FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
THE SECOND CABIN
I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.
Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance
on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had
already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble
over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion
reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and
grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with the
falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the
women wept. Any one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all
absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no
common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and rush to the starboard bow
announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in
mid-river, at the tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of
bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars,
larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated
town in the land to which she was to bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although anxious to see the
worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was
advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table
at command. The advice was excellent; but to understand the choice, and
what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship will
first be necessary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of
stairs. A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and
3, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards
steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below
the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet
a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to
return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages.
Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being
sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents
in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this
new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in
chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip. He
does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths
and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a
distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not only
on different ships, but on the same ship according as her head is to the
east or west. In my own experience, the principal difference between our
table and that of the true steerage passenger was the table itself, and
the crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show myself
ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage. At breakfast we had a
choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make,
the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the
coffee and lay awake after the tea; which is proof conclusive of some
chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack
of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the
second. As a matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many sips,
still doubting which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables at
the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge,
which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and
sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt
junk, and potatoes was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were
of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding days, instead of duff,
we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of a
plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some broken meat from the
saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or
rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish,
neither hot nor cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their
looks belied them sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and
fell to these leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent,
and the soup and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet
throughout the voyage; so that except for the broken meat and the
convenience of a table I might as well have been in the steerage
outright. Had they given me porridge again in the evening I should have
been perfectly contented with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits
and some whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my
spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females; in the second
cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought
I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between
decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a
gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males
and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.
Who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard side of
Steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only there that my superiority became
practical; everywhere else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors
with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a
gentleman after all, and had broken meat to tea. Still, I was like one
with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of
spirits I could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass
plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the
steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember
that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five
cases out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately
pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes
almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively
varied, and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may
thus be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the
second cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and
declared it was an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell
about my steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not
alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less
intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to
travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them
assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence until
they could afford to bring them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on
board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will and
character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed
group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by
the name of "Johnny," in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us
by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and became on the
strength of that an universal favourite--it takes so little in this
world of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots
mason known from his favourite dish as "Irish Stew," three or four
nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young
men who deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots:
the other claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he
was born in England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and
nurtured, but ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom
he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though she was not only
sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in
childhood. In appearance he was like an imbecile Henry the Third of
France. The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of
heart; and I have only bracketed them together because they were fast
friends, and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married couple,
devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had first seen
each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon he
had carried her books home for her. I do not know if this story will be
plain to southern readers; but to me it recalls many a school idyll,
with wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting each other
stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady's
books was both a delicate attention and privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as much
old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her husband,
and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her
own word that she was married; for it was sorely contradicted by the
testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed to have sanctified her for
the single state; even the colour of her hair was incompatible with
matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly spirit
and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill, poor thing; her soul
turned from the viands; the dirty tablecloth shocked her like an
impropriety; and the whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon
keeping her watch true to Glasgow time till she should reach New York.
They had heard reports, her husband and she, of some unwarrantable
disparity of hours between these two cities; and with a spirit
commendably scientific, had seized on this occasion to put them to the
proof. It was a good thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure
time in studying the watch. Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let
it run down. It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of adamant
that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards; and so it
behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she started it
again. When she imagined this was about due, she sought out one of the
young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was embarked on the same experiment as
herself and had hitherto been less neglectful. She was in quest of two
o'clock; and when she learned it was already seven on the shores of
Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried "Gravy!" I had not heard this
innocent expletive since I was a young child; and I suppose it must have
been the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our
fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be
difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during
the voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at
our concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who called up
performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands and
pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from
the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor
could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a _lingua franca_ of many
tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there
is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the
sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper,
even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an _h_; a word of a dialect is
picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it
was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea;
and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at
an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean
voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By
his own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A few years
back, he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife
was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward,
and goes on from one year to another and through all the extremities of
fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look
to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
things to rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee
over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent
medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had bought years ago
for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a
hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called
Golden Oil; cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say
that I partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the
man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones
with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our
neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called
unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation,
you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly
go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the
day's experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a
day's kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species,
and we angled as often as not in one another's baskets. Once, in the
midst of a serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon
himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter,
and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the Friday
forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in
Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now complete, and
began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon the deck. There
were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Americans, a good
handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all now
belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time
to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the
passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores
of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most
dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and
nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at
home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning
restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to
fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of
difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to
this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual
heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an
empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single
cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the
young men enter direct and by the ship-load on their heritage of work;
empty continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of
embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was
tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below
thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were
already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I
thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with
bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing
disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly,
obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who
had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better
days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild
endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and
conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found
myself, like Marmion, "in the lost battle, borne down by the flying."
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard
vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted
by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of
homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their
chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving
girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these
distresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the market may be a
calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow; but it hardly
lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the
morning papers. We may struggle as we please, we are not born
economists. The individual is more affecting than the mass. It is by
the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the
most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now,
when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how
sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the
drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been
unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now
fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed,
all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of
England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited
depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was
shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and
showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and
all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks
scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. "What do you call your
mither?" I heard one ask. "Mawmaw," was the reply, indicating, I fancy,
a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass each other
on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact is but slight,
and the relation more like what we may imagine to be the friendship of
flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so
open in its communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities. The
children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves at a
fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manoeuvring on the
outskirts of acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon
as familiar as home to these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to
hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate
portions of the vessel. "Co' 'way doon to yon dyke," I heard one say,
probably meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth,
watching them climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship
went swinging through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of
their mothers, who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at
these perilous feats. "He'll maybe be a sailor," I heard one remark;
"now's the time to learn." I had been on the point of running forward to
interfere, but stood back at that, reproved. Very few in the more
delicate classes have the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to
them; but the life of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more
immediate and imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of
endurance. And perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should
break his neck than that you should break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention one
little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an
ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle,
his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so
natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and
good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in
motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment
to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little
triumph of the human species. Even when his mother and the rest of his
family lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but few advances. We
discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of
information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world,
or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled
together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had
been so near famine, that you may say they had run into the ship with
the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the
best of possible steamers. But the majority were hugely discontented.
Coming as they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain,
many of them from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as
dead, and many having long been out of work, I was surprised to find
them so dainty in their notions. I myself lived almost exclusively on
bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and
found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working men
were loud in their outcries. It was not "food for human beings," it was
"only fit for pigs," it was "a disgrace." Many of them lived almost
entirely upon biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some
paid extra for better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed
my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was
prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime;
but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was
palatable to myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a
liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
question of the sincerity of his disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A single
night of the steerage had filled them with horror. I had myself
suffered, even in my decent second-cabin berth, from the lack of air;
and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to sleep on
deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to follow my
example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we
should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug about
seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical
terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list
their doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous
exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would
think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in England the
most malarious districts are in the bed-chambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
night so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on the
starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near the
fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night. The ship moved over the
uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement. The ponderous, organic
labours of the engine in her bowels occupied the mind, and prepared it
for slumber. From time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I
lay, and recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness; or I heard,
as it were through a veil, the clear note of the clapper on the brass
and the beautiful sea-cry, "All's well!" I know nothing, whether for
poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of these two syllables in
the darkness of a night at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose
so high that it was difficult to keep one's footing on the deck. I have
spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship's company, and
cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs
of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish,
Russian, German or Norse,--the songs were received with generous
applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a
powerful Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in
vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the
violin. The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to
cut capers in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the
dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have
never seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, the
quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers departed under a
cloud. Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of
society, would have dared to make some fun for themselves and the
spectators; but the working man, when sober, takes an extreme and even
melancholy view of personal deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not
more careful of dignity. He dares not be comical; his fun must escape
from him unprepared, and, above all, it must be unaccompanied by any
physical demonstration. I like his society under most circumstances, but
let me never again join with him in public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even
the inclemencies of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got
together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and
rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck, and the
rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women
in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus disposed,
sang to our hearts' content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the
scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-hall,
such as, "Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle," sounded
bald, bleak, and pitifully silly. "We don't want to fight, but, by
Jingo, if we do," was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity
with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a
Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to
the general effect. And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example
of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with
whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and
attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for
whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our
situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took up
the burden how the sentiment came home to each. "The Anchor's Weighed,"
was true for us. We were indeed "Rocked on the Bosom of the Stormy
Deep." How many of us could say with the singer, "I'm Lonely To-night,
Love, Without You," or, "Go, Someone, and Tell them from me, to write me
a Letter from Home." And when was there a more appropriate moment for
"Auld Lang Syne" than now, when the land, the friends, and the
affections of that mingled but beloved time were fading and fleeing
behind us in the vessel's wake? It pointed forward to the hour when
these labours should be overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a
meeting in the sanded inn, when those who had parted in the spring of
youth should again drink a cup of kindness in their age. Had not Burns
contemplated emigration, I scarce believe he would have found that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated by
sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two of
these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was
observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman
express her surprise that, "The ship didna gae doon," as she saw some
one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish
psalms. Many went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill
pleased with their divine. "I didna think he was an experienced
preacher," said one girl to me.
It was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells, although
the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown
away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly
overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this
hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer
woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a
roar, and shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud
reports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and
looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke,
and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at each lurch, a
different crop of stars, it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing
of small account, and that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken
and eternal.
STEERAGE SCENES
Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort. Down one
flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the centre
occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about twenty
persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter's bench
afforded perches for perhaps as many more. The canteen, or steerage bar,
was on one side of the stair; on the other a no less attractive spot,
the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter. I have seen people packed
into this space like herrings in a barrel, and many merry evenings
prolonged there until five bells, when the lights were ruthlessly
extinguished and all must go to roost.
It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who
lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon,
as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey
time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of
white-faced women. It was as much as he could do to play, and some of
his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from their
bunks at the first experimental flourish, and found better than medicine
in the music. Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time, and a
degree of animation looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly
speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle, even badly,
than to write huge works upon recondite subjects. What could Mr. Darwin
have done for these sick women? But this fellow scraped away; and the
world was positively a better place for all who heard him. We have yet
to understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments. I
told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with him
in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.
"It is a privilege," I said. He thought a while upon the word, turning
it over in his Scots head, and then answered with conviction, "Yes, a
privilege."
That night I was summoned by "Merrily danced the Quaker's Wife" into the
companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5. This was, properly speaking, but a
strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern which swung to and
fro with the motion of the ship. Through the open slide-door we had a
glimpse of the grey night sea, with patches of phosphorescent foam
flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the horizon rising and
falling as the vessel rolled to the wind. In the centre the companion
ladder plunged down sheerly like an open pit. Below, on the first
landing, and lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more
than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and reels, and
hornpipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess railed with iron,
perhaps two feet wide and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats
of honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in
a comely group. In the other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was
convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent,
imperturbable Scots face. His brother, a dark man with a vehement,
interested countenance, who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with open
mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing out remarks to
kindle it.
"That's a bonny hornpipe now," he would say; "it's a great favourite
with performers; they dance the sand dance to it." And he expounded the
sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long "Hush!" with uplifted
finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; "he's going to play 'Auld Robin
Gray' on one string!" And throughout this excruciating movement,--"On
one string, that's on one string!" he kept crying. I would have given
something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much
awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself to the
notice of the brother, who directed his talk to me for some little
while, keeping, I need hardly mention, true to his topic, like the
seamen to the star. "He's grand of it," he said confidentially. "His
master was a music-hall man." Indeed, the music-hall man had left his
mark, for our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs; "Logie
o' Buchan," for instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a
set of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name. Perhaps, after
all, the brother was the more interesting performer of the two. I have
spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him always the same
quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but he never showed to
such advantage as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public
note. There is nothing more becoming than a genuine admiration; and it
shares this with love, that it does not become contemptible although
misplaced.
The dancing was but feebly carried on. The space was almost
impracticably small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of
bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence and
roughness of address. Most often, either the fiddle lifted up its voice
unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it and snapping
fingers on the landing. And such was the eagerness of the brother to
display all the acquirements of his idol, and such the sleepy
indifference of the performer, that the tune would as often as not be
changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before the dancers had
cut half a dozen shuffles.
In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and more
numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round the top of
the companion; and the strange instinct of the race moved some of the
new-comers to close both the doors, so that the atmosphere grew
insupportable. It was a good place, as the saying is, to leave.
The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten at night heavy sprays were
flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion of Steerage No. 1
had to be closed, and the door of communication through the second cabin
thrown open. Either from the convenience of the opportunity, or because
we had already a number of acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr.
Jones and I paid it a late visit. Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an
isosceles triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward
with the contour of the ship. It is lined with eight pens of sixteen
bunks apiece, four bunks below and four above on either side. At night
the place is lit with two lanterns, one to each table. As the steamer
beat on her way among the rough billows, the light passed through
violent phases of change, and was thrown to and fro and up and down with
startling swiftness. You were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so
thin a glimmer could control and disperse such solid blackness. When
Jones and I entered we found a little company of our acquaintances
seated together at the triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party,
in more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion
here in the ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often
overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round and
round and tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it struck a
chill from its foetor. From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely
human noises of the sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus. In the
midst, these five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could
in company. Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and
sensations. One piped, in feeble tones, "Oh why left I my hame?" which
seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances. Another, from the
invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the upper shelf,
found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses
of the "Death of Nelson"; and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus
breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and "this day has done
his dooty" rise and fall and be taken up again in this dim _inferno_, to
an accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling
spray-showers overhead.
All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had interrupted
the activity of their minds; and except to sing they were tongue-tied.
There was present, however, one tall, powerful fellow of doubtful
nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor altogether Irish, but of
surprising clearness of conviction on the highest problems. He had gone
nearly beside himself on the Sunday, because of a general backwardness
to indorse his definition of mind as "a living, thinking substance which
cannot be felt, heard, or seen"--nor, I presume, although he failed to
mention it, smelt. Now he came forward in a pause with another
contribution to our culture.
"Just by way of change," said he, "I'll ask you a Scripture riddle.
There's profit in them too," he added ungrammatically.
This was the riddle--
C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G.
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.
Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo! We were a long
while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering how a
man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense and
divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.
I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion and
the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been gone long,
we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick.
We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the sea kept contrary all
night. I now made my bed upon the second cabin floor, where, although I
ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or
less vitiated indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at
least not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of
a rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick and
the sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his
friend for encouragement. "The ship's going down!" he cried with a
thrill of agony. "The ship's going down!" he repeated, now in a blank
whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might
reassure him, reason with him, joke at him--all was in vain, and the old
cry came back, "The ship's going down!" There was something panic and
catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an
involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. If this
whole parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses
would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of our
corporate human life would be rent across for ever!
The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed. The
wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great
dark blue seas the ship cut a swathe of curded foam. The horizon was
dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly on
the long, heaving deck.
We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a
single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity,
puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same order
as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always
welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as more
conspicuously well done than the former. We had a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when the
result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of
considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was laid
upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager
offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner,
which we had rebaptised, in more manly style, Devil and four Corners,
was my own favourite game; but there were many who preferred another,
the humour of which was to box a person's ears until he found out who
had cuffed him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather,
and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster like bees,
sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories
and laughter went around. The children climbed about the shrouds. White
faces appeared for the first time, and began to take on colour from the
wind. I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after
another, and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly,
down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and
jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air
and throw in the interest of human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with
little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about
nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in
social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was
as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. It was
astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their
presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes
searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at
their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our
hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then
hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage. We were
in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there
was no shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which
these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of
their squire. Not a word was said; only when they were gone Mackay
sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we were all
conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our
enjoyment.
STEERAGE TYPES
We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like a
beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-feet
round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache; a
miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago; an
alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole, no buttons to
his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled all over
with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard him
offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a
lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was
written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him
in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in
the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not
think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting;
but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him a
half-educated Irish Tigg.
Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his antecedents.
Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him down for a harmless
spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand roubles, and whose father
had now despatched him to America by way of penance. Either tale might
flourish in security; there was no contradiction to be feared, for the
hero spoke not one word of English. I got on with him lumberingly enough
in broken German, and learned from his own lips that he had been an
apothecary. He carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book,
and remarked that it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood
out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness. The
first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the
features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the eye
both reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and soft, with an
expression of dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on desperate
circumstances and never looked on them without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. "No, no," he said, "not resolution."
"The resolution to endure," I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, "_Ach, ja_," with gusto,
like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions. Indeed,
he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he said, had
been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of the steerage
may have represented at least some shadow of the truth. Once, and once
only, he sang a song at our concerts, standing forth without
embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long arms
frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a suitable
piece of music, as deep as a cow's bellow and wild like the White Sea.
He was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners.
At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to him, but those with
whom he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in
the condemnation of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be changed;
the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new
ideas, "_wie eine feine Violine_," were audible among the big, empty
drum-notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival,
though with a somewhat indistinct and childish hope.
We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades. It was
the son who sang the "Death of Nelson" under such contrarious
circumstances. He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he could
touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and piccolo in
a professional string band. His repertory of songs was, besides,
inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best to the very
worst within his reach. Nor did he seem to make the least distinction
between these extremes, but would cheerfully follow up "Tom Bowling"
with "Around her splendid form."
The father, an old, cheery, small piece of manhood, could do everything
connected with tinwork from one end of the process to the other, use
almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture frames to boot. "I sat
down with silver plate every Sunday," said he, "and pictures on the
wall. I have made enough money to be rolling in my carriage. But, sir,"
looking at me unsteadily with his bright rheumy eyes, "I was troubled
with a drunken wife." He took a hostile view of matrimony in
consequence. "It's an old saying," he remarked: "God made 'em, and the
devil he mixed 'em."
I think he was justified by his experience. It was a dreary story. He
would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes
would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a paying
contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs. "A bad job
was as good as a good job for me," he said; "it all went the same way."
Once the wife showed signs of amendment; she kept steady for weeks on
end; it was again worth while to labour and to do one's best. The
husband found a good situation some distance from home, and, to make a
little upon every hand, started the wife in a cook-shop; the children
were here and there, busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the
bank, and the golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy
family. But one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through with
his work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and there was
his wife to receive him, reeling drunk. He "took and gave her a pair o'
black eyes," for which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-shop door, gave
up his situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty, with the
workhouse at the end. As the children came to their full age they fled
the house, and established themselves in other countries; some did well,
some not so well; but the father remained at home alone with his drunken
wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed
and negatived.
Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the chain,
and run from home like a schoolboy? I could not discover which; but here
at least he was, out on the adventure, and still one of the bravest and
most youthful men on board.
"Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again," said he; "but I
can do a turn yet."
And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to support
him?
"Oh, yes," he replied. "But I'm never happy without a job on hand. And
I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything. You see no craze about me."
This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
drunken father. He was a capable man, with a good chance in life; but he
had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry, and
involved his sons along with him in ruin. Now they were on board with
us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.
Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to the
most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could have
adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's company. I
was one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman, running to fat
and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for poetry and a
genial sense of fun. I had asked him his hopes in emigrating. They were
like those of so many others, vague and unfounded: times were bad at
home; they were said to have a turn for the better in the States; and a
man could get on anywhere, he thought. That was precisely the weak
point of his position; for if he could get on in America, why could he
not do the same in Scotland? But I never had the courage to use that
argument, though it was often on the tip of my tongue, and instead I
agreed with him heartily, adding, with reckless originality, "If the man
stuck to his work, and kept away from drink."
"Ah!" said he slowly, "the drink! You see, that's just my trouble."
He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the same
time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-ashamed,
half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be beaten. You would
have said he recognised a destiny to which he was born, and accepted the
consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, he was at the same time
fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with him, the whole at an
expense of six guineas.
As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three great
causes of emigration; and for all of them, and drink first and foremost,
this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest
means of cure. You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some time
fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you
stand? _Coelum non animam_. Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is
still whisky, only not so good. A sea-voyage will not give a man the
nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has to be done before we
climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding;
and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible than
another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul tragically
shipwrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is resorted to by
way of anodyne. The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon life with high and
difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and nobly happy, though
at as little pains as possible to himself; and it is because all has
failed in his celestial enterprise that you now behold him rolling in
the garbage. Hence the comparative success of the teetotal pledge;
because to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in
life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the
reformed drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating
drinks, and may live for that negation. There is something, at least,
_not to be done_ each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every evening.
We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the
name of Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the
intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small
Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying the
elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat marred by the
smallness of his eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average. There
were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding
and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto like a man
who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent
debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to
launch and emphasise an argument. When he began a discussion, he could
not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone,
without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay
believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the
human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of
carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected facts
which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads. What is called
information was indeed a passion with the man, and he not only delighted
to receive it, but could pay you back in kind.
With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young,
on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little
hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair.
"The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now or to-morrow. I have
nothing to lose and nothing to hope." And again: "I am sick of the whole
damned performance." He was, like the kind little man already quoted,
another so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was miles from
publishing his weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on
corrupt masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one
night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It was a
treat to see him manage this: the various jesters withered under his
gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force,
and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.
In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the
world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the
word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and
perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in
production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like
laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and
guide. One day he took me to task--a novel cry to me--upon the
over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid
than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing machines and
butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful
handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced a mere fancy
article. Mackay's notion of a book was "Hoppus's Measurer." Now in my
time I have possessed and even studied that work; but if I were to be
left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I
should choose for my companion volume.
I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him own that he had taken
pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view, insignificant; but he
was too wary to advance a step beyond the admission. It was in vain for
me to argue that here was pleasure ready-made and running from the
spring, whereas his ploughs and butter-churns were but means and
mechanisms to give men the necessary food and leisure before they start
upon the search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such
conclusions. The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was
serviceable but what had to do with food. "Eat, eat, eat!" he cried;
"that's the bottom and the top." By an odd irony of circumstance, he
grew so much interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
unnoticed and had to go without his tea. He had enough sense and humour,
indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this himself in
private; and even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile.
Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him
waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor human creatures
who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness
to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the riddler's
definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for
intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him
likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and
steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus,
when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books,
or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct,
he declared I was in a different world from him. "Damn my conduct!" said
he. "I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, 'Can I drive a
nail?'" And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and
steam-engines.
It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of culture;
that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates to a man the
importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by denying him the
necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant of larger thoughts;
and that hence springs this overwhelming concern about diet, and hence
the bald view of existence professed by Mackay. Had this been an English
peasant the conclusion would be tenable. But Mackay had most of the
elements of a liberal education. He had skirted metaphysical and
mathematical studies. He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew, which
would be exceptional among bankers. He had been brought up in the midst
of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous pride, the story of his
own brother's deathbed ecstasies. Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil
himself, and was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances,
without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. And further, there
seemed a tendency among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank
and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in
Scotland, and that is, the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of
culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan
school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts,
and setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity
and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?
Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an Irishman who
based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity precisely
upon these two qualities, that he was natural and happy. He boasted a
fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable gaiety, and
indefatigable good-will. His clothes puzzled the diagnostic mind, until
you heard he had been once a private coachman, when they became
eloquent, and seemed a part of his biography. His face contained the
rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the hawk's nose above
accorded so ill with the pink baby's mouth below. His spirit and his
pride belonged, you might say, to the nose: while it was the general
shiftlessness expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation
to situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship. Barney ate, so
to speak, nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter, and eggs
supported him throughout the voyage; and about mealtime you might often
find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery. His was the first voice
heard singing among all the passengers; he was the first who fell to
dancing. From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun
undertaken but there was Barney in the midst.
You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts--his
tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling to the
air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement--and to have enjoyed
the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between grace
and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a conclusion. He was
not only a great favourite among ourselves, but his songs attracted the
lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails of the
hurricane-deck. He was somewhat pleased, but not at all abashed, by this
attention; and one night, in the midst of his famous performance of
"Billy Keogh," I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an
audacious wink to an old gentleman above.
This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.
He would not hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the passage did
he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his innocent freedoms
and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin where politeness must
be natural to walk without a fall. He was once seriously angry, and that
in a grave, quiet manner, because they supplied no fish on Friday; for
Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of
refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a
young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were
immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of
gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in
our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and
positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior
powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his
extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the Irishman. I have
seen him slink off, with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy,
while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had been professing hostility
to God, and an extreme theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the
spot. These utterances hurt the little coachman's modesty like a bad
word.
THE SICK MAN
One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-arm
and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew
chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and
the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its
unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a
mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to the
rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was impossible
in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet
scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We asked him what
was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a
voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, that he had
been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had walked the deck
against fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen where we found
him.
Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to seek the
doctor. We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there came no reply;
nor could we find anyone to guide us. It was no time for delicacy; so we
ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder and touching my hat
to the officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as I could--
"I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in the
lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor."
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat harshly,
"Well, _I_ can't leave the bridge, my man," said he.
"No, sir; but you can tell me what to do," I returned.
"Is it one of the crew?" he asked.
"I believe him to be a fireman," I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or from
something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question was
immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much freer
from constraint, advised me to find a steward and despatch him in quest
of the doctor, who would now be in the smoking-room over his pipe.
One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down
our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a
night. Let me call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and I rattled down the
companion, breathing hurry; and in his short-sleeves and perched across
the carpenter's bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat, bright,
dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang in
his speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair were enjoying a
deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare say he was tired with his day's
work, and eminently comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did
not stop to consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.
"Steward," said I, "there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't find
the doctor."
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is
the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth--
"That's none of my business," said he. "I don't care."
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought of
his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I glanced
at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like assault and
battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card than violence.
"You will have to make it your business," said I, "for I am sent to you
by the officer on the bridge."
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his pipe,
gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand strolling. From
that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as though
he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a better
impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and two
or three late stragglers had gathered round and were offering
suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was promptly
negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie;
but as it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks,
O'Reilly and I supported him between us. It was only by main force that
we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought in
his paroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably when he
resigned himself to our control.
"O let me lie!" he pleaded. "I'll no' get better anyway." And then with
a moan that went to my heart, "O why did I come upon this miserable
journey?"
I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in
the close, tossing steerage: "O why left I my hame?"
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook
scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he
sought to borrow. The scullion was backward. "Was it one of the crew?"
he asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that
it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us
at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger. The
light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and
grizzled with years; but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from
us the expression and even the design of his face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.
"_It's only a passenger!_" said he; and turning about, made, lantern and
all, for the galley.
"He's a man anyway," cried Jones in indignation.
"Nobody said he was a woman," said a gruff voice, which I recognised for
that of the bo's'un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now the
officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck
rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him not.
"No?" he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft in
person.