his right hand. “You have my hearty thanks, Mr. . . . ?”
“Julius Babson, of Philadelphia,” said the gentleman, shaking Mr. Clemens’s hand. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man, and his silk top hat made him appear even taller. “The pleasure is all mine, believe me.”
“Well, if I can return the favor in any way, be sure to let me know,” said my employer. “Much obliged, Mr. Babson.” With the driver holding an umbrella for us, we thanked our benefactor and hurried into the coach. We managed to get back to our hotel without getting more than a little damp. Not for the first time, I reflected on the benefits of having a well-loved celebrity for my employer, and decided that I had made the right choice of career, after all.
3
The next few days passed rapidly. Mr. Clemens was finishing a magazine article about our journey down the Mississippi, and I was kept busy running errands connected with our upcoming sea voyage. I had never had a passport, and I spent more time than I would have thought possible at a government office, filling out forms and waiting. Luckily, Mr. Clemens had a few acquaintances he could call on to expedite matters, and I eventually had my papers well before our sailing date. Meanwhile, I was responsible for getting our baggage to the ship before sailing, for arranging mail forwarding, and for finding accommodations at the other end of our voyage. My experience as Mr. Clemens’s secretary on our Mississippi tour stood me well, but there were whole new dimensions called up by international travel. I was greatly relieved when we finally found ourselves on the dock at Pier 43, ready to board the City of Baltimore en route to Southampton, England.
You could easily have persuaded me that the entire population of New York City had taken a holiday to come down to the docks that morning. The crowd was so thick that one could barely breathe, and little mountains of luggage spaced about the pier made free movement for more than a few steps in any direction an impossibility. Every few minutes another cart or cab would pull up and discharge more passengers and luggage, with their retinues of porters and servants, all of whom crowded forward in the deluded expectation that they would be allowed to board the boat the instant they arrived. And without exception, when they learned they would be required to wait their turn, they began to complain bitterly—whether anyone would listen or not.
Mr. Clemens, an experienced traveler, turned a weary eye upon the scene. “It never fails, Wentworth,” he said. “They’ve had two or three days to get this ship ready to leave, and they still aren’t ready to let anybody on board. And when they finally do start letting us on, half the damn-fool passengers will charge the gangplank as if they were staking out mining claims, instead of going to cabins they’ve already reserved. We’ll be lucky if nobody gets drowned. Any man with a lick of sense would find a quiet place to sit, so he won’t get knocked down and stepped on. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
I followed him to a corner of the dock, somewhat out of the press, where he sat down on a wooden box and began loading his corncob pipe. From here we had a fine view of the ship, and I realized just how large she was. While City of Baltimore was not the American Line’s largest or fastest ship (City of New York and City of Paris shared those distinctions), she measured close to five hundred feet long. And, as I knew from the steamship line’s advertisements, she could comfortably house over a thousand souls, counting passengers and crew, for the week-long Atlantic crossing.
But I was more surprised to find that a machine—for that is all a giant ocean liner really is—could appear so graceful. Having grown up by a seaport, I had been around ships and boats all my life, from the humblest of fishing dories to the blue-blooded racing yachts that used to come down from Newport in the summer, not to forget the ferryboats and freighters plying New London Harbor. I had seen a different style of nautical design out on the Mississippi, where the riverboat builders had outdone one another in the search for baroque splendor. But nothing had quite prepared me for the sleek elegance of City of Baltimore. For size, power and pure geometrical beauty, she outdid anything I had ever seen. (I later learned that she was considered a mere drudge in comparison to her sister ship, City of Rome.)
In contrast, the crowd gathering to board her seemed to be made up of tiny, unruly beings, scrambling about between their piles of luggage, pushing and shoving and bawling in an amazingly heterogenous mixture of languages. On the face of it, one could hardly credit that the great ship had been designed and built by such creatures, and existed only for their convenience in crossing the ocean. And yet, for the most part this was the cream of our American society, captains of industry and leading professional men (with their families and servants) on their way to visit the Old World, whether for enjoyment or for trade and profit. Relatively few passengers were likely to travel in steerage on an eastward crossing—the Land of Opportunity lay on this side of the Atlantic.
As often when looking at a large crowd, I began to wonder whether anyone I knew might be among the group. I would not have been surprised to find some of my schoolfellows along the dock. In fact, the crowd included a fair number of young men and women of about my age, and I began to reflect with some pleasure on the prospect of having agreeable companionship for the voyage. While Mr. Clemens’s company was by no means onerous, one shares a certain bond with others of one’s own age and class. It struck me that my mother would be much mollified to learn that, despite my having betrayed her hopes of a respectable career, I would at least be traveling with exactly the sort of person she most approved of.
Then my eye lit on a familiar face—and not one I was pleased to see. Not fifteen feet away, wearing a dramatic cape and scowling through a monocle, stood Prinz Heinrich Karl von Ruckgarten, who had made such a nuisance of himself during my previous visit to the docks. Evidently he had decided to travel on City of Baltimore after all. Most likely, he would be on the same first-class deck as Mr. Clemens and I. Well, with any luck, he would leave us alone, and we could make the crossing without any unpleasant encounters with this particular fellow traveler.
But as the prince swept his gaze over the crowd, he turned to look in our direction, and to my dismay, his eye fell on Mr. Clemens and his face lit up in a smile. As he stepped in our direction, I bent over and whispered to my employer, “Be careful with this fellow—I’m afraid he’s going to be difficult.” But Mr. Clemens merely nodded and held his ground, puffing on the corncob pipe.
“Meinherr Mark Twain!” said the prince, stopping in front of us and making a little half-bow. “I am Prinz Heinrich Karl von Ruckgarten, at your service. Am I correct in assuming we are to have the honor of your presence on the crossing to England?”
“I’m not sure how much honor there’ll be to it,” said Mr. Clemens, raising his bushy white eyebrows. “According to the New York papers, I’m a failure in business, and according to the Boston press, I’m a corrupter of American youth. I haven’t read the reports from New Orleans, but after my last visit I wouldn’t be surprised if they listed me as an enemy of polite society. I’ll be on board the Baltimore, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The prince threw back his head and gave a hearty laugh, much to my surprise—I wouldn’t have expected him to have the least sense of humor. “Oho, Herr Twain!” he said, still chuckling. “You are every bit as amusing as I could have asked. I am very much pleased to know you will be one of the company. I had feared the voyage would be ever so tedious, but now I know otherwise.” His countenance was measurably less obnoxious with a smile upon it. Perhaps the fellow’s display of temper at the ticket office had been an aberration. If he were this jovial most of the time, he might not be such bad company after all.
“Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you,” said my employer. “I don’t plan to exert myself any. I’ll have to spend a lot of time in my cabin, finishing up a book. Other than that, I’ll do as little as I can get away
