American Notes | Page 4

and Lady, had
held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months preceding:
that this could by any possibility be that small snug chamber of the
imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of
prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at least
one little sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent
sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not
hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of
sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not
to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a
flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and

profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or
connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little
bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished
lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the city of
London: that this room of state, in short, could be anything but a
pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain's, invented and put in
practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room
presently to be disclosed:- these were truths which I really could not,
for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear upon or comprehend. And
I sat down upon a kind of horsehair slab, or perch, of which there were
two within; and looked, without any expression of countenance
whatever, at some friends who had come on board with us, and who
were crushing their faces into all manner of shapes by endeavouring to
squeeze them through the small doorway.
We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming below, which,
but that we were the most sanguine people living, might have prepared
us for the worst. The imaginative artist to whom I have already made
allusion, has depicted in the same great work, a chamber of almost
interminable perspective, furnished, as Mr. Robins would say, in a style
of more than Eastern splendour, and filled (but not inconveniently so)
with groups of ladies and gentlemen, in the very highest state of
enjoyment and vivacity. Before descending into the bowels of the ship,
we had passed from the deck into a long narrow apartment, not unlike a
gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a
melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming
their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary
length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to the
low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted
dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather. I had not at that time seen
the ideal presentment of this chamber which has since gratified me so
much, but I observed that one of our friends who had made the
arrangements for our voyage, turned pale on entering, retreated on the
friend behind him., smote his forehead involuntarily, and said below
his breath, 'Impossible! it cannot be!' or words to that effect. He
recovered himself however by a great effort, and after a preparatory
cough or two, cried, with a ghastly smile which is still before me,
looking at the same time round the walls, 'Ha! the breakfast-room,

steward - eh?' We all foresaw what the answer must be: we knew the
agony he suffered. He had often spoken of THE SALOON; had taken
in and lived upon the pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand,
at home, that to form a just conception of it, it would be necessary to
multiply the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven,
and then fall short of the reality. When the man in reply avowed the
truth; the blunt, remorseless, naked truth; 'This is the saloon, sir' - he
actually reeled beneath the blow.
In persons who were so soon to part, and interpose between their else
daily communication the formidable barrier of many thousand miles of
stormy space, and who were for that reason anxious to cast no other
cloud, not even the passing shadow of a moment's disappointment or
discomfiture, upon the short interval of happy companionship that yet
remained to them - in persons so situated, the natural transition from
these first surprises was obviously into peals of hearty laughter, and I
can report that I, for one, being still seated upon the slab or perch
before mentioned, roared outright until the vessel rang again. Thus, in
less than two minutes after coming upon it for the first time, we all by
common consent agreed that this state-room was the pleasantest and
most facetious and capital contrivance possible; and that to have had it
one inch larger, would have been quite a disagreeable