On the Trail of The Immigrant Part 3

The last number on the program was a song by a Russian Jewess, a woman whose beauty was marred by bleached hair which had grown rusty, and by a complexion upon which rouge and powder had done their worst. Her voice which was strong rather than melodious, had in it an element of artificiality evidently begotten on the stage. She at once became the star among our entertainers, and though her culture was superficial, she was by far the best company for me.

Her parents, she told me, had been well to do Jews in a market town in Russia. They had broken away from many of the observances and traditions of their religion, they and their children followed all the latest fashions, a governess imported from France brought with her Paul de k.o.c.k's novels and other elevating(?) Parisian literature; music teachers came, who discovered in the only daughter a voice which of course, had to be cultivated in Vienna. There were concerts which the father's money arranged, a few glowing press notices at so much a line, and finally the fruitless struggle to appear in opera.

Then came one of those Anti-Semitic riots, those brutal outpourings of human hate which she was unable to describe. All she could say over and over again was, "Strashno, Strashno," "it was terrible, terrible." The house in which she had lived was a wreck, her father beaten to death, and she--she could not say it; but I knew. She told of women whose mutilated bodies were torn open, and of children whose heads were beaten together until they were a bleeding ma.s.s. Yes, indeed, it was "Strashno, Strashno," terrible, terrible.

Somewhat early in her girlhood, a clerk in her father's store "had looked upon her, and loved her" with a youth's ardour; but she had scorned him, as well she might scorn this uncultured, stupid looking son of Abraham. Again and again he asked her to be his wife, until through her entreaty, her father drove him out of the store. She told me much of her life and perhaps many things which she told me were not true. I knew for instance, that she had not sung before the Czar of Russia, that Hanslick the great musical critic of Vienna did not predict for her a Patti's fame and fortune; nor did I believe that a young millionaire in Berlin blew out his brains because she would not marry him. But I did believe that the poor clerk went to New York, that he had worked day and night in a sweat shop pressing cloaks, that out of his earnings he had supported her in the vain struggle to attain Grand Opera, and that now she was on her way to reward his faithfulness and become his wife.

"What is it like, this America?" "What kind of life awaits one on the East-side?" "What social status has a cloak presser in New York?" "What chance is there for one to reach the goal of Grand Opera?" These and other questions she hurled at me while the line upon the horizon grew clearer, and the hearts of men and women heavy from expectation.

On this ship too, Susanka, a Slovak girl nursed her way across the Atlantic, giving food to a little Magyar baby which she despised; and while she rocked the restless little one to sleep and sang her Slavic lullaby, "Hi-u, Hi-u, Hi-u-shke-e-e"--one could see in her heavy face her heart's hunger for her own child. "Oh! Pany velkomosny (mighty sir), my little child! I had to leave it with a stara baba (old woman) and it was gray, ashen gray when I left it, and it will die, it will die!" and she grew frantic in her grief as she rocked the Magyar child to and fro, "Hi-u, Hi-u, Hi-u-shke-e-e-e." "Who was to blame, Susanka?" The look of pain changed to one of fiery anger as she sent back across the sea, a curse, long and terrible, against her betrayer.

Yes, those are heavy hours and long, on that day when the ship is circled by the welcoming gulls, and the fire-ship is pa.s.sed, while the chains rattle and the baggage is piled on the deck. "Will they let me in, signor?" "Why should they not, Antonio?" "Ah! signor, I have not always been a free man. They held me in jail for four years. Will they know it in America? I stabbed a man,--yes, signor."

"Will they let us in, Guter Herrleben?" anxiously asks Yankev: his wife Gietel and six children are with him and one of the boys lies motionless upon the hatch, pale, worn and almost gone. "Consumption? yes; he was so well, but we were smuggled over and driven by the gendarmes, and had to be out in the damp, and he caught cold and a cough came and you can see, Guter Herrleben, quick consumption!"

Yankev, and Gietel his wife, had an appalling story to tell, and I listened to it as we squatted on deck under the twinkling stars. The moon shone in silvery splendour upon the quiet water, and I wondered why the sea did not grow angry, the constellations pale, and why the moon did not become red like blood at the horror of it all--a horror which never can be told. Imagine an Easter night, a night when Yankev and Gietel celebrated the liberation of Israel from Egyptian bondage. On the same night their Russian neighbours were celebrating the liberation of the human race from the power of death. The synagogue service was over.

They had told the story of Israel's pa.s.sing through the Red Sea, and of the perishing of Pharaoh's hors.e.m.e.n; Yankev had come home to the feast of unleavened bread and bitter herbs; the neighbours had been to the church where until midnight, in darkness and silence, they mourned at the tomb of the slain Christ. Then with the pa.s.sing of the long and silent night they went from street to street shouting: "Christ is risen, Christ is risen, Christ is risen, indeed." But the mob came upon the defenseless home plundering and burning all in its fury, although mercifully sparing the lives of the now homeless and penniless family.

Others fared worse, for they had no money with which to bribe, while their daughters were older and good to look upon. It was a little place and just a little pogrom. It was not written about nor protested against; but what would have been the use?

Dumb from agony we sat there and I had to breathe back into them the faith which they had almost lost, and the courage which had almost left them; a faith and courage which I myself did not possess. In the peace of the night I could hear only the terror of the voice of the Lord saying: "Vengeance is Mine." The gentle Nazarene who came in love to conquer by love, I could scarcely see, and I yearned to make the Psalmist's prayer my own. "Blessed be the Lord G.o.d which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight."

That night and many another last night on board of ship, I listened to the stories of men and women who were fleeing from the terror of Russia's law. Russians who had wrought in secret, who had planned great things and who had risked everything--Bogdanoff, Philipoff, Lermontoff, Lehrman, Loewenstern. Jews and Gentiles who had struck out in their blind fury, who had felt the terror of the law and the greater terror of taking, or trying to take, human life. Some guilty, some innocent; all of them caught in the same net.

Characteristic is the story of a Warsaw merchant who sailed with me on my last journey. On the evening of the 21st of April, 1906, he went to a dentist to have some work done. He went in the evening because he was busy in the daytime, and when he arrived the police were searching the house; after which all the inmates, dentist and patients, were taken to the police station and cast into prison. Two hundred and fifty persons were together in a room large enough for twenty. The odours were frightful, as in common with all Russian prisons there were no toilet conveniences outside of that room, in which for three days they were left. After bribing the officials, twenty fortunate men, my informant among them, were given another room. Nine weeks he remained there utterly unconscious of the reason for his detention; and only after the hard and faithful struggle of his wife was he released,--without an apology, to find his business ruined and only sufficient money left to go to America.

On the same ship I met the widow of a Jewish physician, who was shot down in the act of binding the wounds of those fallen in the uprising of Moscow. Binding the wounds of soldiers and revolutionists alike, he was shot in the back by a police lieutenant who afterwards was promoted to a captaincy.

No, it is not easy to travel in the steerage; not because there is not room enough, nor air enough, nor food enough, although that is all true; but because it is hard to believe down there that the G.o.d of Israel is not dead, nor His arm shortened, if not broken, like those of the Greek deities.

Yet they still have faith in Him, these children of His, who have waited for the fulfillment of His promises. They still wait, although "Jerusalem the golden" is a far away dream, and they are scattered wanderers over the face of the earth.

Friday night, with the coming of the first star, all those who believed, met, to voice their faith in Jehovah.

In a corner of the steerage quarters, while the eyes of the Gentiles looked inquisitively on, they turned towards Zion, and lifting up their voices, greeted the Sabbath: "Come, my beloved, thou Sabbath bride,"

"Lcho dody L Cra.s.s Calo." They sang this one joyous song of Israel, and stretched out their arms as if to press this spiritual bride to their rest-hungry souls.

They do not doubt that Jehovah will guide the destinies of Israel, and that the Sabbath bride will some day descend upon the earth to abide forever, bringing rest and peace to the Israel of G.o.d.

At last the great heart of the ship has ceased its mighty throbbing, and but a gentle tremor tells that its life has not all been spent in the battle with wind and waves. The waters are of a quieter colour, and over them hovers the morning mist. The silence of the early dawn is broken only by the sound of deep-chested ferry-boats which pa.s.s into the mist and out of it, like giant monsters, stalking on their cross beams over the deep. The steerage is awake after its restless night and mutely awaits the disclosures of its own and the new world's secrets. The sound of a booming gun is carried across the hidden s.p.a.ce, and faint touches of flame struggling through the gray, are the sun's answer to the salute from Governor's Island. The morning breeze, like a "Dancing Psaltress,"

moves gently over the gla.s.sy surface of the water, lifts the fog higher and higher, tearing it into a thousand fleecy shreds, and the far things have come near and the hidden things have been revealed. The sky line straight ahead, a.s.saulted by a thousand towering shafts, looking like a challenge to the strong, and a warning to the weak, makes all of us tremble from an unknown fear.

The steerage is still mute; it looks to the left at the populous sh.o.r.e, to the right at the green stretches of Long Island, and again straight ahead at the mighty city. Slowly the ship glides into the harbour, and when it pa.s.ses under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the silence is broken, and a thousand hands are outstretched in greeting to this new divinity into whose keeping they now entrust themselves.

Some day a great poet will arise among us, who, catching the inspiration of that moment will be able to put into words these surging emotions; who will be great enough to feel beating against his own soul and give utterance to, the thousand varying notes which are felt and never sounded.

On this very ship are women who have left the burdens which crippled them, and now hope to walk erect; who have fled from the rough, polluting hands of persecuting mobs, that they may be able to guard their virtue and have it guarded by gallant men. Here are hundreds of Slavs who never knew aught but the yoke of czar or other potentate, whose minds have been enthralled by a galling autocracy, and whose closed eyes have never been permitted to see their own downtrodden strength. Now they shall have the opportunity to prove themselves and show the n.o.bility of a peasant race.

Here are Italians from sh.o.r.es where cla.s.sic art is stored, and the air is soft and full of melody; yet they were left uncouth, rough and unhewn. They come to a rougher but freer air, that they may grow into a gentler, stronger, n.o.bler manhood and womanhood.

Melancholy Jews whose feet never knew a safe abiding place, are here, and their hope is that they may find the peace which went out from their race, when Jerusalem was laid waste and they were scattered among the nations of the earth.

He who thinks that these people scent but the dollars which lie in our treasury, is mightily mistaken, and he who says that they come without ideals has no knowledge of the children of men.

I found myself close to hundreds of these people, closest to the Russian Jews who most excited my sympathies; and one day when they heard that I had been in Bialistok, Kishineff and Odessa, that I knew the horror of it all and that I sympathized with them, they crowded around me almost like wild animals. What did they ask for above everything? Money? No.

The one loud cry was for a speech about America. "Preach to us," they said, "preach to us about America." It was a polyglot sermon which I preached that Sunday from the covered hatch which was my pulpit, and when I spoke to them of their new home and their new duties, they cheered me to the echo.

I have pa.s.sed through this gateway more than ten times; I have sounded as far as a man can sound, the souls of men and women, and I have found them tingling from emotions, akin only to those which we more prosperous voyagers shall feel, when we have crossed the last sea and find ourselves in the presence of the great Judge.

Many of these emigrants expect to find more liberty, more justice, and more equitable law than we ourselves enjoy; they imagine that our common life is permeated by a n.o.ble idealism; and while they cannot give expression to their high antic.i.p.ations they feel more loftily than we think them capable of feeling. Many a time I have heard conversations between those who had read about America and those who were ignorant of its life, and invariably I have had to keep silence; for had I spoken I must have destroyed blessed illusions. From the very people whom we call Sabbath breakers, I have heard glowing descriptions of an ideal American Sabbath, and from men to whom alcoholic beverages seemed essential to life, I have heard a defense of laws regulating the sale of liquor. If, in our superficial touch with them in our own country, we find them materialistic and dulled to what we call our higher life, they are not the only ones at fault.

Cabin and steerage pa.s.sengers alike, soon find the poetry of the moment disturbed; for the quarantine and custom-house officials are on board, driving away the tourist's memories of the splendour of European capitals by their inquisitiveness as to his purchases. They make him solemnly swear that he is not a smuggler, and upon landing, immediately proceed to prove that he is one.

The steerage pa.s.sengers have before them more rigid examinations which may have vast consequences; so in spite of the joyous notes of the band, and the glad greetings shouted to and fro, they sink again into awe-struck and confused silence. When the last cabin pa.s.senger has disappeared from the dock, the immigrants with their baggage are loaded into barges and taken to Ellis Island for their final examination.

V

AT THE GATEWAY

The barges on which the immigrants are towed towards the island are of a somewhat antiquated pattern and if I remember rightly have done service in the Castle Garden days, and before that some of them at least had done full service for excursion parties up and down Long Island Sound.

The structure towards which we sail and which gradually rises from the surrounding sea is rather imposing, and impresses one by its utilitarian dignity and by its plainly expressed official character.

With tickets fastened to our caps and to the dresses of the women, and with our own bills of lading in our trembling hands, we pa.s.s between rows of uniformed attendants, and under the huge portal of the vast hall where the final judgment awaits us. We are cheered somewhat by the fact that a.s.sistance is promised to most of us by the agents of various National Immigrant Societies who seem both watchful and efficient.

Mechanically and with quick movements we are examined for general physical defects and for the dreaded trachoma, an eye disease, the prevalence of which is greater in the imagination of some statisticians than it is on board immigrant vessels.

From here we pa.s.s into pa.s.sageways made by iron railings, in which only lately, through the intervention of a humane official, benches have been placed, upon which, closely crowded, we await our pa.s.sing before the inspectors.

Already a sifting process has taken place; and children who clung to their mother's skirts have disappeared, families have been divided, and those remaining intact, cling to each other in a really tragic fear that they may share the fate of those previously examined.

A Polish woman by my side has suddenly become aware that she has one child less clinging to her skirts, and she implores me with agonizing cries, to bring it back to her. In a strange world, at the very entrance to what is to be her home, without the protection of her husband, without any knowledge of the English language, and with no one taking the trouble to explain to her the reason, the child was s.n.a.t.c.hed from her side. Somewhere it is bitterly crying for its mother, and each is unconscious of the other's fate.

"Gdeye moya shena" (where is my wife?) an old Slovak cries as he looks wildly about for her, whose physique was suspected of being below the normal and who was pa.s.sed on for further examination.

A Russian youth, stalwart and strong, is separated from his household which came together to settle in Dakota; but now he, the mainstay of the family, is gone and they are perplexed and distracted.

A little girl scarcely five years of age, cries: "Mitter, mitter, ich will zu meiner mitter gehen"; she is there alone and uncomforted, surrounded by rough-looking men, while not far away her mother is working herself into hysterics because she must await in the detention room the supreme decision.

A woman with three children has two of them taken from her because they are suspected of disease and found to be afflicted by trachoma; the mother also has the disease, but her husband, now an American citizen, comes to claim her, and she pa.s.ses in while the little ones are held in custody by the immigration authorities.

One by one we pa.s.s the inspectors; we show our money and answer the questions which are numerous and pertinent.

The average immigrant obeys mechanically; his att.i.tude towards the inspector being one of great respect. While the truth is not always told, many of the lies prepared prove both inefficient and unnecessary.