Читать книгу The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow - Edward Alfred Steiner - Страница 7

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THE ship’s doctor was very much like other men of his profession who choose to be knocked about from port to port, dealing out pills and powder, when pills and powders seem of so little consequence. He was young, inexperienced and had not yet learned half the secret of his calling; namely, to keep his mouth shut at the proper time. At breakfast he told us that he had eight cases of consumption in the steerage, and that three men were about the worst he had ever seen.

He told this with the cool air of the medical man who delights in “cases” as such. Then he told us about one of them, a Greek, who was at the point of death, but all the time kept calling for cheese.

“Don’t you give him cheese, all the cheese he wants?” cried one of the young ladies across the table.

“No,” replied the doctor; “what’s the use?”

Then I looked at the young lady and she looked at me; I whispered something to my steward, and she gave an order; and we both had cheese—real Greek cheese for breakfast.

In the morning the steerage looks its best. The deck has been scrubbed and so have some of the passengers. If the day promises to be fair, the travellers unconsciously draw upon the coming joy in large draughts. When I went down that day, I was no more among strangers. Tony greeted me with an unusually broad smile, John Sullivan shook hands with me so vigorously that I thought he must be the veritable John L. and the children gathered round me, confidently awaiting their sweets. This was truly inspiring; but it became touching when the Slavic widow said to her brood: “The Krist-kindel comes.”

In the depths of the steerage they had heard that a man from the cabin had come down and been good to them; that he had petted the children, luring them with sweets. And the steerage gave up its treasure of little ones, seemingly endless in number; so that the stock of good things had to be replenished many a time before each child had its fair and equal share.

Truly it is “More blessed to give than to receive,” yet the blessing brings its burdens, in the disclosure of real or pretended suffering; and the immigrants are no exception to the rule. I know now as I have never known before, the price they pay for the dollars so safely tucked away, which are their wealth, their power and, I trust, their happiness.

Here is a beggarly-looking group of Bulgarians. They left their home in the richest district of that new Balkan czardom about a year ago. I know their village, set in the midst of acres of roses, of poppies and of maize. Like their forefathers they lived there contentedly until restlessness, like a disease, crept upon them. Coming from the plains in the West, it spread its contagion over the Alps, the Carpathians and the Macedonian hills. The men mortgaged their homes, left their wives and children to gather the roses, the poppies and the maize, and took passage at Triest to gather dollars in America.

On landing, they were shipped West and farther West. They travelled by polluted rivers, and over mountains stripped of their verdure and robbed of the wealth of their veins. They saw the refuse of the mines left like broken trappings of war on the battle-field. They saw the glare of a thousand flaming ovens where coal was being baked into coke, and in their shadows they saw besmirched and bedraggled towns, now clustering, now trailing along, now losing themselves in the darkness, and now glowing again in the lurid light of giant flames pouring from huge furnaces. They saw day turned into night by smoke, and night turned into day by unquenched fires, and they knew not whether it was day or night, or heaven or hell to which they had come. At the end of the journey they were led into a deep ravine through which an inky river struggled, and over which hung a cloud as immovable as if the released elements were forming again into solids.

Twelve men were counted by some one who led them, or drove them, or pushed them into a hut which had once been painted some dingy colour, but now was part of the gloom around it. Other twelve men were made to enter another hut, and so on, until all were disposed of. By signs they were given to understand that this was home; so they spread out their woolen coats and went to sleep. When morning came, after a breakfast of cheap whiskey and poor bread, they were marched into the mill of a certain corporation. It would do no good to mention the name of this corporation, and it would do no harm. No one would be offended; for there is no one to offend.

I have very dear friends who own stock in that company, but they just draw dividends—they do not control the mill. The man and the men who run it produce the dividends; they do not own the stock, certainly not all of it. I cannot single out that corporation; it is not the only sinner nor the chief one, and that would be its only consolation, were it looking for anything so unpractical.

My Bulgarians saw boiling pots of metal and red-hot ingots of metal and men of metal, who shouted at them in an unknown tongue, and the louder they shouted the less the men understood. Little by little, however, they grew accustomed to the tumult, and learned to walk skillfully on the inch plank which alone separated them from death and destruction. They found consolation in the bulging envelope full of money which came to them at the end of the week; for it was much money, exchanged into their currency, more money than three months’ labour brought them among the roses, the poppies and the maize.

Two-thirds of it they sent home, and lived on the other third, eating coarse meat and bread, and indulging in strong drink. Month after month they toiled in the mill, and lived in the same ravine, with the thundering, spewing, belching monsters. They lost the freshness of skin and the elasticity of movement characteristic of their race; but were happy in the fat, bulging envelope at the end of the week.

Of the city, with its churches and its beautiful homes they had seen nothing; for the mill ran day and night, and night and day, and Sabbath days and Sabbath nights as well. They cared not for cities or churches or even for fine houses, so long as they got the envelopes.

One morning, however, they came to the mill and it was silent within, as it was silent without, and the door was closed. One week and another they waited; but there was no envelope with money. Their own small change was gone and they were starving. Then came the same man who had driven them twelve by twelve into the huts, and twelve by twelve he drove them out; for they had no money with which to pay the rent, and men with hearts of metal cannot feel what it means to be driven out of a hut, even such a wretched hut, and be in the roofless street.

Half-starved, the men left their miserable shelter and marched into the main street, past the stores and the churches; and then they saw that the city had homes and that not all the men had hearts of metal.

Bread came in abundance, and soup and meat. Fine women were proud to serve them, and the basement of the church became their lodging place. On Sunday they heard above them the voices of little children, and then deep organ tones and a man’s voice speaking loud enough for them to hear, although they could not understand. Then came a great volume of song, and if the congregation sang: “The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord,” poetry never was more true to fact; for the church seemed buttressed upon these Slavic brothers of Jesus, in whom, as in all the needy, He incarnates Himself.

By slow stages the men found their way back to the sea, and through the charity of their own more fortunate countrymen, they were now homeward bound. A more forlorn looking set of men I have never seen; emaciated, ragged, unclean and discouraged. They had paid the price.

A man groped his way towards me, his face disfigured and his eyelids closed forever. He had money, nearly a thousand dollars, he told me. “But what would I not give for only one eye?” he said pathetically. He paid the price when a powder blast blotted daylight out forever.

A rather forward Jewish girl snatched from my hands goodies intended for the children, and at a glance I knew the price she had paid, if she carried any dollars across the sea. She belonged to an ever-increasing number of Jewish women, who have forsaken the path of virtue or have been pushed from it, who knows into how deep a hell?

A man came to me, the mere shadow of a man and asked for some soothing sweet for his cough. He was a Montenegrin and had been a stalwart soldier in the army of his prince, in whose domain the white plague is practically unknown. He, too, carried money home; more money than any man in his village in the Black Mountains had ever possessed. It was earned in the iron works of an Ohio town, in a pit so full of flying metal, ground from rough surfaces, that every breath carried destruction to his lungs.

The sight of this man recalled the conversation at the breakfast table, and I looked for the hospital. Two stories below the steerage deck I found the contagious ward, and upon iron cots lay the three dying men, mere shadows of men except the eyes. They were still the eyes of flesh, grown larger seemingly, through suffering, which was all too real.

Nearest the door, and nearest death apparently, was the Greek. He looked almost happy; for he had cheese, the cheese of Greece, which my opposite neighbour at table was feeding him bit by bit. He ate and ate, and called for more. Poor fellow! His soul had already forgotten the glory of Athens; but his craving stomach had a long memory; it remembered the cheese of Greece.

Stolidly looking at the iron ceiling from which hung the huge sweat drops of the labouring ship, lay a dying Slav. The racial marks of his face were almost obliterated, and one could with difficulty recognize the Slav, except by his silence in suffering. My hands touched his; and although they were mere skin and bone, the marks of heavy labour were still upon them. His memory had not quite faded; for between panting breaths he told me of the village in Hungary from which he had gone, a lusty youth; of the old Matka he had left behind, of the sea voyage and then of his work in the mines. It was “Prach, prach” (dust, dust), he said. He was sure that when the air of the Tatra mountains filled his lungs again, he would get well. Did he want anything? “Yes, palenka.” His native white, biting drink. Oh, if he just had palenka! “Wouldn’t whiskey do as well?” “Yes, anything that gives strength; but palenka would be the best.”

There was a third man, an Italian of the Calabrian group to which Tony and John Sullivan belonged. There was, or there had been, a third man; for even as we turned towards him, a rattle in his hollow chest gave sign that he had crossed to another harbour than that for which he had embarked. We would have lingered; but death brought the nurse and the doctor, with much muttering and many complaints against us, and threats of quarantine.

After all, it was good to reach the noisy deck, even the deck of the steerage—and life.

“Tombola! Tombola!” the Calabrian peasants shouted, shaking a pasteboard box of dice. “Tre, sette, dieci—terno!” the lucky winner screamed, gathering up the greasy soldi piled on the greasy deck.

In another corner the dealer was shaking a wicker basket full of the lucky and unlucky numbers, drawing them forth one by one and calling them out to the winners and the losers. All over the deck there were such groups of noisy Italians, ignorant of the death of a comrade who had drawn the unlucky number—or the lucky one; who can tell?

Unconscious of the fact that death had come in the wake of the ship and overtaken us, all went merrily on—and no one in cabin or steerage must be told; for the dark angel is nowhere so unwelcome as upon the uncertain deep, where there are never more than a few planks of wood or girders of steel between time and eternity. No one thought of death that morning. Who could think of it with the sky so blue and the sea so calm? Even nature seemed oblivious of the fact that one of her children had paid the price.

Nor was the man from Boston, nor many men in Boston, with all their inherited sensitiveness of conscience, nor the men in Pennsylvania where conscience is blackened by coal, and hardened by steel—none of these men, I say, was conscious or is conscious how great is the price these European peasants pay for the dollars they carry home.

In all the industrial states, there are hundreds and thousands of graves, marked by humble wooden crosses, beneath which sleep just such toilers, snatched from life by “The broken wheel, the loosened cord.” They have paid the price, the greatest price, giving their lives for the dollars, the hoarding of which we begrudged them.

No less than 10,000 of these despised aliens laid down their lives in one year, digging coal, making steel, blasting stone and doing the numberless dangerous drudgeries of our industrial life.

All that the Boston man saw was the money, the good clothes, the celluloid collars of the men, and the gaudy shams that decked the women. I could see the mouths of half a dozen mines, out of which were dragged in one year the mangled, powder-burnt, asphyxiated bodies of a thousand once-breathing souls. I heard the cries and groans of hundreds of women and thousands of children; for I have seen mothers embrace bodiless limbs and limbless bodies, fragments of the sons they had borne, and although 30,000,000 dollars and more were carried home by the living, they too had paid a price beyond the hard labour they did. In the suffering they endured in damp mines, by the hot metal blasts, in cold ditches and in dark and dangerous tunnels, they paid the price, indeed.

I wish that the man from Boston and all the men with small vision had been on the deck of that Italian steamer, when three times during her long voyage the engines stopped their breathing, just before sunrise. In the steerage and in the cabin alike, men and women were asleep. The captain, the doctor and a few of us, who knew and dared, were the only ones astir.

From the depths of the ship the sailors carried the sail-cloth sheathed bundles and held them over the waters. Then sharp and clear the captain called: “Let go!” The engines breathed again, the mighty screws churned the quiet sea to foam and the surging waves enfolded the bodies of the men who had paid the price.