While we lay there taking in the last lighter-loads of freight, the hatches were open and the crew at work on deck, so that, with all the emigrants up from the compartments to see the sights, the space forward of the hurricane deck was one seething, jostling mass of people. I improved the opportunity to get my kodak out while the sun was bright and the ship still, and had climbed up on a refrigerator by the forward rail of the hurricane deck, and with my camera hidden was waiting my chance to get a group without having them all looking at the lens. I had given out my occupation as photographer to explain to the ship’s people and my fellow-passengers my possession and use of a camera. They are not often seen in the steerage. As I stood there two men and two women from among the first-class passengers came by and paused at the rail to look down on the steerage crowd. The one man, a well-fed elderly person, I have since ascertained is an influential Western banker and politician. One woman is his wife, the other woman a friend of the first, while the other man is an architect of some repute.
Said Mrs. Banker: “Dear me, just see all those children. What dirty little imps they are.”
A tin-cupful of drinking-water to cleanse a family of faces!
Answered Mrs. Banker’s friend: “Oh, terrible to think of admitting such people wholesale into the United States. Just look at the slovenly dresses of those women, wrinkled and dirty—ugh.”
Sleeping in one’s skirts does not improve their freshness!
“Yes, yes,” observed the architect, “there ought to be a stop put to it: they are a menace to our civilization.”
His grandfather came over to Montreal in the coop of a French sailing-ship about 1840.
“These Italians are the worst of the lot. They are a dangerous element. Stick a knife in you in a minute. Look at that villainous-looking fellow standing right here on this box, smoking a cigar.”
The Wise and Superior Four turned their eyes on me, for it was I the banker meant. He went on.
“There is a fair sample of your Mafia member. Criminal? Why, criminal instinct is written in every line of his head and face. See the bravado in the way he holds his shoulders and the nasty look in his uneasy eyes. I’ll bet he has a bad record a yard long behind him in Italy, and he will double the length of it in America. By George, I should hate to meet that man at night in a lonesome spot.”