Chapter III. My Schoolmates
Teach me American
IT was an extraordinary excuse that Uncle Stanwood gave for his neglect of us. He disposed of the matter by saying, in his Christmas letter, “I was so busy and so hard put to that I had no heart to write till I had gathered enough money to send for you. I know it must have worried you.”
His steamship tickets, however, had suddenly put us in the limelight in the town. “The Brindins are going over!” was the word that passed around. I can imagine no more perfect fame than the United States had gained in the minds of the men and women of our little town. America was conceived as the center of human desire, the pivot of worldly wealth, the mirror of a blissful paradise. If we had fallen heirs to peerages or had been called to Victoria’s court, it is doubtful if more out-and-out respect would have been showered on us than was ours when it was known that we were going to the “States.”
The impression prevailed that in America the shabbiest pauper gets a coat of gold. During the packing, when the neighbors dropped in while Mrs. Girion made a hot brew of porter and passed it around to the visitors and the workers, an America was constructed for us rivaling the most extravagant fairy-tale ever told by Grimm.
“Yis,” chattered Old Scroggs, “they’s wunnerful likely things over theer in Hammerica, I’m told. I heer’s ’at they spends all ther coppers for toffy and such like morsels, havin’ goold a plenty—real goold! Loads o’ it, they saay!”
“That’s so,” put in Maggie, our next-door neighbor. “Everybody has a chance, too. Double wages for very little work. All sorts of apples and good things to eat. Fine roads, too, and everybody on cycles; they’re so cheap out there. They say the sun is always out, too, and not much rain!”
In somebody’s memory there lingered traditions brought from America by a visitor from that country. Besides these traditions, which had to do with “gold,” “paradise,” and “easy work,” there were a half a dozen Yankee words which we dearly loved to prate, as if by so doing we had at least a little fellowship with the wonderful country. In the school-yard my fellows drilled me on these words, Billy Hurd saying, “Now, Al, them Yankees allus talk through the nose, like this,” and he illustrated by a tinpanish, nasal tone that resembled the twang of a tight piano wire. “Now, if you’re going to be American, talk like that, it’s real Yankee. Now let’s see you try the word, ‘Candy,’ which is what they call toffy over there. Only don’t forget to talk through the nose like I did.”
So I dug my hands deep in my pockets, “cocked my jib,” as we called looking pert, and drawled out in most exaggerated form, “Saay, Ha’nt, want tew buy teow cents wuth of kaandy?”
“That’s just like Yankee,” complimented Billy. So I went home, called my aunt’s attention to what I was going to do, and repeated the sentence, much to her delight.
“That’s right, Al,” she said, “learn all the American you can, it will help out when we get there!”
Filled with incidents like these, the days of our English lingering rapidly drew to an end, and every thought in my mind had an ocean steamship at the end of it. The neighbors made it a “time of tender gloom,” for it could be nothing else to a mature person, this taking up of the Brindin family history by the root for transplantation, this breaking off of intimate relationships which, through blood, reached back into misty centuries. Then, too, there was the element of adventure, of risk, for we little knew what prospects were in store for us in that strange land: what would be the measure of our reward for going there. The neighbors were very solemn, but the strange thing about it lay in the fact that there was not one, insular as the British are heralded, who thought that the proposed trip should not be taken!
Finally we came to the farewells and I made mine very concrete. As it was clearly understood that everybody who went to America attained great wealth, I told Clara Chidwick that I would send her a fine gold watch, and when her sister Eline cried with envy, I vowed to send her a diamond brooch. Harry Lomick went off with the promise of five new American dollars, Jimmy Hedding was consoled with the promise of two cases of American “candy,” while Chaddy Ashworth vowed eternal friendship when I promised him a barrel of American apples, and, on the strength of that, as my dearest friend, we mutually promised to marry sisters, to keep house next door to one another when we grew up, and to share whatever good fortune might come to us in the shape of money!
Quite a body-guard of friends saw us off at the station. “Good luck to you!” was the prevailing cry, as we sat in our compartment waiting for the train to start for Liverpool. Then the guard shouted, “All aboard!” and we were in the first, exciting stage of our great adventure.
WHEN THE TRAIN STARTED FOR LIVERPOOL, I COUNTED MY PENNIES WHILE
MY AUNT WEPT BITTERLY
I settled myself back against the leather back of the seat wondering why my aunt was crying so, and then I began to count the pennies with which I planned to purchase some oranges in Liverpool.
Our night in Liverpool, our last night on English soil, is summed up in a memory of a cheap hotel, a stuffy room, and a breakfast on an uncountable number of hard-boiled eggs. In the morning, early, we left that place and were taken on a tram-car to the dock. There I did purchase some oranges from an old witch of an orange woman, big football oranges, which when peeled were small enough, for they had been boiled to thicken the peel, so Aunt said.
On the steerage deck we were jostled by Jews with their bedding and food supplies. At ten o’clock, after we had stood in the vaccination line, the ship sailed from the dock, and I leaned over the side watching the fluttering handkerchiefs fade, as a snow flurry fades. Then the tugs left us alone on the great, bottle-green deep. There was a band in my heart playing, “I’m going to the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
When one makes a blend of bilge-water, new paint, the odor of raw onions, by confining them in an unventilated space under deck, and adds to that blend the cries of ill-cared-for babies, the swearing of vulgar women, and the complaining whine of sickly children, one knows what the steerage on the old “Alaska” was to me. The Jews owned the warm, windswept deck, where they sat all day on the tins which covered the steam-pipes, and munched their raw fish, black bread, and flavored the salt air with the doubtful odor of juicy onions. I heard the English forswear the bearded tribe, denounce them for unbelievers, sniff at the mention of the food they ate; but after all, the English had the wrong end of the stick; they had to stay below deck most of the time, and sicken themselves with the poor, unwholesome fare provided by the ship.
My aunt said to me, one day, “Al, I’d give the world for one of them raw onions that the Jews eat. They’re Spanish onions, too, that makes it all the more aggravating.”
“Why don’t you ask them for a piece of one?” I inquired innocently.
“What,” she sniffed, “ask a Jew? Never!” But when I begged one from a Jew boy, she ate it eagerly enough.
The height of romance for me, however, was in the person of Joe, a real stowaway. He was found on the second day out, and was given the task of peeling the steerage potatoes, a task that kept him busy enough throughout the day. My mouth went open to its full extent, when, after helping him with his potatoes, he would reward me by paring off thick slices of callouse from his palms. Joe said to me, “Never mind, lad, if I work hard they’ll sure land me in Boston when we arrive. I’m going to wark hard so they’ll like me. I do want to go to the States!”
In the women’s cabins, where I had my berth, they held evening concerts of a very decided pathetic kind. Like minor tunes, they always ended in a mournful wailing; for many of the women knew tragedies at first hand, and were in the midst of tragedy, so that their songs and humors were bound to be colored by despair. Carrie Bess, a stout woman whose white neck was crumpled in folds like a washboard, had wit enough to change the somberness of a morgue. She was usually the presiding officer in charge of the concerts. She was on her way to rejoin her husband, though she did not know where he was, but she said, “I’ll get on the train and have it stop in Texas where Jek (Jack) is.” And with this indefinite optimism she threw care to the winds and frolicked. She would throw herself astride a chair, wink at us all, open her mouth like a colored minstrel, and sing lustily,
“It’s very hard to see a girl
Sitting on a young man’s knee.
If I only had the man I love,
What a ’apy girl I’d be!”
Then, when the program had been gone through, with the oft-repeated favorites, like Carrie Bess’ “It’s Very Hard,” the concert would always close with an old sea song that somebody had introduced, a song which, as I lay in my berth and sleepily heard it sung under those miserable swinging lamps, amid the vitiated atmosphere of the cabin, and with the sea sounds, wind, splash of waves, and hissing steam, summed up all the miserable spirit of isolation on a great ocean:
“Jack was the best in the band,
Wrecked while in sight of the land,
If he ever comes back, my sailor boy, Jack,
I’ll give him a welcome home!”
When the numbered sails of pilots hove in sight, and the lightships, guarding hidden shoals with their beacon masts, were passed, the steerage began to get ready for its entrance in the land of dreams. The song went up, every throat joining in:
“Oh, we’re going to the land where they pave the streets with money, la, di, da, la, di, da!”
Finally we sighted a golden band in the distance, a true promise of what we expected America to be. It was Nantasket Beach. That made us put on our Sunday clothes, tie up our goods, and assemble at the rail to catch a further glimpse of the great paradise. An American woman gave me a cent, the first bit of American money my fingers ever touched.
Then the black sheds, the harbor craft, and the white handkerchiefs came into view. I strained an eager, flushing face in an effort to place Uncle Stanwood, but I could not find him.
Nearly all the passengers had left in company with friends, but my aunt and I had to stay on board in instant fear of having to return to England, for uncle was not there to meet us. I saw poor Joe, the stowaway, in chains, waiting to be examined by the authorities for his “crime.” I felt fully as miserable as he, when I whispered to him, “poor Joe!”
After many hours uncle did arrive, and we had permission to land in America. I confess that I looked eagerly for the gold-paved streets, but the Assay Office could not have extracted the merest pin-head from the muddy back street we rode through in a jolting team of some sort. I saw a black-faced man, and cried for fear. I had a view of a Chinaman, with a pigtail, and I drew back from him until uncle said, “You’ll see lots of them here, Al, so get used to it.” When I sat in the station, waiting for the train, I spent my first American money in America. I purchased a delectable, somewhat black, banana!