"Porca di Madonna!" cursed the nearest, pointing to three small blue scars on his neck; "For nothing but these your infernal doctors have made me a beggar!"
"On the sea, when it was too late," whined his companion, "they told me we with red eyes should not go to New York, but to a city named Canada. Madre dí Dío! Why did I not take my ticket to this Canada?"
"You will next time?" I hinted.
"Next time!" he shrieked, dropping from his bunk as noiselessly as a cat. "Is there a next time with a book like that?" He shook in my face the libretto containing a record of his activities since birth, lacking which no Italian of the proletariat may live in peace in his own land nor embark for another. Across every page was stamped indelibly the word "deported."
"They ruined it, curse them! It's something in your maledetta American language that tells the police not to let me go and the agenzia not to sell me a ticket. My book is destroyed! Sono scomunicato! And where shall I get the money for this next time, díceme? To come to America I have worked nine, ten, sangue della Vergine! how do I know how many years! Why did I not take the ticket to this Canada?"
On the morning of June seventh we raised the Azores; at first the dimmest blot on the horizon, a point or two off the starboard bow, as if the edge of heaven had been salt-splashed by a turbulent wave. Excited dispute arose in the throng that quickly mustered at the rail. All but the nautical-eyed saw only a cloud, which in a twinkling the hysterical had pronounced the forerunner of a howling tempest that was soon to bring to the Prinzessin the dreaded mal di mare, perhaps even ununctioned destruction. One quaking father drove his family below and barricaded his corner against the tornado-lashed night to come.
An hour brought reassurance, however, and with it jubilation as the outpost of the eastern world took on corporate form. Before sunset we were abreast the island. An oblong hillside sloped upward to a cloud-cowled peak. Villages rambled away up tortuous valleys; here and there the green was dotted with chalk-white houses and whiter churches. Higher still the island was mottled with duodecimo fields of grain, each maturing in its own season; while far and near brilliant red windmills, less stolid and thick-set than those of Holland, toiled in the breeze, not hurriedly but with a deliberate vivacity befitting the Latin south. Most striking of all was a scent of profoundest peace that came even to the passing ship, and a suggestion of eternal summer, not of burning days and sultry nights, but of early June in some fairy realm utterly undisturbed by the clamorous rumble of the outer world.
Two smaller islands appeared before the day was done, one to port so near that we could count the cottage windows and all but make out the features of skirt-blown peasant women standing firm-footed in deep green meadows against a background of dimming hills. As the night descended, the houses faded to twinkling lights, now in clusters, now a stone's-throw one from another, but not once failing as long as we remained on deck.
For two days following the horizon was unbroken. Then through the morning mists of June tenth rose Cabo San Vicente, the scowling granite corner-stone of Europe, every line of its time-scarred features a defiance to the sea and a menace to the passerby. Beyond stretched a wrinkled, verdureless plateau, to all appearances unpeopled, and falling into the Atlantic in grim, oxide-stained cliffs that here advanced within hailing distance, there retreated to the hazy horizon. All through the day the world's commerce filed past,--water-logged tramps crawling along the face of the land, whale-like oil tanks showing only a dorsal fin of funnel and deck-house, East Indiamen straining Biscayward, and all the smaller fry of fishermen and coasters. A rumor, rising no one knew where, promised that early morning should find us entering the Mediterranean. I subsidized the services of a fellow-voyager dexterous with shears and razor and, reduced to a tuft of forelock, descended once more to the lower dungeon.
Long before daylight I was awakened by the commissario, or steerage steward, tugging at a leg of my trousers and screeching in his boyish falsetto, "Gibiltèrra! Make ready! Gibiltèrra!" It was no part of the commissario's duties to call third-class passengers. But ever since the day he had examined my ticket, the little whisp of a man who never ceased to regard me with suspicion, as if he doubted the sanity of a traveler who was bound for a land that was neither Italy nor America. Of late he seemed convinced that my professed plan was merely a ruse to reach Naples without paying full fare, and he eyed me askance now as I clambered from my bunk, in his pigwidgeon face a stern determination that my knavery should not succeed.