examined our patient with the lantern. He made little of the case, had
the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward
to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had now come to our
assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such "a fine cheery body" should
be sick; and these, claiming a sort of possession, took him entirely
under their own care. The drug had probably relieved him, for he
struggled no more, and was led along plaintive and patient, but
protesting. His heart recoiled at the thought of the steerage. "O let me
lie down upon the bieldy side," he cried; "O dinna take me down!" And
again: "O why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?" And yet once
more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word: "I had
no _call_ to come." But there he was; and by the doctor's order and the
kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of
Steerage No. 1 into the den allotted him.
At the foot of our own companion, just where I had found Blackwood,
Jones and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff,
cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a century upon the
seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blonde eyebrows, and an
eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard. I had not
forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered also that he had helped us
about the lantern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones, and
being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my steam.
"Well," said I, "I make you my compliments upon your steward," and
furiously narrated what had happened.
"I've nothing to do with him," replied the bo's'un. "They're all alike.
They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon the top of
another."
This was enough. A very little humanity went a long way with me after
the experience of the evening. A sympathy grew up at once between the
bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next few days, I
learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable type, and not at
all the kind of man you find in books. He had been at Sebastopol under
English colours; and again in a States ship, "after the _Alabama_, and
praying God we shouldn't find her." He was a high Tory and a high
Englishman. No manufacturer could have held opinions more hostile to the
working man and his strikes. "The workmen," he said, "think nothing of
their country. They think of nothing but themselves. They're damned
greedy, selfish fellows." He would not hear of the decadence of England.
"They say they send us beef from America," he argued: "but who pays for
it? All the money in the world's in England." The Royal Navy was the
best of possible services, according to him. "Anyway the officers are
gentlemen," said he; "and you can't get hazed to death by a damned
non-commissioned ---- as you can in the army." Among nations, England
was the first; then came France. He respected the French navy and liked
the French people; and if he were forced to make a new choice in life,
"by God, he would try Frenchmen!" For all his looks and rough, cold
manners, I observed that children were never frightened by him; they
divined him at once to be a friend; and one night when he had chalked
his hand and went about stealthily setting his mark on people's clothes,
it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his
boyish monkey trick.
In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. I was afraid I
should not recognise him, so baffling had been the light of the lantern;
and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or Irish.
He had certainly employed north-country words and elisions; but the
accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my
ear.
To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1 was an adventure that
required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted
in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect
of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into
their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was
pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I heard that the
sick man was better and had gone on deck.
The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with pink
and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to
add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash down the
decks. But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the steerage. I
found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward of the saloon
deck-house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but
his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey
from a distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and
grains of gold. His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain; and I
soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent and
language had been formed in the most natural way, since he was born in
Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the banks of the Tyne, and
was married to a Scots wife. A fisherman in the season, he had fished
the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, and
the great boats, which required extra hands, were once drawn up on shore
till the next spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces,
or along the wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way
of life he had gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable
house, his hayfield, and his garden. On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on a
pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.
Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the steerage
and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea
and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels. "_I'm_ not
afraid," he had told his adviser, "_I'll_ get on for ten days. I've not
been a fisherman for nothing." For it is no light matter, as he reminded
me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day
breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken,
iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage where you
dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.
The life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard
work and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky,
and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop will
give him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant
ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained.
He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before, when
his appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup. We were all much of
the same mind on board, and beginning with myself, had dined upon
pea-soup not wisely but too well; only with him the excess had been
punished, perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence, and his
first meal had resulted in a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth
on biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England, to
make the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he
scouted as another edition of the steerage.
He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. "Ye see, I had no call
to be here," said he; "and I thought it was by with me last night. I've
a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had no real call to
leave them." Speaking of the attentions he had received from his
shipmates generally, "They were all so kind," he said, "that there's
none to mention." And except in so far as I might share in this, he
troubled me with no reference to my services.
But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by his
story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the habitual
comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December evening, I
encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging
homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together, and it was natural
that we should fall into talk. He was covered with mud; an inoffensive,
ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic cable was a secret
contrivance of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and
I confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
pounds in the bank. But this man had travelled over most of the world,
and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American railroad, with two
dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my
fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and had made all that he
possessed in that same accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled
mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from
the native country of starvation.
Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and hard
times. Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost in his own
pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held strong
opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters, and, when I
led him on, of the men also. The masters had been selfish and
obstructive; the men selfish, silly, and light-headed. He rehearsed to
me the course of a meeting at which he had been present, and the
somewhat long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling into
question the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union delegates; and
although he had escaped himself through flush times and starvation times
with a handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in either man
or master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of
mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country
outside of a sudden and complete political subversion. Down must go
Lords and Church and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must
change hands from worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such
principles, he said, were growing "like a seed."
From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell
discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had
attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been
pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea,--to rend
the old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and in clamour
and civil discord remodel it with the hand of violence.
THE STOWAWAYS
On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our companion,
Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes,
well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face
was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but though not
yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken
his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale
eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience
of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners
forward, but perfectly presentable. The lad who helped in the second
cabin told me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was,
but thought, "by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite, that
he was some one from the saloon."
I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air
and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family
who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But, making
every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard
him tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set forth, in such
dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits
of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction. There were
tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer; of the
East Indies, where in former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal
Engineers, where he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides
of life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the
talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen. The best
talkers usually address themselves to some particular society; there
they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and
yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong power
of style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have turned
any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric
talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of
which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of those
who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and
rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the
ears of duchesses and hostlers.
Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure in
his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which he
praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the sergeants;
but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular, one
among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an episode in the
rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had imagined. But then
there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost impudent
greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent disregard for truth. And
then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, of
Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a
spree. I have a suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but God
disposes all things; and one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom
should he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at
first! What followed? He himself indicated cavalierly that he had then
resigned. Let us put it so. But these resignations are sometimes very
trying.
At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away
from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he was. "That?"
said Mackay. "Why, that's one of the stowaways."
"No man," said the same authority, "who has had anything to do with the
sea, would ever think of paying for a passage." I give the statement as
Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to believe that it
contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the man shall be impudent
and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even pass for a fair
representation of the facts. We gentlemen of England who live at home at
ease have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the
world over, people are stowing away in coal-holes and dark corners, and
when ships are once out to sea, appearing again, begrimed and bashful,
upon deck. The career of these sea-tramps partakes largely of the
adventurous. They may be poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in
their place of concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once
and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land,
the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same way to that
from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates and
the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one
miserable stowaway was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered
but a word or two, and departed for a farther country than America.
When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray for:
that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his forgiveness.
After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as secure
as if he had paid for his passage. It is not altogether a bad thing for
the company, who get more or less efficient hands for nothing but a few
plates of junk and duff; and every now and again find themselves better
paid than by a whole family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for
instance, a packet was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and
courage of a stowaway engineer. As was no more than just, a handsome
subscription rewarded him for his success; but even without such
exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and America, the
stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure. Four
engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship, the _Circassia_; and
before two days after their arrival each of the four had found a
comfortable berth. This was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I
heard from first to last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways.
My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next morning, as
I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal
Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck house. There
was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more than twenty, in
the most miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown with grains of
beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes. Four stowaways had been found
aboard our ship before she left the Clyde; but these two had alone
escaped the ignominy of being put ashore. Alick, my acquaintance of last
night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical engineer; the other
was from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast. Two people
more unlike by training, character, and habits it would be hard to
imagine; yet here they were together, scrubbing paint.
Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
opportunities in life. I have heard him end a story with these words:
"That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses." Situation
after situation failed him; then followed the depression of trade, and
for months he had hung round with other idlers, playing marbles all day
in the West Park, and going home at night to tell his landlady how he
had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of existence was not
unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long continued to enjoy
idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call him
Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually threatening to slip
his cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left
widowed of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met another old
chum in Sauchiehall Street.
"By the bye, Alick," said he, "I met a gentleman in New York who was
asking for you."
"Who was that?" asked Alick.
"The new second engineer on board the _So-and-So_," was the reply.
"Well, and who is he?"
"Brown, to be sure."
For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
_Circassia_. If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought it
was high time to follow Brown's example. He spent his last day, as he
put it, "reviewing the yeomanry," and the next morning says he to his
landlady, "Mrs. X., I'll not take porridge to-day, please; I'll take
some eggs."
"Why, have you found a job?" she asked, delighted.
"Well, yes," returned the perfidious Alick; "I think I'll start to-day."
And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America. I am afraid
that landlady has seen the last of him.
It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a
vessel's departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No. 1,
flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from the
Broomielaw to Greenock. That night, the ship's yeoman pulled him out by
the heels and had him before the mate. Two other stowaways had already
been found and sent ashore; but by this time darkness had fallen, they
were out in the middle of the estuary, and the last steamer had left
them till the morning.
"Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal," said the mate, "and
see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow."
In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest and breakfast, and
was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was over and the game up
for good with that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out an oath at
him, with a "What are you doing there?" and "Do you call that hiding,
anyway?" There was need of no more: Alick was in another bunk before the
day was older. Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was
cursorily inspected. He heard the round come down the companion and look
into one pen after another, until they came within two of the one in
which he lay concealed. Into these last two they did not enter, but
merely glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he was
personally favoured in this escape. It was the character of the man to
attribute nothing to luck and but little to kindness; whatever happened
to him he had earned in his own right amply; favours came to him from
his singular attraction and adroitness, and misfortunes he had always
accepted with his eyes open. Half an hour after the searchers had
departed, the steerage began to fill with legitimate passengers, and the
worst of Alick's troubles was at an end. He was soon making himself
popular, smoking other people's tobacco, and politely sharing their
private stock of delicacies, and when night came, he retired to his bunk
beside the others with composure.
Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and only
the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick appeared on
deck to court inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact, he was
known to several on board, and even intimate with one of the engineers;
but it was plainly not the etiquette of such occasions for the
authorities to avow their information. Every one professed surprise and
anger on his appearance, and he was led prisoner before the captain.
"What have you got to say for yourself?" inquired the captain.
"Not much," said Alick; "but when a man has been a long time out of a
job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances."
"Are you willing to work?"
Alick swore he was burning to be useful.
"And what can you do?" asked the captain.
He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.
"I think you will be better at engineering?" suggested the officer, with
a shrewd look.
"No, sir," says Alick simply.--"There's few can beat me at a lie," was
his engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.
"Have you been to sea?" again asked the captain.
"I've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more," replied the
unabashed Alick.
"Well, we must try and find some work for you," concluded the officer.
And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily scraping
paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet. "You leave me alone,"
was his deduction. "When I get talking to a man, I can get round him."
The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian--it was noticeable
that neither of them told his name--had both been brought up and seen
the world in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and
was closely followed by his mother. His sisters had taken, I think, to
dressmaking. He himself had returned from sea about a year ago and gone
to live with his brother, who kept the "George Hotel"--"it was not quite
a real hotel," added the candid fellow--"and had a hired man to mind the
horses." At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went on his
brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began to find
himself one too many at the "George Hotel." "I don't think brothers care
much for you," he said, as a general reflection upon life. Hurt at this
change, nearly penniless, and too proud to ask for more, he set off on
foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey as he
could. He would have enlisted, but he was too small for the army and too
old for the navy; and thought himself fortunate at last to find a berth
on board a trading dandy. Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy
sprung a leak and went down; and though the crew were picked up and
brought ashore by fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but the
clothes upon their back. His next engagement was scarcely better
starred; for the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so
heartily during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the entire
crew deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.
Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian. He could find no berth
in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a steamer. She
reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday: the Devonian had a bellyful that
morning, laying in breakfast manfully to provide against the future, and
set off along the quays to seek employment. But he was now not only
penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to
have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to
a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that
depicts the man. You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you
have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck.
The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to
beg; although, as he said, "when I had money of my own, I always gave
it." It was only on Saturday morning, after three whole days of
starvation, that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of her own
accord a glass of milk. He had now made up his mind to stow away, not
from any desire to see America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a
place in the forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He lived by
begging, always from milkwomen, and always scones and milk, and was not
once refused. It was vile wet weather, and he could never have been
dry. By night he walked the streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow
Green, and heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians
of the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the
merits of the clergy. He had not much instruction; he could "read bills
on the street," but was "main bad at writing"; yet these theologians
seemed to have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement. Why he
did not go to the Sailors' Home I know not; I presume there is in
Glasgow one of these institutions, which are by far the happiest and the
wisest effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand to my author,
as they say in old books, and relate the story as I heard it. In the
meantime, he had tried four times to stow away in different vessels, and
four times had been discovered and handed back to starvation. The fifth
time was lucky; and you may judge if he were pleased to be aboard ship
again, at his old work, and with duff twice a week. He was, said Alick,
"a devil for the duff." Or if devil was not the word, it was one if
anything stronger.
The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable. The Devonian
was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the first, pulled
his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found work for himself
when there was none to show him. Alick, on the other hand, was not only
a skulker in the grain, but took a humorous and fine gentlemanly view of
the transaction. He would speak to me by the hour in ostentatious
idleness; and only if the bo's'un or a mate came by, fell-to languidly
for just the necessary time till they were out of sight. "I'm not
breaking my heart with it," he remarked.
Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
"Hullo," said he, "here's some real work coming--I'm off," and he was
gone that moment. Again, calculating the six guinea passage-money, and
the probable duration of the passage, he remarked pleasantly that he was
getting six shillings a day for this job, "and it's pretty dear to the
company at that." "They are making nothing by me," was another of his
observations; "they're making something by that fellow." And he pointed
to the Devonian, who was just then busy to the eyes.
The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned to
despise him. His natural talents were of no use either to himself or
others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become
pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was certainly
very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised by
over-confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert
criminal in the dock; and he was so vain of his own cleverness that he
could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the very trick by
which he had deceived you. "Why, now I have more money than when I came
on board," he said one night, exhibiting a sixpence, "and yet I stood
myself a bottle of beer before I went to bed yesterday. And as for
tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it." That was fairly successful
indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy,
might, who knows? have got the length of half a crown. A man who prides
himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence,
above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for
dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the
world at large.
Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick; for at
the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense of humour
that moved you to forgive him. It was more than half as a jest that he
conducted his existence. "Oh, man," he said to me once with unusual
emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, "I would give up anything
for a lark."
It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the best,
or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature. "Mind you,"
he said suddenly, changing his tone, "mind you, that's a good boy. He
wouldn't tell you a lie. A lot of them think he is a scamp because his
clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he's as good as gold." To hear him,
you become aware that Alick himself had a taste for virtue. He thought
his own idleness and the other's industry equally becoming. He was no
more anxious to insure his own reputation as a liar than to uphold the
truthfulness of his companion; and he seemed unaware of what was
incongruous in his attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.
It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the Devonian,
for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder. Busy as he
was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching officer, or even
to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might slip off and smoke a
pipe in safety. "Tom," he once said to him, for that was the name which
Alick ordered him to use, "if you don't like going to the galley, I'll
go for you. You ain't used to this kind of thing, you ain't. But I'm a
sailor; and I can understand the feelings of any fellow, I can." Again,
he was hard up, and casting about for some tobacco, for he was not so
liberally used in this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick
offered him the half of one of his fifteen sticks. I think, for my part,
he might have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of
them, and not lived to regret his liberality. But the Devonian refused.
"No," he said, "you're a stowaway like me; I won't take it from you,
I'll take it from some one who's not down on his luck."
It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the
influence of sex. If a woman passed near where he was working, his eyes
lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to other
thoughts. It was natural that he should exercise a fascination
proportionally strong upon women. He begged, you will remember, from
women only, and was never refused. Without wishing to explain away the
charity of those who helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a
little to his handsome face, and to that quick, responsive nature formed
for love, which speaks eloquently through all disguises, and can stamp
an impression in ten minutes' talk or an exchange of glances. He was the
more dangerous in that he was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite
of himself, and with a soft and pleading eye. Ragged as he was, and many
a scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably furnished, even on board
he was not without some curious admirers.
There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had
dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that defies
analysis. One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper
stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came past,
very neatly attired, as was her custom.
"Poor fellow," she said, stopping, "you haven't a vest."
"No," he said; "I wish I 'ad."
Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his embarrassment,
for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe
and began to fill it with tobacco.
"Do you want a match?" she asked. And before he had time to reply, she
ran off and presently returned with more than one.
That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is concerned,
of what I will make bold to call this love-affair. There are many
relations which go on to marriage and last during a lifetime, in which
less human feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at the
stoke-hole.
Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but in a
larger sense of the word I have yet more to add. Jones had discovered
and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable among her fellows
for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly clad, to the verge,
if not over the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and
a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her
whole expression, and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a
true womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion. She had a
look, too, of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady
than most, had she been allowed the opportunity. When alone she seemed
preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually by
her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of speech and
gesture--not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a man like a
ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and
waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange
to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring
for him. He seemed, from first to last, insensible of her caresses and
attentions, and she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish
husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her
Orson, were the two bits of human nature that most appealed to me
throughout the voyage.
On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and soon
a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her bit of
sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed fingers. She
also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she was on board with
neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom she travelled was the
father of a family, who had left wife and children to be hers. The
ship's officers discouraged the story, which may therefore have been a
story and no more; but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor
girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that day forth.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean
combined both. "Out of my country and myself I go," sings the old poet:
and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and
longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.
Part of the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at least
to me, from this novel situation in the world.
I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute success
and verisimilitude. I was taken for a steerage passenger; no one seemed
surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing but the brass plate
between decks to remind me that I had once been a gentleman. In a former
book, describing a former journey, I expressed some wonder that I could
be readily and naturally taken for a pedlar, and explained the accident
by the difference of language and manners between England and France. I
must now take a humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen,
somewhat roughly clad, to be sure, but with every advantage of speech
and manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything
you please except an educated gentleman. The sailors called me "mate,"
the officers addressed me as "my man," my comrades accepted me without
hesitation for a person of their own character and experience, but with
some curious information. One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason;
several, and among these at least one of the seamen, judged me to be a
petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often set down for a
practical engineer that at last I had not the heart to deny it. From all
these guesses I drew one conclusion, which told against the insight of
my companions. They might be close observers in their own way, and read
the manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend their
observation to the hands.
To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch. It is
true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter, there was no
recognition in their eye, although I confess I sometimes courted it in
silence. All these, my inferiors and equals, took me, like the
transformed monarch in the story, for a mere common, human man. They
gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.
With the women this surprised me less, as I had already experimented on
the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of London simply attired
in a sleeve-waistcoat. The result was curious. I then learned for the
first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much attention ladies are
accustomed to bestow on all male creatures of their own station; for, in
my humble rig, each one who went by me caused me a certain shock of
surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my normal circumstances,
it appeared, every young lady must have paid me some passing tribute of
a glance; and though I had often been unconscious of it when given, I
was well aware of its absence when it was withheld. My height seemed to
decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed me like a dog.
This is one of my grounds for supposing that what are called the upper
classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what are
called the lower; and I wish some one would continue my experiment, and
find out exactly at what stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to
the well-regulated female eye.
Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for, even
with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the ladies for
precisely the average man of the steerage. It was one afternoon that I
saw this demonstrated. A very plainly dressed woman was taken ill on
deck. I think I had the luck to be present at every sudden seizure
during all the passage; and on this occasion found myself in the place
of importance, supporting the sufferer. There was not only a large crowd
immediately around us, but a considerable knot of saloon passengers
leaning over our heads from the hurricane-deck. One of these, an elderly
managing woman, hailed me with counsels. Of course I had to reply; and
as the talk went on, I began to discover that the whole group took me
for the husband. I looked upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled
feelings; and I must own she had not even the appearance of the poorest
class of city servant-maids, but looked more like a country wench who
should have been employed at a roadside inn. Now was the time for me to
go and study the brass plate.
To such of the officers as knew about me--the doctor, the purser, and
the stewards--I appeared in the light of a broad joke. The fact that I
spent the better part of my day in writing had gone abroad over the ship
and tickled them all prodigiously. Whenever they met me they referred to
my absurd occupation with familiarity and breadth of humorous intention.
Their manner was well calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes. You
may be sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a gentleman,
but you scarce publish the feeling to his face. "Well!" they would say;
"still writing?" And the smile would widen into a laugh. The purser came
one day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart by my misguided
industry, offered me some other kind of writing, "for which," he added
pointedly, "you will be paid." This was nothing else than to copy out
the list of passengers.
Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my choice of
roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor. I was openly
jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a considerable knot would
sometimes gather at the door to see my last dispositions for the night.
This was embarrassing, but I learned to support the trial with
equanimity.
Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly and
naturally upon my spirits. I accepted the consequences with readiness,
and found them far from difficult to bear. The steerage conquered me; I
conformed more and more to the type of the place, not only in manner but
at heart, growing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers who
looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for small delicacies. Such
was the result, as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and
porridge. We think we have no sweet tooth as long as we are full to the
brim of molasses; but a man must have sojourned in the workhouse before
he boasts himself indifferent to dainties. Every evening, for instance,
I was more and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it
was delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
was proportionally downcast. The offer of a little jelly from a
fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked elevation in
my spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end and back again for
an oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position. It seemed no disgrace to
be confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once I found
their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other class. I do
not mean that my friends could have sat down without embarrassment and
laughable disaster at the table of a duke. That does not imply an
inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage. Thus I flatter
myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow-passengers; yet my
most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have committed
as few as possible. I know too well that my tact is not the same as
their tact, and that my habit of a different society constituted, not
only no qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me--because I "managed to
behave very pleasantly" to my fellow-passengers, was how he put it--I
could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment to be such
as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I dare say this
praise was given me immediately on the back of some unpardonable
solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a whole. We are all
ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we should consider also the
case of a lord among the ploughmen. I have seen a lawyer in the house of
a Hebridean fisherman; and I know, but nothing will induce me to
disclose, which of these two was the better gentleman. Some of our
finest behaviour, though it looks well enough from the boxes, may seem
even brutal to the gallery. We boast too often manners that are
parochial rather than universal; that, like a country wine, will not
bear transportation for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the
kitchen. To be a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every
relation and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must
first be born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily, the
manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and
meet with a certain external acceptation throughout all the others, and
this tends to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the
amateurish accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should be
human and central.
Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a relation of
equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen. They were not rough, nor
hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly, differed kindly; were
helpful, gentle, patient, and placid. The type of manners was plain, and
even heavy; there was little to please the eye, but nothing to shock;
and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at the spring of behaviour than
in many more ornate and delicate societies. I say delicate, where I
cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like ironwork, without being
delicate, like lace. There was here less delicacy; the skin supported
more callously the natural surface of events, the mind received more
bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that
there was less effective refinement, less consideration for others, less
polite suppression of self. I speak of the best among my
fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon, there
is a mixture. Those, then, with whom I found myself in sympathy, and of
whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater measure of truth, were
not only as good in their manners, but endowed with very much the same
natural capacities, and about as wise in deduction, as the bankers and
barristers of what is called society. One and all were too much
interested in disconnected facts, and loved information for its own sake
with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes display the same
appetite as they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of
the newspaper. Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make out, is often
rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture. I have myself
palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him re-peruse it for
a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and solemn.
Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but though they may be eager
listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing or careful
thinkers. Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which is
covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which we can perceive
relations in that field, whether great or small. Workmen, certainly
those who were on board with me, I found wanting in this quality or
habit of the mind. They did not perceive relations, but leaped to a
so-called cause, and thought the problem settled. Thus the cause of
everything in England was the form of government, and the cure for all
evils was, by consequence, a revolution. It is surprising how many of
them said this, and that none should have had a definite thought in his
head as he said it. Some hated the Church because they disagreed with
it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all hated
the masters, possibly with reason. But these feelings were not at the
root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls ran thus--I have
not got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a revolution I should
get on. How? They had no idea. Why? Because--because--well, look at
America!
To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you come to
that. At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one question in modern
home politics, though it appears in many shapes, and that is the
question of money; and but one political remedy, that the people should
grow wiser and better. My workmen fellow-passengers were as impatient
and dull of hearing on the second of these points as any member of
Parliament; but they had some glimmerings of the first. They would not
hear of improvement on their part, but wished the world made over again
in a crack, so that they might remain improvident and idle and
debauched, and yet enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany
the opposite Virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could
see, that many of them were now on their way to America. But on the
point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far as
they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual income; a
question which should long ago have been settled by a revolution, they
did not know how, and which they were now about to settle for
themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic in a
steamship of considerable tonnage.
And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income question
is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided, if there be no
wisdom and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by a man's purse,
but by his character, that he is rich or poor. Barney will be poor,
Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go where they will,
and wreck all the governments under heaven; they will be poor until they
die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in
consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better grace.
The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his
childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the
ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he
said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In
consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four
or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four, and
then principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in
sheer idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his back against
the door. I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then
undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied
this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all the
educated class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself he
was industrious. But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with
effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organised it.
I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact. A man
fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought into
hospital with broken bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied
that he was a _tapper_. No one had ever heard of such a thing before;
the officials were filled with curiosity; they besought an explanation.
It appeared that when a party of slaters were engaged upon a roof, they
would now and then be taken with a fancy for the public-house. Now a
seamstress, for example, might slip away from her work and no one be the
wiser; but if these fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would
cease, and thus the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection.
Hence the career of the tapper. He has to do the tapping and keep up an
industrious bustle on the housetop during the absence of the slaters.
When he taps for only one or two the thing is child's-play, but when he
has to represent a whole troop, it is then that he earns his money in
the sweat of his brow. Then must he bound from spot to spot,
reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single personality, and swell
and hasten his blows, until he produce a perfect illusion for the ear,
and you would swear that a crowd of emulous masons were continuing
merrily to roof the house. It must be a strange sight from an upper
window.
I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
stories told by my companions. Skulking, shirking, malingering, were all
established tactics, it appeared. They could see no dishonesty when a
man who is paid for an hour's work gives half an hour's consistent
idling in its place. Thus the tapper would refuse to watch for the
police during a burglary, and call himself an honest man. It is not
sufficiently recognised that our race detests to work. If I thought that
I should have to work every day of my life as hard as I am working now,
I should be tempted to give up the struggle. And the workman early
begins on his career of toil. He has never had his fill of holidays in
the past, and his prospect of holidays in the future is both distant and
uncertain. In the circumstance it would require a high degree of virtue
not to snatch alleviations for the moment.
There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good talking of
a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working men. Where books
are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information will be given
and received by word of mouth; and this tends to produce good talkers,
and, what is no less needful for conversation, good listeners. They
could all tell a story with effect. I am sometimes tempted to think that
the less literary class show always better in narration; they have so
much more patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the
points, and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts. At the
same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have not an
agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected quarters, and
when the talk is over they often leave the matter where it was. They
mark time instead of marching. They think only to argue, not to reach
new conclusions, and use their reason rather as a weapon of offence than
as a tool for self-improvement. Hence the talk of some of the cleverest
was unprofitable in result, because there was no give and take; they
would grant you as little as possible for premise, and begin to dispute
under an oath to conquer or to die.
But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that of a
wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of which the
workman's life is built lie nearer to necessity and nature. They are
more immediate to human life. An income calculated by the week is a far
more human thing than one calculated by the year, and a small income,
simply from its smallness, than a large one. I never wearied listening
to the details of a workman's economy, because every item stood for some
real pleasure. If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know that
twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically happy;
while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day, ten to one
the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but misspent money
and a weariness to the flesh.
The difference between England and America to a working man was thus
most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger: "In America," said he,
"you get pies and puddings." I do not hear enough, in economy books, of
pies and pudding. A man lives in and for the delicacies, adornments, and
accidental attributes of life, such as pudding to eat, and pleasant
books and theatres to occupy his leisure. The bare terms of existence
would be rejected with contempt by all. If a man feeds on bread and
butter, soup and porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after dainties.
And the workman dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight of
those cheerless regions where life is more difficult to sustain than
worth sustaining. Every detail of our existence, where it is worth while
to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and enthralling
by the presence of genuine desire; but it is all one to me whether
Croesus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in the bank. There is more
adventure in the life of the working man who descends as a common
soldier into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire who
sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the
manoeuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about the career of him who is
in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market means an
empty belly, and another a copious and savoury meal. This is not the
philosophical, but the human side of economics; it interests like a
story; and the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a small way
of the charm of "Robinson Crusoe"; for every step is critical, and human
life is presented to you naked and verging to its lowest terms.
NEW YORK
As we drew near to New York I was at first amused and then somewhat
staggered, by the cautions and the grisly tales that went the round. You
would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must
speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you
were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military
precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake next
morning without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked
radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and
mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind.
I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of
fact. Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns of the
Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles
the warning was explained; it was but the far-away rumour and
reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a century old,
and half forgotten in the theatre of the events. So I was tempted to
make light of these reports against America. But we had on board with us
a man whose evidence it would not do to put aside. He had come near
these perils in the body; he had visited a robber inn. The public has an
old and well-grounded favour for this class of incident, and shall be
gratified to the best of my power.
My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from New
York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair of
rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station, passed the
day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight struck.
Then they applied themselves to find a lodging, and walked the streets
till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being refused
admittance, or themselves declining the terms. By two the inspiration of
their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and humble, and
after a great circuit found themselves in the same street where they had
begun their search, and in front of a French hotel where they had
already sought accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they returned
to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door. He
seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had at first presented
themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat unaccountably
fallen from a dollar to a quarter. They thought him ill-looking, but
paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the
house. There, in a small room, the man in the white cap wished them
pleasant slumbers.
The room was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences. The
door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was a
couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, and the
other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes see
valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of art
more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of
finding something of this last description that M'Naughten's comrade
pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed.
There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain was designed
to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked
forth into the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily
take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay
abed. M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Balboa and
his men, "with a wild surmise"; and then the latter, catching up the
lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he
stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the
wrist in terror. They could see into another room, larger in size than
that which they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in
the dark. For a second or so these five persons looked each other in the
eyes, then the curtain was dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made
but one bolt of it out of the room and down the stairs. The man in the
white cap said nothing as they passed him; and they were so pleased to
be once more in the open night that they gave up all notion of a bed,
and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.
No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired after
the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under
the conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted
the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers must
remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the following morning;
but we of the second cabin made our escape along with the lords of the
saloon; and by six o'clock Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting
on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-waggon. It rained
miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left
New York, there was scarcely a lull, and no cessation of the downpour.
The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled
the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.
It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money, to
be rattled along West Street to our destination: "Reunion House, No. 10,
West Street, one minute's walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle
Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool Ships;
Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per
night 25 cents; private rooms for families; no charge for storage or
baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
proprietor." Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a humble
hostelry. You entered through a long bar-room, thence passed into a
little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. The
furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American
taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going on,
in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell
sternly interposed, and explained the situation. He was offering to
treat me, it appeared; whenever an American bar-keeper proposes
anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to treat; and if
I did not want a drink, I must at least take the cigar. I took it
bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career on the wrong foot. I
did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from a variety of
reasons, even the best cigar often failing to please if you smoke
three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; "westward the
march of empire holds its way"; the race is for the moment to the young;
what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to
be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and
Judaea are gone by for ever, leaving to generations the legacy of their
accomplished work; China still endures, an old-inhabited house in the
brand-new city of nations; England has already declined, since she has
lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full
of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of
the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard for
an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man,
who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone
fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now
suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep
house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition;
let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the
sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the
American Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it
had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like
some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms of
procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly for
himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key; rather go
without food than partake of a stalled ox in stiff, respectable society;
rather be shot out of hand than direct his life according to the
dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness, the
fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of country
towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood form the
imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there is
added to this a great crowd of stimulating details--vast cities that
grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone south in autumn,
returning with the spring to find thousands camped upon their marshes,
and the lamps burning far and near along populous streets; forests that
disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain that are cleared and
settled, one man running forth with his household gods before another,
while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach;
oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage, action,
and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set
forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York streets,
spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of Liverpool; but
such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have looked inviting.
We were, a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and two
Scots lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome a
compatriot. They had been six weeks in New York, and neither of them had
yet found a single job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present
they were exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such a
dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at which I
should have hesitated; the devil was in it but Jones and I should dine
like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a restaurant; and I
chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking passers-by to ask
from. Yet, although I had told them I was willing to pay anything in
reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price houses, where I
would not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not
know if this were characteristic of New York, or whether it was only
Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising
suggestions. But at length, by our own sagacity, we found a French
restaurant, where there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking,
some so-called French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I
never entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the "private rooms for families" at Reunion
House. It was very small; furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of the
human animal through two borrowed lights; one, looking into the passage,
and the second opening, without sash, into another apartment, where
three men fitfully snored, or, in intervals of wakefulness, drearily
mumbled to each other all night long. It will be observed that this was
almost exactly the disposition of the room in M'Naughten's story. Jones
had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until
near morning, and I, for my part, never closed an eye.
At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men in the
next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over their
toilettes. The sound of their voices as they talked was low and moaning,
like that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at last begun
to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened unconscious
eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for
I dare say I was a little fevered by my restless night, and hurried to
dress and get downstairs.
You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant,
to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There were three
basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white
and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and a pair
of questionable combs. Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing his face
with a good will. He had been three months in New York and had not yet
found a single job nor earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he
also was exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to
grow sick at heart for my fellow-emigrants.
Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell. I had a thousand
and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a journey across
the continent before me in the evening. It rained with patient fury;
every now and then I had to get under cover for a while in order, so to
speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this continued drenching
it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to banks, post-offices,
railway-offices, restaurants, publishers, booksellers, money-changers,
and wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet, and those who
were careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly eye.
Wherever I went, too, the same traits struck me: the people were all
surprisingly rude and surprisingly kind. The money-changer
cross-questioned me like a French commissary, asking my age, my
business, my average income, and my destination, beating down my
attempts at evasion, and receiving my answer in silence; and yet when
all was over, he shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad
nearly a quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction.
Again, in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a man,
who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly never
before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely that he put
no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the names of books or
give me the slightest help or information, on the ground, like the
steward, that it was none of his business. I lost my temper at last,
said I was a stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; but
I would assure him, if he went to any bookseller in England, of more
handsome usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long
shot, it struck the gold. The manager passed at once from one extreme to
the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded me with kindness;
he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses and came
bareheaded into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might
lunch, nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough. These
are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America. It
is this same opposition that has most struck me in people of almost all
classes and from east to west. By the time a man had about strung me up
to be the death of him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would be
just upon the point of melting into confidence and serviceable
attentions. Yet I suspect, although I have met with the like in so many
parts, that this must be the character of some particular state or group
of states; for in America, and this again in all classes, you will find
some of the softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.
I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's towards the evening, that I
had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and leave
them behind for the benefit of New York city. No fire could have dried
them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition
was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart I said
farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the
floor of Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell
hired a man to carry my baggage to the station, which was hard by,
accompanied me thither himself, and recommended me to the particular
attention of the officials. No one could have been kinder. Those who are
out of pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent
meal and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this word of
thanks, before I enter fairly on the second chapter of my emigrant
experience.