Short Stories of the New America: Interpreting the America of this age to high school boys and girls
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Short Stories of the New America: Interpreting the America of this age to high school boys and girls
Short stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
They boarded the ship, and the Dream gave them a courage that surprised
them. There were others going aboard, and Ivan and Anna felt that those
others were also persons who possessed dreams. She saw the dreams in
their eyes. There were Slavs, Poles, Letts, Jews, and Livonians, all
bound for the land where dreams come true. They were a little
afraid—not two per cent of them had ever seen a ship before—yet their
dreams gave them courage.
The emigrant ship was dragged from her pier by a grunting tug and went
floundering down the Baltic Sea. Night came down, and the devils who,
according to the Esthonian fishermen, live in the bottom of the Baltic,
got their shoulders under the stern of the ship and tried to stand her
on her head. They whipped up white combers that sprang on her flanks and
tried to crush her, and the wind played a devil’s lament in her rigging.
Anna lay sick in the stuffy women’s quarters, and Ivan could not get
near her. But he sent her messages. He told her not to mind the sea
devils, to think of the Dream, the Great Dream that would become real in
the land to which they were bound. Ivan of the Bridge grew to full
stature on that first night out from Libau. The battered old craft that
carried him slouched before the waves that swept over her decks, but he
was not afraid. Down among the million and one smells of the steerage he
induced a thin-faced Livonian to play upon a mouth organ, and Big Ivan
sang Paleer’s “Song of Freedom” in a voice that drowned the creaking of
the old vessel’s timbers, and made the seasick ones forget their
sickness. They sat up in their berths and joined in the chorus, their
eyes shining brightly in the half gloom:
“Freedom for serf and for slave,
Freedom for all men who crave
Their right to be free
And who hate to bend knee
But to Him who this right to them gave.”
It was well that these emigrants had dreams. They wanted them. The sea
devils chased the lumbering steamer. They hung to her bows and pulled
her for’ard deck under emerald-green rollers. They clung to her stern
and hoisted her nose till Big Ivan thought that he could touch the door
of heaven by standing on her blunt snout. Miserable, cold, ill, and
sleepless, the emigrants crouched in their quarters, and to them Ivan
and the thin-faced Livonian sang the “Song of Freedom.”
The emigrant ship pounded through the Cattegat, swung southward through
the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The
big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer
consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the
harried steamer nosed her way in and anchored off Gravesend.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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