Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found,
when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boat
out. His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office of
the Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in by
sufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been given
up, in one of the saloon-deck rooms. It was that or nothing; and he felt
rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled him
to come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the difference
between the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which he
would have taken if he had been allowed a choice.
With the three hundred dollars he had got for his book, less the price of
his passage, changed into German bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely
buttoned in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe from
pillage as from poverty when he came out from buying his ticket; he
covertly pressed his arm against his breast from time to time, for the
joy of feeling his money there and not from any fear of finding it gone.
He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he, as
he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the
wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to
themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.
He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American
restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret
included. When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was
stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again in
lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze,
which he made the most of by keeping his hat off. It did not really
matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather
which had nothing to do with the temperature. Partly because he was born
to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him,
and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, he
was opulently content with the present moment. But he thought very
tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he had
already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America. New York
was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got a
foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, he
believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurt
him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.
He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home
so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky. He fancied,
for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its
glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as to
see it more and more objectively. It was his power of detachment from
this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charm
as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them together
for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do with
his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself. Perhaps
he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; he
could, detach himself from his art as well as his material.
Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of
the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work. He
knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of
unprofessional tenderness in his nature. He was good to his mother, and
he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he
had left her when he came to Chicago. After he got that invitation from
the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had
not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not
know it was he who had invented that nickname for him. He promptly avowed
this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the Bird
of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away. He failed to
move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for softening
toward him that he was from Burnamy's own part of Indiana, and was a
benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was graduated.
But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad of his
good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as most people
seem to get their luck. They liked him, and some of them liked him for
his clean young life as well as for his cleverness. His life was known to
be as clean as a girl's, and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes,
though he had rather more chin than most girls.
The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed
he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if
the conductor would put him off at the right place. It was nearly nine
o'clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where
he had decided to pass the night. After he found her, and went on board,
he was glad he had not gone sooner. A queasy odor of drainage stole up
from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of
the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming
and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of
chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden
silences of trampling sea-boots. Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon
and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then
he went to his state-room. His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not
come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into
his berth.
He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving
impressions. He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the
eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner. He thought he would use the material
first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he found
himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the
choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the
restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had
begun to dream, and that he must get up. He was just going to get up,
when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new
day outside. He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six; he
glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night alone
in it. Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth, and
jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no feature or
emotion of the ship's departure.
When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat
he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air. His room-mate
was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage,
and Burnamy tried to infer him from it. He perceived a social quality in
his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and
sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own
equipment. The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of
polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here
and there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and
Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it
had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B.
Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of
the lower berth.
The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the
passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the
steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and
he now imagined a trespass on his property. But he reassured himself by a
glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down the
stream and through the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his room
again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better
in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he
professed a much more general purpose. He blamed himself for not having
got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the
passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;
but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he
thought might do.
His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already
missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into;
and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down
the narrow passage where he supposed it was. A lady was standing at an
open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning
forward with her head within and talking to some one there. Before he
could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say: "Perhaps he's
some young man, and wouldn't care."
Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within. The lady
spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, "No, I don't suppose you
could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer."
She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a
moment at the threshold. She looked round over her shoulder and
discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage.
She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape;
with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she
vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood
staring into the doorway of his room.
He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on
his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly
gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast. He begged his pardon, as he
entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him. "I'm afraid I left
my things all over the place, when I got up this morning."
The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his
hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy
vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the
way over. "You slept on board, then," he suggested, arresting himself
with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain
pocket of his steamer bag.
"Oh, yes," Burnamy laughed, nervously: "I came near oversleeping, and
getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself,
and so--"
He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of
Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye. He would have liked to offer his lower
berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession
of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it. He noticed that
as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a
weary easing of his person from one limb to the other. He stooped to pull
his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.
"Let me get that out for you!" He caught it up and put it on the sofa
under the port. "Is that where you want it?"
"Why, yes," the other assented. "You're very good," and as he took out
his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the
intimacies of the situation. "Have you arranged with the bath-steward
yet? It's such a full boat."
"No, I haven't," said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then
he had not known that there was a bath-steward. "Shall I get him for
you?"
"No; no. Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you."
Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse
for lingering. In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it
to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth. He went
away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he
got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag,
he said, abruptly: "Mr. Triscoe, I wish you'd take the lower berth. I got
it at the eleventh hour by some fellow's giving it up, and it isn't as if
I'd bargained for it a month ago."
The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy
fancied suspicion and even resentment. But he said, after the moment of
reflection which he gave himself, "Why, thank you, if you don't mind,
really."
"Not at all!" cried the young man. "I should like the upper berth better.
We'll, have the steward change the sheets."
"Oh, I'll see that he does that," said Mr. Triscoe. "I couldn't allow you
to take any trouble about it." He now looked as if he wished Burnamy
would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.