Essays; Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894 -- Travel
There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had
dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that defies
analysis. One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper
stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came past,
very neatly attired, as was her custom.
‘Poor fellow,’ she said, stopping, ‘you haven’t a vest.’
‘No,’ he said; ‘I wish I ’ad.’
Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his embarrassment,
for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe
and began to fill it with tobacco.
‘Do you want a match?’ she asked. And before he had time to reply, she
ran off and presently returned with more than one.
That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is concerned,
of what I will make bold to call this love-affair. There are many
relations which go on to marriage and last during a lifetime, in which
less human feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at the
stoke-hole.
Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but in a
larger sense of the word I have yet more to add. Jones had discovered
and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable among her fellows
for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly clad, to the verge,
if not over the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and
a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole
expression, and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a true
womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion. She had a look,
too, of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady than most,
had she been allowed the opportunity. When alone she seemed preoccupied
and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually by her side a
heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of speech and gesture—not
from caution, but poverty of disposition; a man like a ditcher, unlovely
and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and waited on with her eyes
as if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange to see this hulking
fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring for him. He seemed,
from first to last, insensible of her caresses and attentions, and she
seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish husband, who sang his
wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her Orson, were the two
bits of human nature that most appealed to me throughout the voyage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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