Chapter IV (2)

The last piece of first-class baggage rolled aboard. Giant hawsers strained, and were released. It was departure. From my coign at a deck porthole the Landing Stage came into focus. I confess I exclaimed. As far as the eye could reach, on the water and street levels, the glance of thousands on thousands was rivetted on the vessel as she cautiously edged away. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky innocently blue. All indifferent to us in the background stood the massive city of Liverpool, concentrated on affairs, but no less indifferent to the city itself ranged this childlike, almost awestruck, army of curiosity, silently intent on us as we receded into the river. From our porthole (I was joined by a Syrian) we could not help a glow of pride. My companion was not able to vent his feelings in English, but he was quite moved. His was an Indian-like head—high cheekbones, thin lips, hard, beady eyes. He dwelt on the vast crowd, ejaculating “ah-ye-ye-ye,” and clucking his tongue. I smiled at his solid wonderment. Then he craned out of the porthole to view the water far, far below. I followed suit. He pointed down, and gave a significant, cheerfully reckless laugh. I laughed, too. We were in for it, and no mistake.

The steamer’s first evening was spent, doing nothing, out in the Mersey. The tide was in some way blameworthy. It seemed inefficient of nature, but as we lay opposite Liverpool the night-lights came out, definite and serene and friendly, and I took out my mental clutch.

Time came for supper. I reserved for the morning the mysteries of the cuisine. I had earlier gone below to the pantry, after some talk with a humane steward, and to my surprise I had been allowed to help myself to a cup of tea.

The first evening was one of extraordinary activity. Still in their best clothes, around our half of the entire deck poured streams and streams of passengers. It was almost impossible to tread one’s way. And in several places these streams turned themselves into dancing whorls, where volunteers with a concertina had appeared. I happen to like the concertina, and I enjoyed it during five entire days, though not so much the concertina as the movement of life which it promoted. There were never any deck sports, nor games, nor organized distraction. But, except for one awful seasick period, there was endless dancing and singing. On this first evening I stood in the rings that framed the waltzers, and my blood raced with their pleasure. The Swedes in particular took part much and well. They occasionally ventured on those new forms, but only for dancing reasons. When Swedes really want to hug each other, they do it openly and for its own sake.

To increase the friendliness of the evening, everyone was willing to talk a little. I chatted with a Russian, a Greek, an Englishwoman and an Englishman. He was a young and unhappy Englishman, and in disgust at the ignorant foreigner. I later learned that he made up the difference and was allowed to go second class.

At 9 p.m., tired of repeated searches for my bedroom steward (he was dishing out in the pantry most of the time), I went to the assistant chief steward of the third class to see if I could be transferred to the 4-berth room. He’d see, he said in a serious bass voice, he’d let me know. At 9.30 p.m. he again told me he’d see. Whether he has yet seen or not I have no means of discovering. At 10 p.m. I took the berth, with the consent of the other men in the cabin. I gave my tip to the bedroom steward, as I guessed he was the less Tammanyized. The assistant chief steward was a strong character, free from numerical superstition. He asked 13 cents for five penny stamps.

In my room the bedding proved simple—a coarse white bag of straw for mattress, and one dark blue horse blanket for clothing. A small pouch of straw served as pillow. No linen, of course, and no frills of any kind. There was an iron spring frame. I found it ascetic but clean. The single blanket was not enough. I used my rug, and my fellow passengers used overcoats and rugs, too. The mattresses, I was told, serve just one trip. They are dumped overboard as soon as the steamer is out to sea on the return voyage. In my bed I was the only living creature present.

Those who rose early had advantages. They had first use of the tin basin in their own room, or of the bowls in the general washing room. They had a bid for the solitary bath tub in male steerage. They were up in time to be allowed to walk all the way aft, and look down the wide lane of jade and white in the wake of the _Lusitania_. And they were in time for the first sitting.

Those who did not rise early had to listen to the tramplings that began long before sunrise. Despite this, I got up late. Fifty of us waited over half an hour outside an iron grill at the head of the dining room stairs. The dining room is quite inadequate, so there had to be four sittings—first come, first served. When we reached below we took seats where we could. There was an understanding, however, by which Britishers were grouped together. This was made effectual by stewards who stood where the ways parted, and thrust Jews and Poles and mid-Europeans to one side, and Britishers and Scandinavians to the other.

On the whole, the food during the trip was edible. I could not eat the bacon or the beef. I did not try the eggs. The tea was vile and usually not very hot. The coffee was vile. But the bread, served in individual loaves, was most palatable. The Swedish bread was excellent. The oatmeal was edible, even with the wretchedly thin condensed or dried milk. We had herrings and at another time sausages, and both were fair. The potatoes were always excellently boiled and good of their kind, but the browned potatoes were invariably overcooked and not fit to serve. The cold meats for supper could be eaten. The boiled rice was insipid. The stewed prunes and stewed apricots were palatable. I had very good baked beans and navy beans, good pea soup and fair broth. I had no complaints to make of the food. I never decided whether it was butter or margarine, but I ate it willingly. It certainly had not that callously metallic taste that margarine used to have.

The service was on bold, wholesale lines. Twenty sat at each table, and there were two equipments of bread and butter, sugar, salt, pepper and vinegar. A disconsolate plant decorated each table. One steward took charge of each ten people. I sat at a different table practically every time, and most of my companions were delightfully obliging and unaggressive. Only those who so wished had to stand up and harpoon their bread roll. There were a few tiresome people who damned the food and failed to pass the salt. The stewards were elusive, or rather that one-tenth part of a steward who was your share. I regretted on one occasion to discover egg shells in my dessert, and the next day I was pained to find a knob of beef in my stewed apples. My sympathetic steward remarked: “Puts you a bit off, don’t it?” It do.

From about five in the morning till eleven at night these stewards are working. Work is a good thing. It is strange that the stewards look unhealthy and fatigued. It is due to the inherent inferiority of stewards.

Queenstown was the distraction for several hours on the first day out. The Cunard and White Star Lines have just discerned that the harbor is unsafe for big boats. At what point of profit, I wondered, would Queenstown harbor suddenly and miraculously become safe again?

As we left the coast of Ireland there came an unctuous swell upon the sea. You would not think it could upset anyone, but when I ascended after dinner I was horrified. Rows of passengers lay where they were stricken, all too evidently ill, ghosts of their braver selves. The stewards were in the dining room and could not come, and did not come, for well over an hour. For well over an hour no effort at all was made to clean the decks. I now understood this grave disadvantage of third class, to which the company itself contributes. But there was much kindness to the decimated, and much tolerance. Later I admired immensely the work of the matrons. I seldom met three more splendid, capable, sympathetic women. There were superior passengers who despised the childishness with which simpler people gave in. I myself laughed when I saw a girl lying with complete abandon plumb on top of another girl. The grim sailor heard me and muttered: “Only an ignorant person’d laugh at anyone was seasick.”

During this distressing hour a Russian came flying to the master at arms. “The doctor! the doctor!” “You can’t have the doctor,” said the man in blue, not unkindly. “We can’t help seasickness. It’s got to be expected.” “The doctor! Not seaseek! dead!” He made a ghastly face. “Oh, all right,” said the master-at-arms, and we went straight below.

Terrific pleading calls shook the cabin. “Sonya! Sonya!” The master-at-arms walked right in, and emerged supporting a sack-like girl, very white and inert. “You could cut the air with a knife,” murmured the weary master-at-arms. He assisted her on deck, and she was wooed to consciousness.

At this time, on the enclosed deck, there was much commotion. A striking red-haired Jewess, clad in green, had fainted and was put sitting on a bench. A venerable Jew appealed to her excitedly while an earnest young soul at the other side cried for water. It made me furious to see the limp woman propped up, but they were evidently playing according to the rules of a different league. The water at last came and much to my surprise the earnest soul put it to her own lips. But not to drink it. In her the Chinese laundryman had an efficient rival. She was the most active geyser I ever saw. After a time there was a feeble motion of protest, to the regret of the delighted spectators.

On the open deck during this weather the Jews monopolized one corner. I counted thirty of them huddled inseparably together in their misery, like snakes coiled in the cold. As they began to recover, a leg would wiggle from under one blanket, and a head be thrust out from under another. Later they sat up and drank their tea out of glasses, nibbling the sugar. They soon littered the place with apple peels and orange peels. After generations of inhibition they probably needed to be told that they were permitted by a merciful dispensation to use the sea as a waste basket.

As the sea fell slumberously still, life recovered its audacity. Again the decks became clamorous, multitudinous. People thronged the promenade, or swarmed on the benches that do duty for deck chairs. They began smoking everywhere again, and out came the stewards and the Black Crowd to enjoy a sociable cigarette. There was little to do but talk, until the dancing began. The grim sailor looked pityingly on Babel, as he patrolled the Second Class partition. He was for smaller ships. “On a smaller ship,” he deigned to remark, “you can come up and throw your weight around.”

Differences in manners obtruded. The third day out a youth emerged whom I took to be a swineherd from the beech forests of Croatia. He was not handsome. His fringe encroached upon his little eyes. His chin was unformed. Up over his trousers, as if he had just waded through the piggery, his socks were drawn. There he stood, plastic youth, a hand in his pocket, pivotting a heel, surveying the world through his own hirsute thatch. Suddenly, deliberately, he blew his nose Adam-like. A Swedish woman next me turned livid. “De dirty pig.” I felt myself the brother of a Swede. The Croatian saw us but beheld us not. His mouth ajar, he ruminated afresh on the fleshpots of Croatia. Raw material, simple even to the verge of our ancestral slime. I prayed “God be with thee,” and looked elsewhere.

That evening amid the throng which waited for admittance to the dining room appeared a Greek. The glaring electric light concentrated on that swart face, flung-out chest, and bared neck. He was incredibly blasphemous and incredibly self-important. “Seventy-five dollars, see. American money!” He showed his money to us, and gave a chuckle. His lip curled. “They only Hunkies,” indicating his companions who connected themselves with him by slavish eyes. “I in America before, Christ, yes!” His eye roved boldly, and he showed his white teeth. “I got more money still, you bet your life. When I get over I marry no Hunkie. I marry Henglish girl. Yeh, Christ, you bet!” He antagonized us, and yet we watched him eagerly. He lapped up our interest. Overcome with the savor of attention, he incontinently spat. I drew away. “It’s a’ right,” he said half-obsequiously, “I know what I do. I no’ spit on American.” He felt too much kinship to spit on an American.

So things happen, but only in the steerage. At the door of the café below, you will not find a Polish count informing the steward: “I marry a Henglish girl. No penniless Hunkie for me.” Nor will the first-class steward answer: “Who cares? Who’ll buy a beer?”

In all these days, among all these peoples, there was no friction. Some youths did start to make boisterous fun of two barefooted Italian women, walking up and down in bright petticoat and kerchief. But the Italians smiled and skipped back and sat down, and there was no more “fun.” Between congruous people intercourse was easy and frank. The fresh-hued Scandinavians were exceptionally lively. A little English group revolved quietly together, with a private afternoon teapot for central sun. Another little group, including two girls in service, a cotton spinner and a grocery clerk, often sat in the prow and talked amiably about anything from the food on board to their notion of a God. They say that “sociability proceeds from weakness.” Steerage, at any rate, is highly sociable. In some cases it was also frankly amatory. The attractive girls, so soon well known, seemed to have no fear of the predatory males. They took each other lightly. But at 9.30 p.m., all the feminine kind, even the rebellious, had to leave their conquests and go below. This rule was enforced to the letter.

Two days before landing we had another medical experience. We learned that American citizens in the third class were immune from smallpox and need not be troubled on that score, but that aliens in the third class must all be vaccinated. It was said there were ways of evading this, but I found none. For several hours we were assembled while the women filed in. After an hour in line, our turn came to enter the surgery improvised in the companionway. On a table flamed a number of small spirit lamps, over which the stewards sterilized the metal scrapers. I bared my arm, as per orders from a pasty youth. The doctor answered my queries by taking my arm, scraping it gently and applying the lymph. “It is not our law,” he said politely. “Take this chap,” motioned a bullet-headed assistant, and I was shoved to another group. “Rub it off,” whispered a friendly scullion, but I let it stay, out of curiosity. The new group crowded around another big table. An additional hour’s standing brought up my turn to answer the clerk’s questions. He recorded on the manifesto that I was destined for Brooklyn and had friends. This was added to the facts I had provided when I engaged passage. I was now catalogued for Ellis Island.

The day before landing there was, I believe, another medical inspection. We got in line for it, but the crowd simply disregarded the stewards, and I never even saw the doctor. On that evening the barriers were partly down, and the Goths and Huns invaded two decks.

It was Friday morning before we came into the yellow waters of the harbor, and passed under the cliffs of Manhattan. Already a fissure had appeared in the steerage. On one side, separated from us more and more, went the naturalized citizens, each armed with his papers. On the other, we aliens congregated, to be shipped in due time to Ellis Island.

It was an inhuman morning, a morning of harrowing strain and confusion. Though the inspection of baggage amounted to nothing in itself, especially as there had been no preliminary declaration, there was the uncertainty, and the three hours’ delay. Searching for baggage, waiting for inspectors, hectored and shouted at, the poorer immigrants reminded one of Laocoön. And then we had to wait for the boat to Ellis Island, and we had to lug our hand baggage with us for the hours that were to come. This fact alone made the day an ordeal for all except the strongest, a brute ordeal to which wealthier folk would not submit for two successive days.

On the Ellis Island boat we were crammed like cattle. “Move up, I say, move up. God! move UP, you damned kike!” So spoke our burly exemplar of American citizenship. We “moved up” until the last square foot of floor was shut off from sight by close-packed bodies. We coöperated with the U. S. Government as well as we could to provide conditions for another Slocum disaster. When such a disaster does occur on one of these old boats, every editor in the country will demand with magnificent emphasis: “Fix the responsibility!” Let us by all means wait till the steed is stolen.

Ellis Island basked in the sun. It was handsome and trim and restful, after the swarming pier. We entered the fine examination building single file, always lugging our suitcases and bundles and bags and wraps and boxes and babies.

Medical inspection, a real inspection this time. We passed through a cleverly arranged aisle, and at each angle a new doctor in khaki sought for blemishes. I finally impinged on a man who asked me if I could see well without my glasses. I answered: “Not at all.” He leaned over, and made two crosses in blue chalk on my raincoat. At the exit from this trap an attendant wrote another little piece on my raincoat, “Vis.,” short for vision. I was allowed to lay down my bags, and sit and wait for half an hour.

When the special examiners were ready, we were led up a corridor and shown into a bright room. Around the walls were men and boys in all stages of dress and undress, as at a bathing beach.

“Ken you read English?” I said yes. “Read that over there.” A familiar oculist test card hung on the wall. Being already so tired that I would have welcomed deportation, I resentfully choked out: “B, T B R, F E B D,” and so on. “All right, doc.,” said the attendant, and a civil man at a high desk silently handed me an initialled slip. Outside this was taken, and my dilapidated Inspection Ticket was stamped “Specially Examined.” I had passed the test, and went back for my baggage to the ante-room. A woman there, flushed and petulant, commented on her being examined. The attendant turned away contemptuously. “Aw, she’s ben hittin’ the pipe, or somethin’.”

Up the steps into the great hall I proceeded. It resembled a big waiting room, where to my delight benches ran the length of the room. It was now nearly three, and I had neglected to eat anything all day. In the particular bench decided by my Inspection Ticket, I emphatically sat down.

At the far end of these benches ran a long screen at right angles. In that screen were a number of gates. Each gate was guarded by a seated official with our manifestoes on the desk before him. Through those gates we immigrants were being sieved into the United States.

At last I was in the sieve. The guardian of the gate was kind of voice. “You have a brother in Brooklyn, eh?” “How much money have you got?” I was not asked to show it. “All right, pass on. No, there is nothing further. You can go as far as you like now!” Two of us from the _Lusitania_ whipped down the steps, bags and all, and delivered up our Inspection Tickets at a last, final door. The sun shone outside. The air was fresh. The light danced on the sea. There were no more policemen, stewards, masters-at-arms, doctors, baggage examiners, attendants, inspectors. I drew a deep breath, and tried to forget the benefits of civilization.

On the ferry to New York there mingled future Americans from the Anchor Line and the Red Star Line, as well as from the Cunard. Already I could find only a few of my former companions. Some had gone before. Some were still on the Island. In the present crowd they were absorbed, obliterated. The little world of the _Lusitania_ was already annexed by America, as a little meteor is annexed by the burning star. I regretted this absorption, this obliteration. For six days I had belonged to them, and they had belonged to me. I thought of their geniality, their simplicity, their naturalness, their long-suffering. I was sorry to say good-bye.

THE C. T. U.

GEORGE CRAM COOK

The battle began Monday morning when Assistant Professor Clark seated himself facing the President in the President’s office.

“I want permission,” said the lanky, trim-bearded young man, “for Vida Martin, who is here raising money for the striking button-cutters of Manistee, to speak in Assembly Hall.”

The President’s grey eyes opened a little wider, then narrowed shrewdly. He swung a little in his swivel chair, and pulled his graceful iron-grey moustache. Then he said gently: “Would you regard it as proper for the University to take sides to that extent in an industrial dispute?”

“We listened to Judge Graham’s Menace of Syndicalism.”

“An address which was general. This is a specific conflict.”

“Judge Graham talked about it.”

“In illustration of his general point. Miss Martin, I understand, talks of nothing else. She is an extreme radical—a professional firebrand. I am surprised to find a man of your standing in sympathy with her ideas.”

“I’m not—altogether,” replied Clark. “That is scarcely a sufficient reason for not listening to them. I want our students to hear her side of the case—undistorted.”

“We cannot lend unsound cases the weight of university authority,” said the President.

“Judge Graham’s case was thoroughly unsound,” said Clark. “Vida Martin is, as you say, an extreme radical. But we have listened to an extreme reactionary. If it is the policy of the University not to take sides, it cannot invite him to speak and refuse to let her. Her subject, I ought to say, is general—the Ideals of Syndicalism. As to her soundness: she knows industrial unionism from the inside—her own experience as organizer. She knows its leaders personally. All Judge Graham knows is his own prejudice against labor and some newspaper stories.”

The President swung back to his desk and arranged some papers.

Clark sat there looking irritatingly thorough.

“What made you take the responsibility of discussing this with Vida Martin?” the President demanded.

“I met her on the train from Manistee last night. I used to know her at Hull House. She spoke of the dismissal of Brooks and Gleason here last year for insisting on their right to express their real ideas, and made the sweeping claim that there is no free speech in any American university. I said I’d disprove that by getting Assembly Hall for her. If she can’t have it, it seems to bear out her charge against us.”

“Haven’t you yourself enjoyed freedom of speech here?”

“Yes, I have. But frankly, I’m afraid I’ve never had anything to say that was dangerous.”

“Afraid! Your talk with Miss Martin seems to have had a singular effect on your point of view.”

“It has,” admitted Clark. “I never put such new life into the thinking of any student as she put into mine last night. Six years ago in Chicago she was not unlike me. If the labor movement makes her what she is and the University makes me what I am—there’s something wrong with the University. I think we should try to understand her.”

“By all means—those of us who have not already done so.”

Clark smiled.

“Understanding her is one thing,” said the President, nettled, “and giving her violent doctrines such sanction by the University as you propose is quite another. You’ve been carried off your feet. When you regain your balance you’ll thank me for not granting this wild request of yours. Is there anything further you wish to say?”

Clark rose to go. “Only that I regret this failure—of the University.”

“It’s not the University that’s in danger of failing, Mr. Clark,” said the President significantly.

Having sufficiently endangered his career to no purpose, Mr. Clark strode out of the Liberal Arts’ Building, past the black bulletin boards on which the announcement of Vida Martin’s lecture would not appear. He marched down the old flagstone walk beneath the oaks and budding maples and across to the hotel—a three-story brick building painted slate-grey.

There, with a local labor leader and the editor of a Bohemian paper who were helping her organize her meeting for the following night, he found Vida Martin, a trim, strong woman of thirty, not yet at the height of her vivid powers.

She handed Clark the first draft of a handbill. To his dismay it announced as the place of her meeting—Assembly Hall.

“That’s gone to the printers,” she said casually.

“I—I’m sorry,” said Clark. “I have misled you. My confidence in the University’s impartiality was misplaced. You must let me stand the difference in your printing bill. You have been refused the use of Assembly Hall.”

Vida Martin smiled at him the smile of a wicked minx. “You didn’t mislead me a bit, dear Kenton Clark,” she said. “I have already engaged the Opera House for to-morrow night.”

Dear Kenton Clark stared at the handbill. “Engaged the Opera House and printed Assembly Hall on your dodgers!”

She nodded. “My æsthetic sense,” she explained. “I thought how nice it would look to have a cunning red line through ‘Assembly Hall’ and ‘Opera House’ stamped on in red with a rubber stamp. Don’t you love to use a rubber stamp?”

As the guile of the agitator dawned on him he started to disapprove.

“It’s just a shame,” she said, catching his expression, “for me to come contaminating the innocent professorial mind with the spectacle of fighting tactics.”

He laughed. “The professorial mind isn’t wholly infantile. The University deserves what you’re going to give it. I shall announce your meeting in my classes.”

“Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?”

“Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I _will_ lose my job!” Clark replied hotly.

That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture.

After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him.

“What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box in Assembly Hall.”

“Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered.

Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.”

“John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with her now.”

Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him.

“Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark.

With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.

Five minutes after he met her he was quarrelling like an old friend with Vida Martin—over Thompson and Geddes’ “rustic reinterpretation” of evolution. Vida would none of it, holding that Nature’s creative centres are now great cities—where evolution is kept entirely too busy making a new kind of soul in women to bother with bugs and things.

Of the woman’s revolution Guthrie had a literary knowledge, but in his cooped life Vida was the first who embodied it—the first who viewed life with the unshockable tolerance of science, the first whose mental background was wholly non-theological, the first even who was wholly conscious of her economic independence and its implications. The new ideas and feelings alive in her made him see the paleness of what he had got from those plays, novels, and sociology books. The quiet fearlessness with which she gave him and Kenton Clark to understand that she had laid aside ready made morality, “the parasite code of woman subordinate,” took his scholarly breath. She had replaced it, he gathered, not with another code, but with a habit of discrimination “confronting apparent good and evil with armed light—the Ithuriel spear of woman free.” So unprofessorily the professor phrased it when the thoughts she stirred in him began to sing. He was not aware of it, but they sang the sooner because her heavy black hair had copper glints in it and the joy of thinking made her eyes such wells of light.

“I’ve been thirteen years here in my treadmill,” he said to her as he was leaving. “You, from your wonderful cities, make me realize that I have taught all the life out of my old knowledge. I need new contacts with the life of to-day. I must have more significant things to teach. I want to see all I can of you while you’re here, and then—it would help to keep in touch with you and your world through letters.”

He started to ask her and Clark to dinner, but reflected that he must first go home and lead up to that.

“There’s a living soul,” said Kenton Clark when Guthrie had gone.

“And with a flickering creativeness,” Vida added. “I wonder if anything could gather the flickers into a flame?”

“A passion for a woman,” Clark surmised.

“Or a cause.”

Afterwards they remembered her saying that, and looking back it seemed a premonition.