On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

Greeks, Servians, Bulgarians, Magyars, Italians and Slovaks laugh at one another’s antics and while listening to the strange sounds, are beginning to enter into a larger fellowship than they ever enjoyed; for so close as this many of them never came without the hand upon the hilt or the finger upon the trigger.

When Providence is generous and grants a quiet evening, the merriment will grow louder and louder, drowning the murmur of the sea and silencing the sorrows of the yesterday and the fears for the morrow.

“Yes, brothers, we are travelling on to America, the land of hope; let us be merry. Where are you going, Czeska Holka?” (a pet name for a Bohemian girl). “To Chicago, to service, and soon, I hope, to matrimony; that’s what they say, that you can get married in America without a dowry and without much trouble.” Ah, yes; and get unmarried again without much trouble; but of this fact she is blissfully ignorant. “Where are you going, signor?” “Ah, I am going to Mulberry Street; great city, yes, Mulberry Street, great city.” “Polak, where are you going?” “Kellisland.” “Where do you say?” “Kellisland, where stones are and big sea.” “Yes, yes, I know now: Kelly’s Island in Ohio. Fine place for you, Polak; powder blast and white limestone dust, yet a fine sea and a fine life.”

All of them are going somewhere to some one; not quite strangers they; some one has crossed the sea before them. They are drawn by thousands of magnets and they will draw others after them.

We have all become good comrades; for fellowship is easily begotten by the fellows in the same ship, especially in the steerage, where no barriers exist and where no introductions are possible or necessary. I am sharing many confidences; of young women who go to meet their lovers; of young men who go to make their fortunes; of bankrupts who have fled the heavy arm of the law; of women hiding moral taint; of countless ones who are hiding grave physical infirmities; and of some who have lost faith in God and men, in law and justice.

Yet most of them believe with a simpler faith than our own; God is real to them and His providence stretches over the seas. No morning, no matter how tumultuous the waves, but the Russian Jews will put on their phylacteries, and kissing the sacred fringes which they wear upon their breasts, will turn towards the East and the rising Sun, to where their holy temple stood.

Rarely will a Slav or Italian go to bed without committing himself to the special care of some patron saint.

Vice there is, crude, rough vice, down here in the steerage. Yes, they drink vodka,—even that rarely; but up in the cabin they drink champagne and Kentucky whiskies, the same devils with other names. Seldom do the steerage passengers gamble—a friendly game of cards perhaps, here and there; while up in the cabin, from sunlight until dawn, poker chips are piled and pass to and fro among daintily attired men and women. There are rough jests in this steerage, and scant courtesy; but virtue is as precious here as there, although kept under tremendous temptation. I have crossed the ocean hither and thither, often in the steerage, more often in the cabin; and I have found gentlemen in dirty homespun in the one place, and in the other supposed gentlemen who were but beasts, although they had lackeys to attend them, and suites of rooms in which to make luxurious a useless existence. The steerage brings virtue and vice in the rough. A dollar might not be safe, and yet as safe as a whole bank up in the cabin; the steerage might steal a loaf of white bread or a tempting cake, but it has not yet learned how to corner the wheat market; the men in the steerage might be tempted to steal a ride upon a railroad, but in the cabin I have met rascals who had stolen whole railroads, yet were called “Captains of Industry.”

Down in the steerage there is a faith in the future, and in the despair which often overwhelms them, I needed but to whisper: “Be patient, this seems like Hell, but it will soon seem to you like Heaven.”

Yes, this Heaven is coming; coming down almost from above, on yonder fringe of the sea, for far away trails the low lying smoke of the pilot boat, and but a little farther off is—land—land. None but the shipwrecked and the emigrants, these way-farers who come to save and be saved, know the joy of that note which goes from lip to lip as it echoes and reëchoes in thirty languages, yet with the one word of throbbing joy,—land—land—America.