V Our Critics
The third-class waiting-room in the Oderberg station, on the Northern Railroad of Austria, is splendid vantage ground from which to watch the racial and national conglomerate that forms the insecure structure called the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Here from her East and West, her North and South, one meets those great social currents which stream from the mountains to the plains and from the villages to the cities. Here, also, the tides of immigration come in and go out, and by their volume one can judge the prosperity of the United States, or at least the condition of our labour markets.
Here the “spick and span” German, from across the border, meets his less vigorous and more “gemuethlich” cousin, the Austrian.
Here the Moravian and the Czech touch elbows and glory in their Slavic speech—the age-long battle for the supremacy of their language being one of the few points which they have won in this contentious monarchy.
This is also the meeting place of Southern and Western Slavs, and here the fierce looking Bosnians carry, in their erstwhile weapon belts, pins, pipes, jack-knives and razors, which they sell to their Slavic brothers of the West; they even deign to speak in broken German to the hated “Schwabs,” when driving their bargains.
Glancing around the crowded waiting-room, one sees Ruthenians and Wallachians, in picturesque garb, travelling from their impoverished mountain homes to the upper Danubian plain. They are harvesters, and their backs are bent under the weight of crude cooking utensils and primitive harvest implements.
Close to this group are fiercely moustachioed Magyars, in their semi-Oriental, loose, white linen trousers and heavy sheepskin coats. They are going to take charge of the flocks of sheep on some lordly estates; they know the ways of all four-footed animals, and are considered faithful shepherds.
In one corner stand smoothly shaven, coarse featured Slovaks, in clothing, home-made, from their felt boots to their felt hats; primitive folk they are, seeking labour in the industrial cities along this busy highway.
Of course, there are Jews from the East and the West; as far removed from each other in culture and beliefs as those two points of the compass, yet all swayed by the same mysterious force which at its best turns their vision towards Jehovah, and at its worst towards Mammon.
They all are divided more or less by speech, blood and faith and are united, only by the poverty which compels them to travel third-class on the government’s railways, whose low-zone tariff encourages the migrations of its people; thus easily relieving economic distress in some regions and providing labour where it is needed.
When the train comes, the conductor sorts this mixture of humanity according to his prejudices or the seeming ability of the travellers to reward him for rescuing them from this malodorous conglomerate, by providing a less crowded compartment. As a rule, I am willing to be thus rescued, but not this time; for there is one element in evidence which makes the well-known mass of people more interesting than usual; namely, the returning immigrant. “Where thou goest, I will go,” even if it was into the thick of bag and baggage carried on the backs of men and women, through the narrow door, into an already over-crowded compartment where windows were hermetically sealed and where the air was not only stiflingly hot but full of mysterious odours, much unlike those of “Araby the blest.”
There seemed no limit to the capacity of the car or to the patience of the passengers who were being pushed about like cattle; until the conductor attempted to thrust in a woman of unusual size, who evidently was acquainted with our ways and certain words of our language. She let loose upon the official the vials of her wrath, her realistic Slavic becoming fairly lurid, reënforced as it was by English words, which, when used in America, make even printers gasp, when they must be printed. Were it not that such words can be indicated only by dashes, it would prove interesting to record them here, to show what changes they undergo upon the lips of our apt pupils.
Puffing and panting, this colossal woman forced her way through the crowded car, looking for a seat. I gave her my place, and as she accepted it, she asked laconically, “’Merican man?” When I nodded assent, the point of contact was made, we shook hands and said: “How do you do?”
Like an electric current the greeting communicated itself from bench to bench. A woman across the aisle caught the force of it and waved her hand over the heads of the crowd as she cried: “How do you do?” She held up a fretful boy of five, who raised his voice in lamentation; while she said: “Behave yourself, kid; there’s an American boss on the car.” But the boy, thoroughly American, would not be frightened by threats of boss, police, or any other bugaboo. He pulled at her skirt, clutched her expansive hat, nearly tearing it from its insecure moorings, then rolled the window shade up and down, suddenly letting it go with a spring—after which, all in one breath, he peremptorily demanded candy, water, bananas, and that his mother make the reluctant “choo-choo cars” go at once.
This woman’s husband is a merchant in Wilmerding, Pa., and she, after many years in America, was going home to visit her people, bringing this hopeful youngster with her to disturb the “peace of Jerusalem.”
“If he were my boy,” growled the unfortunate man who sat on the same bench with him, “I’d throw him out the window;” and the woman apologetically said: “He is an American boy, and they are all like this. You can’t tame them. Whipping does no good.”
“Well,” the man muttered, under his fierce moustachio, “I am glad I am not living in America.”
A young Moravian woman, who, in America, had exchanged her peasant garb and ruggedness for our more expensive dress and gentler ways, corroborated the mother’s statement. She had worked in American homes and testified: “Children in America are all terrible. Nothing is sacred to them; neither the kitchen nor the church. It’s because they have so few children; they spoil them.”
“Yes,” agreed a young Hungarian Jew; “in America, they have the one child system, and many women do not have even one child. They are so sterile. You should see how thin and flat-chested they are.”
Then, in his realistic way, he described the physique of our women. He was a great talker, that young Jew. Having been unsuccessful in New York, he was returning home a cynic and a severe critic.
“Hm!” he continued; “the women of America are the boss. Just think of it; you can’t get a woman to black your boots. That is the reason so many men get a divorce.”
He knew all about the American woman’s luxuries, and talked loudly and long of silken petticoats, lace waists, and other sartorial mysteries; for he had worked in a tailor’s shop and was acquainted with all woman’s “doings.”
“The American men are to blame!” exclaimed a man who was crowded close to me. He had returned from America some time before, and was travelling up and down the country, buying butter and eggs. He had caught a vision of the American man and his business methods in Chicago, where he had worked in a large packing-house, and in a modest way, he was applying his knowledge.
“They work like niggers,” he continued, “and let their women remain in idleness, sitting all day long in rocking-chairs, rocking, rocking”—and he imitated the motion—“and eating candy. Just think of it! They buy candy by the pound!”
Evidently he was not imitating the example of American men in the treatment of his wife who was with him, sharing the hardships of the journeys from village to village. While he was speaking, she drew their luncheon from her ample pockets: hard rye bread and Salami, a sausage as hard as the bread.
“No, indeed!” He had not taken her to America. “That’s where they spoil the women.”
His aspiration was to ultimately control the butter and egg business in his region, and future historians may record his name as a “Captain of Industry,” with those of Armour and Swift. He knew a little of every language spoken in the dual monarchy, and that, together with the fact that he spoke some English, made him a most interesting travelling companion. The greater part of the time he preached to the peasants the gospel of business. “You poor rascals,” he said; “you work in the fields from sunrise to sunset, eat bread-soup, and not much else, three times a day, and carry loads heavy enough to break your backs; while the Jews, who do the business, live in fine houses, eat the best spring geese, which you raise for them, and send their children to college. You ought to go to America and see business. Even the little boys of rich people sell newspapers and lemonade in front of their fathers’ palaces. Go into business and the Jews will have to go back to Jerusalem where they came from.”
The peasants all nodded their heads and said: “Tak ye, tak ye,” it is so, it is so; but one could see in their placid, half-stupid faces, that if they ever have the spirit which ventures, they must first go to America.
The corpulent woman who had accepted my seat knew something about the lot of her kind in America, and, having by this time recovered her breath, she very emphatically gave the butter and egg man her views on the subject.
“You say that women don’t work in America, and that they are spoiled? I just come from there; I have been there fourteen years, in McKeesport, Pa. I have kept boarders ever since I went there, and I haven’t had time to sit in a rocking-chair, and my husband never bought me any candy. It’s true, you can’t beat us women there as you can over here. Soon after we went there, my husband beat me when he was drunk. I took it as patiently as I did here, and he beat me again and I didn’t say anything; although I carried a black eye for a week. Then the young woman who takes the money at the grocery store asked me how I hurt myself. I said I didn’t hurt myself, my husband did it. Then that young girl, as thin as a rail and as meek-looking as a swallow, said: ‘You tell me the next time he hits you.’
“It wasn’t long before he beat me again, and I told her and the police came and took him by the neck and put him in the lock-up, and it cost me twenty-five dollars to get him out. I earned that money myself and it was no punishment to him. I told the young woman about it, and she said: ‘The next time he hits you, you hit back.’ I said: ‘Is it allowed?’ She laughed, and said: ‘If he hits you first and you kill him, nothing will happen to you.’ It wasn’t long until he came home drunk and beat me again and I gave him one with the rolling-pin and he fell, and as he was lying there I got so angry I gave him another and another, and after that he knew better than to beat me.”
This Slavic Deborah told her story graphically and dramatically, and, undoubtedly, her husband was not the first immigrant to learn that marriage on the European plan is one thing, and on the American plan, quite another matter.
“Yes,” said the young Moravian woman. “When I get married, I’ll get an American husband. They don’t expect a dowry, and they don’t make you work like a slave.”
“In a year he’ll get divorced,” the young Hungarian Jew broke in. “They do that quickly.”
“And what of it?” she retorted. “I’ll be still better off. He’ll have to pay me.”
I do not know exactly at what point of the conversation I began to sing the praises of the American man; his loyalty and his sense of justice—if there is one thing that I enjoy more than singing the praise of the American woman it is lauding the American man.
Hardly had I begun to speak, when a young Roumanian, whom I had not previously noticed, commenced to rail at me, telling me in a mixture of three languages to keep my mouth shut; for he knew better. From the time he landed in New York until he left the country, he had not met a man who did not take advantage of him or ill-treat him. In Chicago, he was lured from the Union Station to a saloon on Canal Street, and, when he came to himself, he was lying in an alley, penniless. He found his way to Montana, where he herded sheep. There he tasted something of loneliness and homesickness, seeing nothing for weeks but red hills and blue sky—not a living thing except his sheep, or wolves to drive away. Then one day came American men on ponies and killed every one of his sheep, hundreds and hundreds of them, knocked him down and threatened to riddle him with bullets if he did not turn his face towards the East and march on without looking back. Days and days he walked, and because his face was of a darker hue than others, and his clothes looked strange, “No man gave unto him.” He then worked in the mines of Colorado. “The men there,” he said, “shoot, drink, and gamble, and have about as much regard for human life as for the life of sheep, and as soon as I had money enough I made ready to go home.” No more America for him, and no praise for its men.
“That’s not so, Brother,” came a voice from the farther end of the car, and I turned to see this valiant champion of ours. Had I been asked to give the place of his nativity, I should have put it in that Middle West of ours, which takes from her children all surplus flesh and puts in its place bone and sinew. His complexion was sallow, and the general expression of his face betokened sensitiveness, bordering on the abnormal. “I have been in America twenty years, and those years in Chicago, and I have met many good men. The good men don’t shoot and drink and gamble.”
It seemed strange language to my travelling companions; but to me it sounded familiar.
After the Chicago man had delivered his exordium, I had no difficulty in getting his story from him, and then I knew “whence this man had this doctrine.” Emigrating in his young manhood to Chicago, he had come in touch with Methodist missionaries, who befriended him and saved him from a life of intemperance and infidelity. Unfortunately, his awakened, religion-hungry soul became confused by the shibboleths of contending sects; he travelled and travailed all the way, from striving after a “Second Blessing,” to “Soul Sleepers,” “Seventh Day Adventists,” and Dowie’s religious movement, which at times looked like Opera Bouffe, but which ended in a great tragedy. I did not discover what form of faith was now holding the allegiance of his spirit; but as he told me that it was neither a church nor a sect, I surmised that he belonged to some church or sect whose chief doctrine is that it is neither.
Evidently the Spirit was upon him, some spirit at least; for he told me that he had been sent to Hungary to convert his brethren. Knowing how much the region from which he came needed some moral and religious quickening, I timidly offered him my hand and my good wishes; but he declined both. He “must not lean on the arm of flesh; so the Bible says.” The odour of tobacco offended his sensitive nostrils, and, turning to the butter and egg man, who was the chief offender, he pointed to his pipe, saying: “Throw that devilish thing away!” But a Slav and his pipe are not so soon parted, and the butter and egg man held firmly to his; although he smiled, not wishing to offend this prophet in Israel. Then the luckless man pulled his whiskey bottle out of his pocket and offered it to the ex-Dowieite, who took it, lifted it high in air, and made an eloquent temperance address, after which he threw the bottle out the window.
If, as a drowning man, he had refused a life-preserver, or had thrown diamonds into the sea, his Slavic brothers would not have thought him more reckless or insane. Palenka, as they call it, gives strength. Black bread and palenka have kept the hard-working Slav alive, have given him courage and cheer, and this crazy man had thrown the precious stuff away!
Yet he was so righteously indignant, so wrought up over his heroic task, that the peasants who had risen to remonstrate with him or to attack him, sank back into their seats; while over them all came a solemn silence, broken only by the grinding and jolting of the flat car-wheels.
This was the psychological moment for the prophet to declare his mission and preach to us all, and he did. It was a fervent message; one in which much truth and falsehood mingled, and if Dowie’s spirit hovered near, his satisfaction at hearing one of his disciples speak of the things for which he fought and on which he throve, would have been marred only by the fact that, for once at least, “Elijah the Second” was outdone. All the Dowie vernacular, translated into the realistic Slavic, was let loose by this apostle. Now it was the voice of some Old Testament prophet which spoke; and again it was as if a John pleaded for love’s sake. Then came a jumble of words and bitter invective, which, by comparison, caused the imprecatory Psalms to seem like the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.
No sooner had the preacher resumed his seat than the spell he had woven about his auditors was broken. The butter and egg man rose and demanded to be reimbursed for his wasted palenka, concluding his remarks by asserting that in America good people do drink whiskey, that everybody drinks, and that “they make you drink whether you want to or not.”
“Tak ye,” so it is, said a young man, who, as far as his clothing was concerned, might have just stepped out of an American Jockey Club. His voice was guttural and every sentence was punctuated by oaths.
“My father keeps a saloon in Hazleton, and the policemen and aldermen come there and drink, and at election time the burgess comes and ‘sets ’em up’ for everybody.”
While he spoke, he jingled the money in his pockets and kept his audience much interested by telling about his betting on horse-races, the intricacies of the game of poker, how much money his father made on liquor and what a high and mighty position was that of a saloon-keeper in Hazleton. He was going to Galicia to visit his grandparents, and he meant to show the slow town of Przemysl what it means to have a “hot time.”
At Hodonin, in Moravia, I had to leave the train; so I bade good-bye to the interesting company.
The woman from McKeesport said, as we shook hands, “America all right, and you bet I’m going back just as soon as I have seen to my property.”
With a contemptuous glance at the young Jew, the Moravian girl said: “Right she is! There’s nothing the matter with America, and when I go back, I bet you I’ll get an American husband!”
“Oh, yes! Of course. They are lying on the shelf waiting for you!” sneered the object of her contempt.
The sport tried to be kind in his good-bye words; but he used so many oaths that he became repulsive. When I remonstrated, he said:
“In America, everybody swear—no make trouble to say: good-morning your—Highness. See a man—slap him on shoulder and say: Hello—John—you—how dy? So long, then, you—old man, good-bye.”
The butter and egg man gripped my hand mightily, and as a parting word gave me this injunction. “Don’t let your old woman boss you;” then, glancing at our prophet, he added: “He little not all right.”
The Roumanian shepherd looked out the window and made no effort to take my proffered hand. His sallow face was drawn by pain, caused by something I dimly divined.
We were at the station, a station famous for a certain kind of sausage, whose odorous steam soon filled our nostrils. Taking several portions from the tray which a waiter held towards me, I gave them to the Roumanian peasant. Like a wild beast he fell upon the food, while into his pain-drawn face came a ray of human joy.
The prophet had difficulty in making up his mind about me. Reluctantly he stretched out his hand as I was leaving the car. When I grasped it, he querulously asked: “Have you received the Blessing?” and with great assurance I answered: “You bet.”