For example, there was the matter of a correct traveling costume.
Between seasons on the Atlantic one wears what best pleases one. One
sees at the same time women in furs and summer boys in white ducks.
Tweed-enshrouded Englishmen and linen-clad American girls promenade
together, giving to the decks that pleasing air of variety and
individuality of apparel only to be found in southern California during
the winter, and in those orthodox pictures in the book of Robinson
Crusoe, where Robinson is depicted as completely wrapped up in
goatskins, while Man Friday is pirouetting round as nude as a raw
oyster and both of them are perfectly comfortable. I used to wonder
how Robinson and Friday did it. Since taking an ocean trip I understand
perfectly. I could do it myself now.
There certainly were a lot of things to think over. I do not recall now
exactly the moment when I ceased thinking them over. A blank that was
measurable by hours ensued. I woke from a dream about a scrambled egg,
in which I was the egg, to find that morning had arrived and the ship
was behaving naughtily.
Here was a ship almost as long as Main Street is back home, and six
stories high, with an English basement; with restaurants and elevators
and retail stores in her; and she was as broad as a courthouse; and
while lying at the dock she had appeared to be about the most solid and
dependable thing in creation--and yet in just a few hours' time she had
altered her whole nature, and was rolling and sliding and charging and
snorting like a warhorse. It was astonishing in the extreme, and you
would not have expected it of her.
Even as I focused my mind on this phenomenon the doorway was stealthily
entered by a small man in a uniform that made him look something like an
Eton schoolboy and something like a waiter in a dairy lunch. I was about
to have the first illuminating experience with an English manservant.
This was my bedroom steward, by name Lubly--William Lubly. My hat is off
to William Lubly--to him and to all his kind. He was always on duty;
he never seemed to sleep; he was always in a good humor, and he always
thought of the very thing you wanted just a moment or two before you
thought of it yourself, and came a-running and fetched it to you. Now
he was softly stealing in to close my port. As he screwed the round,
brass-faced window fast he glanced my way and caught my apprehensive
eye.
"Good morning, sir," he said, and said it in such a way as to convey a
subtle compliment.
"Is it getting rough outside?" I said--I knew about the inside. "Thank
you," he said; "the sea 'as got up a bit, sir--thank you, sir."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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