day. We send for a doctor in every case, and we women sit up night after
night to nurse every one that needs it. We provide proper food for the
sick and the convalescent from our own tables. We take care of the old
and decrepit, and of all the children. From birth to death they know
that they will be abundantly provided for. What poor family around the
Five Points has any such assurance? Who provides doctors and medicine
and dainties for them when they are ill? Who cares for their children?
Who assures them, in childhood and in old age, of as abundant a supply
of food and clothing, and as good a roof, as we give to the negroes? I
go every morning, as I just now said, to see every sick or afflicted
negro on my own plantation and on that of my guardian. How often have
you gone to the region of the Five Points to minister to those who are
ill and suffering and perhaps starving there?’
“‘Oh, that is all cared for by the charitable organizations’ she said,
‘and by the city missionaries.’
“‘Is it?’ I answered. ‘I do not find it so. I have emptied my purse a
dozen times in an effort to get a doctor for a very ill person here, and
to buy the medicines he prescribed, and to provide food for starving
ones. And then, next day I have found that the sick have died because
the well did not know how to cook the food I had provided, or how to
follow the doctor’s directions in the giving of medicine. I tell you
these poor people are immeasurably worse off than any negro slave at the
South is, or ever was. So far as I can learn there is no working
population in the world that gets half so much of comfort and care and
reward of every sort for its labor, as the negroes of Virginia get.’
“Then the woman broke out. She said: ‘You are dressed in a superb
satin’--it was at a social function--‘and every dollar of its cost was
earned by a negro slave on your plantation.’ I answered, ‘You are
equally well dressed. Will you tell me who earned the money that paid
for your satin gown?’ Then, Cousin Arthur, I lost my temper and my
manners. I told her that while we in Virginia profited by the labor of
our negroes, we gave them, as the reward of their labor, every desire of
their hearts and, besides that, an assurance of support in absolute
comfort for their old age, and for their children; while the laboring
class in New York, from whose labor she profited, and whose toil
purchased her gown, had nobody to care for them in infancy or old age,
in poverty and illness and suffering. ‘It is all wrong on both sides,’ I
said. ‘The toilers ought to have the full fruits of their toil in both
cases. The luxury of the rich is a robbery of the poor always and
everywhere. There ought not to be any such thing anywhere. The woman who
made your underclothing was robbed when you bought it at the price you
did. You wronged and defrauded the silk spinners and weavers and the
sewing women when you bought your gown. Worse than that; you have among
you men who have accumulated great fortunes in manufactures and
commerce. How did they do it? Was it not in commerce by paying the
producers for their products less than they were worth? Was it not in
manufactures by paying men and women and children less than they have
earned? Was not the great Astor estate based upon a shrewd robbery of
the Indian trappers and hunters? And has it not been swelled to its
present proportions by the growth of a city to whose growth the Astors
have never contributed a single dollar? Isn’t the whole thing a wrong
and a robbery? Isn’t the “Song of the Shirt” a reflection of truth?
Isn’t there slavery in New York as actually as in Virginia, and isn’t it
infinitely more cruel?’
“Then the woman shifted her ground. ‘But at least our laborers are
free,’ she said. ‘Are they?’ I answered. ‘Are they free to determine for
whom they will work or at what wages? Cannot their masters, who are
their employers, discharge them at will, when they get old or feeble or
otherwise incompetent, and leave them to starve? No master of a Virginia
plantation can do that. His neighbors would actually lynch him should he
turn a decrepit old negro out to die or even should he deny to him the
abundant food and clothing and housing that he gives to the able-bodied
negroes who make crops. And,’ I added, for I was excited, ‘this cruelty
is not confined to what are ordinarily called the laboring classes. I
know a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who has worked for years to
build up the fortunes of his employers. He has had what is regarded as a
very high salary. But being a man of generous mind he has spent his
money freely in educating the ten or a dozen sons and daughters of his
less fortunate brother. He is growing old now. He has earned for his
master, a thousand dollars for every dollar of salary that he ever
received just as all his fellow workers in the business have done. But
he is growing old now, and under the strain of night and day work, he
has acquired the habit of drinking too much. He hasn’t a thousand
dollars in the world as his reward for helping to make this other man,
his master, absurdly, iniquitously rich. Yet in his age and infirmity,
the other man, luxuriating in his palatial summer home which is only one
of the many palaces that other men’s toil late into the night has
provided for him, decides that the old servitor is no longer worth his
salary, and decrees his discharge. Is there anything so cruel as that in
negro slavery? Is that man half so well off as my negro mammy, who has a
house of her own and all the food and clothes she wants at the age of
eighty, and who could have the service of a dozen negro attendants for
the mere asking?’
“Now, Cousin Arthur, please don’t misunderstand me. Even what I have
seen at the Five Points doesn’t tempt me to believe in slavery. I want
of all things to see that exterminated. But, really and truly, I find an
immeasurably worse slavery here in New York than I ever saw in Virginia,
and I want to see it all abolished together, not merely the best and
kindliest and most humane part of it. I want to see the time when every
human being who works shall enjoy the full results of his work; when no
man shall be any other man’s master; when no man shall grow rich by
pocketing the proceeds of any other man’s genius or industry. I said all
this to that woman, and she replied: ‘You are obviously a pestilent
socialist. You are as bad as Fourier and Albert Brisbane and Horace
Greeley.’ That was very rude of her, seeing that Mr. Greeley was
present, but I’ve noticed that the people who most highly pride
themselves on good manners are often rude and inconsiderate of others to
a degree that would not be tolerated in Virginia society--except perhaps
from Mr. Madison Peyton. By the way, Mr. Jefferson Peyton was present,
and to my regret he said some things in defence of slavery which I could
not at all approve. Mr. Greeley interrupted him to say something like
this:
“‘The dear young lady is quite right. We have a horrible slavery right
here in New York, and we ought to make war on that as earnestly as we do
on African slavery at the South. I’m trying to do it in the
Try-bune’--that’s the way he pronounces the name of his paper--‘and I’m
going to keep on trying.’
“That encouraged me, for I find myself more and more disposed to respect
Mr. Greeley as I come to know him better. I don’t always agree with him.
I sometimes think he is onesided in his views, and of course he is
enormously self-conceited. But he is, at any rate, an honest man, and a
brave and sincere one. He isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, any more
than you are, and I like him for that. Another great editor whom I have
met frequently, seems to me equally courageous, but far less
conscientious. He is inclined to take what he calls ‘the newspaper view’
of things,--by which he means the view that appeals to the multitude for
the moment, without much regard for any fixed principle. Socially he is
a much more agreeable man than Mr. Greeley, but I don’t think him so
trustworthy. Mr. Greeley impresses me as a man who may be enormously
wrong-headed, under the influence of his prejudiced misconceptions, but
who, wrong-headed or right-headed, will never consciously wrong others.
If he had been born the master of a Virginia plantation he would have
dealt with his negroes in the same spirit in which he has insisted upon
giving to his fellow workers on the Tribune a share in the profits of
their joint work. Mr. Greeley is odd, but I like him better than any
editor I have met.”
So the girl went on, writing objectively and instinctively avoiding the
subjective. But she did not always write so seriously. She had “caught
the patter” of society and she often filled pages with a sparkling,
piquant flippancy, which had for Arthur a meaning all its own.
XXX
AT SEA
_T_he voyage to Europe in 1860 was a much more serious undertaking than
the like voyage is in our later time. It occupied a fortnight or three
weeks, for one thing, where now a week is ample time for the passage.
The steamers were small and uncomfortable--the very largest of them
being only half the size of the very smallest now regarded as fit for
passenger service. There was no promenade deck or hurricane deck then,
above the main deck, which was open to the sky throughout its length and
breadth, except for the interruption of one small deck house, covering
the companion way, a ventilator pipe here and there, and perhaps a
chicken coop to furnish emaciated and sea sick fowls for the table
d’hôte. There was no ice machine on board, and no distilling apparatus
for the production of fresh water. As a consequence, after two days out,
the warm water which passengers must drink began to taste of the ancient
wood of the water tanks; at the end of a week it became sickeningly
foul; and before the end of the voyage it became so utterly undrinkable
that the most aggressive teetotaler among the passengers was compelled
to order wine for his dinner and to abstain from coffee at breakfast.
The passenger who did not grow seasick in those days was a rare
exception to an otherwise universal rule, while, in our time, when the
promenade deck is forty or fifty feet above the waves, and the
passengers are abundantly supplied both with palatable food and with
wholesome water, only those suffer with _mal de mer_ who are bilious
when they go on board, or who are beset by a senseless apprehension of
the sea.
The passenger lists were small, too, even allowing for the diminutive
size of the ships. One person crossed the ocean then where perhaps a
hundred cross in our time.
There were perhaps twenty passengers in the cabin of the ship in which
Dorothy sailed. By the second day out only two of the ship’s company
appeared at meals or at all regularly took the air on deck. Dorothy was
one of these two. The other she herself introduced, as it were, to
Arthur, in a long, diary-like letter which she wrote on shipboard and
mailed at Liverpool.
“I’m sitting on a great coil of rope, just behind the deck house,” she
wrote, “where I am sheltered from the wind and where I can breathe my
whole body full of the delicious sea air. The air is flavored with great
quantities of the finest sunshine imaginable. Every now and then I lay
my paper down, and a very nice old sailor comes and puts two big iron
belaying pins on it, to keep it from blowing overboard while I go
skipping like a ten-year-old girl up and down the broad, clean deck, and
enjoying the mere being alive, just as I do on horseback in Virginia
when the sun is rising on a perfect morning.
“I ought to be down stairs--no, I mustn’t say ‘down stairs,’ when I’m at
sea, I must say ‘below.’ Well, I ought to be below ministering to
Edmonia and her friend Mrs. Livingston,--or Mildred, as she insists on
my calling her--both of whom are frightfully sick; but really and truly,
Edmonia won’t let me. She fairly drove me out, half an hour ago. When I
didn’t want to go she threatened to throw her shoes at my head, saying
‘You dear little idiot, go on deck and keep your sea-well on, if you
can.’ And when I protested that she seemed very ill and that I hadn’t
the heart to go on the beautiful deck and be happy in the delicious air
and sunshine while she was suffering so, she said: ‘Oh, I’m always so
for the first three or four days, and I’m best let alone. My temper is
frightful when I’m seasick. That’s why I took separate staterooms for
you and me. I don’t want you to find out what a horribly ill-tempered,
ill-mannered woman I am when I’m seasick. How can I help it? I’ve got a
mustard plaster on my back and two on my chest, and I’ve drunk half a
bottle of that detestable stuff, champagne, and I’m really fighting mad.
Go away, child, and let me fight it out with myself and the
stewardesses. They don’t mind it, the dear good creatures. They’re used
to it. I threw a coffee cup full of coffee all over one of them this
morning because she presumed to insist upon my swallowing the horrible
stuff, and she actually laughed, Dorothy. I couldn’t get up a quarrel
with her no matter what I did, and so I tried my hand on the ship’s
doctor. I don’t like him anyhow. He’s just the kind that would make love
to me if he dared, and I don’t like men that do that.’ Then Edmonia
added: ‘He wouldn’t quarrel at all. When I told him he was trying to
poison me with bicarbonate of soda in my drinking water, he seriously
assured me that bicarbonate of soda isn’t poisonous in the least
degree, that it corrects acidity, and all that sort of thing. I gave him
up as hopeless,--but remind me, Dorothy, that when we go ashore I must
put half a dozen sovereigns into his hand--carefully wrapped up in
paper, so that he shan’t even guess what they are--as his well earned
fee for enduring my bad temper. But now, Dorothy, you see clearly that
this ship doesn’t provide any proper person for me to quarrel with, and
so I must fall back upon you, if you persist in staying here and
arrogantly insulting me with your sublime superiority to seasickness. So
get out of my room and stay out till I come on deck with my mind
restored to a normal condition.’ I really think she meant it, and so I’m
obeying her. And I should be very happy with the air and the sunshine
and my dear old sailorman who tells me sailor stories and sings to me
the very quaintest old sailor songs imaginable, if I could be sure that
I’m doing right in being happy while Edmonia is so very miserable.
“As for Mildred--Mrs. Livingston--she lies white-faced and helpless in
her bunk--there, I got the sailor term right that time at the first
effort--while her husband simply sleeps and moans on the sofa. The
doctor says they are ‘progressing very satisfactorily’ and so I am
taking his advice and letting them alone. But why anybody should be
seasick, _how_ anybody _can_ be sick at sea, I simply cannot understand.
The ship’s doctor tried to explain it to me this morning, but he forgot
his explanation. He--well, never mind. He ought to have a wife with a
plantation or something of that sort, so that his abilities might have
an opportunity. I don’t think much of his abilities, and I don’t like
him half as well as I do my old sailor. He is going to tell me--the old
sailor, I mean and not the doctor--all about his life history tonight.
We are to have a moon, you know, and, as he’s on the ‘port watch,’
whatever that may mean, he’s going to come on deck and tell me all about
himself. I’ll tell you about it in tomorrow’s instalment of this
rambling letter.”
On the following day, or perhaps a day later even than that, Dorothy
wrote:
“This is another day. I don’t just know what day. You know they keep
changing the clock at sea, and I’ve got mixed up. Edmonia still throws
shoes and medicine bottles and coffee cups at me whenever I thrust my
head inside the portière of her stateroom, and Mildred, though she has
sufficiently recovered to come on deck, lies helpless in a deck chair
which my sailor has ‘made fast’--you see I’m getting to be an expert in
nautical terms--to a mast or a spar or something, and when I speak to
her, says, ‘Go away, child, and be happy in the midst of human misery,
if you can. Let me alone.’ When I ask her concerning her husband she
answers: ‘I suppose he’s comfortable in his misery. At any rate, he has
two bottles of champagne by his side, and he is swearing most hopefully.
I always know he is getting over it when he begins to swear in real
earnest, and with a certain discretion in the choice of his oaths. Now,
run away, you ridiculously well girl or I’ll begin to borrow from Rex’s
vituperative vocabulary.’ Rex is her husband you know.
“The sailor’s story didn’t amount to anything, so I’ll not bother you
with a repetition of it.”
[As a strictly confidential communication, not to be mentioned to
anybody, the author so far intrudes upon attention at this point, as to
report that the sailorman, at the end of his picturesque and imaginative
narrative, professed a self-sacrificing willingness to abandon the
delights of a sea-faring existence, and to content himself thereafter
with the homelier and less romantic duties of master of Pocahontas
plantation. Dorothy, in continuing her letter, was quite naturally
reticent upon this point. But she went on liking that old sailorman, in
whose devotion to her comfort on deck nothing seemed to make the
slightest difference. Perhaps this chronic mariner already had ‘a wife
in every port’ and was only ‘keeping his hand in’ at courtship. At any
rate after duly disciplining him, Dorothy went on liking him and
accepting his manifold, sailorly attentions. Ah, these women! How very
human they are in face of all their airs and pretensions!]
It was a day later that Dorothy wrote:
“There is a very extraordinary lady on board, and I have become
acquainted with her, in a way. I didn’t see her at all during the first
day out. As she tells me she is never seasick, I suppose she kept her
cabin for some other reason. At any rate the first time I met her was on
the morning of that second day out, when I was skipping about the deck
and making believe that I was little Dorothy again--little ten-year-old
Dorothy, who didn’t care if people were seeing her when she skipped. The
captain saw me first. He’s a dear old fellow with a big beard and nine
children and a nice little baby at home. And, think of it, the people
that hire him to run their ship won’t let him bring his wife on board
or any of his children on any account! That isn’t quite correct either,
for two voyages ago it was the twenty-first anniversary of his marriage,
and when he asked permission to bring his wife and baby with him on his
trip to New York and back, just to celebrate, you see, the company gave
permission without any hesitation. But when he came on board, he found
another captain in command for that one trip, and himself only a
passenger. That’s because the company don’t want a captain’s attention
distracted, and I suppose a new baby whom he had never seen before would
have distracted him a great deal. Anyhow that’s the way it was and the
only reason the captain told me about it was that I asked him why he
didn’t have his wife and children on board with him always. But I set
out to tell you about the lady. After the captain had ‘captured’ me, as
he put it, and had taken me up on the bridge, and had shown me how to
take an observation and how to steer--he let me steer all by myself for
more than a mile and I didn’t run the ship into anything, perhaps
because there wasn’t anything within five hundred miles to run into--I
went down on deck again, hoping that maybe Diana had got well enough to
come out, but she hadn’t. She isn’t violently ill, but she’s the most
entirely, hopelessly, seasick person I’ve seen yet. She--well, never
mind. She’ll get well again, and in the meanwhile I must tell you about
the lady. She spoke to me kindly and said:
“‘As you and I seem to be the only well passengers on board, I think I’m
entitled to a sea acquaintance with you, Miss Dorothy. You know sea
acquaintances carry no obligations with them beyond the voyage, and so
no matter how chummy we may become out here on the ocean you needn’t
even bow to me if we meet again on shore.’ She seemed so altogether nice
that I told her I wouldn’t have a mere sea acquaintance with her, but
would get acquainted with her ‘for truly,’ as the children say. She
seemed glad when I said that, and we talked for two hours or more, after
which we went to luncheon and sat side by side--as everybody else is
seasick we had the table all to ourselves and didn’t need to mind whose
chairs we sat in.
“Well, she is a strangely fascinating person, and the more I know of her
the more she fascinates me. Sometimes she seems as young as I myself am;
sometimes she seems very old. She is tall and what I call willowy. That
is to say she bends as easily in any direction as a willow wand could,
and with as much of grace. Indeed grace is her dominant characteristic,
as I discovered when she danced a Spanish fandango to my playing--just
all to ourselves you know, behind the deck house. She knows everybody
worth knowing, too--all the editors and artists and actors and singers
and pianists and people in society that I have met, and a great many
others that I haven’t met at all. And she really does know them, too,
for one day in her cabin I saw a great album of hers, and when she saw I
was interested in it she bade me take it on deck, saying that perhaps it
might amuse me during the hour she must give to sleep. And when I read
it, I found it full of charming things in prose and verse, all addressed
to her, and all signed by great people, or nearly all. She told me
afterwards that she valued the other things most--the things signed by
people whose names meant nothing to me. ‘For those,’ she said, ‘are my
real friends. The rest--well, no matter. They are professionals, and
they do such things well.’ I don’t just know what she meant by that, but
I have a suspicion that she loves truth better than anything else, and
that she doesn’t think distinguished people always tell the truth when
they write in albums. At any rate when I asked her if I might write and
sign a little sentiment in her album, she said, with more of emotion
than the occasion seemed to call for: ‘Not in that book, my child! Not
as a tag to all those people. If you will write me three or four lines
of your own on a simple sheet of paper and sign it, I’ll have it
sumptuously bound when I get to Paris, in a book all to itself, and
nobody else shall ever write a line to go with it while I live.’
“Wasn’t it curious? And especially when you reflect how many
distinguished people she knows! But she brought me a sheet of very fine
paper that afternoon, and said: ‘I don’t want you to write now. I don’t
want you to write till our voyage is nearly over. Then I want you to
write the truth as to your feeling for me. No matter what it is, I want
it to be the truth, so that I may keep it always.’ I took the sheet and
wrote on it, ‘I wish you were my mother.’ That was the truth. I do wish
every hour that this woman were my mother. But she refused to read what
I had written, saying: ‘I will keep it, child, unread until the end of
the voyage. Then I’ll give it back to you if you wish, and you shall
write again whatever you are prompted to write, be it this or something
quite different.’
“Curiously enough, her name is in effect the same as my own, translated
into French. She is Madame Le Sud. That means Mrs. South, of course, and
when I called her attention to the fact, she said: ‘perhaps that may
suggest an additional bond of affection between us.’”
Several days passed before Dorothy resumed her writing.