“It wasn’t long before he beat me again, and I told her and the police came and took him by the neck and put him in the lock-up, and it cost me twenty-five dollars to get him out. I earned that money myself and it was no punishment to him. I told the young woman about it, and she said: ‘The next time he hits you, you hit back.’ I said: ‘Is it allowed?’ She laughed, and said: ‘If he hits you first and you kill him, nothing will happen to you.’ It wasn’t long until he came home drunk and beat me again and I gave him one with the rolling-pin and he fell, and as he was lying there I got so angry I gave him another and another, and after that he knew better than to beat me.”
This Slavic Deborah told her story graphically and dramatically, and, undoubtedly, her husband was not the first immigrant to learn that marriage on the European plan is one thing, and on the American plan, quite another matter.
“Yes,” said the young Moravian woman. “When I get married, I’ll get an American husband. They don’t expect a dowry, and they don’t make you work like a slave.”
“In a year he’ll get divorced,” the young Hungarian Jew broke in. “They do that quickly.”
“And what of it?” she retorted. “I’ll be still better off. He’ll have to pay me.”
I do not know exactly at what point of the conversation I began to sing the praises of the American man; his loyalty and his sense of justice—if there is one thing that I enjoy more than singing the praise of the American woman it is lauding the American man.
Hardly had I begun to speak, when a young Roumanian, whom I had not previously noticed, commenced to rail at me, telling me in a mixture of three languages to keep my mouth shut; for he knew better. From the time he landed in New York until he left the country, he had not met a man who did not take advantage of him or ill-treat him. In Chicago, he was lured from the Union Station to a saloon on Canal Street, and, when he came to himself, he was lying in an alley, penniless. He found his way to Montana, where he herded sheep. There he tasted something of loneliness and homesickness, seeing nothing for weeks but red hills and blue sky—not a living thing except his sheep, or wolves to drive away. Then one day came American men on ponies and killed every one of his sheep, hundreds and hundreds of them, knocked him down and threatened to riddle him with bullets if he did not turn his face towards the East and march on without looking back. Days and days he walked, and because his face was of a darker hue than others, and his clothes looked strange, “No man gave unto him.” He then worked in the mines of Colorado. “The men there,” he said, “shoot, drink, and gamble, and have about as much regard for human life as for the life of sheep, and as soon as I had money enough I made ready to go home.” No more America for him, and no praise for its men.
“That’s not so, Brother,” came a voice from the farther end of the car, and I turned to see this valiant champion of ours. Had I been asked to give the place of his nativity, I should have put it in that Middle West of ours, which takes from her children all surplus flesh and puts in its place bone and sinew. His complexion was sallow, and the general expression of his face betokened sensitiveness, bordering on the abnormal. “I have been in America twenty years, and those years in Chicago, and I have met many good men. The good men don’t shoot and drink and gamble.”
It seemed strange language to my travelling companions; but to me it sounded familiar.
After the Chicago man had delivered his exordium, I had no difficulty in getting his story from him, and then I knew “whence this man had this doctrine.” Emigrating in his young manhood to Chicago, he had come in touch with Methodist missionaries, who befriended him and saved him from a life of intemperance and infidelity. Unfortunately, his awakened, religion-hungry soul became confused by the shibboleths of contending sects; he travelled and travailed all the way, from striving after a “Second Blessing,” to “Soul Sleepers,” “Seventh Day Adventists,” and Dowie’s religious movement, which at times looked like Opera Bouffe, but which ended in a great tragedy. I did not discover what form of faith was now holding the allegiance of his spirit; but as he told me that it was neither a church nor a sect, I surmised that he belonged to some church or sect whose chief doctrine is that it is neither.