“Land?”
“Oh aye.”
Mr. Wrenn sat up so vigorously that he bumped his head. He chucked his papers beneath the pillow with his right hand, while the left was feeling for the side of the berth. “Land!” he bellowed to drowsing cabin-mates as he vaulted out.
The steerage promenade-deck, iron-sided, black-floored, ending in the iron approaches to the galley at one end and the iron superstructures about a hatch at the other, was like a grim swart oilily clean machine-shop aisle, so inclosed, so over-roofed, that the side toward the sea seemed merely a long factory window. But he loved it and, except when he had guiltily remembered the books he had to read, he had stayed on deck, worshiping the naive bright attire of immigrants and the dark roll and glory of the sea.
Now, out there was a blue shading, made by a magic pencil; land, his land, where he was going to become the beloved comrade of all the friends whose likenesses he saw in the white-caps flashing before him.
Humming, he paraded down to the buffet, where small beer and smaller tobacco were sold, to buy another pound of striped candy for the offspring of the Russian Jews.
The children knew he was coming. “Fat rascals,” he chuckled, touching their dark cheeks, pretending to be frightened as they pounded soft fists against the iron side of the ship or rolled unregarded in the scuppers. Their shawled mothers knew him, too, and as he shyly handed about the candy the chattering stately line of Jewish elders nodded their beards like the forest primeval in a breeze, saying words of blessing in a strange tongue.
He smiled back and made gestures, and shouted “Land! Land!” with several variations in key, to make it sound foreign.
But he withdrew for the sacred moment of seeing the Land of Promise he was newly discovering—the Long Island shore; the grass-clad redouts at Fort Wadsworth; the vast pile of New York sky-scrapers, standing in a mist like an enormous burned forest.
“Singer Tower…. Butterick Building,” he murmured, as they proceeded toward their dock. “That’s something like…. Let’s see; yes, sir, by golly, right up there between the Met. Tower and the Times—good old Souvenir Company office. Jiminy! ‘One Dollar to Albany’—something like a sign, that is—good old dollar! To thunder with their darn shillings. Home!… Gee! there’s where I used to moon on a wharf!… Gosh! the old town looks good.”