In the women’s cabins, where I had my berth, they held evening concerts of a very decided pathetic kind. Like minor tunes, they always ended in a mournful wailing; for many of the women knew tragedies at first hand, and were in the midst of tragedy, so that their songs and humors were bound to be colored by despair. Carrie Bess, a stout woman whose white neck was crumpled in folds like a washboard, had wit enough to change the somberness of a morgue. She was usually the presiding officer in charge of the concerts. She was on her way to rejoin her husband, though she did not know where he was, but she said, “I’ll get on the train and have it stop in Texas where Jek (Jack) is.” And with this indefinite optimism she threw care to the winds and frolicked. She would throw herself astride a chair, wink at us all, open her mouth like a colored minstrel, and sing lustily,
“It’s very hard to see a girl
Sitting on a young man’s knee.
If I only had the man I love,
What a ’apy girl I’d be!”
Then, when the program had been gone through, with the oft-repeated favorites, like Carrie Bess’ “It’s Very Hard,” the concert would always close with an old sea song that somebody had introduced, a song which, as I lay in my berth and sleepily heard it sung under those miserable swinging lamps, amid the vitiated atmosphere of the cabin, and with the sea sounds, wind, splash of waves, and hissing steam, summed up all the miserable spirit of isolation on a great ocean:
“Jack was the best in the band,
Wrecked while in sight of the land,
If he ever comes back, my sailor boy, Jack,
I’ll give him a welcome home!”