Essays of Travel | Page 8

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