Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 29

1879

“Make way! Move!” At the dock in Greenock, porters wheeling carts loaded head-high with baggage struggled through the throngs of people pushing to board the Devonia. It was the ?rst week of August, and Louis thought he might die of heat prostration as he was swept along with the sweating people around him. In the distance beyond, he saw that the crowd was being funneled through a narrow gateway as they approached the steamer. On his back he wore a knapsack; in one hand he clutched a valise and, in the other, a railway rug. Half carrying, half dragging the rug, he rued his decision to carry books in it. Six heavy volumes of George Bancroft’s History of the United States weighed down the satchel by a good  stone  and  a  half.  What  had  he  been  thinking?  He  was  glad  for  the  valise  he’d brought, though. When the snaking mass of humanity stopped, he sat down on the valise and for a brief moment congratulated himself on his impromptu seat. Just as quickly, he saw the folly of his ingenuity. The crowd began moving again, and he was nearly run over by the human wave. Louis fought his way back to his feet, heaved up his bag, and pushed onward with the others, past luggage carts that had been abandoned by a few frustrated porters. Ahead, the steamer loomed black and long as a city block. Three masts it had, with a red stack in the middle. At the starboard side of the ship, the mob tapered itself into a docile stripe that moved upward and into the steamer.

Onboard,  Louis  followed  the  directions  to  his  second-cabin  bunk.  Carved  out  of  the steerage  section  in  the  bowels  of  the  ship,  the  second  cabin  was  cordoned  o?  by  a perforated screen of wood. Other than the table he got for his extra two guineas, and the thin partition, Louis’s lot as a second-cabin inmate was not so di?erent from that of the men and women in steerage. Bodies were stacked into what looked like cages set into the walls of the ship, each with sixteen bunks. It didn’t take long to discern that people had separated   themselves   into   sections   according   to   their   languages:   Germans   and Scandinavians in the starboard pens; English speakers mostly forward. In Steerage No. 1, down two flights of steps and set into the nose of the ship, he found mostly single men.
Once he’d settled into his place, he walked around to have a better look at his fellow passengers’ accommodations. People were loading their belongings into their bunks and taking out of bags the tin cups and utensils they had brought for dining. That was the other

part of the second-cabin bargain: Louis didn’t have to provide his own eating implements, nor his own bedding.

The mood of that ?rst day was almost gay; there was a hopeful feeling in the air as the Devonia  moved  out  of  the  harbor.  In  his  second-cabin  section,  Louis’s  fellow  travelers introduced themselves. There was a Scotsman called “Irish Stew,” a newly married young English couple, and a frail woman bound for Kansas who continually consulted her watch, which was set to Glasgow time. There was also a pair of young men traveling together, a Scot and a young Irishman who claimed to be an American until his charade was detected. A?ronted by the notion that any man would deny his homeland, Louis could not bring himself to talk to the fool for the rest of the voyage.

It was in the evening of the second day that the other passengers began to reveal their various talents. There was a ?ddler bunked in the nose of the boat, where the ship’s most violent bucking occurred, who had played a few tunes the ?rst night before being taken terribly seasick. The ?ddler couldn’t be roused from his bed, so the others did what they could. They gathered up by the main deckhouse, where Louis discoursed upon his ?ageolet, while a few men produced pennywhistles, a small drum, and an accordian to o?er up their repertoires. But it was the singers—mostly Scots—who claimed the day. One by one, they overcame their shyness to stand up and sing a Scottish verse that touched upon everyone’s hearts; “O why left I my hame?”

Louis  ate  the  same  porridge  for  breakfast  as  the  men  and  women  in  steerage;  at dinnertime, atop a dirty tablecloth, he downed the same soup—Irish stew—croquettes, beef, potatoes, and excellent bread. He was taken aback by the complaints about the food. The workingmen in steerage insisted that the food was inedible and resorted to their caches of tinned ?sh. Louis was puzzled, for he considered his palate fairly well traveled. This was steamer fare, to be sure, and the di?erence between the co?ee and tea was negligible, but he found the food quite good. On pudding days—Tuesday and Thursday—the emigrants voiced their pleasure. More often they complained about the lack of niceties as if it were a social injustice.

The only second-cabin passenger whom Louis befriended was one Mr. Jones, a Welsh blacksmith in the act of reinventing himself as a salesman. At ?rst Louis took him for a countryman, as his dialect was hard to pin down. He was a widower who once was wealthy enough, though his money was all gone. Yet he was going forward and felt con?dent that

the patent medicine he intended to peddle in America would save his hide.
“Golden Oil, Mr. Stevenson,” he said. “If you have the croup or a broken ?ngernail, come to me, sir, and I shall cure it.”

Louis had not officially declared his own line of business until Mr. Jones inquired. “A writer chap,” he answered when pressed.

“What are you writing?”

“A story.”

“You don’t say! A made-up story?” “Yes.”

Mr. Jones let out a hearty laugh. “Oh, I could help you with some lyin’ stories.” “This is about a  man who is like me,” Louis said,  “a  man who enjoys observing and
collecting ‘types,’ so to speak—big personalities. He’s fascinated by all sorts of people, and he comes upon a man who is a complete fraud, a man who takes advantage of foreigners in Paris by—”

Mr. Jones looked stricken. “Say no more. I shall read it when it is published.” Jones  seemed  content  to  simply  observe  a  writer  working.  When  other  steerage
passengers gathered around Louis and joked about his enterprise as he hunkered down over his  notebook,  Mr.  Jones  hushed  them.  One  afternoon,  though,  the  man  caught  Louis furtively taking notes in the shadows as a group of men spoke about abandoned mills and plows, about factory girls nearly starving.

“I know what you’re up to.” Jones’s whisper was testy.  “You’re going to tell about us. About where we come from and what we eat and what torments the pitiful souls are going through. Eh? You’re spyin’ in the slums, ain’t ye?”

Louis felt his neck and face flush hot.

Jones shrugged. “I shan’t tell anyone,” he said, waving the bottle of Golden Oil. “We’re all imposters, one way or another.”

“Thank you,” Louis said softly.

After  that,  they  talked  deeply  at  the  end  of  the  day,  each  sharing  what  he  had experienced. Jones, it turned out, was a ?aneur of sorts, walking about observing what he could, given the restrictions on the boat.

“Seasickness is the great equalizer,” Mr. Jones remarked one evening. “I caught a glimpse of ?rst cabin today when I went up to speak to the steward about the food. He told me

there’s plenty of ‘em prostrate up there.”

“Ay, but it’s a universal condition down here,” Louis said. In the stu?y, common air of steerage, one man’s seasickness was everyone’s. Music seemed their only comfort. At one point Louis linked hands with a group of men who encircled a group of women to help reduce the swaying motion that was making them sick. The men sang “Lassie Wi’ the LintWhite Locks” sweetly enough to make Robert Burns weep, wherever he was.
Music could not save them, though. By the seventh day, the bunks smelled and looked like the pens of animals. A mess of tin cups, rotting food, ?lthy clothes, and soiled rags and sheets shared space on the shelves with the resident bodies in steerage. Louis took note of every unsavory detail. Among the ghostly faces with eyes at half-mast, he found men and women whose fine characters shone through the bleak circumstances.
Above  his  little  writing  table,  a  single  dim  lantern  swayed  in  the  cabin’s  perpetual twilight. Louis sat reading his notes and gloating over the embarrassment of riches that steerage provided. At last, real material! A book was building in his mind. It was beginning to flow, yes, he could feel it coming. He would call it The Amateur Emigrant.
He went up to sleep on the deck when he could and invited others to join him, but no one did. Up  top, he could lie looking  at the stars and think of  Fanny without tainting  her memory with the terrible smells below. The fresh air, cold as it was, calmed his stomach, cleansed  his  lungs.  Eavesdropping  among  the  emigrants,  he  had  pitied  them  for  their vague, unfounded dreams. With his head clear, he wondered if he was as big a dreamer as the rest. Here he was, rushing to see Fanny, with no real assurances from her. Was he on a fool’s errand?

When he returned to his writing table, he scribbled out a new paragraph for a story he’d begun, “The Story of a Lie.”

… the woman I love is somewhat of my handiwork; and the great lover, like the great painter, is he that can so embellish his subject as to make her more than human … To love a character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of … nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves.

One Tuesday morning the sea grew placid. Relieved passengers emerged on deck and strolled in their allotted space. Color returned to faces, and the ?ddler played his Celtic tunes. How emotionally intense the music of Louis’s homeland was, veering from exuberant joy  to  haunting  sorrow.  He  felt  his heart  leap  and sink  as the  tunes changed,  and he wondered if the airs struck the hearts of those passengers not from Scotland in the same

way. Around him people chatted merrily about what they would do ?rst after their feet hit the  land.  In  the  midst  of  the  gaiety,  three  unfamiliar  faces  appeared.  They  were  a gentleman and two young women from ?rst cabin who had come to have a look at the steerage crowd. As they stepped around the outstretched legs of people sitting on the deck, one of the women held a delicate forefinger to her nose.

Louis felt his chest expand with outrage. “If we are not allowed to enter their section of the deck,” he said indignantly, “they should not be allowed to enter ours.”
“Aye!” other voices chimed in.

At teatime the next day, when the steward came around with broken pieces of meat that had obviously been scraped from the plates of ?rst-cabin passengers, the crowd sent up a cry of disgust. Louis joined them. He wanted a  nice joint of meat as much as the next fellow.

As the steamer neared America, Louis’s brain fairly itched with excitement for his essay, and then he realized he simply itched. All over. The wretched linens he was so pleased to get for free as part of his two extra guineas were, no doubt about it, filled with mites.
When the ship pulled into New York, it was midday. Louis put on a pair of clean trousers he had reserved for the occasion, which promptly fell to his knees. He had lost ?fteen pounds, he guessed, and red welts crisscrossed his skinny legs and arms and belly where he had scratched himself to a pulp.