From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded
unusually ominous and grave. I had heard enough
revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow-passengers;
but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell discredited
from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was
calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved
the policy which had been pursued by labour in the
past; and yet this was his panacea,—to
rend the old country from end to end, and from top
to bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel
it with the hand of violence.
THE STOWAWAYS
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 blackguardly 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 some one 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 hin, tell his own stories.
They were so swingingly 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. and 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 thumb-nail
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 colouring
of rhetoric and rodomontade, must have been the style
of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of duchesses
and hostlers.
