I have followed your good advice, have told my story as I told it to you; and yours be the praise and the blame. You interrupted me in the telling, by saying that I did not know the first cabin, and that my story would not be complete until I knew that part of the ship and that portion of the world also.
I have as you see taken passage in the first cabin. They sold me the ticket as readily as if it were for the steerage and did not ask for my pedigree, only for my check. Fifty dollars more gave me the privilege of sitting where you sat (which was at one time the “seat of the scornful”), of looking proudly upon the second cabin, and pityingly upon the steerage below.
It is a delightful sensation this; of being summoned to your meals by the notes of a bugle rather than by the jangle of a shrill bell; of looking over half a yard of menu, and ordering what you want, and whom you want, just as you please, rather than being ordered about as some one else pleases.
The first day out I found the first cabin as quiet as the steerage; only more dignified. The passengers were walking on tiptoe; many of them trying to adjust themselves to these labyrinthine luxuries; while the distinguished rustle of silken petticoats relieved the pressure of the atmosphere, which naturally was tense from the excitement of the beginning of a journey. Critically, almost with hostility, each passenger measured the other; the tables were buried beneath the loads of flowers and floral designs which were past the fading, and in the first melancholy stages of decay; so that all of it reminded me of a palatial home, to which the mourners have just returned from a rich uncle’s funeral.
As yet, no one had spoken to me, although I had volunteered a wise remark about the weather to one passenger, and the gentleman addressed recoiled as if I had struck him with a sledge hammer. I learned afterwards that he occupied a thousand dollar suite of rooms and that his name was Kalbsfoos or something like it. In choosing his seat at the table, I heard him remark to the head steward that he did not want to sit “near Jews,” nor any “second class looking crowd”; but that was a difficult task to accomplish.
More than a third of the passengers were Jews, and more than two-thirds were people whose names and bearing betrayed the fact that they were either the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves, who too were returning to the Old World because they had succeeded. In the Vs. Mr. Vanderbilt’s name headed the list, but the name closest to his was Vogelstein; while between such American or English names as Wallace and Wallingford, were a dozen Woolfs and Wumelbachers, Weises and Wiesels. I need not tell you of the multitude of the Rosenbergs and Rosenthals there were in our cabin. Mr. Funkelstein and Mr. Jaborsky were my room-mates. First cabin after all is only steerage twice removed, and beneath its tinsel and varnish, it is the same piece of world as that below me; which you pity, and which you dread.