The intercourse between the passengers was not pleasant. We got tired of
each other. The fact that none of us could get on or off, gave us a sort
of feeling that we were prisoners; or, when locked up at night in our
berths, that we were animals traveling in the same menagerie; brought
together by chance, and held together through necessity.
There was one couple on board that won my attention. It was a man,
full-grown, handsome and accomplished, but with the deep furrows in his
brow that always come after a man has wrestled with the world; and the
girl not more than fifteen years of age. The girl had not worn off the
subtle bloom of childhood that gave her grace and glow, as the
dew-chrism of early dawn graces the lily. She was not beautiful, after
the approved models, but there was an elastic freshness, a bright charm
that would have put beauty to the blush. She was brimming with the
splendid and tender divinity that fills the odorous buds just before
they burst into life’s beauty. She was full of spring. She carried its
balms about with her, its aroma hung about her skirts, and its auroral
light illuminated her very being. She was April, with all its joys and
all its happy tears—its dear restlessness, and its thrills. I marveled
to see how the man of affairs loved her. It annoyed me to see how this
man, with all his vast concerns, his rugged schemes, his vaulting
ambition, bowed down at the feet of a child. It was a very miracle of
love that centered all the impulses, aspirations, hopes, and endeavors
of this man of the world in a bright slip of a girl. She understood her
power, too; and taking the reins of affairs in her little fingers,
carried herself with a pretty imperiousness. Not always was she
mistress, though. Once in awhile I noticed, when he held her beneath his
words, her eyes softened and fell, and she sat half absorbed and
trembling, thrilling under an ecstasy that stirred her soul to its very
depths, and yet left her unconscious of what it meant or from what it
came. I watched this couple with a strange interest, and my heart went
out to the child. But beyond this there was nothing interesting on
shipboard. The people were all tame. They seemed to have been planted on
the ship, and grown there. They were all indigenous; and hence, when the
pilot—a breezy fellow, by the way—jumped on board just outside of New
York, he brought with him the charm of a rare exotic, and actually
acquired a sort of game flavor, by being a stranger.