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 Quake’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 a 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
newcomers 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.