At last the ship began to creak and slowly bridge, and the delay at
Southampton came to an end. The gangway was removed and the vessel
indulged in the awkward evolutions that were to detach her from the land.
Count Vogelstein had finished his cigar, and he spent a long time in
walking up and down the upper deck. The charming English coast passed
before him, and he felt this to be the last of the old world. The
American coast also might be pretty—he hardly knew what one would expect
of an American coast; but he was sure it would be different.
Differences, however, were notoriously half the charm of travel, and
perhaps even most when they couldn’t be expressed in figures, numbers,
diagrams or the other merely useful symbols. As yet indeed there were
very few among the objects presented to sight on the steamer. Most of
his fellow-passengers appeared of one and the same persuasion, and that
persuasion the least to be mistaken. They were Jews and commercial to a
man. And by this time they had lighted their cigars and put on all
manner of seafaring caps, some of them with big ear-lappets which somehow
had the effect of bringing out their peculiar facial type. At last the
new voyagers began to emerge from below and to look about them, vaguely,
with that suspicious expression of face always to be noted in the newly
embarked and which, as directed to the receding land, resembles that of a
person who begins to perceive himself the victim of a trick. Earth and
ocean, in such glances, are made the subject of a sweeping objection, and
many travellers, in the general plight, have an air at once duped and
superior, which seems to say that they could easily go ashore if they
would.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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