every port’ and was only ‘keeping his hand in’ at courtship. At any rate after duly disciplining him, Dorothy went on liking him and accepting his manifold, sailorly attentions. Ah, these women! How very human they are in face of all their airs and pretensions!]
It was a day later that Dorothy wrote:
“There is a very extraordinary lady on board, and I have become acquainted with her, in a way. I didn’t see her at all during the first day out. As she tells me she is never seasick, I suppose she kept her cabin for some other reason. At any rate the first time I met her was on the morning of that second day out, when I was skipping about the deck and making believe that I was little Dorothy again – little ten-year-old Dorothy, who didn’t care if people were seeing her when she skipped. The captain saw me first. He’s a dear old fellow with a big beard and nine children and a nice little baby at home. And, think of it, the people that hire him to run their ship won’t let him bring his wife on board or any of his children on any account! That isn’t quite correct either, for two voyages ago it was the twenty-first anniversary of his marriage, and when he asked permission to bring his wife and baby with him on his trip to New York and back, just to celebrate, you see, the company gave permission without any hesitation. But when he came on board, he found another captain in command for that one trip, and himself only a passenger. That’s because the company don’t want a captain’s attention distracted, and I suppose a new baby whom he had never seen before would have distracted him a great deal. Anyhow that’s the way it was and the only reason the captain told me about it was that I asked him why he didn’t have his wife and children on board with him always. But I set out to tell you about the lady. After the captain had ‘captured’ me, as he put it, and had taken me up on the bridge, and had shown me how to take an observation and how to steer – he let me steer all by myself for more than a mile and I didn’t run the ship into anything, perhaps because there wasn’t anything within five hundred miles to run into – I went down on deck again, hoping that maybe Diana had got well enough to come out, but she hadn’t. She isn’t violently ill, but she’s the most entirely, hopelessly, seasick person I’ve seen yet. She – well, never mind. She’ll get well again, and in the meanwhile I must tell you about the lady. She spoke to me kindly and said:
“ ‘As you and I seem to be the only well passengers on board, I think I’m entitled to a sea acquaintance with you, Miss Dorothy. You know sea acquaintances carry no obligations with them beyond the voyage, and so no matter how chummy we may become out here on the ocean you needn’t even bow to me if we meet again on shore.’ She seemed so altogether nice that I told her I wouldn’t have a mere sea acquaintance with her, but would get acquainted with her ‘for truly,’ as the children say. She seemed glad when I said that, and we talked for two hours or more, after which we went to luncheon and sat side by side – as everybody else is seasick we had the table all to ourselves and didn’t need to mind whose chairs we sat in.
“Well, she is a strangely fascinating person, and the more I know of her the more she fascinates me. Sometimes she seems as young as I myself am; sometimes she seems very old. She is tall and what I call willowy. That is to say she bends as easily in any direction as a willow wand could, and with as much of grace. Indeed grace is her dominant characteristic, as I discovered when she danced a Spanish fandango to my playing – just all to ourselves you know, behind the deck house. She knows everybody worth knowing, too – all the editors and artists and actors and singers and pianists and people in society that I have met, and a great many others that I haven’t met at all. And she really does know them, too, for one day in her cabin I saw a great album of hers, and when she saw I was interested in it she bade me take it on deck, saying that perhaps it might amuse me during the hour she must give to sleep. And when I read it, I found it full of charming things in prose and verse, all addressed to her, and all signed by great people, or nearly all. She told me afterwards that she valued the other things most – the things signed by people whose names meant nothing to me. ‘For those,’ she said, ‘are my real friends. The rest – well, no matter. They are professionals, and they do such things well.’ I don’t just know what she meant by that, but I have a suspicion that she loves truth better than anything else, and that she doesn’t think distinguished people always tell the truth when they write in albums. At any rate when I asked her if I might write and sign a little sentiment in her album, she said, with more of emotion than the occasion seemed to call for: ‘Not in that book, my child! Not as a tag to all those people. If you will write me three or four lines of your own on a simple sheet of paper and sign it, I’ll have it sumptuously bound when I get to Paris, in a book all to itself, and nobody else shall ever write a line to go with it while I live.’