And at Ellis Island a terrible thing happened, unforeseen—a shipwreck in the very harbour.
As the "freight" filed slowly along the corridor-cages in the great bare hall, like cattle inspected at ports by the veterinary surgeon, it came into the doctor's head that Leah's eye-trouble was infectious. "Granular lids—contagious," he diagnosed it on paper. And this diagnosis was a flaming sword that turned every way, guarding against Leah the Land of Promise.
"But it is not infectious," she protested in her best German. "It is only in the family."
"So I perceive," dryly replied America's Guardian Angel, who was now examining the obvious sister clinging to Leah's skirts. And in Biela, heavy-eyed with sickness and want of sleep, his suspicious vision easily discovered a reddish rim of eyelid that lent itself to the same fatal diagnosis, and sent her to join Leah in the dock of the rejected. The fresh-faced Tsirrélé and the wizen-faced mother of Srul passed unscrutinized, and even the dread clerk at the desk who asked questions was content with their oath that the wealthy Srul would support them. Srul was, indeed, sent for at once, as Tsirrélé was too pretty to be let out under the mere protection of a Polish crone.
When the full truth that neither she nor Biela was to set foot in New York burst through the daze in Leah's brain, her protest grew frantic.
"But my sister has nothing the matter with her—nothing. O gnädiger Herr, have pity. The Königsberg doctor—the great doctor—told me I had no disease, no disease at all. And even if I have, my sister's eyes are pure as the sunshine. Look, mein Herr, look again. See," and she held up Biela's eyelids and passionately kissed the wet bewildered eyes. "She is to be married, my lamb—her bridegroom awaits her on the wharf. Send me back, gnädiger Herr; I ought not to have come. But for God's sake, don't keep Biela out, don't." She wrung her hands. But the marriage card had been played too often in that hall of despairing dodges. "Oh, Herr Doktor," and she kissed the coat-tail of the ship's doctor, "plead for us; speak a word for her."
The ship's doctor spoke a word on his own behalf. It was he who had endorsed the two girls' health-certificates at Hamburg, and he would be blamed by the Steamship Company, which would have to ship the sisters back free, and even defray their expenses while in quarantine at the dépôt. He ridiculed the idea that the girls were suffering from anything contagious. But the native doctor frowned, immovable.
Leah grew hysteric. It was the first time in her life she had lost her sane standpoint. "Your own eye is affected," she shrieked, her dark pock-marked face almost black with desperate anger, "if you cannot see that it is only because my sister has been weeping, because she is ill from the voyage. But she carries no infection—she is healthy as an ox, and her eye is the eye of an eagle!" She was ordered to be silent, but she shrieked angrily, "The German doctors know, but the Americans have no Bildung."
"Oh, don't, Leah," moaned Biela, throwing her arms round the panting breast. "What's the use?" But the irrepressible Leah got an S.I. ticket of Special Inquiry, forced a hearing in the Commissioners' Court.
"Let her in, kind gentlemen, and send back the other one. Tsirrélé will go back with me. It does not matter about the little one."