Comes the day before the last day. There is a bustle of getting
ready for the landing. Customs blanks are in steady demand at the
purser's office. Every other person is seeking help from every
other person, regarding the job of filling out declarations. The
women go about with the guilty look of plotters in their worried
eyes. If one of them fails to slip something in without paying
duty on it she will be disappointed for life. All women are natural
enemies to all excise men. Dirk, the Smuggler, was the father of
their race.
Comes the last day. Dead ahead lies a misty, thread-like strip
of dark blue, snuggling down against the horizon, where sea and
sky merge.
You think it is a cloud bank, until somebody tells you the glorious
truth. It is the Western Hemisphere - your Western Hemisphere.
It is New England. Dear old New England! Charming people - the New
Englanders! Ah, breathes there the man with soul so dead who never
to himself has said, this is my own, my native land? Certainly
not. A man with a soul so dead as that would be taking part in a
funeral, not in a sea voyage. Upon your lips a word hangs poised.
What a precious sound it has, what new meanings it has acquired!
There are words in our language which are singular and yet sound
plural, such as politics and whereabouts; there are words which
are plural and yet sound singular, such as Brigham Young, and there
are words which convey their exact significance by their very
sound. They need no word-chandlers, no adjective-smiths to dress
them up in the fine feathers of fancy phrasing. They stand on
their own merits. You think of one such word - a short, sweet word
of but four letters. You speak that word reverently, lovingly,
caressingly.
Nearer and nearer draws that blessed dark blue strip. Nantucket
light is behind us. Long Island shoulders up alongside. Trunks
accumulate in gangways; so do stewards and other functionaries.
You have been figuring upon the tips which you will bestow upon
them at parting; so have they. It will be hours yet before we
land. Indeed, if the fog thickens, we may not get in before
to-morrow, yet people run about exchanging good-byes and swapping
visiting cards and promising one another they will meet again.
I think it is reckless for people to trifle with their luck that
way.
Forward, on the lower deck, the immigrants cluster, chattering a
magpie chorus in many tongues. The four-and-twenty blackbirds
which were baked in a pie without impairment to the vocal cords
have nothing on them. Most of the women were crying when they
came aboard at Naples or Palermo or Gibraltar. Now they are all
smiling. Their dunnage is piled in heaps and sailors, busy with
ropes and chains and things, stumble over it and swear big round
German oaths.
Why, gracious! We are actually off Sandy Hook. Dear old Sandy
- how one loves those homely Scotch names! The Narrows are nigh
and Brooklyn, the City Beautiful, awaits us around the second
turning to the left. The pilot boat approaches. Brave little
craft! Gallant pilot! Do you suppose by any chance he has brought
any daily papers with him? He has - hurrah for the thoughtful pilot!
Did you notice how much he looked like the pictures of Santa Claus?
We move on more slowly and twice again we stop briefly. The
quarantine officers have clambered up the sides and are among us;
and to some of us they give cunning little thermometers to hold
in our mouths and suck on, and of others they ask chatty, intimate
questions with a view to finding out how much insanity there is
in the family at present and just what percentage of idiocy
prevails? Three cheers for the jolly old quarantine regulations.
Even the advance guard of the customhouse is welcomed by one and
all - or nearly all.
Between wooded shores which seem to advance to meet her in kindly
greeting, the good ship shoves ahead. For she is a good ship, and
later we shall miss her, but at this moment we feel that we can
part from her without a pang. She rounds a turn in the channel.
What is that mass which looms on beyond, where cloud-combing office
buildings scallop the sky and bridges leap in far-flung spans from
shore to shore? That's her - all right - the high picketed gateway
of the nation. That's little old New York. Few are the art centers
there, and few the ruins; and perhaps there is not so much culture
lying round loose as there might be - just bustle and hustle, and
the rush and crush and roar of business and a large percentage of
men who believe in supporting their own wives and one wife at a
time. Crass perhaps, crude perchance, in many ways, but no matter.
All her faults are virtues now. Beloved metropolis, we salute
thee! And also do we turn to salute Miss Liberty.
This series of adventure tales began with the Statue of Liberty
fading rearward through the harbor mists. It draws to a close
with the same old lady looming through those same mists and drawing
ever closer and closer. She certainly does look well this afternoon,
doesn't she? She always does look well, somehow.
We slip past her and on past the Battery too; and are nosing up
the North River. What a picturesque stream it is, to be sure! And
how full of delightful rubbish! In twenty minutes or less we shall
be at the dock. Folks we know are there now, waiting to welcome
us.
As close as we can pack ourselves, we gather in the gangways.
Some one raises a voice in song. 'Tis not the Marseillaise hymn
that we sing, nor Die Wacht am Rhein, nor Ava Maria, nor God Save
the King; nor yet is it Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.
