There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache
darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the
spirit bereft of all reasonable consolation. Therefore I do not think
it trivial or untrue to say that there is for the moment nothing more
satisfactory in life than to have bought your ticket on the night boat
up the Hudson and secured your stateroom key an hour or two before
departure, and some time even before the pressure at the clerk's
office has begun. In the transaction with this castellated baron, you
have, of course, been treated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity,
and your self-respect swells with a sense of having escaped positive
insult; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket against its
gutta-percha number, and you walk up and down the gorgeously
carpeted, single-columned, two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush
sofas and chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic
chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristocratic gloom of the
yellow waiters. Your own stateroom, as you enter it from time to time,
is an ever new surprize of splendors, a magnificent effect of
amplitude, of mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains, and of marble topt
washstand. In the mere wantonness of an unalloyed prosperity you say
to the saffron nobleman nearest your door, "Bring me a pitcher of
ice-water, quick, please!" and you do not find the half-hour that he
is gone very long.
[Footnote 60: From Chapter III of "Their Wedding Journey." Copyright,
1871, 1888, Houghton, Mifflin Company.]
If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much pleasure from these
things, then imagine the infinite comfort of our wedding journeyers,
transported from Broadway on that pitiless afternoon to the shelter
and the quiet of that absurdly palatial steamboat. It was not yet
crowded, and by the river-side there was almost a freshness in the
air. They disposed of their troubling bags and packages; they
complimented the ridiculous princeliness of their stateroom, and then
they betook themselves to the sheltered space aft of the saloon, where
they sat down for the tranquiller observance of the wharf and whatever
should come to be seen by them. Like all people who have just escaped
with their lives from some menacing calamity, they were very
philosophical in spirit; and having got aboard of their own motion,
and being neither of them apparently the worse for the ordeal they had
passed through, were of a light, conversational temper.
"What an amusingly superb affair!" Basil cried as they glanced through
an open window down the long vista of the saloon. "Good heavens!
Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain republicans to Albany in
comfort and safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise?
Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter," he added. "I am
spoiled for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour; I am a
ruinous spendthrift, and a humble three-story swell-front up at the
South End is no longer the place for me. Dearest,
'Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,'
never to leave this Aladdin's-palace-like steamboat, but spend our
lives in perpetual trips up and down the Hudson."
To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly
sketched the life they could lead aboard. Since they could not help
it, they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval
between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our
democratic menage to the taste of the richest and most extravagant
plebeian amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as
little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a
sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecile who will have lace
curtains to the steamboat berth into which he gets with his pantaloons
on, and out of which he may be blown by an exploding boiler at any
moment; it is he who will have for supper that overgrown and shapeless
dinner in the lower saloon, and will not let any one else buy tea or
toast for a less sum than he pays for his surfeit; it is he who
perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and the reluctance of the
waiters; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with his
womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel
sit. Personally, he is not so bad; he is good-looking, like all of us;
he is better drest than most of us; he behaves himself quietly, if not
easily; and no lord so loathes a scene. Next year he is going to
Europe, where he will not show to so much advantage as here; but for
the present it would be hard to say in what way he is vulgar, and
perhaps vulgarity is not so common a thing after all.