HELEN thought the prospect of England slipping away from her in the rain
as the ship throbbed down the river, too desolate for endurance, so she
descended to her cabin with the unavowed intention of casting herself
upon her berth to weep. Miss Stitch was there, however, and Mrs.
Forsyth-Jones, who occupied the berth above Miss Stitch’s, and the
steward, which seemed to Helen a good many, and she retreated.
“Oh, come in!” both the ladies cried; but Helen thought it was obviously
impossible. She wandered into the long dining-saloon and sat down in one
of the revolving chairs; she watched a fat ayah patting a baby to sleep
on the floor, looked into the ladies’ cabin and went hastily out again,
for already the dejected had begun to gather there, prone on the sofas
and commiserated by the stewardesses. Finally she made her way upon deck
again, meeting Mrs. Macdonald in the companion-way. “Are you all right?”
asked Mrs. Macdonald cheerfully; but, before Helen had time to say that
she was or was not, the lady had disappeared.
The deck was full of irresolute people like herself, who sat about on
the damp benches or walked up and down under the awning, still with the
look of being fresh from town, still in gloves and stiff hats, and
land-faring garments. They put their hands in their pockets and
shivered, and looked askance at each other, or made vain attempts to
extract their own from the steamer chairs that were heaped up astern,
waiting the offices of a quartermaster. An occasional hurrying steward
was stopped a dozen times by passengers thirsting for information.
Barefooted Lascars climbed about their monkey-like business among the
ropes, or polished the brasses on the smoking-cabin, or holystoned a
deck which seemed to Helen immaculately clean before. She found a dry
corner and sat down in it to consider how much more familiar with the
ship many of the people seemed to be than she was, and to envy all the
accustomed ones. It seemed to Helen that she had better not analyse her
other emotions. She wasn’t comfortable, but no doubt she soon would be;
she wasn’t cheerful; but how could anybody expect that? She was restless
and damp and unhappy, and it finally became necessary for her to draw
young Browne’s photograph out of her hand-bag and peruse it in shelter
of the _Daily Graphic_ for a very long time. After which her spirits
rose appreciably. “He _is_ a dear!” she smiled to herself, “and he’s got
a lovely forehead—and in just five weeks I shall see him again—just five
weeks!”
Quite an ordinary reflection you see, without a shade of subtlety, a
reflection probably common to engaged young ladies the world over; but I
have already warned you under no circumstances to expect anything
extraordinary from Helen. It will be my fault if you find her dull, I
shall be in that case no faithful historian, but a traducer. I have not
known the present Mrs. Browne to be dull, even at the close of a
protracted round of Indian social gaieties; but you must not expect her
to be original.
The voyage to Calcutta began in this way, and I happen to know that its
chief feature of consolation—young Browne’s forehead—remained in Helen’s
pocket, and was constantly bespoken. Especially perhaps in the Bay of
Biscay, which fulfilled all its traditions for her benefit. I fear that
there were moments, tempestuous moments, in the Bay of Biscay,
heightened by the impassioned comments of Miss Stitch and Mrs.
Forsyth-Jones, when Helen did not dare to dwell upon the comparative
advantages of desiccated spinsterhood in Canbury, and matrimony in
foreign parts attainable only by sea. She felt that it would be
indiscreet, that she could not trust her conclusions to do credit to her
fealty. If it were not for Miss Stitch and Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, Helen
reflected, the horrors of the situation would have been less keen; but I
have no doubt that each of these ladies entertained the same sentiments
towards her two fellow-voyagers. They united, however, in extolling the
steward. The stewardess was a necessarily perfunctory person, with the
quaverings of forty ladies in her ears at once. The stewardess was
always sure she “didn’t know, ma’am,” and seemed to think it was a duty
one owed the ship to go up on deck, no matter how one felt. She was also
occasionally guilty of bringing one cold vegetables, if one occurred
about thirty-ninth upon her list of non-diners in public. But the
steward was a man, and always respectfully cheerful. He could tell
exactly why it was the ship rolled in that peculiar manner—owing to the
disposition of iron in the hold. He knew just how long they would be in
“the Bay,” and what sort of weather “she” would be likely to experience
during the night; also could predict within a quarter of an hour, the
time at which they would land at Gibraltar. He was generally incorrect
in every particular, but that made no difference to the value of his
sanguine prophecies, while it mitigated the distressful effects of his
gloomy ones. And it was always he who brought the first advice that the
ports might be opened, who calmed all fear of a possible rat or
cockroach “coming up from the hold,” and who heralded the ladies’
appearance on deck with armfuls of rugs, in the days of early
convalescence. They chanted to one another continually how “nice” he
was, and how hard he was obliged to work, poor fellow, each mentally
determining a higher figure for her farewell tip than she had thought of
the day before. This is the custom of ladies the world over who sail
upon the seas.
It must be mentioned that Mrs. Macdonald visited Helen’s cabin several
times in the Bay of Biscay. For her part Mrs. Macdonald was never ill,
she simply made up her mind not to be, and in her opinion if Helen would
only commit herself to a similar effort she would be all right
immediately. The expression of this opinion rather lessened the value of
Mrs. Macdonald’s sympathy; and the announcement that there was really
lovely weather going on above and the ship was beginning to be so jolly,
failed to make Helen any more comfortable. “Well, you are funny!” Mrs.
Macdonald would say cheerfully in departing, and she said it every day.
Mr. Macdonald remarked that Gibraltar looked much as usual the morning
they steamed under its hostile shadow, and Mrs. Macdonald said that if
she wasn’t in absolute need of some darning cotton and letter-paper she
wouldn’t think of going ashore—the place was such an old story. The
consideration of darning cotton prevailed, however, and the Macdonalds
went ashore, Helen with them. Helen’s acquaintance with the Macdonalds
had progressed meanwhile. She had learned what not to expect of them,
which excluded all but the gayest and airiest and most indifferent
companionship, and this facilitated matters between them considerably.
It was a little difficult at first. It seemed to this young lady from
Wiltshire, brought up among serious traditions of matrimony, that her
case, if not herself, ought to be taken a little more importantly; that
some impression of the fateful crisis in her life, toward which they
were helping to hurry her, ought to be evident occasionally in the
Macdonald conduct or conversation. It was only gradually that she came
to see how lightly such projects as hers and young Browne’s were
regarded by these people who were still in the initial stages of their
own; how little space she or her affairs occupied in their good-natured
thoughts; how invariably she must expect any reference to it to be
jocular. During the process Helen had now and then a novel sense of
making one of the various parcels which Mrs. Macdonald had undertaken to
bring out to friends in Calcutta—a feeling, that she ought properly to
be in an air-tight box in the hold, corded and labelled and expected to
give no further trouble. She realized, at moments, that she was being
“shipped” to young Browne.
They did exactly what everybody does in Gibraltar. There was no time to
get permission from the authorities and go through the galleries, there
never is. Barring which, the people of the ships find themselves without
resource except to drive in the rattle-trap conveyances of the place
through its narrow twisting, high-walled over-topping white streets and
out past the Spanish market, where everybody buys figs and pomegranates
to throw overboard afterwards, and so emerging from the town trot
through the sand and the short grass round the mighty gray foot of the
Rock, to look up and marvel at the terror of those irregular holes upon
its face, and the majesty that it had long before it became conscious
with cannon. Helen and the Macdonalds did all this and said just what P.
and O. voyagers have said for the last quarter of a century about it.
Coming back Mrs. Macdonald bought her darning cotton and her
letter-paper at a little shop, whose black-browed proprietor sold
photographs and wicked knives, and long pipes as well. Afterwards they
all strolled through the Alameda gardens, that cling for life among
their verbenas and rose bushes to the sides of the Rock, and finally
fell into that fatal corner shop which entraps the unwary with curios.
All roads seem to lead to it in Gibraltar, and one knows it by the crowd
of speculative passengers that encumber the doorway considering and
contrasting desirable purchases. The Spaniards inside are haughty and
indifferent, they will abate a shilling or two of their exorbitance
perhaps, not more. That is what the Macdonalds said to everybody in an
undertone—“You needn’t try, they won’t come down—it doesn’t seem to be
worth their while. We used to think they would, but now we don’t ask
them!” and in the face of this advice of experience the passengers
hesitated still more over their ill-shaped Moorish vases, black and red
and blue and gilt, their brass and coloured glass hanging lamps from
Cairo, their Persian china superficially gilt but beautifully blue. The
things that fascinated Helen were curious plaques in relief, all marshy
greens, in which the most realistic lizards and toads were creeping
about in imitated moss. Miss Peachey would have liked at least four of
these, they struck her as so original and clever, until Mrs. Macdonald
at her elbow said, in an impressive whisper “_Don’t!_ You see them in
_boarding_-houses in Calcutta!” when she put them reluctantly down, and
bought a big bedecked Spanish hat to make a work-basket of, and a large
fan, upon which sundry ladies of depraved appearance and very Irish
features were dancing a _fandango_ instead. I have seen that fan in the
present Mrs. Browne’s Calcutta drawing-room frequently since. She has it
fastened on the wall immediately under a photogravure of _The Angelus_,
and she will not take it down.
Between Gibraltar and Naples, Helen observed the peculiarities of the
species P. and O. passenger, the person who spends so large a portion of
a lifetime shorter than the average, in wondering how much more of this
delightful or this abominable weather “we’ll have,” in the Indian Ocean
or the Red Sea. She observed that Miss Stitch arose betimes every
morning, and attended the service held by the little pale ritualistic
clergyman in the saloon before the tables were laid for breakfast, which
struck her as eminently proper, Miss Stitch being a missionary. She also
noticed that Mrs. Forsyth-Jones, returning to her husband in Burmah,
with three photographs of him in uniform variously arranged in the
cabin, had as many small flirtations well in hand, one in the morning,
of the promenade sort, with a middle-aged Under-Secretary, one in the
afternoon, conducted in long chairs, enhanced by sunset, with a Royal
Engineer, whose wife was similarly occupied at the other end of the
ship, and one in the evening in a secluded corner of the hurricane deck,
charitably witnessed by the moon and stars, with a callow indigo planter
about the age of her eldest son. Helen thought that the missionary or
somebody, some older person, ought to speak to this lady in terms of
guarded reproof, and tell her that her conduct was more conspicuous than
perhaps she knew; and our young lady from Wiltshire was surprised to
observe not only that nobody did, but that Mrs. Forsyth-Jones seemed to
be a person of some popularity on board. The Macdonalds, for instance,
hung about her chair with solicitude, in the temporary absence of any of
the _attachés_. Mrs. Macdonald herself had plenty of “men-friends” as
she called them. They buzzed about her, whenever she sat or stood long
enough to permit their approach, all day—they were always bringing her
rugs, or old numbers of _Punch_, or an orange. But Mrs. Macdonald did
not particularize, she was content with a general empire, though she
prized that, as anybody could see. Among the throng Mr. Macdonald
remained supreme; she expected most attention from him too, and she
called him “Mac.”
Miss Stitch confided to Miss Peachey her opinion that “the people on
board this ship” were more than usually cliquey; but this was not a
conclusion that Helen would have arrived at unassisted. She saw about
her day after day, lining the long tables and afterwards scattered about
easefully on deck, a great many people, some of whom she thought
agreeable-looking, and others distinctly the reverse. Miss Stitch seemed
to think one ought to know everybody. Helen was sure that a few—a very
few—of the agreeable-looking people would do quite well. She did not see
at all how Miss Stitch could bring herself to talk to the person who sat
next her at table, and wore a large diamond ring on his third finger,
and drank champagne every day at tiffin, and said he was travelling for
his “’ealth,” and pointed most of his remarks with a tooth-pick. Helen
thought that even missionary zeal would not carry her so far as that. On
the other hand, she found it difficult to understand why everybody,
including Miss Stitch, seemed agreed not to make acquaintance with a
soft-eyed, sad-faced lady of rather dark complexion, who talked in a
gentle voice with a slightly foreign accent, Helen thought, and was
accompanied by three daughters, who much resembled her. They looked very
quiet and lady-like to Helen, and she thought the manners of certain
boisterous young ladies who polkaed with the ship’s officers on a
heaving deck after dinner, and whom everybody accepted, suffered by
comparison with them. When she was told that their name was De Cruz,
Helen privately criticised her fellow countrywomen’s attitude. “It must
be,” she said to herself, “because they are foreign.” And so it
was—because they were foreign. “About four annas in the rupee,” said
Miss Stitch about them one day, and told Helen that she would find out
what that meant before she had been long in India. But Miss Stitch, M.
D., was interested in the welfare, temporal and eternal, only of ladies
who were “pure native.”
Then one peaceful rainy morning, after a rolling night, Naples lay
before them, gathered all about her harbour with Vesuvius gently
smoking in the distance. The slippery hurricane deck was full of
people looking for Vesuvius, grouped round the single male passenger,
who, awakened by the first officer at four in the morning, had seen it
spouting fire. Enviable male passenger! Invidious first officer! Out
from shore came disreputable Neapolitan companies in small boats, with
stringed instruments, who lay under the ship’s sides and sang,
“Finiculi—Finicula!” in a lavish and abandoned manner, turning up
their impudent faces for contributions from the truly musical souls on
board. Helen listened, enraptured, to a number of these renditions,
after which she concluded that she preferred “Finiculi—Finicula” as
she had heard it sung by Mr. Browne, in Canbury, Wilts. After
breakfast, the Macdonalds attached themselves to an exploring party
for Pompeii, under the guidance of a black-browed Neapolitan,
representing Messrs. Cook. Mrs. Macdonald went about in a pretty, new
waterproof, with Bulwer’s _Last Days_ in her hand, telling people she
really must go this time, she had been lazy so often before, and it
was so awfully cheap with these people—carriages, rail, tiffin and see
everything for only thirty francs each! Helen and Miss Stitch stayed
behind, the night had been too rough to let them venture on the
absorption of so much ancient history, even at this advantageous rate.
But later, when the sun came out, the young ladies recovered their
spirits sufficiently to cruise adventurously to shore by themselves,
to engage a ragged-pocketed “guide” of perhaps thirteen, and a
rattling little victoria, pulled by a clinking little pony, with bells
upon his collar, and drive about Naples for three delicious hours. I
can’t say they added much to their stock of information. They had no
idea where to go and what to see; but one can always absorb colour and
life without a guide-book, happily; and I know, from what she told me
afterward, that Helen Peachey did that. They found abundant happiness
in the curio shops and much unpalatable fruit in the open market; they
filled their rattle-trap of a carriage with great bunches of tiny pink
roses at a few coppers apiece, and buried their faces in them. They
were told, driving through a grand toppling main street, all draped
and garlanded with little glass bells for candles, red, green, and
blue, that the King was coming next day. The boy guide told them this.
He showed them also the Royal Palace, with all the statues of former
kings standing about outside, and the “Grand Café de l’Europe,” much
embellished by a painter whose art had evidently once found favour
with the municipality. In the opinion of the guide, the “Grand Café de
l’Europe” was what reasonable people came to Naples to see; he pointed
it out many times and with an increasing show of personal admiration.
He was a very useful, clever boy the young ladies thought, especially
when he took them to the post office and obtained for Miss Stitch a
receipt for the registered letter she wanted to send away, in as
business-like a manner as if he were in the habit of transmitting
large sums abroad daily. “Don’ you lossit, for _good_niz sake!” he
exclaimed, as he gave her the slip. But I doubt whether he was quite
worth the sum he claimed at the water’s edge when they departed—the
pay of a full-grown, well-fed guide for a whole day, plus a
_pourboire_, which they ungrudgingly gave between them.
But I cannot give any more of my valuable space to Mrs. Browne’s
reminiscences of that voyage, which must, according to the volumes of
them, have lasted a space of about seven months. I believe they were all
very gay at Port Said, walking through the single wide China bazar
street of the place, flaming with colour and resonant of musicians in
the gambling houses, drinking black coffee on the boulevard, and
realizing no whit of Port Said’s iniquity. The Suez Canal had no
incident but several loathly odors, and then came the long smooth voyage
to Colombo and a fantastic glimpse of first cocoanut trees fringing the
shores of Ceylon. A great deal here about sapphires and rubies and cat’s
eyes and little elephants made of ivory and small brown diving-boys, and
first tropical impressions, but I must not linger in the chronicling.
Then the sail up to Madras, and the brief tarrying there, and the days
that came after, short days when everybody packed and rejoiced. At last,
one night at ten o’clock, a light that was not a star, shining far
through the soft still darkness beyond the bow of the ship, the light at
the mouth of a wide brown river that slipped to the sea through the
India, Helen would see in the morning, and past the city whither her
simple heart had gone before her.
* * * * *
Mrs. Macdonald kept out of the way. It was the one considerate thing she
did during the voyage. Young Browne, rather white and nervous-looking,
came upon Mr. Macdonald first in the turbulent shore-going crowd. Mr.
Macdonald was genial and reassuring. “You’ll find her over there, old
man,” said he without circumlocution, “rather back. Better bring her up
to Hungerford Street to breakfast yourself.” And Helen straightway was
found by young Browne in the precise direction Mr. Macdonald had
indicated, and “rather back.” She always remembers very distinctly that
on that occasion she wore a blue Chambray frock and a sailor hat with a
white ribbon round it. It is not a matter of consequence, still it might
as well be mentioned.
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