The Amateur Emigrant Chapter 3 - Steerage Scenes

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Chapter 3 of The Amateur Immigrant. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Amateur Immigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson. 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 purchase 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 interp. I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there till 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 unbeloadious in steerage No. 1, and on the Monday forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in strathby 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 him in his fiddle case, and he seemed alive to the fact.

It is a privilege, I said. He thought while upon the word, turning her over into Scott's head, I then answered with conviction, yes, a privilege.

That night I was summoned by Merrily Dance the Quaker's wife into the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5 This was, properly speaking, but a strip across a deck-house, knit by a sickly lantern which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship. Through the open side 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 in 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 feet long, which stood for orchestra and seats of honour. In the one balcony five slattonly 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 Scott's 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 bonnie hornpipe now, he would say. It's a great favourite with performers. They danced the sand dance to it. And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly it would be along, clash, with uplifted finger and glowing supplicating eyes. He's going to play old 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 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 seaman to the star. His grand of it, he said confidently, his master was a musical man. Indeed, the musical man had left his mark, for our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old ears. Lurgy of Buckingham, for instance, he knew only as a quick jigging figure in the 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 afterward repeatedly, and found him always the same quick fiery bit of a man, not without brains, but he never showed such an 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 contemplable, although misplaced. The dancing was but feebly carried on, the space was almost impractically 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 landings.