When the service was concluded we went over the church with a young Russian who had fled to America to escape conscription, and who averred that he would never go back to his own country. His nose was broken, and of a peculiar blue hue, owing to blood-poisoning. His finger-nails were cut short to the quick, but even so, the coal-dust was deep between the flesh and the nail. He was most cordial, his handshake was something to remember, even to rue a little. He had been one of those who took the collection, and he emptied the money on to a table—a clatter of cents and nickels. He showed us with much edification the big bath behind the pulpit where the converted miners upon occasion walked the plank to the songs of fellow-worshippers. They were no doubt attracted by the holiness of water, considering the dirt in which they lived.
"He is a Socialist," said Kuzma, as we went away to have lunch. "A Socialist and a Baptist as well. He has a Socialist gathering in the afternoon and Russian tea and speeches, and he wants me to go. But they hold there should be no private property. I want private property. I want to travel and to have books of my own, so I can't call myself a Socialist."
In the afternoon Kuzma took me to the Public Library and showed me its resources. In the evening we went to supper at the house of a dear old Slovak lady, who had come from Hungary on a visit thirty years ago, and had never returned to her native land. She had been courted and won and married within three weeks of her arrival—her husband a rich Galician Slav. Now she was a widow, and had three or four daughters, who were so American you'd never suspect their foreign parentage.
She told me of the many Austrian and Hungarian Slavs in Pennsylvania, and gave it as her opinion that whenever a political party was badly worsted in south-eastern Europe the beaten wanted to emigrate en bloc to the land of freedom. When they came over they held to the national traditions and discussed national happenings for a while, but they gradually forgot, and seldom went back to the European imbroglio.
A touching thing about this lady's house was a ruined chapel I found on the lawn—a broken-down wooden hut with a cross above it, built when the Slav tradition had been strong, and used then to pray in before the Ikon, but now only accommodating the spade and the rake and a garden-roller.
We had a long talk, partly in Russian, partly in English—the old lady had forgotten the one and only knew the other badly. So it was a strange conversation, but very informing and pleasant.
Slavs always talk of human, interesting things.
Kuzma was very happy, having spent a long day with an Englishman whose name had been in the newspaper. We walked back to the hotel, and for a memory he took away with him a newspaper-cutting of a review of one of my books and a portrait of the tramp himself.
Next day, through the kindness of a young American whom I had met the week before entirely by chance, I was enabled to go down one of the coal-mines of Scranton, and see the place where the men work. The whole of the city is undermined, and during the daytime there are more men under Scranton than above it.