boys, pushing people right and left in a breakneck game of touch; the
excitement of a group of Russians doing feats of strength; the sweet
happiness of dainty Swedish girls dancing with their rough partners
to the strains of an accordion. How good to escape from it all and
trespass on the steward's promenade at the very extremity of the
after-deck, where the emigrants may not go, and where they are out of
sight and out of hearing.
The ocean is retreating behind us with storm-scud and smoke of foam
threshed out from our riven road. Vast theatres of waves are falling
away behind us and slipping out of our ken backward into the homeward
horizon. Above us the sky is grey, and the sea also is grey, waving now
and then a miserable flag of green.
What an empty ocean! There is nothing happening in it but our ship.
And for me, that ship is just part of my own purpose: there is nothing
happening but what I willed. The slanting red funnels are full of
purpose, and the volumes of smoke that fly backward are like our sighs,
regrets, hopes, despairs, the outward sign of the fire that is driving
us on.
Up on the steward's promenade on Thursday morning I fell into
conversation with a young Englishman, and he poured out his heart to
me. He was very homesick, and had spoken to no one up till then. He was
in a long cloak, with the collar turned up, and a large cloth cap was
stuck tightly on his head to keep it from the wind. His face was red
with health, but his forehead was puckered, and his eyes seemed ready
to shed tears.
"Never been so far away from the old country before?" I hazarded.
"No."
"Would you like to go back?"
"No."
"Are you going to friends in America?"
He shook his head.
"I'm going on my own."
"You are the sort that America wants," I ventured. He did not reply,
and I was about to walk away, snubbed, when another thought occurred to
me.
"I once left the old country to seek my fortune elsewhere," said I. "I
felt as you do, I expect. But it was to go to Russia."
He looked up at me with an inquisitive grimace. I suggested that I
knew what it was to part with a girl I loved, and a mother and friends
and comforts, and to go to a strange country where I knew no one, and
thought I had no friends. At the mention of parting with the girl he
seemed to freeze, but curiosity tempted him and he let me tell him some
of my story.
"I reckon that England's pretty well played out," said he.
"Not whilst it sends its sons out into the world--you to America, and
me to Russia," said I with a smile. "It will only be played out when we
haven't the courage to go."
"Well," said he, "I reckon I _had_ to go, there wasn't anything else
for me to do. It wasn't courage on my part. I didn't want to go. I
reckon there ought to be room in England for the likes of me. It isn't
as if I had no guts. I'm as fit as they make them, only no good at
figures. I think I had the right to a place in England and a decent
screw, and England might be proud of me. I should always have been
ready to fight against the Germans for her. I joined the Territorials,
I learned to shoot, I can ride a horse."
"Why didn't you go into the army?"
"That's not the place for a decent fellow. Besides, my people wouldn't
allow it, and my girl's folks would be cut up. And I reckon there's
something better to do than be drilled and wait for a war. My people
wanted me to be something respectable, to go into the Civil Service,
or a bank, or an insurance office, or even into the wholesale fruit
business. I was put into Jacob's, the fruit firm, but I couldn't work
their rate. I've been hunting for work the last five months. That takes
it out of you, don't it? How mean I felt! Everybody looked at me in
such a way--you know, as much as to say 'You loafer, you lout, you
good-for-nothing,' so that I jolly well began to feel I was that, too,
especially when my clothes got shabby and I had nothing decent to put
on to see people."
As my acquaintance talked he rapidly became simpler, more child-like,
confiding, and tears stole down his cheek. The reserved and surly lad
became a boy. "What a life," said he, "to search work all day, beg a
shilling or so from my mother in the evening, meet my girl, tell her
all that's happened, then at night to finish the day lying in bed
trying to imagine what I'd do if I had a thousand a year!
"I reckon I could have earned a living with my hands, but my people
were too proud; yes, and I was too proud also, and my girl might not
have liked it. Still, I'd have done anything to earn a sovereign and
take her to the theatre, or go out with her to the country for a day,
or make her a nice present and prove I wasn't mean. I used to be
generous. When I had a job I gave plenty of presents; but you can't
give things away when you have to borrow each day. You even walk
instead of taking a car, and you are mean, mean, mean--mean all day.
Then in the evening you talk of marrying a girl, of having a little
home, and you dare to kiss her as much as you can or she will let, and
all the while you have in the wide world only a few coppers--and a
mother."
[Illustration: "ONE OF THE YOUNG LADIES WAS BEING TOSSED UP IN A
BLANKET WITH A YOUNG IRISH LAD."]
We went and leaned over the ship and stared down at the sea.
Tears! I suppose millions had come there before and made that great
salt ocean of them.
The boy now lisped his confidence to me hurriedly, happily, tenderly.
"But I reckon I've got a good mother, eh? She loved me more than I
dreamed. How she cried on Friday! how she cried! It was wild. Sometimes
I used to say I hated her. I used to shout out angrily at her that I'd
run away and never come back. That was when she said hasty things to
me, or when she wouldn't give me money. I used to think I'd go and be
a tramp, and pick up a living here and there in the country, and live
on fruit and birds' eggs, sleeping anywhere. It would be better than
feeling so mean at home. But then, my girl--every night I had to see
her. I felt I could not go away like that, never to come home with a
fortune--never, never to be able to marry her. Every night she put her
arms round my neck and kissed me, and called me her old soldier, her
dear one--all sorts of sweet things. I reckon we didn't miss one night
all this last year.
"Her father's all right. I had thought he would be different. I was a
bit afraid of what he'd say if he got to hear. But she told him on her
own, and one night she took me home. They had fixed it up themselves
without asking me, and he was very kind. I told him I wanted a job, and
I thought p'raps he was going to get me one. But no; he was a queer
sort, rather. 'I'm going to wipe out that story of yours,' he says.
Then he goes to his bureau and writes a note and puts it in an envelope
and addresses it to me. 'Here you are, young man,' says he. I opened
the envelope and read one word on a slip of paper--AMERICA.
'Millions have told your story before,' says he, 'and have had that
word given them in answer. You get ready to go to America; I'll find
you your passage-money and something to start you off in the new
country. You'll do well; you'll make good, my boy,' and he slapped me
on the back.
"You bet I felt excited. He saw my mother and told her his plan. She
said she couldn't stand in my way. I got the _Government Handbook on
the United States_, and the emigration circular. I read up America at
the public library. I wonder I hadn't thought of it before. America is
a great country, eh? They look at you differently, I bet, and a strong
young man's worth something there. My word, when I come back....
"I wonder if I shall come back or if she'll come out to me. I wonder if
her father would let her. I guess he would....
"She loves me. My word, how she loves me! I didn't dream of it before.
I used to think the harder you kissed, the more it meant; but she
kissed me in a new way, so softly, so differently. She said I was hers,
that I would be safe wherever I went in the wide world, and I was
never to feel afraid. I've got to do without her now. I reckon no other
girl is going to mean much to me."
He looked rather scornfully at a troop of pretty Swedes who had invaded
our sanctuary.
"It is queer how sure I feel of good luck because of her and what she
did. I feel as if everything must turn my way. Downstairs yesterday
they challenged me to play a game of cards, and I won fifty cents; but
I felt it was wrong to spend my luck that way. The chap wouldn't play
any more; he said I was in a lucky vein. He was quite right. Whatever I
turn my hand to, I'm bound to have unexpected good luck. I feel so sure
I'm going to get a job, and a real good one, too. I shan't play any
more cards this journey."
The sun had come out, and the bright light blazed through our smoke,
and I felt that the boy's faith was blazing just that way through his
regrets.
The sun crept on and overtook us on his own path, and then at last went
down in front of us, far away in the waste of waters.
My acquaintance and I went away to the last meal of the day, to the
strangely mixed crowd of prospective Americans at the table, where men
sat and ate with their hats on, and where no grace was said. "What
matter that they throw the food at us?" I asked. "We are men with
stout hearts in our bosoms; we are going to a great country, where a
great people will look at us with creative eyes, making the beautiful
out of the ugly, the big and generous out of the little and mean, the
headstone out of the rock that the builders rejected."
After supper I left my friend and went upstairs alone. The weather had
changed, and the electric lights of the ship were blazing through the
rain, the decks were wet and windswept, and the black smoke our funnels
were belching forth went hurrying back into the murky evening sky. The
vessel, however, went on.
Downstairs some were dancing, some singing, some writing home
laboriously, others gossiping, others lying down to sleep in the little
white cabins. There was a satisfaction in hearing the throbbing of the
engines and feeling the pulse of the ship. We were idle, we passed the
time, but we knew that the ship went on.
Going above once more at nine, I found the rain had passed, the sky was
clear and the night full of stars. In the sea rested dim reflections of
the stars, like the sad faces we see reflected in our memory several
days after we have gone from home. I stood at the vessel's edge and
looked far over the glimmering waves to the horizon where the stars
were walking on the sea. "What will it be like in America?" whispered
the foolish heart. "What will it be like for him?" Then sadness
came--the long, long thoughts of a boy. I whispered the Russian verse:
"There is a road to happiness,
But the way is afar."
And yet, next morning, I saw the Englishman dancing for hours with a
pretty Russian girl from a village near Kiev--Phrosia, the sister of
Maxim Holost, a fine boy of eighteen going out to North Dakota. I had
noticed the Englishman looking on at the dancing, and then suddenly, to
my surprise, at a break in the tinkling of the accordion, he offered
his arm to the Russian and took her down the middle as the music
resumed....
I was much in demand among the Russians on Friday and Saturday, for
they wanted to take the English language by storm at the week-end. I
taught Alexy by writing out words for him, and six or seven peasants
had copied from him and were busy conning "man," "woman," "farm,"
"work," "give me," "please," "bread," "meat," "is," "Mister," "show,"
"and," "how much," "like," "more," "half," "good," "bad," the numbers,
and so on. They pronounced these words with willing gusto, and made
phrases for themselves, calling out to me:
"Show me worrk, pleez."
"Wer is Meester Stamb?"
"Khao match eez bread?"
"Give mee haaf."
Alexy tried his English on one of the waiters at dinner time.
"Littel meet, _littel_, give mee more meet."
The steward grinned appreciatively, and told him to lie down and be
quiet.
Maxim and his sister were accompanied by a grizzled peasant of sixty or
so, wearing a high sugar-loaf hat sloping back from an aged, wrinkled
brow. This was Satiron Federovitch, the only old man on deck. His black
cloak, deep lined with wadding, was buttoned up to his throat, and the
simplicity of his attire and the elemental lines of his face gave him
a look of imperturbable calm. Asked why he was going to America, he
said that almost every one else in the village had gone before him. A
Russian village had as it were vanished from the Russian countryside
and from the Russian map and had transplanted itself to Dakota. Poor
old greybeard, he didn't want to go at all, but all his friends and
relatives had gone, and he felt he must follow.
Holost told every one how at Libau the officials doubted the
genuineness of his passport, and he had to telegraph to his village
police, at his own expense, to verify his age and appearance. The
authorities didn't relish the idea of such a fine young man being
lost by any chance to the army. If only they had as much care for the
villages as they have for their legions!
[Illustration: ENGLISH.]
[Illustration: RUSSIANS.
Fedya. Satiron. Alexy. Yoosha. Karl. Maxim Holost.]
I was up betimes on Saturday morning and watched the vessel glide
out of the darkness of night into the dusk of the dawn. The electric
light up in the mainmast, the eye of the mast, squinted lividly in
the half-light, and the great phantom-like ship seemed as if cut out
of shiny-white and blood-red cardboard as it moved forward toward
the west. The smoke from the funnels lay in two long streamers to
the horizon, and the rising sun made a sooty shadow under it on the
gleaming waves. As the night-cloud vanished a great wind sprang up,
blowing off America. Old Satiron was coming laboriously upstairs, and
he slipped out on to the deck incautiously.
"Gee whizz!" The mocking American wind caught his astrakhan hat and
gave it to the sea. Poor old Satiron, he'll turn up in Dakota with a
derby on, perhaps.
Saturday was a day of preparation. We packed our things, we wrote
letters to catch the mail, we were medically inspected--some of us
were vaccinated. All the girls had to take off their blouses and the
young men their coats, and we filed past a doctor and two assistants.
One man washed each bare arm with a brush and some acid. The doctor
looked and examined. The other assistant stood with lymph and lancet
and rapidly jabbed us. The operation was performed at an amazing pace,
and was only an unpleasant formality. Many of those who were thus
vaccinated got their neighbours to suck out the vaccine directly they
returned to their cabins. This was what the boy who had left the dog
behind him did. He didn't want blood-poisoning, he said. Nearly all the
Russians had been vaccinated five or six times already. In Russia there
is much disease and much faith in medicine. In England good drainage,
many people not vaccinated, little smallpox; in Russia, no drains, much
vaccination, and much of the dread disease.
On Saturday night there was a concert, at which all the steerage
were present, and in which any one who liked took part. But English
music-hall songs had all the platform--no foreign musicians
participated.
Sunday was Easter Day, and I was up in the dark hours of the morning
and saw the dawn. Sunrise showed the clouds in the east, but in north
and south and west the other clouds still lay asleep. Up on the
after-deck of the great tireless steamer little groups of cloaked and
muffled emigrants stood gazing over the now familiar ocean. We knew it
was our last day on the ship, and that before the dawn on the morrow we
should be at the American shore. How fittingly was it Easter, first day
of resurrection, festive day of spring, day of promise and hope, the
anniversary of happy days, of first communions!
In the wan east the shadowy wings of gulls were flickering. The
blood-red sun was just coming into view, streaked and segmented with
blackest cloud. He was striving with night, fighting, and at last
gaining the victory. High above the east and the wide circle of glory
stood hundreds of attendant cloudlets, arrayed by the sun in robes of
lovely tinting, and they fled before him with messages for us. Then,
astonishing thing, the sun disappeared entirely into shadow. Night
seemed to have gotten the victory. But we knew night could not win.
The sun reappeared almost at once, in resplendent silver, now a rim, in
a moment a perfect shield. The shield had for a sign a maiden, and from
her bosom a lovely light flooded forth upon the world. We felt that we
ourselves, looking at it, were growing in stature in the morning. The
light enveloped us--it was divine.
But the victory still waited. All the wavelets of the eastern sea were
living in the morning, dancing and mingling, bewildering, baffling,
delighting, but the west lay all unconquered, a great black ocean of
waves, each edged with signs of foam, as if docketed and numbered.
All seemed fixed and rigid in death. The sun disappeared again and
reappeared anew, and this time he threw into the world ochre and fire.
The wide half-circle of the east steamed an ochreous radiance to the
zenith. The sun was pallid against the beauty he had shed; the lenses
of the eye fainted upon the unearthly whiteness. It was hard to look
upon the splendid one, but only at that moment might he be seen with
the traces of his mystery upon him. Now he was in his grave-clothes,
all glistening white, but at noon he would be sitting on the right hand
of God.
Easter!
"Will there be any service in the steerage to-day?"
"No, there will only be service for first and second-class passengers."
"Is that because they need it more than we?"
There was no answer to that impolite remark. Still it was rather
amusing to find that the Church's office was part of the luxury of the
first and second class.
The third class played cards and danced and sang and flirted much as
usual. They had need of blessing.
So at night a Baptist preacher organised a prayer-meeting on his own
account, and the English-speaking people sang "Onward, Christian
soldiers," in a rather half-hearted way at eight o'clock, and "Jesus,
lover of my soul, let me to Thy Bosom fly," at nine; and there was a
prayer and a sermon.
A few hours after I had lain down to sleep Maxim Holost put his head in
at my cabin and cried out:
"America! Come up and see the lights of America."
And without waiting for me to follow, he rushed away to say the same
thing to others, "America! America!"
II
THE ARRIVAL OF THE IMMIGRANT
The day of the emigrants' arrival in New York was the nearest earthly
likeness to the final Day of Judgment, when we have to prove our
fitness to enter Heaven. Our trial might well have been prefaced by a
few edifying reminders from a priest.
It was the hardest day since leaving Europe and home. From 5
A.M., when we had breakfast, to three in the afternoon, when
we landed at the Battery, we were driven in herds from one place to
another, ranged into single files, passed in review before doctors,
poked in the eyes by the eye-inspectors, cross-questioned by the
pocket-inspectors, vice detectives, and blue-book compilers.
Nobody had slept the night before. Those who approached America for
the first time stood on the open deck and stared at the lights of
Long Island. Others packed their trunks. Lovers took long adieus and
promised to write one another letters. There was a hum of talking in
the cabins, a continual pattering of feet in the gangways, a splashing
of water in the lavatories where cleanly emigrants were trying to wash
their whole bodies at hand-basins. At last the bell rang for breakfast:
we made that meal before dawn. When it was finished we all went up on
the forward deck to see what America looked like by morning light. A
little after six we were all chased to the after-deck and made to file
past two detectives and an officer. The detectives eyed us; the officer
counted to see that no one was hiding.
At seven o'clock our boat lifted anchor and we glided up the still
waters of the harbour. The whole prow was a black mass of passengers
staring at the ferry-boats, the distant factories, and sky-scrapers.
Every point of vantage was seized, and some scores of emigrants were
clinging to the rigging. At length we came into sight of the green-grey
statue of Liberty, far away and diminutive at first, but later on, a
celestial figure in a blaze of sunlight. An American waved a starry
flag in greeting, and some emigrants were disposed to cheer, some shed
silent tears. Many, however, did not know what the statue was. I heard
one Russian telling another that it was the tombstone of Columbus.
We carried our luggage out at eight, and in a pushing crowd prepared
to disembark. At 8.30 we were quick-marched out of the ship to the
Customs Wharf and there ranged in six or seven long lines. All the
officials were running and hustling, shouting out, "Come on!" "Hurry!"
"Move along!" and clapping their hands. Our trunks were examined and
chalk-marked on the run--no delving for diamonds--and then we were
quick-marched further to a waiting ferry-boat. Here for the time being
hustle ended. We waited three-quarters of an hour in the seatless
ferry, and every one was anxiously speculating on the coming ordeal
of medical and pocket examination. At a quarter to ten we steamed for
Ellis Island. We were then marched to another ferry-boat, and expected
to be transported somewhere else, but this second vessel was simply
a floating waiting-room. We were crushed and almost suffocated upon
it. A hot sun beat upon its wooden roof; the windows in the sides
were fixed; we could not move an inch from the places where we were
awkwardly standing, for the boxes and baskets were so thick about our
feet; babies kept crying sadly, and irritated emigrants swore at the
sound of them. All were thinking--"Shall I get through?" "Have I enough
money?" "Shall I pass the doctor?" and for a whole hour, in the heat
and noise and discomfort, we were kept thinking thus. At a quarter-past
eleven we were released in detachments. Every twenty minutes each and
every passenger picked up his luggage and tried to stampede through
with the party, a lucky few would bolt past the officer in charge, and
the rest would flood back with heart-broken desperate looks on their
faces. Every time they failed to get included in the outgoing party
the emigrants seemed to feel that they had lost their chance of a job,
or that America was a failure, or their coming there a great mistake.
At last, at a quarter-past twelve, it was my turn to rush out and find
what Fate and America had in store for me.
Once more it was "Quick march!" and hurrying about with bags and
baskets in our hands, we were put into lines. Then we slowly filed up
to a doctor who turned our eyelids inside out with a metal instrument.
Another doctor scanned faces and hands for skin diseases, and then we
carried our ship-inspection cards to an official who stamped them. We
passed into the vast hall of judgment, and were classified and put into
lines again, this time according to our nationality. It was interesting
to observe at the very threshold of the United States the mechanical
obsession of the American people. This ranging and guiding and hurrying
and sifting was like nothing so much as the screening of coal in a
great breaker tower.
It is not good to be like a hurrying, bumping, wandering piece of coal
being mechanically guided to the sacks of its type and size, but such
is the lot of the immigrant at Ellis Island.
[Illustration: DAINTY SWEDISH GIRLS AND THEIR PARTNERS LOOKING OVER THE
SEA.]
But we had now reached a point in the examination when we could rest.
In our new lines we were marched into stalls, and were allowed to
sit and look about us, and in comparative ease await the pleasure of
officials. The hall of judgment was crowned by two immense American
flags. The centre, and indeed the great body of the hall, was
filled with immigrants in their stalls, a long series of classified
third-class men and women. The walls of the hall were booking-offices,
bank counters, inspectors' tables, stools of statisticians. Up above
was a visitors' gallery where journalists and the curious might
promenade and talk about the melting-pot, and America, "the refuge of
the oppressed." Down below, among the clerks' offices, were exits; one
gate led to Freedom and New York, another to quarantine, a third to the
railway ferry, a fourth to the hospital and dining-room, to the place
where unsuitable emigrants are imprisoned until there is a ship to take
them back to their native land.