White faces appeared for the first time, and
began to take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work
making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than
moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly, down sat the fiddler
in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and
ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and
throw in the interest of human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way
with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful
air about nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of
the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea
that one person was as good as another. But I began to be troubled
by this episode. It was astonishing what insults these people
managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their
clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters
and incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were
too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till
they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they
would depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth very
innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no
shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which
these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances
of their squire. Not a word was said; only when they were gone
Mackay sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we
were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the
course of our enjoyment.
STEERAGE TYPES
We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like
a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-
feet round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his
moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages
long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without
hyperbole, no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and
tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of
sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of
his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could
overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his
brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in
Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in
the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do
not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or
interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour.
You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.
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