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 cheerily follow up ‘Tom Bowling’ with
‘Around her splendid form.’
The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, 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; 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
ship-wrecked. 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 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—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 goodwill. 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 have 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.