The Italians were from the South of Italy and had lost the romance of their native land but not the fragrance of the garlic. They quarrelled somewhat loudly and gesticulated wildly; but were good neighbours during those sixteen days. They were shy and not easily lured into confidences by one who knew their language but poorly, in spite of the fact that he knew their country well and loved it. In sixteen days the average American has a chance to discover at least one thing which he has found it hard to believe; that all Italians are not alike, that they do not look alike, and that they are not all Anarchists. When some relationship was established between us, and I had to serve as the link among the three races, we had a grand “Festa” to which the Slavs contributed some gutteral songs and clumsy dances, and the Italians, sleight of hand performances which made them appear still more uncanny to the Slavs.
They also supplied a Marionette theatre, of the Punch and Judy show variety, and “last but not least,” music from a hurdy-gurdy which played the dulcet notes of “Cavalliero Rusticana” and a dashing tune about “Marghareta, Marghareta.” “Signors and Signorinas,” said Pietro, after he had played all the tunes of his limited repertoire, “I have the great honour of presenting to you the national anthem of the great American country to which we are travelling.” He turned the crank, and out came,—the ragtime notes of “Ta—ra—ra—boom—de—a.”
The last number on the program was a song by a Russian Jewess, a woman whose beauty was marred by bleached hair which had grown rusty, and by a complexion upon which rouge and powder had done their worst. Her voice which was strong rather than melodious, had in it an element of artificiality evidently begotten on the stage. She at once became the star among our entertainers, and though her culture was superficial, she was by far the best company for me.
Her parents, she told me, had been well to do Jews in a market town in Russia. They had broken away from many of the observances and traditions of their religion, they and their children followed all the latest fashions, a governess imported from France brought with her Paul de Kock’s novels and other elevating(?) Parisian literature; music teachers came, who discovered in the only daughter a voice which of course, had to be cultivated in Vienna. There were concerts which the father’s money arranged, a few glowing press notices at so much a line, and finally the fruitless struggle to appear in opera.
Then came one of those Anti-Semitic riots, those brutal outpourings of human hate which she was unable to describe. All she could say over and over again was, “Strashno, Strashno,” “it was terrible, terrible.” The house in which she had lived was a wreck, her father beaten to death, and she—she could not say it; but I knew. She told of women whose mutilated bodies were torn open, and of children whose heads were beaten together until they were a bleeding mass. Yes, indeed, it was “Strashno, Strashno,” terrible, terrible.
Somewhat early in her girlhood, a clerk in her father’s store “had looked upon her, and loved her” with a youth’s ardour; but she had scorned him, as well she might scorn this uncultured, stupid looking son of Abraham. Again and again he asked her to be his wife, until through her entreaty, her father drove him out of the store. She told me much of her life and perhaps many things which she told me were not true. I knew for instance, that she had not sung before the Czar of Russia, that Hanslick the great musical critic of Vienna did not predict for her a Patti’s fame and fortune; nor did I believe that a young millionaire in Berlin blew out his brains because she would not marry him. But I did believe that the poor clerk went to New York, that he had worked day and night in a sweat shop pressing cloaks, that out of his earnings he had supported her in the vain struggle to attain Grand Opera, and that now she was on her way to reward his faithfulness and become his wife.
“What is it like, this America?” “What kind of life awaits one on the East-side?” “What social status has a cloak presser in New York?” “What chance is there for one to reach the goal of Grand Opera?” These and other questions she hurled at me while the line upon the horizon grew clearer, and the hearts of men and women heavy from expectation.
On this ship too, Susanka, a Slovak girl nursed her way across the Atlantic, giving food to a little Magyar baby which she despised; and while she rocked the restless little one to sleep and sang her Slavic lullaby, “Hi-u, Hi-u, Hi-u-shke-e-e”—one could see in her heavy face her heart’s hunger for her own child. “Oh! Pany velkomosny (mighty sir), my little child! I had to leave it with a stara baba (old woman) and it was gray, ashen gray when I left it, and it will die, it will die!” and she grew frantic in her grief as she rocked the Magyar child to and fro, “Hi-u, Hi-u, Hi-u-shke-e-e-e.” “Who was to blame, Susanka?” The look of pain changed to one of fiery anger as she sent back across the sea, a curse, long and terrible, against her betrayer.
Yes, those are heavy hours and long, on that day when the ship is circled by the welcoming gulls, and the fire-ship is passed, while the chains rattle and the baggage is piled on the deck. “Will they let me in, signor?” “Why should they not, Antonio?” “Ah! signor, I have not always been a free man. They held me in jail for four years. Will they know it in America? I stabbed a man,—yes, signor.”
“Will they let us in, Guter Herrleben?” anxiously asks Yankev: his wife Gietel and six children are with him and one of the boys lies motionless upon the hatch, pale, worn and almost gone. “Consumption? yes; he was so well, but we were smuggled over and driven by the gendarmes, and had to be out in the damp, and he caught cold and a cough came and you can see, Guter Herrleben, quick consumption!”