Essays of Travel
by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #627 · 407,859 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Essays of Travel
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: August 1, 1996 [eBook #627]
Most recently updated: November 12, 2017
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/627
Credits: Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS OF TRAVEL ***
Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative image]
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1905
SECOND IMPRESSION
Contents
PAGE
I. The Amateur Emigrant: From The Clyde To Sandy
Hook—
The Second Cabin 3
Early Impressions 11
Steerage Scenes 21
Steerage Types 30
The Sick Man 42
The Stowaways 53
Personal Experience And Review 69
New York 81
II. Cockermouth And Keswick 93
Cockermouth 94
An Evangelist 97
Another 100
Last Of Smethurst 102
III. An Autumn Effect 106
IV. A Winter’s Walk In Carrick And Galloway 131
V. Forest Notes—
On The Plains 144
In The Season 149
Idle Hours 153
A Pleasure-Party 157
The Woods In Spring 164
Morality 169
VI. A Mountain Town In France 175
VII. Random Memories: _Rosa Quo Locorum_ 189
VII. The Ideal House 199
IX. Davos In Winter 207
X. Health And Mountains 212
XI. Alpine Diversion 217
XII. The Stimulation Of The Alps 222
XIII. Roads 227
XIV. On The Enjoyment Of Unpleasant Places 237
I.
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
To
ROBERT ALAN MOWBRAY STEVENSON
Our friendship was not only founded before we were born by a community of
blood, but is in itself near as old as my life. It began with our early
ages, and, like a history, has been continued to the present time.
Although we may not be old in the world, we are old to each other, having
so long been intimates. We are now widely separated, a great sea and
continent intervening; but memory, like care, mounts into iron ships and
rides post behind the horseman. Neither time nor space nor enmity can
conquer old affection; and as I dedicate these sketches, it is not to you
only, but to all in the old country, that I send the greeting of my
heart.
R.L.S.
1879.
THE SECOND CABIN
I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.
Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance
on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had
already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble over
their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion
reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and
grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with the
falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the
women wept. Any one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all
absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no
common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now
announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in
mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of
bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars,
larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated
town in the land to which she was to bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although anxious to see the
worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was
advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table
at command. The advice was excellent; but to understand the choice, and
what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship will
first be necessary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of
stairs. A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and
3, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards
Steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below
the officers’ cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet
a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to
return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages.
Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being
sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents
in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this
new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in
chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip. He
does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths and
a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a distinct
superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not only on
different ships, but on the same ship according as her head is to the
east or west. In my own experience, the principal difference between our
table and that of the true steerage passenger was the table itself, and
the crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show myself
ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage. At breakfast we had a
choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make,
the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the
coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive of some
chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack of
snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the
second. As a matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many sips,
still doubting which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables at
the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge,
which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and
sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt
junk, and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of
a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days, instead of duff, we
had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of a plum-pudding.
At tea we were served with some broken meat from the saloon; sometimes in
the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or rissoles; but as a
general thing mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor
cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied them
sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these
leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup
and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the
voyage; so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table
I might as well have been in the steerage outright. Had they given me
porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly contented
with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and water
before turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably stands
ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In
the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and
gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a
male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks, I came on
a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it,
of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously
confined to the same quarter of the deck. Who could tell whether I
housed on the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was
only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I was
incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a
swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat
to tea. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at
home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh myself
with a look of that brass plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the
steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember that
the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five cases
out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately pays the
steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes almost
nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively varied,
and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may thus be
had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the second
cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it
was an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell about my
steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone in
their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less intimate, I am
sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin;
and all who had left their wives behind them assured me they would go
without the comfort of their presence until they could afford to bring
them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on
board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will and
character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed
group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by the
name of ‘Johnny,’ in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us by
his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and became on the
strength of that an universal favourite—it takes so little in this world
of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots mason,
known from his favourite dish as ‘Irish Stew,’ three or four nondescript
Scots, a fine young Irishman, O’Reilly, and a pair of young men who
deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots; the other
claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was born in
England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and nurtured, but
ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom he faithfully
neglected throughout the voyage, though she was not only sick, but much
his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in childhood. In appearance
he was like an imbecile Henry the Third of France. The Scotsman, though
perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only
bracketed them together because they were fast friends, and disgraced
themselves equally by their conduct at the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married couple,
devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had first seen
each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon he
had carried her books home for her. I do not know if this story will be
plain to southern readers; but to me it recalls many a school idyll, with
wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting each other stride-legs,
flushed with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady’s books was both a
delicate attention and a privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as much
old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her husband,
and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her
own word that she was married; for it was sorely contradicted by the
testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed to have sanctified her for
the single state; even the colour of her hair was incompatible with
matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly spirit
and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned
from the viands; the dirty tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety;
and the whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch
true to Glasgow time till she should reach New York. They had heard
reports, her husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours
between these two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had
seized on this occasion to put them to the proof. It was a good thing
for the old lady; for she passed much leisure time in studying the watch.
Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let it run down. It was inscribed
on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch must
never be turned backwards; and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the
exact moment ere she started it again. When she imagined this was about
due, she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was
embarked on the same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less
neglectful. She was in quest of two o’clock; and when she learned it was
already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried
‘Gravy!’ I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was a young
child; and I suppose it must have been the same with the other Scotsmen
present, for we all laughed our fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be
difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during the
voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at our
concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who called up
performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands and
pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from
the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor
could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a _lingua franca_ of many
tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there
is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea.
They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a
Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an _h_; a word of a dialect is picked
up from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man’s place of birth. So it
was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea;
and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at
an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean voyages
having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By his own
account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A few years back,
he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead
and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes
on from one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune
undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see
Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things to
rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee over a
flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent
medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had bought years ago
for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a
hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called
Golden Oil, cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say
that I partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the
man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones
with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our
neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called
unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you
might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go
to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day’s
experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day’s
kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we
angled as often as not in one another’s baskets. Once, in the midst of a
serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own
I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but Jones, with a
better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter, and declared,
what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the Friday
forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in
Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now complete, and
began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon the decks. There
were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Americans, a good
handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all now
belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time
to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the
passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of
the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration,
from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in
my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more
pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful
and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and
helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own
hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome,
and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of
self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal
act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded
with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct and by the
shipload on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the
bo’s’un’s whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are
domesticated to the service of man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of
embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was
tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below
thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were
already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I
thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff
or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition.
Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient
citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed
to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.
Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance. In
a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally, such
as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, ‘in the
lost battle, borne down by the flying.’
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard
vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted
by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of
homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests
beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls.
But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses
livingly to my imagination.
A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and
makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as we
please, we are not born economists. The individual is more affecting
than the mass. It is by the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the
carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the significance of
tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the
rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were
a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the
prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the
one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two
might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of
failures, the broken men of England. Yet it must not be supposed that
these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was
cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of
hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some
were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests
and ready laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks
scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. ‘What do you call your
mither?’ I heard one ask. ‘Mawmaw,’ was the reply, indicating, I fancy,
a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass each other
on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact is but slight,
and the relation more like what we may imagine to be the friendship of
flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so
open in its communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities. The
children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves at a
fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manœuvring on the
outskirts of acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon
as familiar as home to these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to
hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate
portions of the vessel. ‘Go ’way doon to yon dyke,’ I heard one say,
probably meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth, watching
them climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship went swinging
through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of their mothers,
who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these perilous
feats. ‘He’ll maybe be a sailor,’ I heard one remark; ‘now’s the time to
learn.’ I had been on the point of running forward to interfere, but
stood back at that, reproved. Very few in the more delicate classes have
the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life of
poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and imperious,
braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after
all, it is better that the lad should break his neck than that you should
break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention one
little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an
ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle,
his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so
natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and
good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in
motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment
to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little
triumph of the human species. Even when his mother and the rest of his
family lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few advances. We
discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of
information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world,
or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled
together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had
been so near famine that you may say they had run into the ship with the
devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the best of
possible steamers. But the majority were hugely contented. Coming as
they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them
from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and many
having long been out of work, I was surprised to find them so dainty in
their notions. I myself lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge, and
soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and found it, if not
luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working men were loud in their
outcries. It was not ‘food for human beings,’ it was ‘only fit for
pigs,’ it was ‘a disgrace.’ Many of them lived almost entirely upon
biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some paid extra for
better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of the
degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to hear him
grumble, for grumbling is the traveller’s pastime; but I was not prepared
to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to myself. Words I
should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal allowance; but when a
man prefers dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity of his
disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A single
night of the steerage had filled them with horror. I had myself
suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the lack of air; and
as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to sleep on
deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to follow my
example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we
should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug about
seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical
terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list their
doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had
sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would think we had been
brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious
districts are in the bedchambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the night
so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on the
starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near the
fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.
The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement.
The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels occupied the
mind, and prepared it for slumber. From time to time a heavier lurch
would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to the obscure borders of
consciousness; or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note of
the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-cry, ‘All’s well!’ I know
nothing, whether for poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of
these two syllables in the darkness of a night at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so
high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the deck. I have
spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship’s company, and
cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs
of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish,
Russian, German or Norse,—the songs were received with generous applause.
Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful
Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to
dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin.
The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers
in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the dance, they
conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen
decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, the quadrille was
soon whistled down, and the dancers departed under a cloud. Eight
Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of society, would have
dared to make some fun for themselves and the spectators; but the working
man, when sober, takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal
deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity. He
dares not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above
all, it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration. I like his
society under most circumstances, but let me never again join with him in
public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even
the inclemencies of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got
together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and
rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck, and the
rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women
in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus disposed, sang
to our hearts’ content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene;
others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such
as, ‘Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,’ sounded bald,
bleak, and pitifully silly. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if
we do,’ was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which
the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch
mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general
effect. And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of the
sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with whom I
conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and attributed
their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for whisky, to the
campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our
situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took up
the burden how the sentiment came home to each, ‘The Anchor’s Weighed’
was true for us. We were indeed ‘Rocked on the bosom of the stormy
deep.’ How many of us could say with the singer, ‘I’m lonely to-night,
love, without you,’ or, ‘Go, some one, and tell them from me, to write me
a letter from home’! And when was there a more appropriate moment for
‘Auld Lang Syne’ than now, when the land, the friends, and the affections
of that mingled but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the
vessel’s wake? It pointed forward to the hour when these labours should
be overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded
inn, when those who had parted in the spring of youth should again drink
a cup of kindness in their age. Had not Burns contemplated emigration, I
scarce believe he would have found that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated by
sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two of these
departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was observed
strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman express
her surprise that ‘the ship didna gae doon,’ as she saw some one pass her
with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish psalms. Many
went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with
their divine. ‘I didna think he was an experienced preacher,’ said one
girl to me.
Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells, although
the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown
away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly
overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this
hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer
woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a
roar, and shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud
reports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and
looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke,
and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at each lurch, a different
crop of stars, it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small
account, and that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.
STEERAGE SCENES
Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort. Down one
flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the centre
occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about twenty
persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter’s bench afforded
perches for perhaps as many more. The canteen, or steerage bar, was on
one side of the stair; on the other, a no less attractive spot, the cabin
of the indefatigable interpreter.
I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel, and
many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells, when the lights
were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to roost.
It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who
lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon,
as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey
time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of
white-faced women. It was as much as he could do to play, and some of
his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from their
bunks at the first experimental flourish, and found better than medicine
in the music. Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time, and a
degree of animation looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly
speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle, even badly,
than to write huge works upon recondite subjects. What could Mr. Darwin
have done for these sick women? But this fellow scraped away; and the
world was positively a better place for all who heard him. We have yet
to understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments. I told
the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with him in his
fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.
‘It is a privilege,’ I said. He thought a while upon the word, turning
it over in his Scots head, and then answered with conviction, ‘Yes, a
privilege.’
That night I was summoned by ‘Merrily danced the 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.
This was the riddle—
C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G;
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.
Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo! We were a long
while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering how a
man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense and
divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.
I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion and
the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been gone long,
we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick.
We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the sea kept contrary all
night. I now made my bed upon the second cabin floor, where, although I
ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or
less vitiated indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at
least not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of a
rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick and the
sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his
friend for encouragement. ‘The ship’s going down!’ he cried with a
thrill of agony. ‘The ship’s going down!’ he repeated, now in a blank
whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might
reassure him, reason with him, joke at him—all was in vain, and the old
cry came back, ‘The ship’s going down!’ There was something panicky and
catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an
involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. If this
whole parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses
would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of our
corporate human life would be rent across for ever!
The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed. The
wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great
dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam. The horizon was
dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly on
the long, heaving deck.
We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a
single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity,
puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same order
as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always welcome;
and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as more conspicuously
well done than the former. We had a regular daily competition to guess
the vessel’s progress; and twelve o’clock, when the result was published
in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of considerable interest. But
the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was laid upon our guesses. From the
Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken. We had,
besides, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which we had rebaptized,
in more manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own favourite game;
but there were many who preferred another, the humour of which was to box
a person’s ears until he found out who had cuffed him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather,
and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster like bees,
sitting between each other’s feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories
and laughter went around. The children climbed about the shrouds. White
faces appeared for the first time, and began to take on colour from the
wind. I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after
another, and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly,
down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and
jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air
and throw in the interest of human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with
little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about
nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in
social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was
as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. It was
astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their
presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes
searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at
their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing.
Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how
wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth
very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no
shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these
damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their
squire. Not a word was said; only when they were gone Mackay sullenly
damned their impudence under his breath; but we were all conscious of an
icy influence and a dead break in the course of our enjoyment.
STEERAGE TYPES
We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like a
beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow’s-feet
round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache; a
miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago; an alpaca
coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole, no buttons to his
trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled all over with
impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a
situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord.
Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written
on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in
Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the
same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think
I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but
there was entertainment in the man’s demeanour. You might call him a
half-educated Irish Tigg.
Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his antecedents.
Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him down for a harmless
spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand roubles, and whose father
had now despatched him to America by way of penance. Either tale might
flourish in security; there was no contradiction to be feared, for the
hero spoke not one word of English. I got on with him lumberingly enough
in broken German, and learned from his own lips that he had been an
apothecary. He carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book,
and remarked that it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood
out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness. The
first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the
features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the eye
both reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and soft, with an
expression of dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on desperate
circumstances and never looked on them without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not resolution.’
‘The resolution to endure,’ I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘_Ach_, _ja_,’ with gusto,
like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions. Indeed,
he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he said, had
been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of the steerage
may have represented at least some shadow of the truth. Once, and once
only, he sang a song at our concerts; standing forth without
embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long arms
frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a suitable
piece of music, as deep as a cow’s bellow and wild like the White Sea.
He was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners.
At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to him, but those with
whom he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in
the condemnation of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be changed;
the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new
ideas, ‘_wie eine feine Violine_,’ were audible among the big empty drum
notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival, though
with a somewhat indistinct and childish hope.
We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades. It was
the son who sang the ‘Death of Nelson’ under such contrarious
circumstances. He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he could
touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and piccolo in
a professional string band. His repertory of songs was, besides,
inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best to the very
worst within his reach. Nor did he seem to make the least distinction
between these extremes, but would 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.
THE SICK MAN
One night Jones, the young O’Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-arm
and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew
chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and the
fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its unwelcome
outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a mosquito. Even
the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to the
rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was impossible
in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet
scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We asked him what
was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a
voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, that he had
been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had walked the deck
against fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen where we found
him.
Jones remained by his side, while O’Reilly and I hurried off to seek the
doctor. We knocked in vain at the doctor’s cabin; there came no reply;
nor could we find any one to guide us. It was no time for delicacy; so
we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder and touching my hat
to the officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as I could—
‘I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in the
lee scuppers; and I can’t find the doctor.’
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat harshly,
‘Well, _I_ can’t leave the bridge, my man,’ said he.
‘No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,’ I returned.
‘Is it one of the crew?’ he asked.
‘I believe him to be a fireman,’ I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly, whether
it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or from something
conciliatory in my address, the officer in question was immediately
relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much freer from
constraint, advised me to find a steward and despatch him in quest of the
doctor, who would now be in the smoking-room over his pipe.
One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down our
companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a night.
Let me call him Blackwood. O’Reilly and I rattled down the companion,
breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and perched across the
carpenters bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper,
Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang in his
speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair were enjoying a
deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare say he was tired with his day’s
work, and eminently comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did
not stop to consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.
‘Steward,’ said I, ‘there’s a man lying bad with cramp, and I can’t find
the doctor.’
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is the
prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth—
‘That’s none of my business,’ said he. ‘I don’t care.’
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought of
his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I glanced
at O’Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like assault and
battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card than violence.
‘You will have to make it your business,’ said I, ‘for I am sent to you
by the officer on the bridge.’
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his pipe,
gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand strolling. From
that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as though
he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a better
impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and two
or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was promptly
negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie;
but as it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks,
O’Reilly and I supported him between us. It was only by main force that
we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought in
his paroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably when he
resigned himself to our control.
‘O let me lie!’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll no’ get better anyway.’ And then,
with a moan that went to my heart, ‘O why did I come upon this miserable
journey?’
I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in the
close, tossing steerage: ‘O why left I my hame?’
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook
scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he sought
to borrow. The scullion was backward. ‘Was it one of the crew?’ he
asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that it
was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us at an
easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger. The light,
as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled
with years; but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the
expression and even the design of his face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.
‘_It’s only a passenger_!’ said he; and turning about, made, lantern and
all, for the galley.
‘He’s a man anyway,’ cried Jones in indignation.
‘Nobody said he was a woman,’ said a gruff voice, which I recognised for
that of the bo’s’un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now the
officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck
rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him not.
‘No?’ he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft in
person.
Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough and
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 orders 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 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 blond 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
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, 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 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 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 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 prison 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 seem to
have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement. Why he did not go
to the Sailors’ House 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 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 seaman, 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 tribute of a glance;
and though I had often not detected it when it was 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
failings 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 born idleness, either
eating fruit or standing with his back against a 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 where 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 a 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 circumstances, 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 offense 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 Crœsus 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 solder into the battle of life,
than in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an office, like Von
Moltke, and only directs the manœuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear
about the career of him who is in the thick of business; to whom one
change of market means 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 all who are thus situated partakes
in a small way 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 cautious 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
Cévennes, 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 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.
It 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 Vasco’s seamen,
‘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 downstairs. 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-wagon. It rained
miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New
York, there was scarce 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 minutes 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
Judæa are gone by forever, 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 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 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
answers 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 toward 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 meals and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this
word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second {92} and far less
agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.
II.
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
A FRAGMENT
1871
Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity
may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees
may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same principle, I may
say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any of my
little journeyings and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot describe
a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been before me only
a very little while before; I must allow my recollections to get
thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure
gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a process
of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the
Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I am
obliged to write letters during the course of my little excursion, I so
interfere with the process that I can never again find out what is worthy
of being preserved, or what should be given in full length, what in
torso, or what merely in profile. This process of incubation may be
unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid that I have made this
mistake with the present journey. Like a bad daguerreotype, great part
of it has been entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning
and nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little patch
of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an old picture
that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the cleaner. I remember
a tale of an old Scots minister called upon suddenly to preach, who had
hastily snatched an old sermon out of his study and found himself in the
pulpit before he noticed that the rats had been making free with his
manuscript and eaten the first two or three pages away; he gravely
explained to the congregation how he found himself situated: ‘And now,’
said he, ‘let us just begin where the rats have left off.’ I must follow
the divine’s example, and take up the thread of my discourse where it
first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.
COCKERMOUTH
I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so,
it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight lit up
English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,—as it
were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever really be more
unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that is set between
England and Scotland—a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so
difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood;
pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one
would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few
years of quarrelsome isolation—a mere forenoon’s tiff, as one may call
it, in comparison with the great historical cycles—has so separated their
thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor steamers, nor
railways, nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, seem able to
obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration of another century
or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of
grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had been walking out
of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in a
dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes of
the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and voices
of the gossips round about me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and
then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in the spring
evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to grow
upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill—a great, gaunt
promontory of building,—half on dry ground and half arched over the
stream. The road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between
the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden enclosure, with a
small house and a large signboard within its privet hedge. I was pleased
to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of a sanded
parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society of parochial gossips
seated within over their churchwardens; but as I drew near, the board
displayed its superscription, and I could read the name of Smethurst, and
the designation of ‘Canadian Felt Hat Manufacturers.’ There was no more
hope of evening fellowship, and I could only stroll on by the river-side,
under the trees. The water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and
dusted all over with a little mist of flying insects. There were some
amorous ducks, also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a
little farther down. But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I
was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that had
been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to
the inn, and supper, and my bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress my
intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to Furness,
and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by that last
and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to introduce
tradition and authority into the choice of a man’s own pleasures. I can
excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical heresies, because
them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by present
argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures. If I prefer tame
scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and woodlands
to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont Blanc; or if I prefer
a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or two chosen companions,
to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely
state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to establish them as
principles. This is not the general rule, however, and accordingly the
waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to hear the route that
I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to Cockermouth for
pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in vain that I put up
a little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I said
I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that there was ‘nothing
to see there’—that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood; and at last, as the
handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave way, as men always do
in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to leave for Keswick by a
train in the early evening.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with ‘nothing to
see’; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague
picture of the town and all its surroundings. I might have dodged
happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle and in
and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person in a
strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to make set
habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up
the same, road that I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the
hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put to
await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he looked
something like the typical Jew old-clothes man. As I drew near, he came
sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so curious an expression on
his face that I instinctively prepared myself to apologise for some
unwitting trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in this
belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me going up this way last
night; and after having answered in the affirmative, I waited in some
alarm for the rest of my indictment. But the good man’s heart was full
of peace; and he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about
fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright
shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats aside to
go along the water-side and show me where the large trout commonly lay,
underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much disappointed, for my
sake, that there were none visible just then. Then he wandered off on to
another tack, and stood a great while out in the middle of a meadow in
the hot sunshine, trying to make out that he had known me before, or, if
not me, some friend of mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we
should feel more friendly and at our ease with one another. At last he
made a little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best
writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the sense,
and that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that he had little
things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to recall; and
that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now died out in
himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and active. Then he
told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river above the dam which
he was going to lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in
after years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the
recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo present
enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the sake of
manufacturing ‘a reminiscence’ for himself; but there was something
singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker found in making
reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish luxury can
be imagined. After he had unmoored his little embarkation, and seen me
safely shoved off into midstream, he ran away back to his hats with the
air of a man who had only just recollected that he had anything to do.
I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very nice
punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting moored to
an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I was bound in
gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and cherish its
recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be
that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came ashore
again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself and
his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than
anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation. In
order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself for
having failed to enjoy his treat sufficiently, I determined to continue
up the river, and, at all prices, to find some other way back into the
town in time for dinner. As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with
admiration; a look into that man’s mind was like a retrospect over the
smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from the
Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men. I cannot be very
grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I
find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full
of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a
hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that
what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life’s wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and
contentment.
ANOTHER
I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp. After I had
forced my way through a gentleman’s grounds, I came out on the high road,
and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the top of a long
hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom. An Irish
beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side, came up to ask
for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little tragedy of her
life. Her own sister, she told me, had seduced her husband from her
after many years of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving her
destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. She seemed quite hopeful
and cheery, and, though she was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her
husband’s earnings, she made no pretence of despair at the loss of his
affection; some day she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see
her duly righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
gratefully received. While she was telling all this in the most
matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man, with
a high white hat and darkish clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid
pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half-salutation.
Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a business-like way whether
she had anything to do, whether she were a Catholic or a Protestant,
whether she could read, and so forth; and then, after a few kind words
and some sweeties to the child, he despatched the mother with some tracts
about Biddy and the Priest, and the Orangeman’s Bible. I was a little
amused at his abrupt manner, for he was still a young man, and had
somewhat the air of a navy officer; but he tackled me with great
solemnity. I could make fun of what he said, for I do not think it was
very wise; but the subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting
light, so I shall only say that he related to me his own conversion,
which had been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency of
a gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my case,
he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave them to me,
and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.
LAST OF SMETHURST
That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick, and
was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes. This
fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually putting
his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they saw _him_
coming. At last, when the train was already in motion, there was a
commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear to our carriage door.
_He_ had arrived. In the hurry I could just see Smethurst, red and
panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my companion’s outstretched
band, and hear him crying his farewells after us as we slipped out of the
station at an ever accelerating pace. I said something about it being a
close run, and the broad man, already engaged in filling one of the
pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of his own stupidity in
forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had good-naturedly gone
down town at the last moment to supply the omission. I mentioned that I
had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had been very polite to me;
and we fell into a discussion of the hatter’s merits that lasted some
time and left us quite good friends at its conclusion. The topic was
productive of goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked about the
season, and agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick
and sup in company. As he had some business in the town which would
occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time and
go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised wonders.
The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a place
where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as I went
along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew in gusts
from the far end of the lake. The sky was covered with flying scud; and,
as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and
moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my
hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust,
when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden and
violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time
there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into
the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter
and disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of the ground. I
accosted them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to
be told the names of all manner of hills and woods and places that I did
not wish to know, and we stood together for a while and had an amusing
little talk. The wind, too, made himself of the party, brought the
colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do to repress their
drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to pirouette round and
round upon her toes (as girls do) when some specially strong gust had got
the advantage over her. They were just high enough up in the social
order not to be afraid to speak to a gentleman; and just low enough to
feel a little tremor, a nervous consciousness of wrong-doing—of stolen
waters, that gave a considerable zest to our most innocent interview.
They were as much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a
wicked baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no
inclination to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and
waterfalls and on to more promising subjects, when a young man was
descried coming along the path from the direction of Keswick. Now
whether he was the young man of one of my friends, or the brother of one
of them, or indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but they
incontinently said that they must be going, and went away up the path
with friendly salutations. I need not say that I found the lake and the
moonlight rather dull after their departure, and speedily found my way
back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water in the commercial room with
my late fellow-traveller. In the smoking-room there was a tall dark man
with a moustache, in an ulster coat, who had got the best place and was
monopolising most of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to
me from both sides, that this was the manager of a London theatre. The
presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must own that
the manager showed himself equal to his position. He had a large fat
pocket-book, from which he produced poem after poem, written on the backs
of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing could be more humorous than his
recitation of these elegant extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes with
which he varied the entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less
countrified in my appearance than in most of the company, he singled me
out to corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with one
little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for confirmation.
The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the elbows with the
manager, until I think that some of the glory of that great man settled
by reflection upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second person in
the smoking-room as he was the first. For a young man, this was a
position of some distinction, I think you will admit. . . .
III.
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
1875
‘Nous ne décrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforçons d’exprimer sobrement et simplement l’impression que nous en
avons reçue.’—M. ANDRÉ THEURIET, ‘L’Automne dans les Bois,’ Revue des
Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. {106}
A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave upon
us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and dissipated if
we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the quick foot. Things fall
for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them for a moment
in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone before the sun
is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can steal like a
dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round
towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the landscape (as
we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the moment only
during which the effect endures; and we are away before the effect can
change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long scroll of continuous
wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment of the
season, the weather and the landscape, and certain to be unified more and
more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes of thought. So that
we who have only looked at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as
we went by, will have a conception of it far more memorable and
articulate than a man who has lived there all his life from a child
upwards, and had his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow,
and belied by that of the day after, till at length the stable
characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him behind the
confusion of variable effect.
I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that in
which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only by
the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will and
contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He may
change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow vague
preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the shadow or
the sun-shine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns
immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him
into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon.
In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang of
reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his self-respect. It is
true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free action,
the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only; and as they
begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that they have made
for themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have entertained
for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they know not why.
They will be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke
above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned one village and
not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable power. And yet
a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious liberty, and they will
begin to hear imperious voices calling on them to return; and some
passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation, will set its
hand upon their shoulder and lead them back into the old paths. Once and
again we have all made the experiment. We know the end of it right well.
And yet if we make it for the hundredth time to-morrow: it will have the
same charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we have
felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for ever from
our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and circumscriptions,
and go forward as a new creature into a new world.
It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage me up
the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for walking
at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and
lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour reacted
on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees
were still fairly green, shot through with bright autumnal yellows,
bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the solid bricks of woodland
that lay squarely on slope and hill-top were not green, but russet and
grey, and ever less russet and more grey as they drew off into the
distance. As they drew off into the distance, also, the woods seemed to
mass themselves together, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon
the limit of one’s view. Not that this massing was complete, or gave the
idea of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long Indian
file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly enough,
against the sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have seen the effect
employed cleverly in art, and such long line of single trees thrown out
against the customary sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain
fantastic effect that was not to be despised; but this was over water and
level land, where it did not jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills
and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted,
the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was something so
sketchy and merely impressional about these distant single trees on the
horizon that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to art,
than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, ‘How like a picture!’
for once that we say, ‘How like the truth!’ The forms in which we learn
to think of landscape are forms that we have got from painted canvas.
Any man can see and understand a picture; it is reserved for the few to
separate anything out of the confusion of nature, and see that distinctly
and with intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got by
that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of
confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably in colour, for
it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and the distance I could
see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful carolling of larks which
seemed to follow me as I went. Indeed, during all the time I was in that
country the larks did not desert me. The air was alive with them from
High Wycombe to Tring; and as, day after day, their ‘shrill delight’ fell
upon me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of the
country, that I could have baptized it ‘The Country of Larks.’ This, of
course, might just as well have been in early spring; but everything else
was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later year. There was no
stir of insects in the grass. The sunshine was more golden, and gave
less heat than summer sunshine; and the shadows under the hedge were
somewhat blue and misty. It was only in autumn that you could have seen
the mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves
that lay about the road, and covered the surface of wayside pools so
thickly that the sun was reflected only here and there from little joints
and pinholes in that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would have
been troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of
fowling-pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.
For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly still.
They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing of the
larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling of isolation
that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me quicken my steps
eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road. This fellow-voyager
proved to be no less a person than the parish constable. It had occurred
to me that in a district which was so little populous and so well wooded,
a criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and-seek with the
authorities for months; and this idea was strengthened by the aspect of
the portly constable as he walked by my side with deliberate dignity and
turned-out toes. But a few minutes’ converse set my heart at rest.
These rural criminals are very tame birds, it appeared. If my informant
did not immediately lay his hand on an offender, he was content to wait;
some evening after nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the
outlaw, weary of outlawry, would give himself quietly up to undergo
sentence, and resume his position in the life of the country-side.
Married men caused him no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by the
foot. Sooner or later they would come back to see their wives, a peeping
neighbour would pass the word, and my portly constable would walk quietly
over and take the bird sitting. And if there were a few who had no
particular ties in the neighbourhood, and preferred to shift into another
county when they fell into trouble, their departure moved the placid
constable in no degree. He was of Dogberry’s opinion; and if a man would
not stand in the Prince’s name, he took no note of him, but let him go,
and thanked God he was rid of a knave. And surely the crime and the law
were in admirable keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic
offender. The officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the
criminal came to visit him, and the criminal coming—it was a fair match.
One felt as if this must have been the order in that delightful seaboard
Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in such sweet accents, and the
Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shearers danced
with nosegays in their bosoms, and chanted their three songs apiece at
the old shepherd’s festival; and one could not help picturing to oneself
what havoc among good peoples purses, and tribulation for benignant
constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and footpath,
of a new Autolycus.
Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and struck
across country. It was rather a revelation to pass from between the
hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a great coming and
going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in every second field, lusty
horses and stout country-folk a-ploughing. The way I followed took me
through many fields thus occupied, and through many strips of plantation,
and then over a little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet,
set with tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making ready for the
winter, and so back again into the quiet road. I was now not far from
the end of my day’s journey. A few hundred yards farther, and, passing
through a gap in the hedge, I began to go down hill through a pretty
extensive tract of young beeches. I was soon in shadow myself, but the
afternoon sun still coloured the upmost boughs of the wood, and made a
fire over my head in the autumnal foliage. A little faint vapour lay
among the slim tree-stems in the bottom of the hollow; and from farther
up I heard from time to time an outburst of gross laughter, as though
clowns were making merry in the bush. There was something about the
atmosphere that brought all sights and sounds home to one with a singular
purity, so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with water. After
I had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began to remount the
hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got back again, from the
head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in front of me a
donkey tied to a tree. Now, I have a certain liking for donkeys,
principally, I believe, because of the delightful things that Sterne has
written of them. But this was not after the pattern of the ass at Lyons.
He was of a white colour, that seemed to fit him rather for rare festal
occasions than for constant drudgery. Besides, he was very small, and of
the daintiest portions you can imagine in a donkey. And so, sure enough,
you had only to look at him to see he had never worked. There was
something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that of a
schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling. It was
plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than they
had plodded with a freight through miry lanes. He was altogether a
fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and though he was just then
somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of the levity of his
disposition by impudently wagging his ears at me as I drew near. I say
he was somewhat solemnised just then; for, with the admirable instinct of
all men and animals under restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter
about the tree that he could go neither back nor forwards, nor so much as
put down his head to browse. There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled,
part angry, part, I believe, amused. He had not given up hope, and dully
revolved the problem in his head, giving ever and again another jerk at
the few inches of free rope that still remained unwound. A humorous sort
of sympathy for the creature took hold upon me. I went up, and, not
without some trouble on my part, and much distrust and resistance on the
part of Neddy, got him forced backwards until the whole length of the
halter was set loose, and he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to
make him. I was pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to a
fellow-creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see
how he was profiting by his freedom. The brute was looking after me; and
no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long white face into the
air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to bray derisively. If
ever any one person made a grimace at another, that donkey made a grimace
at me. The hardened ingratitude of his behaviour, and the impertinence
that inspired his whole face as he curled up his lip, and showed his
teeth, and began to bray, so tickled me, and was so much in keeping with
what I had imagined to myself about his character, that I could not find
it in my heart to be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter.
This seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by
way of rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until
I began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned
to pursue my way. In so doing—it was like going suddenly into cold
water—I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She was
all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond question
that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white donkey in
the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she had already
recommended her spirit most religiously to Heaven, and prepared herself
for the worst. And so, to reassure her, I uncovered and besought her,
after a very staid fashion, to put me on my way to Great Missenden. Her
voice trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at
rest; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the path until I came
to the end of the wood, and then I should see the village below me in the
bottom of the valley. And, with mutual courtesies, the little old maid
and I went on our respective ways.
Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden was close at hand, as she had
said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms about it.
The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the afternoon sunshine.
The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled the neighbouring fields and
hung about the quaint street corners. A little above, the church sits
well back on its haunches against the hillside—an attitude for a church,
you know, that makes it look as if it could be ever so much higher if it
liked; and the trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a density of
shade in the churchyard. A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many
boards and posters about threatening dire punishment against those who
broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, and offering rewards
for the apprehension of those who had done the like already. It was fair
day in Great Missenden. There were three stalls set up, _sub jove_, for
the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and a great number of holiday children
thronged about the stalls and noisily invaded every corner of the
straggling village. They came round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously
upon penny trumpets as though they imagined I should fall to pieces like
the battlements of Jericho. I noticed one among them who could make a
wheel of himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave
pre-eminence upon the strength of the accomplishment. By and by,
however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors, leaving the
fair, I fancy, at its height.
Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. It was pitch-dark in the
village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for a light here
and there in an uncurtained window or from an open door. Into one such
window I was rude enough to peep, and saw within a charming _genre_
picture. In a room, all white wainscot and crimson wall-paper, a perfect
gem of colour after the black, empty darkness in which I had been
groping, a pretty girl was telling a story, as well as I could make out,
to an attentive child upon her knee, while an old woman sat placidly
dozing over the fire. You may be sure I was not behindhand with a story
for myself—a good old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and the
village melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney,
and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should love,
and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson room.
Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we are inspired
with when we look through a window into other people’s lives; and I think
Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same text. The subject, at least,
is one that I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember, night after
night, at Brussels, watching a good family sup together, make merry, and
retire to rest; and night after night I waited to see the candles lit,
and the salad made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without
any abatement of interest. Night after night I found the scene rivet my
attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint
imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the _Arabian Nights_ hinges upon
this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other people’s
roofs, and going about behind the scenes of life with the Caliph and the
serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, besides; it is salutary
to get out of ourselves and see people living together in perfect
unconsciousness of our existence, as they will live when we are gone. If
to-morrow the blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is realised, the
girl will none the less tell stories to the child on her lap in the
cottage at Great Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and
mix their salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill in
the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping garden
behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the tune of my
landlady’s lamentations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers that had
been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so much pleased in the
summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered over by white
butterflies. And now, look at the end of it! She could nowise reconcile
this with her moral sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies are
created with a side-look to the composition of improving apologues, it is
not altogether easy, even for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M’Cosh,
to decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long
and abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
the distance driven by him during eight years’ service on the box of the
Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We tackled the
question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for Sundays
and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant conclusion of our
labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna in my information. I did
not know the circumference of the earth. The landlord knew it, to be
sure—plainly he had made the same calculation twice and once before,—but
he wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the moment I showed
myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in the result.
Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either
hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a sea,
before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook over the
place. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was shallow, and a
little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions. From the level
to which I have now attained the fields were exposed before me like a
map, and I could see all that bustle of autumn field-work which had been
hid from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only for a
moment as I followed the footpath. Wendover lay well down in the midst,
with mountains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to
the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of the
fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it became a mere
hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and snatches of
slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over the
horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and there with blue, and
with certain faint russets that looked as if they were reflections of the
colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear the ploughmen shouting
to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead,
and, from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All these noises came to me very thin
and distinct in the clear air. There was a wonderful sentiment of
distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky footholds
cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover and, as far as I could see,
all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech
plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been suffered to
extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about the
shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the
summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so matted
together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather. The
prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there
with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond the
outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the wood; and as
soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green
forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin foliage. In places where the
wood had itself for a background and the trees were massed together
thickly, the colour became intensified and almost gem-like: a perfect
fire green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature; but
they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned and wound
among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke the light up
pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, straight
tree-stems with the light running down them as down the shafts of
pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to something, and led only to
a corner of sombre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of delicate
foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along the top of
it, so that against a dark background it seemed almost luminous. There
was a great bush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket
than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and
the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth, had
in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet carpeting
of last year’s leaves. The spirit of the place seemed to be all
attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath to number my
footfalls. One could not help feeling that there ought to be some reason
for this stillness; whether, as the bright old legend goes, Pan lay
somewhere near in siesta, or whether, perhaps, the heaven was meditating
rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through the leaves.
It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon,
of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only where the path lay
much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of
the wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be
walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature
fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a
moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and change and melt
one into another, as I continued to go forward, and so shift my point of
view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling,
now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this
noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through the
trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the tops
of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat
little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing almost to the door of
it. Just before me, however, as I came upon the path, the trees drew
back and let in a wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It was
here that the noises had their origin. More than a score of peacocks
(there are altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of
peahens, and a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary
barn-door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn among
the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and fro, and
came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which the surface
was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his head
along the ground after the scattered corn. The clucking, cooing noise
that had led me thither was formed by the blending together of countless
expressions of individual contentment into one collective expression of
contentment, or general grace during meat. Every now and again a big
peacock would separate himself from the mob and take a stately turn or
two about the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon the rail, and
there shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with himself and what
he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none of these admirable
birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail. Tails, it
seemed, were out of season just then. But they had their necks for all
that; and by their necks alone they do as much surpass all the other
birds of our grey climate as they fall in quality of song below the
blackbird or the lark. Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade
of glorious colour and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in
mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady’s butterflies at
Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the
consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a
fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without
having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these
melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would have
given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all the spring
woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the same extent in
nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a man’s eyes; and to
come upon so many of them, after these acres of stone-coloured heavens
and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and white roads, was like
going three whole days’ journey to the southward, or a month back into
the summer.
I was sorry to leave _Peacock Farm_—for so the place is called, after the
name of its splendid pensioners—and go forwards again in the quiet woods.
It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches; and as the day
declined the colour faded out of the foliage; and shadow, without form
and void, took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and delicate
gradations of living green that had before accompanied my walk. I had
been sorry to leave _Peacock Farm_, but I was not sorry to find myself
once more in the open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking
evening sky, and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street should
go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen with a new
idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of neighbours to join in
his heresy. It would have somewhat the look of an abortive
watering-place, such as we may now see them here and there along the
coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some of
them, and the look of long habitation, of a life that is settled and
rooted, and makes it worth while to train flowers about the windows, and
otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. The
church, which might perhaps have served as rallying-point for these loose
houses, and pulled the township into something like intelligible unity,
stands some distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the
public buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be
the principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and three
peaked gables, and many swallows’ nests plastered about the eaves.
The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I never
saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour in
which I spent the remainder of the evening. It was a short oblong in
shape, save that the fireplace was built across one of the angles so as
to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly truncated
by a corner cupboard. The wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey
carpet on the floor, so old that it might have been imported by Walter
Shandy before he retired, worn almost through in some places, but in
others making a good show of blues and oranges, none the less harmonious
for being somewhat faded. The corner cupboard was agreeable in design;
and there were just the right things upon the shelves—decanters and
tumblers, and blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water. The
furniture was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down
to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. And you may fancy
how pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over by the light of a
brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of
perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror above the
chimney. As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept looking round
with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was about me,
and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in forming
part of it. The book I read was about Italy in th
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