Reminiscences of the South Seas

And then there was a pleasant club, with the usual hideous decoration, but very comfortable and with such a good table, and such a real one meats that were meats, and fish that was fish, and fruits in quantity, and fruits are not fruits for pleasure unless they be in quantity; and good wine and champagne of a kind that is not ours; and a Mr. Cutler who took us there and talked of things he had done or would do, that were interesting, and the contrast between the smoothness of life there, and the apparent difficulties outside. I say apparent because many of them are based upon a feeling of indifference or look out for yourself in any event outside. Yes, the Union Club was a good waster of time. And then I am not yet well recovered at all from the strain of the beginning of the month; and I felt as if I had sea-legs and gait from the motion of the car. So that I shall say nothing of the great bay, nor its mountainsides, that look at this time as if they were nothing but those we have seen all along, but with the sea rolling in.

We got off on Saturday, not at noon as stated, but waiting for a couple of hours in dock, the little steamer filled with people and with very pretty girls, who, alas! were not to accompany us. But we have a circus troupe la Buffalo Bill; an impresario with the nose and figure head of the boy, and his wife, or lady, the usual variety blonde to match, joining, like the telegraph, (through the seas and continent of America), furthest Australia and the Singing Hall of London. Long-haired cowboys see them off, one of them fair-haired and boyish and sixty-two. There are Indians, one long-haired, saturnine, and yet smiling, with the usual length of jaw and hair (so that his back runs up from his waist to his hat), who sits with some female, perhaps a dancer, and talks sentiment evidently, in his way, to my great delight and hers, too, whatever she might say. They sit with one blanket around them, and he points gracefully, and puts things in her hair and draws presents out of his pockets, wrapped up in paper, and puts them back to pull them out again. She sits against him, and smiles at him ironically, and laughs, and generally looks like a pretty cat lapping cream.

The cowboys meander about and go to the bar-room too frequently, especially one, a fair-haired one, who feels the first attack of sea-sickness, and sits with his head on his hand and resents his comrades begging him to come below, telling them that they have mistaken the man he is, that he is a Pawnee medicine man, he is, and that he will wipe the floor with them; and then he subsides again so that my expected row does not occur.

Then everybody subsides, even the cheerful young Englishmen and old Englishmen, and the middle-aged Englishmen, who pervade a good part of the ship and utter all their small stock of remarks with slowness and power. There are others the teacher going back for her vacation, to the seminary at Hawaii the young German I suspect of being an R.C. priest, and the Scotchman who has carefully talked for the last hour on the advantage of our system of checking baggage, which as he says allows you to go on without getting off at any station to see if the guard has the things all right. But as he remarks, for the hand luggage, a mon can take care of that himself, otherwise he would not be fit to take care of MONEY!!

But the weather is disappointing, very cold (so that ulsters are convenient), dark and grey, and there is a heavy coast sea, which I didnÕt like until yesterday, since when it has been warm, and we have had blue sky in large patches through rents in the violet silveriness of the clouds. It is the exquisite clearness of the blue of the Pacific, a butterfly blue, laid on as it were between the clouds, and shading down to white faintness in the far distance, where the haze of ocean covers up the turquoise. The sea has the blue for a long time, but dark and reflecting the grey sky. This morning (Thursday) it has been blue like a sapphire, dark to look at except near by, but when you look down to it, and see it framed in the openings of the windows or the gangways, blue light pours out of it, and I realize that my blue sketches of four years ago are no exaggeration. When the clouds open somewhat, the blue light pours down and makes the shadows of the clouds violet, except when this fog against the warm sky looks red and rosy. Even the shadows of the blue sea look at moments reddish, when they reflect the opposite grey cloud. But we are not yet quite in the sun seas this is not the season yet nor the place. There is all the time a veil of cloud, a veil so heavy as to make great cumulus clouds bunch out in extreme modelling. But when it is grey, all in silver there is a light a lilac grey, a silver, not known to the other side; and it is only when the distant smoke of the steamer goes over the grey clouds that I realize that they become like those of the north Atlantic.