Under the Wide and Starry Sky (16 page)

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 first 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 off 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 different 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 first 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. Affronted 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 fiddler bunked in the nose of the boat, where the ship's most violent bucking occurred, who had played a few tunes the first night before being taken terribly seasick. The fiddler 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 flageolet, while a few men produced pennywhistles, a small drum, and an accordian to offer 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 fish. Louis was puzzled, for he considered his palate fairly well traveled. This was steamer fare, to be sure, and the difference between the coffee 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 first 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 confident 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 fingernail, 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 flaneur 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 first 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 stuffy, 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 Lint-White 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, filthy 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.”

One Tuesday morning the sea grew placid. Relieved passengers emerged on deck and strolled in their allotted space. Color returned to faces, and the fiddler 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 first 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 first 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 first-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 fifteen pounds, he guessed, and red welts crisscrossed his skinny legs and arms and belly where he had scratched himself to a pulp.

Rain soaked Louis and Jones as they left the
Devonia
and hurried through Manhattan's gritty streets in search of a hotel. After all the dire warnings on board about murderers lurking on every corner, they were relieved to find a friendly Irish family running a cheap boardinghouse not far from the docks. In the morning, when Louis went to collect waiting mail, he found a telegram from Monterey. It was from Fanny's sister, who was staying with her there at an inn. The message was simple and direct:
Fanny sick with brain fever
. Frantic, Louis grabbed his bag from the hotel, raced to the ferry terminal, and bought a ticket to Jersey City, where he would begin his train journey west.

Later the next day, relieved to be ensconced in his train seat with heads nodding around him, he pensively watched the lights of Philadelphia come and go before he fell into his own slumber. When he woke, the train was at a complete standstill in a hilly green stretch of country that looked not unlike England. An accident on the tracks up ahead had brought everything to a halt, and for an entire day, Louis sat in the train cars with the other frustrated passengers, unmoving and without food. It wasn't until the next night when the train pulled into Pittsburgh that he went to a café at the station. He'd not eaten for some thirty hours.

The emigrant train might have been merely uncomfortable if he had been in reasonable health. But the privations of the ocean voyage had come home to settle upon his profoundly reduced self. He was ill with fever, chills, and aches, but the worst of it was the itching. Louis expected he could forgive an itching man nearly anything.

He grinned darkly when he remembered he had packed a small bottle of laudanum. It wasn't enough to last the whole ten-day trip, but for now it was a miracle. Louis cursed the pharmacist he'd sought out in New York who had looked at his bitten arms and issued him useless pills for his liver, of all things. In San Francisco, he would find whatever oil was prescribed for the itch—if, in fact, this hell was caused by mites. Periodically, the other possibility sent shivers of terror through him: The itch might be syphilis. People with the disease often got a rash that looked a lot like the one he had.
If this be the pox
,
I know where I earned it—in the Old Town.
Louis drank down a dose of the laudanum and, fighting despair, took out his pen and notebook.

Dear Colvin,
he wrote as he waited for his misery to subside,
I never knew it was so easy to commit suicide.
Certainly, Henley and Bob believed he was doing just that when he set out on his journey. Sobered by their concern, he had written a quick will before boarding the
Devonia.
Now, in the grip of depression and pain, he thought,
Where would I be buried if I died on this train tonight?
Without hesitation, he wrote,
Under the wide and starry sky.
Below the line, he began composing an epitaph for his gravestone.
Robert Louis Stevenson, born 1850 of a family of engineers. Died …

He stayed awake as a poem came to him.

When he woke, his fingers were covered in ink, and the conductor was shouting “Chicago!” As the train jolted to a stop, he tried to stand but fell backward into his seat. After a while, a newsboy came by and gave him a hand getting up. On legs intoxicated by the drug, Louis made his way into the train station, where he found a plate of ham and eggs. Waiting to board the next train, he lay down on marble stairs with his arms outstretched and watched himself as if from the outside with a removed sort of curiosity, to see what would become of him.

Another train appeared, this one running as far as Council Bluffs and the Pacific Transfer Station, where he would board his final train to California. Somehow he got himself on it.

At a hotel in Council Bluffs that night, he spent part of his dwindling money on a decent room, where he ate, drank, and fell asleep picturing Fanny sitting under the arbor at the Chevillon. In the morning, feeling revived, he joined a hundred other emigrants outside the station waiting to board. Here was the great melting pot of America everyone talked about, right on this platform. What an assortment of humanity! Irish, German, and Swedish types—but these people were not fresh off of steamer ships, he discovered after a couple of short conversations. They had been in America for a while. They were from the eastern and middle states, failed farmers and factory men headed west with nothing to lose.

The train had two dozen cars, three of which were for passengers, the rest for baggage and cattle. As people moved forward in line, they were dispatched by the ticket taker to specific cars. It became evident to Louis that a sorting process was under way, and soon enough he found himself in the middle car of the three for passengers. His fellows on that car, it turned out, were all men traveling alone, with the exception of a small boy, perhaps eight, who had whooping cough. Women and children, along with a few men traveling with their families, boarded in the car behind his. The third passenger car, just ahead, was filling with Chinese.

Louis surveyed his new accommodations. Rows of wood benches on either side of the aisle allowed two sitters, but just barely. At the front, a stove occupied one corner, and at the back was a toilet closet. As the train moved out of the station, a white-haired conductor appeared at the front of car. “Gentlemen!” he shouted. Then, lowering his voice, “Gentlemen. I will explain this once.” The crowd silenced itself. “These here wood benches you're sittin' on? You can make ‘em face each other. Even better, you can make ‘em flatten out and join into a bed.” The conductor held up a flat piece of wood. “Now, this here is the board that will connect ‘em.” He chased two men from their seats and demonstrated how the benches collapsed. “Let me explain how we do things on this train. You need to find a chum to share your bed with. Between the two of ya's, you buy one board. Okay. Then each man buys his own cushions.” The conductor put down the board and held up three square straw-stuffed, gingham-covered cushions. “Each man puts these on top, you got yourself a bed. One board and three cushions costs two-fifty.” As the information sank into the heads of the emigrants, the men began to look around warily for a suitable bedmate with whom to split the cost of a board.

“No need for shyness now, boys.” The conductor laughed. “I'll do the matchmakin', if you ain't got a partner.” He proceeded to pair up travelers as he walked along the aisle. When he got to Louis's bench, he solicited a nearby gentleman in a suit who appeared alarmed that he might be paired with the ragged-looking Scot. “I talked to this fella up here already,” the man protested, standing and scurrying over to the side of a boyish traveler. “Feel like I know him. I believe me and him will be bunkmates, what do you say, young fella?”

The conductor moved on in his mating game. “Any offers?” he asked, looking around for another prospect. Louis felt himself blush and, in that moment, understood the plight of every woman who faced an arranged marriage.

“I don't mind,” said a strapping young Pennsylvania Dutch youth, stoically stepping up like a volunteer for a chancy military maneuver.

That night, as the train chugged through the dark hills of Iowa, the men in the car swigged from bottles and listened to the lonely tunes of a cornet player. The booze and the music loosened them, and they shared where they were headed. In short time, everyone in the car had a new train name. Louis's bunkmate was “Pennsylvania”; the young fellow going west to cure his asthma was called “Dubuque” for his hometown; Louis was dubbed “Shakespeare.”

The heat inside the train was blistering, so he wore only trousers and a shirt left unbuttoned and open. Every morning he went out onto the platform at the back of the train car with a tin dish of water to and the cloth and bar of soap he had bought at the same time as his bedding. It was a risky operation to bathe on the back platform of a moving train, with one arm looped through the wood railing for stability. Louis quickly apprehended who was bathing and who was not: There appeared to be a direct relationship between how much flesh one exposed and how much one smelled. Louis found the stench of the men in his car profound, but when he came into proximity with the women and children, he felt near to fainting. The least offensive were the Chinese, who were more thorough in their daily toilets and actually washed their feet, an idea that had not occurred to any of the men on his car, including him.

And yet it was the Chinese who were reviled in one vicious “joke” after another by the white emigrants. It was common for men to make gagging sounds in proximity to a Chinese passenger. Not long before it had been the Irish who were hated, yet here was a race even more despised in the land of opportunity. Never mind that the Chinese had invented gunpowder and printing and a thousand ideas that the Western world was glad to imitate. It puzzled Louis, and he jotted down:
Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs.

Perched up top of a train car, where he could escape the closeness of the passenger section, Louis felt the terrible itching ease some. He looked out at the flat, near-naked Nebraska plains and pondered his notions about the United States. Like a lot of young Europeans, he had for some while viewed America as a promised land. Any place declaring from the outset that it was dedicated to the proposition of all men being created equal had a foot up. Places like Edinburgh seemed staid and passé compared to, say, Chicago, where a man could capitalize upon his native talents in grand fashion, regardless of who his father was. In the scheme of things, it was hard not to feel some jealousy that America was on the ascent, and Europe was wallowing in decline, thanks to its own bad behavior.

Judging from the people he'd encountered so far, the American personality was gruff and suspicious until it became suddenly, inexplicably kind. Just this morning, he had experienced the dichotomy. Louis had positioned himself at the back of his car to catch fresh air through the door. Because the latch was broken, he held open the door with his foot. When a newsboy passed, he kicked Louis's leg hard, causing him to cringe in pain. But when the boy figured out just how sick Louis was, his cruelty vanished.

“Have a pear,” he said when he passed later, and handed Louis the fruit. “You can borrow one of these, if you want,” he added, giving him a newspaper. “Just keep it nice so's I can sell it.”

Dubuque, who had observed the encounter, moved a wad of tobacco out of the way of his tongue. “Most folks here got leather hides, Shakespeare. But inside? You're gonna find a sack o' feathers.”

It was true. Americans as a people were decent types at heart. But their generosity did not extend to the Chinese. Nor to the Indians, who came in for particular ridicule. At a station near Omaha, a small family approached the idling train to sell trinkets to the passengers. The tiny woman was wearing a dirty print dress and a man's bowler hat. The man looked strange and displaced, standing there in red suspenders and a dandy's striped waistcoat with a watch fob dangling from the buttonhole. The children were merely dirty, wearing rags of indecipherable origin. How could American citizens witness such humiliation and not rise up in outrage? Louis was seething with that question when Pennsylvania joined a group of other male passengers outside the train car and began dancing behind the Indian family while whooping wildly, much to the delight of the men inside.

Louis might have downed the whole bottle of laudanum at that moment were he not out of the stuff. How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook:
Indians at Omaha station
:
I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization.

“What just came over you?” he fumed when Pennsylvania made his jolly return. “Did you leave your decency in your pocket when you got off the train?” Shamed, the boy turned his head away from his seat partner.

Louis stared out the window after that, watching the plains turn into the stark black hills of Nebraska. When the train slowly pulled into a station in Wyoming, he saw an eastbound train reloading its passengers. Weary-looking people hurried to return to their cars on the other side of the platform, but not before shouting into the windows of Louis's westbound train, “Go back! Turn around and go back!”