A Basement Story

It was one of those obscure days found only on the banks of

Newfoundland. There was no sun, and yet no visible cloud; there was

nothing, indeed, to test the vision by; there was no apparent fog, but

sight was soon lost in a hazy indefiniteness. Near objects stood out with a

distinctness almost startling. The swells ran high without sufficient

provocation from the present wind, and attention was absorbed by the

tremendous pitching of the steamer's bow, the wide arc described by the

mainmast against no background at all, and by the smoky and bellying

mainsail, kept spread to hold the vessel to some sort of steadiness in the

waves. There was no storm, nor any dread of a storm, and the few

passengers who were not seasick in stateroom bunks below, or stretched

in numb passivity on the sofas in the music saloon, were watching the

rough sea with a cheerful excitement. In the total absence of sky and the

entire abolition of horizon the eye rejoiced, like Noah's dove, to find some

place of rest; and the mainsail, smoky like the air, but cutting the smoky

air with a sharp plane, was such a resting place for the vision. This sail

and the reeky smokestack beyond, and the great near billows that

emerged from time to time out of the gray obscurity--these seemed to

save the universe from chaos. On such a day the imagination is released

from bounds, individuality is lost, and space becomes absolute--the soul

touches the poles of the infinite and the unconditioned.

I do not pretend that such emotions filled the breasts of all the twenty

passengers on deck that day. One man was a little seasick, and after

every great rushing plunge of the steamer from a billow summit into a

sea valley he vented his irritation by wishing that he had there some of

the poets that--here he paused and gasped as the ship balanced itself on

another crest preparatory to another shoot down the flank of a swell,

while the screw, thrown clean out of the water, rattled wildly in the

unresisting air and made the ship quiver in every timber--some of those

poets, he resumed with bitterer indignation, that sing about the loveliness

of the briny deep and the deep blue--but here an errant swell hit the

vessel a tremendous blow on the broadside, making her roll heavily to

starboard, and bringing up through the skylights sounds of breaking

goblets thrown from the sideboards in the saloon below, while the

passenger who hated marine poetry was capsized from his steamer chair

and landed sprawling on the deck. A small group of young people on the

forward part of the upper deck were passing the day in watching the

swells and forecasting the effect of each upon the steamer, rejoicing in

the rush upward followed by the sudden falling downward, much as

children enjoy the flying far aloft in a swing or on a teetering see-saw, to

be frightened by the descent. Some of the young ladies had books open

in their laps, but the pretense that they had come on deck to read was a

self-deluding hypocrisy. They had left their elderly relatives safely

ensconced in staterooms below, and had worked their way up to the deck

with much care and climbing and with many lurches and much grievous

staggering, not for the purpose of reading, but to enjoy the society of

other young women, and of such young men as could sit on deck. When

did a young lady ever read on an ocean steamer, the one place where the

numerical odds are reversed and there are always found two gallant

young men to attend each young girl? This merry half dozen, reclining in

steamer chairs and muffled in shawls, breathed the salt air and enjoyed

the chaos into which the world had fallen. On this deck, where usually

there was a throng, they felt themselves in some sense survivors of a

world that had dropped away from them, and they enjoyed their social

solitude, spiced with apparent peril that was not peril.

The enthusiastic Miss Sylvia Thorne, who was one of this party, was very

much interested in the billows, and in the attentions of a student who sat

opposite her. From time to time she remarked also on some of the

steerage passengers on the deck below; particularly was she interested in

a young girl who sat watching the threatening swells emerge from the

mist. Miss Sylvia spoke to the young lady alongside of her about that

interesting young girl in the steerage, but her companion said she had so

much trouble with the Irish at home that she could not bear an Irish girl

even at sea. Her mother, she went on to say, had hired a girl who had

proved most ungrateful, she had--but here a scream from all the party

told that a sea of more than usual magnitude was running up against the

port side. A minute later and all were trying to keep their seats while the

ship reeled away to starboard with vast momentum, and settled swiftly

again into the trough of the sea.

Miss Thorne now wondered that the sail, which did not flap as she had

observed sails generally do, in poems, did not tear into shreds as she had

always known sails to do in novels when there was a rough sea.