I could not resist the temptation. I stepped over to the other end of the box, within a few feet of him, looked up, and said:
“Pardon me; but you are one of the fools who are not safe from their own errors, even in a daylight throng.”
At noon I had an opportunity for which I had been waiting: fine, high sunlight on a dinner crowd, and the purser in charge.
This man was a huge fellow, tall and heavy, as powerful as an ox, and one would have thought the two silver stripes on his sleeve were the decorations of a Czar. At every meal, when he superintended the ladling out to the capo di rancio corps and their helpers, he had taken upon himself the handling of the crowd. He had no set system of lining them up as the men on the Lahn had, but would pick out groups of three and four as the fancy occurred to him and pass them on to the servers, pouring forth a flood of directions, commands, and oaths in German which of course no one but his own men understood. His use of Italian seemed to be limited to “Avanti! Avanti!” which seemed to mean to him, “Hurry up!” “Come on!” “Stand back there!” “Let me pass!” “That is enough!” “Come back here!” “Don’t push!”—and forty other things. The crowd in the rear always pushed the front ranks up nearer the entrance to the “Lane of Food,” as the Italians dubbed it, and this seemed to irritate the Czar immeasurably. Forgetting that it was all the fault of his lack of system and constant change of method, he would charge into the press like an angry bull, and clear a lane through them by hurling his own huge bulk into the mass of human beings.
The unfortunate feature of this was that the Italians, with their natural deference, allowed the women and children who were doing capo di rancio duty to have the foremost places. I had seen him hurl about women with babies in their arms, and children clinging to their skirts, as if they were mere bundles of rags, and I determined that he should be reckoned with, and, as evidence, sought a photograph of one of his charges in the very act.
Taking a position on the top after rail of the fo’c’s’le head on the port side, I set the shutter at one fifteenth of a second and gave the diaphragm a sixteen opening. One of the pictures I took, which is herewith reproduced, tells its own story.
As we sailed away from Gibraltar on a smooth sea, the steerage, well-fed on bumboat delicacies, gathered on the main deck and fo’c’s’le head, and games of lotto, cards, and mora, the guessing game, were soon in progress on every hand. Here and there groups were singing or struggling with a few simple sentences in English. Gaetano Mullura and several of the boys were gathered about my wife, and she was teaching them how to count money and ask for something to eat, two of the essentials in America. Gaetano and Felicio Pulejo saved one sentence mass of new information: “Give me some bread, please,”—but lost the “some,” the “please,” and the expression in the shuffle. All during the voyage they went about observing to their admiring fellow-passengers:
LIFE ABOARD THE PRINZESSIN IRENE
Men’s Sleeping-quarters—Ladling out Food—The Purser Hurling Passengers About—On the Fo’c’s’l-head
“Gifa me bret,” or “Gifa me meat.”