My Life

Once assigned to our different bunks on the Elbe, one of the head firemen told us off to our different watches. An officer, passing at this time, remarked that the head fireman had "a rum lot" of trimmers to handle.

"Ach Gott!" the latter returned jovially. "The heat will sweat 'em into shape. I know the kind."

No doubt he did, but I recall some men, nevertheless, that the heat failed to sweat into shape, or into anything else worth while. They were born laggards and sneaks, throwing all the work they could shirk on others who were honestly trying to do their best. It is trite enough to say that such human beings are found everywhere, but they certainly ought to be barred from the fire-room of an ocean liner.

My "watches," four hours long, began at eight in the morning and at four in the afternoon; the rest of the time was my own, excepting when it was my turn to carry water and help clean up the mess-room.

The first descent into the fire-room is unforgettable. Although hell as a domicile had long since been given up by me as a mere theological contrivance, useful to keep people guessing, but otherwise an imposition on a sane person's intelligence and not worth considering in the general scheme of things, going down that series of ladders into the bowels of the old Elbe, the heat seemingly jumping ten degrees a ladder, gave my cock-sure disposal of hell a severe jolt. I thought of General Sherman's oft-quoted remark about war, and wondered whether he had ever tested his faith in the same by later investigations in a liner's stoke-room. Indeed, I thought of everything, it seemed, that spelled hellish things.

At last the final ladder was reached, and we were at the bottom – the bottom of everything was the thought in more minds than one that afternoon. The head fireman of our watch immediately called my attention to a poker, easily an inch and a half thick and twenty to thirty feet long. "Yours!" he screamed. "Yours!" and he threw open one of the ash doors of a furnace pantomiming what I was to do with the poker. I dove for it madly, just barely raised it from the floor, and got it started into the ashes – and then dropped none too neatly on top of it. "Hurry up, you sow-pig," the fireman yelled, and I struggled again with the terrible poker, finally managing to rake out the ashes. Then came "ash heave," the Elbe having the old bucket system for the job. Great metal pails were let down to us from above through a ventilator. The pails filled, they were hauled up again, dumped and then sent down for another filling. On one occasion a pail broke loose from the chain, and came crashing down the ventilator under which I was having an airing. For some reason I did not hear the pail, and the fireman had barely time to shove me out of danger when the bucket fell to the floor with a sickening thud. If we had ever met – but what's the use of "if-ing" any more than "perhapsing"? It was simply a clear case of deferred "cashing-in."

The ashes out and up, we trimmers were divided into shovelers and carriers. Sometimes I was a carrier and had to haul baskets of coal to the firemen – "trimming" the coal consists, so far as I ever found out, in merely dumping the basketfuls conveniently for the firemen; and sometimes I was a shoveler, my duties then consisting of filling the baskets for the passers. Every bit of it, passing and shoveling, was honest, hard work. Shirking was severely reprimanded, but, as I have said, there were a few who did just as little as they could, although they were far better fitted for the work than I was, for instance. Once our "boss" decided that I was moving too slowly. He found me struggling with a full basket, in the alleyway between the hot boilers. "Further with the coals," he cried; "further!" accompanying the command with what he termed a "swat" on my head with his sweat-rag. I was tired out, mentally and physically, my head was dizzy, and my legs wobbled. For one very short second, after the fireman had hit me, I came very near losing control of myself, and doing something very reckless. That sweat-rag "swat" had aroused whatever was left in me of manhood, honor and pride, and I looked the fireman in the eye with murder in my own. He turned, and I was just about to reach for a large piece of coal and let him have it, when such vestiges of common-sense as were left to me asserted themselves; and I remembered what treatment was accorded mutinous acts on the high seas. Without doubt I should have been put in irons, and further trouble might have awaited me in Germany. I dropped the piece of coal and proceeded on my way, a coward, it seemed, and I felt like one. But it was better for the time being to put up with such feelings, galling though they were, than to be shut up and thrown into irons. I must blame my tramp life, if blame be necessary in the premises, for having often pocketed my pride on more or less similar occasions, when an overwhelming defeat stared me in the face had I taken the offensive.

About the middle of each watch "refreshments" were served in the shape of gin. A huge bottle, sometimes a pail, was passed around, and each man, fireman as well as trimmer, was expected to take his full share. During the short respite there was the faintest possible semblance of joviality among the men. Scrappy conversations were heard, and occasionally a laugh – a hoarse, vulgar, coal-dust laugh might be distinguished from the general noise. Our watch was composed of as rough a set of men as I have ever worked with. Every move they made was accompanied with a curse, and the firemen, stripped to the waist and the perspiration running off them, looked like horrible demons, at times, when they tended their fires. Yet when the "watch" was over with and the men had cleaned up, many of them showed gentler traits of character which redeemed much of their roughness when below.

The call to go up the ladders was the sweetest sound I heard throughout the trip. First, the men to relieve us would come clattering down, and soon after we were free to go back to daylight and fresh air again. There was generally a shout of gladness on such occasions, the firemen being quite as happy as the inexperienced trimmers. My little Italian friend used to sing "Santa Lucia" on nearly every climb bathwards and bunkwards. A wash-down awaited all of us at the top, and soon after a sumptuous meal, in quantity and wholesomeness certainly as good as anything given the saloon passengers. The head fireman insisted on our eating all that we could. He wanted able-bodied, well-nourished trimmers on his staff, and I, at least, often had to eat more than I wanted, or really needed.

One day I decided to try to escape a watch. The night before I had hardly slept at all, my eyes were painfully sore from cinders getting into them, and I was generally pretty well used up. Other men had been relieved of duty at different times, and it seemed to me that my turn was due. I went to the doctor.

"Well?" he said in English. I dwelt mainly on my sore eyes, telling him how the heat inflamed them.

"Let me see them," and he threw back the lids in turn, washing out each eye as if it had been a marble-top table.

"How about them now?" he questioned, after throwing away the blackened cloth. It would have paid to tell him that they were better if only to keep him from going at them again.

"Oh, but my lame back!" I replied, glad to shift the doctor's attention in that direction. The worst he could do to my back was to put a plaster on it, I reasoned, and this would almost certainly relieve me of one watch at least.

"Don't stoop so much," was all he would recommend. "What else?"

"Well, Doctor," I pursued, "I'm sick, sick all over. I need at least one watch to rest up in."

The good man became facetious.

"Why, we're all sick," he laughed. "The captain, the first officer, the cook, and what not. We're terribly short-handed. If you don't keep your watches the ship simply won't go, and heaven knows when we'll see Bremerhaven."

I smiled a very sickly smile, and retired. If the old Elbe was so hard up for propulsion power that my weak services were unequivocally necessary, then of course I must do my utmost to save the lives, perhaps, of the precious freight in the cabins – but, oh! how I wished that I had remained in Hoboken and become a saloonkeeper, anything in fact but a coal-passer.

The first glimpse we had of land may have been a lovelier sight to some of the cabin passengers than it was to us trimmers, but it hardly seems possible. My companions told me that the rocks and cliffs, barely visible, on our left, were England, the home of my ancestors, but this fact did not interest me one-half so much as the far more important fact that they represented terra firma. I wanted to put my feet on land again, even in Turkey if necessary. Coal-passing, bunker life, hot fires, and clanging ash buckets had cured me for the time being at least of all sea-going propensities in a professional capacity. A flattering offer to command a great liner would hardly have tempted me just then. Indeed, tramp life, with all its drawbacks, seemed a summer pastime compared with bunker life.

The twelfth day out, I think it was, we "made" Bremerhaven, where the good ship was to have a rest, and the men who had shipped in Hoboken were to be paid off. The long voyage was over, I had finished my last "watch" below, and was free to mingle with the steerage passengers on deck and view the new country I had traveled so far to see. My clothes were the same that I had gone on board with in Hoboken – a fairly respectable outfit then, but now sadly in need of cleaning and repair. My face and hands were dark and grimy, although they had been given numberless washings; it was simply impossible to get all of the coal dust out of them. Indeed, it was days before my hands looked normal again.

The head fireman saw me on the deck, and came up to me. His whole manner had changed. His duty was over, the great ship was in the harbor, and he could afford to unbend a little.

"Not dressed yet to go ashore?" he said in a friendly manner, his eyes running hurriedly over my clothes. "We'll dock soon, and you want to be ready."

"These are all the shore clothes or any other kind that I've got," I replied, and for aught I could see just then they were all that I was going to have for some time to come.

"I'm too big, or you could have some of mine," the fireman assured me, the obvious sincerity of his offer making me quite forget the "swat" he had given me in the fire-room. We shook hands, congratulated each other on having done his part to help bring the ship into port, and then separated, five minutes and a kindly manner on the part of the fireman having been quite sufficient to scatter forever, I trust, all the murderous thoughts of revenge I had been a week and more storing up against him. Such has been the fate of nearly all of my revengeful intentions in life. Either they have consumed themselves with their own intense warmth, or a few words of reconciliation have cooled them down until they have become flabby and useless.

It was a very different line of coal-passers that marched from the Elbe to the Seemann's Amt in Bremerhaven to be paid off, from the one that had formed in front of the Hebrew's store in Hoboken. Our hard and miserable task was behind us, money was "in sight," and the majority of the men were at home again. We received seventeen marks and fifty pfennigs apiece for the trip, four dollars and a fraction in American currency. We bade one another good-by over some krugs of beer, and singly and in groups went our different ways. I waved a final adios to the Elbe, and joined two firemen, who spoke English and had offered to see me off for Berlin, my next destination.

I learned in their company something that life in sailor's quarters and homes later on has confirmed in every particular —i. e., seafaring men, when bidding one another good-by after a voyage together, should each take absolutely different directions on separating, eschewing all group gatherings and "one last drink" sociability. But one might as well preach theosophy to baboons, as to try to teach this doctrine to men who "go down to the sea in ships." Indeed, it is a thankless job to attempt to teach the latter anything until they have squandered a part of their money, only too frequently all of it, on a drunk. It was thus in Bremerhaven in my day, and I make no doubt that it is the same to-day wherever there are ports and paid-off seafaring men – in Calcutta, Singapore, 'Frisco, New York, or where you will. And why not? Is the coal-passer's life to be spent entirely in the bunkers? What is more natural than that when ashore he should try to forget some of the hard knocks, sweat and dust in the stoke-room, in a carousal in the open? What, indeed, has all the turmoil below been suffered for if not to allow such indulgence on land? The moralist, the economist, the Sabbatarian doubtless have their individual answers to these queries. All I know about the questions and my relation to them at the time of leaving the Elbe in Bremerhaven is that, my ticket for Berlin secured and two spare marks slyly hidden away in case of an emergency, prudence, temperance and economy were utterly disregarded. I sang, laughed and feasted with my friends to the limit of my financial and physical capacity, and I cannot recall having enjoyed a more righteous "good" time on a dollar and a half in all my life. So, hard though the voyage had been, I blessed the Elbe for the pleasure she had guided me to. Poor old ship! I was in Rome when she went down in the North Sea. I was reading the "bulletins" in front of the English book-store in the Piazza di Spagne. Suddenly my eyes spied the dispatch about the Elbe. "Down!" I muttered aloud, and people standing near looked at me as if, perhaps, I had lost a friend in the mishap. I had, indeed. In dire time of need, perhaps at the turning point in my life, one road leading I knew not where, the other, as it proved and as I hoped, to a home and decent living – on such an occasion – that creaking, tired out ship bore me safely out of trouble to a welcome port across the sea. If this is not friendship, if it be strange that I looked solemn and reminiscent in front of that bulletin board, then I know not what kind deeds and grateful remembrance thereof mean.

The journey to Berlin was a sorry undertaking. I started tired, my ticket read fourth-class, there were several confusing changes, and, for most of the journey, I was wedged in among a crowd of burly and scented Poles. Ordinarily, on a respectable train and with a third-class ticket, the journey from Bremen is about six hours. On my train it took close to sixteen, if not eighteen hours. A more humble home-coming could hardly be imagined, and I wasted no mental efforts in trying to increase the humility by imagining anything. At Celli there was some diversion in waiting an hour or two, and in listening to the gabble of a little Jewish tramp bound for Nürnberg. He had just come from America, he claimed, by way of England, having been boosted out of that country and across the North Sea by some alleged philanthropic agency, anxious apparently to relieve Great Britain of anything likely to increase the income tax. He was traveling afoot, and was full of the usual list of turnpike ghost-stories and "hand-outs." I told him some of my story to explain why I looked so dirty.

"They won't let you into Berlin," he declared, "looking like that. Can't you clean up some?" I tried once again, at a pump, to get rid of the steamer dust and grime, but this effort left no marked improvement in my appearance. Pretty soon the time for my train drew near, and then the little wanderer displayed himself in his true colors.

"You're'n American," he said, "so'm I. Can't you help me out a little – five cents'll do?"

Everything that begs and cringes in any nationality that I have ever known was present in that miserable boy's manner and voice. But he was a wanderer like myself, and I had a twenty-pfennig piece that I could just barely spare. He saw me feel in my pocket and hesitate. "For the sake of America," he whined, and foolish sentimentalist that I was, I gave him the money, although he already had more than I did. He said that the five cents was necessary to complete his evening fund for supper and lodging. I refer to this lad because he is typical of so many would-be Americans in distress, and on account of his utter lack of Road fellowship in bothering me – poorer than he was – when a complete townful of Germans was staring him in the face. The international Road is shamefully disgraced by these unscrupulous vagabonds.

My arrival in Berlin at one o'clock in the morning, dirty, clothes frayed and torn, and my exchequer so low that I could not afford even a "groschen" (two and a half cents) for a street-car ride, was sorrier, if that be possible than had been the journey from Bremen. One thing I had carefully preserved, however, my mother's address. Asking and feeling my way, laughed at by night street hawks and workmen, and watched suspiciously by policemen, I finally found the house. It was two o'clock in the morning now.

The portier answered my ring at the street door. I told him a tale such as he had probably never heard before nor will ever hear again, but my success was probably due more to my obvious foreign nationality than to the story. He knew that my people were foreigners, and he knew so little else of any account, as I learned later, that, in spite of my looks, he doubtless reasoned that Americans are permitted all kinds of eccentricities, and that I was what I claimed to be: a ship's engineer on short shore-leave with his luggage lost in transit. A lame "ghost story" at best, no matter how well delivered, but it won in my case.

"Well, I'll go up with you and see what the madame says," he finally declared, and up we marched, the good man looking at me furtively under his brows every now and then, evidently wondering whether or not he was making an awful mistake. My mother answered our ring.

"Who is there?" she asked in German, accustomed to the nocturnal calls of the telegraph messengers. I forgot my grammar, my looks, everything in fact except that on the other side of that door was one human being most likely to give me a night's lodging and to forgive.

"It's me!" I replied in English. The door opened, the portier was given his fee, and I entered a home which, next to the old brown house in our Middle West, has done more to make home seem worth while than any other that I have known.

CHAPTER IX

UNTER DEN LINDEN

The Berlin of the late eighties was a very different city from the Berlin of to-day. There is probably no other Continental city which has undergone so many changes in the same period of time. When I wandered into the place nearly twenty years ago there were no electric cars – horses were still the exclusive motive power in the business streets; there was no rational direction of traffic – there isn't to-day in some parts; there were no automobiles that I can remember having seen; there were no great department stores such as now vie with those of New York; there was no such street lighting as there is to-day; and there were by no means so many Germans leaning on window sills and on the streets. Like Moscow, the place resembled a great overgrown village more than it did the capital of a great country. The people were provincial, the military upstarts often acted as if they thought the city had been built and was kept up for their exclusive entertainment, and strangers, particularly Americans, who ventured to dress as they do at home – white dresses in summer for ladies, for instance – were stared at as if they were a new species of human beings. In one particular, however, the city has not changed, and probably never will, i. e., in the amount of noise the Berliners are equal to when they are turned loose in the streets, afoot, in trains or in Drosckken. If it be true that the word German, philologically dissected, means a shouter in battle, then the word Berliner means two shouters talking about a battle. The incessant ya-yaing and nein-neining in the streets, the perspiring and nervous self-consciousness that comes to a large-boned populace suddenly advanced to Welt-Stadt significance, the reckless driving of the cabbies, the screams of the cabbies' victims, these all contribute to the present provinciality of the metropolis, in spite of the modern trolleys, automobiles, half-Londonized policemen, and taxameter cabs. Indeed, these very appurtenances of cosmopolitan, the crunching trolley, for instance, and the puffing "auto," accentuate very strikingly the undue emphasis which the town puts in noises, and are indicative of its lust for more. Twenty years ago the shouting and buzzing were not so bad, but the city is now making up for any silences that may have been observed at that time.

Part of the street roar and clamor is due to the unusual amount of small traffic in the streets, to the thousands and thousands of cabs, "commercial" tricycles and pushbarrows, all of which claim the right to play their part in the city's roar and bustle. But a much more conspicuous cause, if not the main one, is the fact that Berlin has grown up to Welt-Stadt prominence, overnight, as it were, and the good Berliners have not yet untangled their feet sufficiently to keep an orderly pace under the new order of things. Two-thirds of them are still living under the old horse-car régime, and when they come to congested corners, where the trolley's clang and the automobile's "toff-toff" prevail, they very willingly lend a hand in increasing the general confusion.

At least this is the way the town impressed me a year or two ago, as compared with the easy-going city I first entered as a coal-passer, with honorable discharge papers in my pocket, and very little else. But far be it from me to dwell on this subject, for if there is any city in the world to which I ought to be grateful, it is Berlin. If it pleases the Berliners to shout their World City distinction from the housetops, as if fearful that it might otherwise escape notice, well and good; the noise sounds funny, that is all – particularly after London and New York.

I began my career in the town in a very "Dutch" ready-made suit of clothes, high-heeled shoes that could be pulled on at one tug like the "Romeo" slipper, a ready-made fly-necktie, and a hat the style of which may be seen at its best in this country in the neighborhood of Ellis Island; it was local color hatified indeed. While I lay asleep on the sofa in my mother's library, making up for the loss of sleep at sea, my mother went out and kindly made these purchases. Washed, dressed and fed, I may have looked "Dutch," but I was clean at least, and there was no dusky fireman about to order me to hurry "further mit de coals."

The family physician, a gentleman who has since come on to great things and is one of Berlin's most famous medical men, for some reason best known to himself examined me carefully to see how I had stood the journey. All that he could find out of the way was a considerably quickened heart action, which did not give him great concern, however. At that time the good man was just beginning to pick up English, and at our first meeting made me listen to his rendering of "Early to bed, early to rise," etc. A few weeks later, when making a professional visit on an American young lady, a new neighbor of ours, he was emboldened to give some advice in English – to compose an original sentence. He wanted the young lady to take more exercise, and this is how he told her to get it.

"Traw a teep inspiration, take t'ree pig shteeps across te floor, and ten expire." She pulled through her ailment splendidly.

In those days, the late eighties and early nineties, the American colony, as it was called, lived mainly in the western part of the city, in the neighborhood of the Zoological Gardens. The doctor, or professor, as he is now called, was for years the colony's physician, and many were the regrets when he gave up visiting us. We were still privileged to call at his office, but hospital work and Imperial patients made it impossible for him to call on us, although he kindly made neighborly visits in my mother's home as long as he remained in our street. He is now getting old and gray, but I found him as friendly and hospitable on my last visit to Berlin, in spite of his fine villa, lackeys and carriages, as when he examined me for broken bones and twisted muscles after the coal-passing experience. I told him that I was on my way to Russia to study the heavily-advertised revolution. His face became grave, as of old when studying a case. "Be careful, my son," he cautioned me; "be very careful in Poland." The fatherly warning and the friendly interest brought back to my mind memories of the Berlin that I had known and in a way loved, the town that took me in and truly gave me another chance.