Читать книгу With Poor Immigrants in America - Stephen Graham - Страница 6

THE BOISTEROUS FLEMINGS.

A strange gathering of seekers, despairers, wanderers, pioneers, criminals, scapegoats. I thought of all the reasons that had brought these various folk together to make a community, that had brought them all together to form a Little America. From Great Britain it is so often the drunkard who is sent. Some young fellow turns out to be wilder than the rest of his family; he won't settle down to the sober, righteous, and godly life that has been the destiny of the others; he is likely to disgrace respectability, so parents or friends give him his passage-money and a little capital and send him away across the sea. Henceforth his name is mentioned at home with a 'ssh, or with a tear—till the day that he makes his fortune. With the drunkard go the young forger or embezzler whose shame has been covered up and hidden, but who can get no "character" from his last employer. Then there are the unemployed, and those discontented with their jobs, the out-of-works, the men who have seen no prospect in the old land and felt no freedom. There are the wanderers, the rovers, the wastrels, so called, who have never been able to settle down; there are also the prudent and thoughtful men who have read of better conditions and go simply to take advantage of them. There are those who are there almost against their will, persuaded by the agents of the shipping companies and the various people interested to keep up the flow of people into America. There are the women who are going out to their sweethearts to be married, and the wives who are going to the husbands who have "made good"; there are the girls who have got into trouble at home and have slid away to America to hide their shame; there are girls going to be domestic servants, and girls doomed to walk the streets—all sitting down together, equals, at a table where no grace is said but the whisper of hope which rises from each heart.

But it is not only just these people whom I have so materially and separately indicated. The cheerful lad who is beginning to flirt with his first girl acquaintance on the boat has only a few hours since dried the tears off his cheeks; they are nearly all young people on the boat, and they mostly have loving mothers and fathers in the background, and friends and sweethearts, some of them. And there are some lonely ones who have none who care for them in all the world. There are young men who are following a lucky star, and who will never be so poor again in their lives, boys who have guardian angels who will never let them injure their foot on the ground, boys who have in their favour good fairies, boys and girls who have old folk praying for them. And there is the prodigal son, as well as the too-prodigal daughter. There are youngest brothers in plenty, going to win the princess in a way their elder brothers never thought of; young Hans is there, Aladdin, Norwegian Ashepattle, Ivan Durak—the Angel of Life is there; there is also the Angel of Death.

We sat down together to our first meal—the whole company of the emigrant passengers broke bread together and became thereby one body—a little American nation in ourselves. I am sure that had the rest of the world's people been lost we could have run a civilization by ourselves. We had peasants to till the soil, colliers to give us fuel, weavers and spinners to make cloth, tailors to sew it into garments, comely girls of all nations to be our wives; we had clerks and shop-keepers and Jews with which to make cities; musicians and music-hall artists to divert us, and an author to write about it all.

Mugs half-full of celery soup were whisked along the tables; not a chunk of bread on the platters was less than an inch thick; the hash of gristly beef and warm potato was what would not have been tolerated in the poorest restaurant, but we set ourselves to eat it, knowing that trials in plenty awaited us and that the time might come when we should have worse things than these to bear. The Swedes and the British were finicky; the Russians and the Jews ate voraciously as if they'd never seen anything so good in their lives.

The peasant woman next to me crossed herself before and after the meal; her Russian compatriots removed their hats and some of them said grace in a whisper to themselves. But most ate even with their hats on, and most with their hands dirty. You would not say we ate as if in the presence of God and with the memories, in the mind, of prayers for the future and heart-break at parting with home; yet this meal was for the seeing eye a wonderful religious ceremony, a very real first communion service. The rough food so roughly dispensed was the bread and wine, making them all of one body and of one spirit in America. Henceforth all these people will come nearer and nearer to one another, and drift farther and farther from the old nations to which they belonged. They will marry one another, British and Jewish, Swedish and Irish, Russian and German; they will be always eating at America's board; they will be speaking the one language, their children will learn America's ideals in America's school. Even from the most aboriginal, illiterate peasant on board, there must come one day a little child, his grandson or great-grandson, who will have forgotten the old country and the old customs, whose heart will thrill to America's idea as if he had himself begotten it.

On Sunday morning when we came upstairs from our stuffy little cabin we were gliding past the green coast of Ireland, and shortly after breakfast-time we entered the beautiful harbour of Queenstown, blue-green, gleaming, and perfect under a bright spring sun. Hawkers came aboard with apples, knotted sticks, and green favours—the day following would be St. Patrick's. And we shipped a score of Irish passengers.

Outside Queenstown a different weather raged over the Atlantic, and as we steamed out of the lagoon it came forward to meet us. The clouds came drifting toward us, and the wind rattled in the masts. The ocean was full of glorious life and wash of wave and sea. A crowd of emigrants stood in the aft and watched the surf thundering away behind us; the great hillsides of green water rose into being and then fell out of being in grand prodigality. Gulls hung over us as we rushed forward and poised themselves with gentle feet outstretched, or flew about us, skirling and crying, or went forward and overtook us. Meanwhile Ireland and Britain passed out of view, and we were left alone with the wide ocean. We knew that for a week we should not see land again, and when we did see land that land would be America.

THE DREAMY NORWEGIAN WITH THE CONCERTINA. THE ENDLESS DANCING.

Then we all began to know one another, to talk, to dance, to sing, to play together. All the cabins were a-buzz with chatter, and along the decks young couples began to find one another out and to walk arm and arm. Two dreamy Norwegians produced concertinas, and without persuasion sat down in dark corners and played dance music for hours, for days. Rough men danced with one another, and the more fortunate danced with the girls, dance after dance, endlessly. The buffets were crowded with navvies clamouring for beer; the smoking-rooms were full of excited gamblers thumbing filthy cards. The first deck was wholly in electric light, you mounted to the second and it was all in shadow, you went higher still and you came to daylight. You could spend your waking hours on any of these levels, but the lower you went the warmer it was. On the electric-light deck were to be found the cleaner and more respectable passengers; they sat and talked in the mess-room, played the piano, sang songs. Up above them all the hooligans rushed about, and there also, in the shadow, in the many recesses and dark empty corners young men and women were making love, looking moonily at one another, kissing furtively and giving by suggestion an unwonted atmosphere to the ship. It was also on this deck that the wild couples danced and the card-players shuffled and dealt. Up on the open deck were the sad people, and those who loved to pace to and fro to the march music of the racing steamer and the breaking waves.

I wandered from deck to deck, everywhere; opened many doors, peered into many faces, sat at the card-table, crushed my way into the bar, entered into the mob of dancers, found a Russian girl and talked to her. But I was soon much sought for. When the Russian-speaking people found out I had their language they followed me everywhere, asking elementary questions about life and work and wages in America. Even after I had gone to bed and was fast asleep my cabin door would open and some woolly-faced Little Russian would cry out, "Gospodin Graham, forgive me, please, I have a little prayer to make you; write me also a letter to a farmer."

I had written for several of them notes which they might present at their journey's end.

All day long I was in converse with Russians, Poles, Jews, Georgians, Lithuanians, Finns.

"Look at these Russian fatheads (duraki)," said a young Jew. "Why do they go to America? Why do they leave their native land to go to a country where they will be exploited by every one?"

"Why do you leave it, then?" asked a Russian.

"Because I have no rights there," replied the Jew.

"Have we rights?" the Russian retorted.

"If I had your rights in Russia I'd never leave that country. I'd find something to do that would make me richer than I could ever be in America."

There were three or four peasants around, and another rejoined. "But you could have our rights if you wished."

Whereupon I broke in:

"But only by renouncing the Jewish faith."

"That is exactly the truth," said the Jew.

"Yes," said a Russian called Alexy Mitrophanovitch, "he can have all our rights if he renounces his faith."

"If I am baptized to get your rights what use is that to you? Why do Christians ask for such an empty thing?"

"All the same," said another Russian, "in going to America you will break your faith, and so will we. I have heard how it happens. They don't keep the Saints' days there."

Alexy Mitrophanovitch was a fine, tall, healthy-looking peasant workman in a black sheepskin. With him, and as an inseparable, walked a broad-faced Gorky-like tramp in a dusty peak-hat. The latter was called Yoosha.

"You see, all I've got," said Alexy to me, "is just what I stand up in. Not a copeck of my own in my pocket, and not a basket of clothes. My friend Yoosha is lending me eighty roubles so as to pass the officials at New York, but of course I give it back to him when we pass the barrier. We worked together at Astrakhan."

"Have you a bride in Russia?"

No, he was alone. He did not think to marry; but he had a father and a mother. At Astrakhan he had been three thousand versts away from his village home, so he wouldn't be so much farther away in America.

He was going to a village in Wisconsin. A mate of his had written that work was good there, and he and Yoosha had decided to go. They would seek the same farmer, a German, Mr. Joseph Stamb—would I perhaps write a letter in English to Mr. Stamb? …

Both he and Yoosha took communion before leaving Astrakhan. I asked Alexy whether he thought he was going to break his faith as the other Russians had said to the Jew. How was he going to live without his Tsar and his Church?

He struck his breast and said, "There, that is where my Church is! However far away I go I am no farther from God!"

Would he go back to Russia?

He would like to go back to die there.

"Tell me," said he, "do they burn dead bodies in America? I would not like my body to be burned. It was made of earth, and should return to the earth."

The man who slept parallel with me in my cabin was an English collier from the North Country. He had been a bad boy in the old country, and his father had helped him off to America. Whenever he had a chance to talk to me, it was of whippet-racing and ledgers and prizes and his pet dog.

"As soon as a get tha monny a'll enter that dawg aht Sheffield. A took er to Durby; they wawn't look at 'er there. There is no dawg's can stan' agin her. At Durby they run the rabbits in the dusk, an' the little dawg as 'ad the start could see 'em, but ourn moight a been at Bradford fur all she could see. A'll bet yer that dawg's either dead or run away. She fair lived fer me. Every night she slep in my bed. Ef ah locked 'er aht, she kick up such a ra. Then I open the door an' she'd come straight an' jump into bed an' snuggle 'erself up an' fall asleep. … "

The dirtiest cabins in the ship were allotted to the Russians and the Jews, and down there at nine at night the Slavs were saying their prayers whilst just above them we British were singing comic songs or listening to them. Most of us, I reckon, also said our prayers later on, quietly, under our sheets; for we were, below the surface, very solitary, very apprehensive, very child-like, very much in need of the comfort of an all-seeing Father.

The weather was stormy, and the boat lost thirty-six hours on the way over. The skies were mostly grey, the wind swept the vessel, and the sea deluged her. The storm on the third night considerably reduced the gaiety of the ship; all night long we rolled to and fro, listening to the crash of the waves and the chorus of the spring-mattresses creaking in all the cabins. My boy who had left the "dawg" behind him got badly "queered up." He said it was "mackerel as done it," a certain warm, evil-looking mackerel that had been served him for tea on the Tuesday evening. Indeed the food served us was not of a sort calculated to prepare us for an Atlantic storm—roast corned beef, sausage and mash, dubious eggs, tea that tasted strongly of soda, promiscuously poked melting butter, ice cream. On tumultuous Tuesday the last thing we ate was ice cream! We all felt pretty abject on Wednesday morning.

Our sickness was the stewards' opportunity. They interviewed us, sold us bovril and hawked plates of decent ham and eggs, obtained from the second-class table or their own mess. The British found the journey hard to bear, though they didn't suffer so much as the Poles and the Austrians and the Russians. I found the whole journey comparatively comfortable, stormy weather having no effect on me, and this being neither my first nor worst voyage. Any one who has travelled with the Russian pilgrims from Constantinople to Jaffa in bad weather has nothing to fear from any shipboard horror on a Cunarder on the Atlantic.

Only two of the Russians went through the storm happily, Alexy and Yoosha. They had worked for nights and months on the Caspian Sea in a little boat, almost capsizing each moment as they strained at their draughts of salmon and sturgeon; one moment deep down among the seas, the next plunging upward, shooting over the waves, stopping short, slithering round—as they graphically described it to me.

When the storm subsided the pale and convalescent emigrants came upstairs to get sea air and save themselves from further illness. Corpse-like women lay on the park seats, on the coiled rope, on the stairs, uttering not a word, scarcely interested to exist. Other women were being walked up and down by their young men. A patriarchal Jew, very tall and gaunt, hauled along a small, fat woman of his race, and made her walk up and down with him for her health—a funny pair they looked. On Wednesday afternoon, about the time the sun came out, one of the boisterous Flemings tied a long string to a tape that was hanging under a pretty French girl's skirts, and he pulled a little and watched her face, pulled a little more and watched the trouble, pulled a little more and was found out. Then several of the corpse-like ones smiled, and interest in life was seen to be reviving.

Next morning when I was up forward with my kodak, one of the young ladies who had been so ill was being tossed in a blanket with a young Irish lad of whom she was fond, struggling and scratching and rolling with a young fellow who was kissing her, whilst four companions were dangerously hoisting them shoulder high, laughing and bandying Irish remarks. Life only hides itself when these folk are ill; they will survive more than sea-sickness.

The white dawn is haggard behind us over the black waves, and our great strong boat goes thundering away ahead of the sun. It is mid-Atlantic, and we stare into the same great circle of hungry emptiness, as did Columbus and his mariners. Our gaze yearns for land, but finds none; it rests sadly on the solitary places of the ocean, on the forlorn waves lifting themselves far away, falling into nothingness, and then wandering to rebirth.

Nothing is happening in the wide ocean. The minutes add themselves and become hours. We know ourselves far from home, and we cannot say how far from the goal, but still very far, and there is no turning back. "Would there were," says the foolish heart. "Would I had never come away from the warm home, the mother's love, the friends who care for me, the woman who loves me, the girl who has such a lot of empty time on her hands now that I have gone away, her lover." How lonely it is on the steerage deck in the crowd of a thousand strangers, hearing a score of unknown tongues about your ears, hearing your own language so pronounced you scarce recognise it!

The mirth of others is almost unpardonable, the romping of Flemish 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."

"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!

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!"