Essays of Travel Tale 3 - The Amateur Emigrant Part C

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

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Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

CHAPTER I. THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT. PART C.

THE STOAWAYS. 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 black, guardly 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 someone 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 swingily 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&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 thumbnail 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 coloring of rhetoric, and Brodeur Montaude must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of duchesses and hostilers. 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 10,000. It sounded so far exactly like an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life as such, and one as I had imagined. But then there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost impotent greed after retuities, and a truly impotent disregard for truth. And then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, of woolage, 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 trine.

At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away from the companion, and I could ask McKay who and what he was. That, said McKay, 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 this statement as McKay'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.