Dorothy South

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.

“I haven’t added a line to my letter for two or three days past. That’s because I have been so busy learning to know and love Madame Le Sud. She is the very sweetest and most charming woman I ever saw in my life. She is a trifle less than forty – just old enough I tell her, to be my mother if it had happened in that way. Then she asked me about my real mother and I couldn’t tell her anything. I couldn’t even tell when she died, or what her name had been or anything about her. Isn’t it a strange thing, Cousin Arthur, that nobody has ever told me anything about my mother? It makes me ashamed when I think of it, and still more ashamed when I remember that I never asked anything about her, except once. That time I asked my father some question and he answered only by quickly rising and going out to mount his horse and ride away all alone. That is the way he always did when things distressed him, and as I didn’t want to distress him I never asked him anything more about my mother. But why haven’t I been told about her? Was she bad? And is that why everybody has been so anxious about me, fearing that I might be bad? Even if that were so they ought to have told me about my mother, especially after I began to grow up and know how to stand things bravely. May be when I was too little to understand it was better to keep silent. But when I grew older there was no excuse for not telling me the truth. I don’t think there ever is any excuse for that. The truth is the only thing in the world that a sane person ought to love. I’m only seventeen years old, but I’m old enough to have found out that much, and I don’t think I shall ever quite forgive those who have shut out from me the truth about my mother. You, Cousin Arthur, haven’t had any hand in that. I never asked you, but I know. If you had known about my mother you’d have told me. You could not have helped it. The only limitation to your ability that I ever discovered is your utter inability to tell lies. If you tried to do that you’d make such a wretched failure of the attempt that the truth would come out in spite of you. So, of course, you are as ignorant as I am about my mother.

“But I wanted to tell you about Madame Le Sud. To me she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet most people would call her hideously ugly. Indeed, I’ve heard people on the ship call her that way, for they’re beginning at last to come out on deck and try to get well. She has a terribly disfiguring scar. It begins in her hair and extends down over her left eye which it has put out, and down her cheek by the side of her nose, almost, but not quite to her upper lip. The scar is very ugly, of course, but the woman is altogether beautiful. She impresses me as wonderfully fine and fragile – delicate in the same way that a piece of old Sèvres china is. She plays the violin divinely. She wouldn’t play for me at first, and she has since confessed that she feared to make me afraid to play for her. ‘For I am a professional musician,’ she said, ‘or rather I was, till I got this disfiguring scar. After that how could I present myself to an audience?’ Then she told me how she got the scar. She was celebrating something or other with a company of friends. They drank champagne too freely, and one of them, taking from Madame Le Sud’s mantelpiece a perfume bottle, playfully emptied its contents on her head. It was a perfume bottle, but it held nitric acid which somebody had been using medicinally. In an instant the mischief was done and Madame Le Sud’s career as a famous musician was ended forever.

“When she got well she was very poor, having spent all her money during her illness. A manager came to her and wanted her to go on as ‘the veiled violinist,’ he pretending that she was some woman of distinguished family and high social position whose love of music tempted her to exercise her skill upon the stage, but whose social position forbade her to show her face or reveal her name. He offered her large sums if she would do this, but she refused to make herself a party to such a deception. She secured employment, as she puts it, in a much humbler capacity which enables her to turn her artistic taste to account in earning a living, and it is in connection with this employment that she is now on her way to Paris. She did not tell me what her employment is, and of course I did not ask her. But now that I have learned something of her misfortunes, and have seen how bravely she bears them, I love her better than ever.

“Diana has come upon deck at last, ‘dressed and in her right mind.’ She is very proud of having been ‘seasick jes’ like white folks.’ She so far asserts her authority as to order Edmonia – who is quite herself again – and me to array ourselves in some special gowns of her personal selection for the captain’s dinner today. It is to be a notable affair and Madame Le Sud is to play a violin solo. They asked me to play also, but I refused, till Madame Le Sud asked me to give ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ with her to play second violin. Think of it! This wonderful musical artist volunteering to ‘play second fiddle’ to a novice like me! But she insists upon liking my rendering of the dear old melody and she has taken the trouble to compose a special second part, which, she generously says, ‘will bring out the beauty’ of my performance.

“We expect to make land during tonight, and by day after tomorrow, I’ll mail this letter at Liverpool.”

XXXI

THE VIEWS AND MOODS OF ARTHUR BRENT

W HEN Dorothy had gone Arthur Brent felt a double necessity for diligence in the ordering of plantation affairs. He realized for the first time what he had done in thus sending Dorothy away. For the first time he began to understand his own condition of mind and the extent to which this woman had become a necessity to his life. Quite naturally, too, her absence and the loss of his daily association with her served to depress him, as nothing else had ever done before. The sensation of needing some one was wholly novel to him, and by no means agreeable. “What if I should never have her with me again – never as my Dorothy?” he reflected. “That may very easily happen. In fact I sent her away in order that it might happen, if it would. Her affection for me is still quite that of a child for one much older than herself. Edmonia does not so regard it, but perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps her conviction that Dorothy the woman loves me even more than Dorothy the child ever did, and that her love will survive acquaintance with other and more attractive men, and other and more attractive ways of life, is born only of her eager desire to have that come about. A year’s absence will not make Dorothy forget me or even love me less than she does now. But how much does she love me now, in very truth? May it not happen that when she returns a year hence she will have given her woman’s heart to some other, bringing back to me only the old, child love unchanged? I must be prepared for that at all events. I must school myself to think of it as a probability without the distress of mind it gives me now. And I must be ready, when it happens, to go away from here at once and take up again my life of strenuous endeavor and absorbing study. I mustn’t let this thing ruin me as it might some weakling in character.”

In order that he might be ready thus to leave Virginia when the time should come, rejoicing instead of grieving over Dorothy’s good fortune in finding some fitter life than his to share, Arthur knew that he must this year discharge the last dollar of debt that rested upon the Wyanoke estate. He must be a free man on Dorothy’s return – free to reënter the world of scientific work, free to make and keep himself master of his own mind, as he had always been until this strange thing had come over his life.

He thus set himself two tasks, one of which he might perhaps fulfil by hard work and discreet management. The other promised to be greatly more difficult. He made a very bad beginning at it by sitting up late at night to read and ponder Dorothy’s letters, to question them as to the future, to study every indication of character or impulse, or temporary mood of mind they might give.