The Amateur Emigrant Chapter 8 - New York

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:01)

Chapter 8 of The Amateur Emigrant This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter 8 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 whooped 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 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 Savines, and that by a learned professor, and when I reached Prudel's 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 those 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 kind of incident, and shall be gratified to the best of my power. My fellow passenger, whom we shall call Mahorton, 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, past the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight struck. Then they applied themself 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 began 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 a piece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the house. There, in a small room, the man in the white cap wished them pleasant sombers.

It was varnished 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 Mahorton'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 a bed. Mahorton and his comrade stared at each other, like Vasco's seaman, 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 Mahorton, 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 persons sat crouching and silent in the dark. For a second or two these five persons looked at each other in the eyes. Then the curtain was dropped, and Mahorton 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 the 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 scarcer lull and no cessation of the downpour. The roadways were flooded, a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air. The restaurants smelled heavily of wet people and wet clothing.