Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (230 page)

“My dear old boy,” she cut in on his pleadings, “I know it all. I don’t in the least resent it. The only thing I resent is that I wasn’t up here in time to see the statue from a distance. I was looking forward to catching it against the sky. And now...”

So quickly had they passed the columnar mass and the schooner that the vessel already looked small and dark-sailed against the mist and the morning sun, and the statue had taken a heavy form against the pale yellow sky. The shores of the bay spread out before them, low and greenish, without sparkle in the waters, where innumerable black posts stood up or slanted over and innumerable small steamers raised the foam at their bows. There was a great impression of pale largeness, of swift gliding, and of strangeness.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.’ I’ve never been so excited, and do believe me when I say I’m having a good time. And I’m going to have one. I’ll try to get all sorts of impressions ready to tell all sorts of nice people. But there are so many, it’s a little bewildering.”

He pressed her arm with a great pleasure.

“Oh — well,” he said, “I can’t keep the boat still even for you to have time to see everything.”

“I don’t
want
the boat kept still,” she said, beating one of her feet upon the boards, “it’s simply thrilling.”

A bewildering rush of subjects for information didn’t exactly overwhelm her, but in her new attitude of mind she let them excite her tremendously. An odd little island, with a sandy shore and what was apparently a collection of railway stations and large villas out over the water to the left, gave her at once the odd satisfaction of really seeing American soil and the little feeling of grimness at learning that it was Ellis Island where all the dim crowd of emigrants forward and astern would be interned. It depressed her a little to have it forced upon her that here, on the hind side of the statue, the first thing that you ran against — after you had had yourself a liberty taken with you — was at least an impression of imprisonment for the offenceless. But she had immediately to face the problem of why all the women — and here was an extraordinary crowd of them bedizened and plumed, silhouetted against and obscuring the view on the forward rail, uttering an indescribable babel of cries, pulling each other by the shoulders to attract attention to some new point of view — as to why the women looked all so extraordinarily different. On the voyage they had seemed simple rather to supererogation: simple at least to a point of quite good taste. Now they were cloaked, furred, in spite of the tepid mist, ribboned, bonneted, jewelled. It struck her as extraordinary that these people — who did in a way know how to dress when there was comparatively no one to see them — should have adopted war-paints so portentous in which to go before the public in the streets.

But Don’s explanation that they hadn’t done it because of a sudden madness of bad taste or out of a desire to label themselves as just landed from Yurrup, but merely to avoid outrageous Customs’ dues — Don’s explanation was lost a little in her mind by the fact that by the time he had arrived at it he had also arrived at piloting her round the comer, through the excited crowd. It wasn’t, however, too excited to yield her precedence so that she might gather the impressions they so much wanted her to be overwhelmed by — and she reached a position where she took in at once, as in a blaze, the fact that she was beside her father, in a little, as it were, cleared space, and being borne forward by the steamer into a great gulch filled with a vast cloud of vapours blowing from on high towards her left hand, paved with a flat floor of pale, cream-coloured water.

It took her a gasping moment to realise that the cliffs on the right were buildings, the black mudbanks on the left were really the arched glass roofs of stations and steamer quays, and the shuttles, like beetles that glided in an extraordinary maze, with, as it were, odd elbows jerking out of their roofs and little gilt eagles stuck about over them, were steamboats of a sort. And in this confusion she was aware of a man, wonderfully florid, pink-cheeked, shaven and blueeyed, who, as if he were the leader of the band of watchers around them, held her father by his black shoulder and pointed a red hand towards what seemed a thin filament high in the air, half invisible in the mist and rapidly being hidden behind the pigeon-holed white cliffs that she had again to make an effort to remember were buildings. The man was saying that that was the finest bridge in the world, and something in the minatory tones of his voice brought to Eleanor’s lips the remark:

“Why, you said there was no coal smoke in New York!”

It wasn’t indeed that she wanted to convict him of error — it was simply that in her excitement she wanted to say something to him, and all at the moment that came into her head was that on the night of the sunset he had made that statement. Immediately afterwards she recollected also that he was the Reverend Mr Campbell.... He turned upon her with a violence that for a minister seemed singular until she remembered that it might be part of a creed and said, with a loud, beautifully-trained and remarkably-overbearing voice:

“There — is — no — coal — smoke — in — New — York!”

Eleanor — since they were both of them gazing at three black and gigantic pillars of smoke that issued from three black and gigantic chimneys in the wilderness of yellow mist and white vapour — Eleanor uttered an: “Oh, but—” But the clergyman’s hard eyes and a feeling that he would certainly knock her down if she persisted in disbelieving in his particular miracle made her rejoice a little when there came from behind her back the gentle voice of Mr Houston.

“You must remember, my dear, that Mr Campbell’s a Scotsman!”

“At any rate,” Mr Campbell fulminated, “the State of New York has laws against coal smoke.”

But Eleanor had by now afforded herself the relief of turning her back to the clergyman.

“My dear,” Mr Houston addressed her directly again. He jerked back his tired, brown face with the white, fragile beard and showed his thin neck. “You’ll find it much the same all the world over. Good Americans don’t go to Europe because they like America. And Scotsmen who’d probably make very bad Scotsmen at home — why, they come to America and pretend to like it. Of course you’ve heard of the tail-less fox!”

Don gave him a look of the most intense gratitude and threw at Eleanor another of a sort of agonised pleading.

“Indeed,” he said, “it’s true. You wouldn’t find any real Americans so rude as that,”

“Dear thing,” she whispered, “it’s all right. I’m enjoying it all. I
believe
about the tail-less fox.”

It was at this moment that Mr Houston touched Don upon the shoulder, and jerking his beard back with an odd gesture of implying that he desired a little secrecy, asked him in a whisper how they were going to get to their hotel. He hadn’t heard Don or his uncle speak of their having anybody to meet them. And left to herself for the minute — the numerous persons who had asked her for her impressions having dwindled away — Eleanor had time to form a new impression of the fact that the entering of New York harbour — and she regretted it quite a little! — was over. The voyage was over: it was done with. For the great vessel had stopped. It moved no more its spars from building to building; it began to turn. She saw upon the one bank the name of a firm that supplied patterns to all creation — a name in letters as high as the column in Trafalgar Square — a name that seemed to give to the city on the further side an odd cachet of being connected — of having for its mission the supplying to civilisation of the little flimsy bits of paper she had often enough “cut out” by. And quite close at hand, in letters much smaller, but each still as large as a house, was the name she expected to hear. The Collar Kelleg Lines! There they were: a dozen openings like railway tunnels: grey wharves: grey piles: the home of this ship and of how many more? She had an odd little shiver. She hadn’t ever thought that she would come to see
her
name — her name dominating the most important estuary in the world. It is true that the letters were merely in white upon a black board. But she saw all round each letter a bevy of electric lamps. By night then they would flare, she and Don, in the face of a whole civilisation!

And she wondered if this, too, were one of the things that Canzano would wish her to have a good time with. But she swallowed it with the reflection that this at least was the other side of the world. It was in a sense terrible — but it was in a sense as if she
had
attained to a sort of irresponsibility. She wouldn’t, in the Park at home, like to ride on a horse painted blue with the name of her soap upon it. But she could just imagine herself doing it in the Park here — if there were a Park — for probably it was, as you might say, a custom, and
all
these people had their names stuck up somewhere to blaze through the astonished nights. In that way it mightn’t be worse than putting on a hat manufactured in Fifth Avenue.

She had determined to bear it and grin — or rather to take it as one of the ingredients of the general grin with which, for Don’s sake, she was to embrace all of life here — when Don came back to her. His face was an odd mixture of smile and concern — his lips being curved upwards, his eyes, as he came, searching her face.

“Would you believe?” he shouted, for a din was beginning to drown even the insistent, broad, melodious and continued hooting of steam-syrens that for the last hour had seemed to be the pervading note of the landscape, “that old man Marconi’d from mid-Atlantic for carriages to take us to our hotel! He was asking me just now if I thought three would be enough to take us all and the servants,”

“The old
dear
!” Eleanor shouted to him, and she heard him cry:

“That’s cheering!” And it was a little thing that puzzled her for the rest of her life — she never remembered to ask him — whether he meant that Mr Houston’s kind thought had cheered him or whether the sounds that now overwhelmed all others — the high, wailing, insistent and ferociously exciting tumult — were the product of welcoming lungs. She couldn’t ask him at the moment, it seemed to blind and to confuse her so, but he took her by the hand and led her round to the other side of the deck.

The ship was imprisoning itself, with an imperceptible gliding, against a shed that appeared to be a mile long — a shed whose sides, of what she could not help thinking were unnecessary ugly black planks, had in it long openings from which there appeared to spurt innumerable pocket-handkerchiefs. And she realised that the extraordinary high wail came from thousands and thousands of human beings behind the handkerchiefs. At that same moment she realised that the handkerchiefs themselves were liberally interscattered with tiny editions of that blue and pink and white flag which amidst the more assertive flags of the nations is as frailly pretty as is the American pretty woman amongst the beauties of the world.

She found herself thinking: “Fancy
our
people producing Union Jacks!” and “Fancy
our
people making such a noise at a landing!” dimly, amidst the turmoil, for each sound seemed to be having added to it the wailings of new contingents, waving from every cranny of the vessel itself new handkerchiefs or new flags.

“And, after all,” she was reasoning to herself, “why shouldn’t there be an excitement?” There were, when one came to remember it, three thousand people on board, and perhaps three had come to welcome each of them. It was only the high note of the sound itself — the whoop, the yell, the resonant quality like that of the wailing overtone of a bell — that remained surprising. You wouldn’t find anywhere in the real Eastern world a crowd capable of producing it. It was the real difference!

She began to think that the spirit of the place had infected her, for she had forgotten her aunt. But already it was too late to think. She was taken, at Don’s side, by the crowd in the tiny space. The vessel had touched the quay, and at the contact, as if the time for action having come the time for shouting had passed, there fell a dead silence — and in the silence the battle raged. A lady thrust a bundle of umbrella handles into her face at the moment that a man thrust a bag into her back, and half a dozen, rushing out of the door of the saloon, pushed Don over upon her so that she was crushed against the rail. It astonished her: but a minute later it excited her; she set her white teeth, used her elbows, and laughed at Don’s perturbed expression as she had often enough done at home when pushed into the pit at a theatre. And after all, if the bangs that she got were harder, wasn’t the spectacle she was going to see more exciting than anything she had ever experienced at home? And with a laughing nod at him, as he stood on the inclined gangway above her, holding his arms across from rail to rail and supporting the crowd off her with his back, she ran down the planks as if she were shooting a chute at a suburban exhibition at home and uttered, as he was propelled down upon her by the crowd behind him: