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.
