IV
LAND, HO!
THE gay spirits soon flag when land is heralded; for Ellis Island is ahead, with its uncertainties, and the men and women who were the merriest and who most often went to the bar, thus trying to forget, now are sober, and reflect. The troubled ones are usually marked by their restless walk and by their eagerness to seek the confidences of those who have tested the temper of the law in this unknown Eldorado.
Not long ago, on one of the ships in which I sailed, there was in the steerage, a monk, who neither walked nor talked like one. He shunned me, not because of my heresies, but because of my Latin, and although he mumbled out of a prayer-book and unskillfully counted his beads, I knew that “The devil a monk was he.”
On the eve of the great day of landing, he was pacing the deck, evidently in an unreverential mood, and I too was there, being one of those who prefer the biting wind of the night to the polluted air of the steerage. He came close to me as we walked, and hesitatingly asked me in a French to which clung a peculiar dialect never spoken in monasteries, whether I had been in America before. When I replied in the affirmative, he inquired all about the examination of baggage and of men, and when I told him how strict it is, that nothing is hid from the lynx eyes of the custom-house officials, and that nothing is sacred to them, not even the body of a monk, he grew visibly excited.
Stealthily he drew from under the folds of his cassock, a stone, a large, brilliant, tempting diamond, and said: “You may have that.” As I took it between my fingers, I detected traces of the torn rim of its setting, and passed it back into the trembling hand of his “Reverence.” “You needn’t be afraid of that,” he said; “I am one of the monks driven out of France, and I am taking the treasures of the Brotherhood over. I am afraid of the high duty and it will be cheaper for me to give you that diamond which is a pendant from the jewels of the Virgin, than to pay for what I have; that is, if you will help me to pass this little bag safely in.” With this he drew aside his cassock and fumbling in the folds brought to light a little bag which he would have handed to me, but I assured him that I was not a smuggler even for pious purposes, and after darting at me an impious glance, he disappeared into the steerage.
The next day at Quarantine, a messenger boy of unusual size came on board and calling out the names of a rather large number of steerage passengers handed them telegrams which were written in English and were rather suspiciously vague.—“Pavel Moticzka,—Ivan Kovaloff,—Isaac Goldberg,” and last,—“Jaques Rosenstein.” My friend the monk nearly jumped out of his cassock to reach for his message, and the “Boy,” who made most remarkable haste for a telegraph messenger, slipped a pair of handcuffs where only rosaries hung; and a Jewish jeweller’s clerk from Paris, who was running away with the best part of his employer’s diamonds,—was in the toils of the law.
Some years ago when the steerage of the Hamburg American Line had not been made even partially decent by our stringent immigration laws, over 500 steerage passengers, booked for the Fürst Bismark, at that time the swiftest boat of the line, were, without explanation or notification, stowed away in a freight boat scheduled to cross in twelve days, but never having actually made the trip in less than sixteen days.
The quarters were very close but the number of passengers was not excessively large, the weather was favourable, and blissfully ignorant of the slowness of the ship, we were comparatively happy.
We were divided about equally into Russian Jews, Slavs and Italians, and there was very little choice so far as comradeship was concerned. The passengers were all fairly dirty, the Italians being easily in the lead, with the Russian Jews a good second, and the Slavs as clean as circumstances allowed.