When they stopped in Jersey City, Ray made haste out of the car to see
what became of his beneficiaries, and he followed closely after them,
and got near them on the ferry-boat. They went forward out of the cabin
and stood among the people at the bow who were eager to get ashore
first. They each held her heavy baby, and silently watched the New York
shore, and scarcely spoke.
Ray looked at it too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the
grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the
grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges
with freight trains in sections on them; the canal-boats in tow of the
river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails
half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the
stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise
steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and
wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond,
and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and
clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the
necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the
brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively
expressed in an incredible picturesqueness. Ray saw nothing amiss in it.
This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of
the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not
afraid. He took a new grip of the travelling-bag where he had his
manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it
went into some publisher’s keeping. He would not trust it to the trunk
which he had checked at Midland, and which he now recognized among the
baggage piled on a truck near him. He fingered the outside of his bag to
make sure by feeling its shape that his manuscript was all right within.
All the time he was aware of those two young women, each with her baby
in her arms, which they amused with various devices, telling them to
look at the water, the craft going by, and the horses in the wagon-way
of the ferry-boat. The children fretted, and pulled the women’s hair,
and clawed their hats; and the passengers now and then looked
censoriously at them. From time to time the young women spoke to each
other spiritlessly. The one whose child had thrown her pocket-book away
never lost a look of hopeless gloom, as she swayed her body half round
and back, to give some diversion to the baby. Both were pretty, but she
had the paleness and thinness of young motherhood; the other, though she
was thin too, had the fresh color and firm texture of a young girl; she
was at once less tragic and more serious than her sister, if it was her
sister. When she found Ray gazing fixedly at her, she turned discreetly
away, after a glance that no doubt took in the facts of his neat,
slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its dark eyes
and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant mouth; his
sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked with a few
browner freckles.
He was one of those men who have no vanity concerning their persons; he
knew he was rather handsome, but he did not care; his mind was on other
things. When he found those soft woman-eyes lingering a moment on him he
had the wish to please their owner, of course, but he did not think of
his looks, or the effect they might have with her. He fancied knowing
her well enough to repeat poetry to her, or of reading some favorite
author aloud with her, and making her sympathize in his admiration of
the book. He permitted his fancy this liberty because, although he
supposed her married, his fancy safely operated their intellectual
intimacy in a region as remote from experience as the dreamland of
sleep. She and her sister had both a sort of refinement; they were
ladies, he felt, although they were poorly dressed, and they somehow did
not seem as if they had ever been richly dressed. They had not the New
Yorkeress air; they had nothing of the stylishness which Ray saw in the
other women about him, shabby or splendid; their hats looked as if they
had been trimmed at home, and their simple gowns as if their wearers had
invented and made them up themselves, after no decided fashion, but
after a taste of their own, which he thought good. He began to make
phrases about them to himself, and he said there was something
pathetically idyllic about them. The phrase was indefinite, but it was
sufficiently clear for his purpose. The baby which had thrown away the
pocket-book began to express its final dissatisfaction with the
prospect, and its mother turned distractedly about for some new
diversion, when there came from the ladies’ cabin a soft whistle, like
the warbling of a bird, low and rich and full, which possessed itself of
the sense to the exclusion of all other sounds. Some of the people
pressed into the cabin; others stood smiling in the benediction of the
artless strain. Ray followed his idyllic sisters within, and saw an old
negro, in the middle of the cabin floor, lounging in an easy pose, with
his hat in one hand and the other hand on his hip, while his thick lips
poured out those mellow notes, which might have come from the heart of
some thrush-haunted wild wood. When the sylvan music ceased, and the old
negro, with a roll of his large head, and a twist of his burly shape,
began to limp round the circle, every one put something in his hat. Ray
threw in a nickel, and he saw the sisters, who faced him from the other
side of the circle, conferring together. The younger had the bill in her
hand which Ray had sent them by the conductor to pay their car fares
home. She parleyed a moment with the negro when he reached them, and he
took some of the silver from his hat and changed the bill for her. She
gave him a quarter back. He ducked his head, and said, “Thank yeh,
miss,” and passed on.
The transaction seemed to amuse some of the bystanders, and Ray heard
one of them, who stood near him, say: “Well, that’s the coolest thing
I’ve seen yet. I should have about as soon thought of asking the deacon
to change a bill for me when he came round with the plate in church.
Well, it takes all kinds to make a world!”
He looked like a country merchant, on a first business visit to the
city; his companion, who had an air of smart ease, as of a man who had
been there often, said:
“It takes all kinds to make a town like New York. You’ll see queerer
things than that before you get home. If that old darkey makes much on
that transaction, I’m no judge of human nature.”
“Pshaw! You don’t mean it wasn’t a good bill?”
The two men lost themselves in the crowd now pressing out of the cabin
door. The boat was pushing into her slip. She bumped from one elastic
side to the other, and settled with her nose at the wharf. The snarl of
the heavy chains that held her fast was heard; the people poured off and
the hollow thunder of the hoofs and wheels of the disembarking teams
began. Ray looked about for a last glimpse of the two young women and
their babies; but he could not see them.