“I gotta two brother over there,” he explains. “Besides, here I gotta talka da Ingleese. Alla same, I feela fine!”
Antonio is not the only man who is going back with a personal interest in the European situation. On a coil of rope on the well-deck, broad-faced and Turanian, sits another young man. If Antonio’s real name is difficult to pronounce, this man’s is out of range altogether; for he is a Russian. He is addressed indifferently as Clambakovitch or Roughneckski.
“I live fifty miles from German border,” he says. “I come over here seven years ago: I go through Berlin and sail from Hamburg. Now the Germans have my home. I do not hear from my people for three years. So now I go home—through Berlin again!”
After that, Clambakovitch Roughneckski’s plans are perfectly definite. He is coming back to America—for good. Already he is wedded to the soil of Pennsylvania. Antonio’s views are the same.
The affection of her children for America is a wonderful thing. Domestic or imported, it makes no matter. To the native-born American, America is still the little country—the little strip of coastline—which stood up successfully to a dunder-headed monarch in days when men did not govern themselves: to the naturalized American, America is the land which gave him his first real taste of personal liberty. Each cherishes America to-day—the one because he helped to make her free, the other because she has made him free.
We are in the danger zone now. It is difficult to realize that thrilling circumstance, because no one seems to worry at all.
The same games of shuffle-board, bull-board, chess, checkers, and bridge are in progress; each day sees the same guard-mountings, parades, and inspections; off duty, the same quantity of tobacco and chewing-gum is being consumed. Only if the ship is brought up short by a heavy sea, or an iron door clangs suddenly in some distant stokehold, are we conscious of any tension at all. For a moment heads are turned, or conversation breaks. But that is all. A year ago, old hands tell us, things were different. There really was cause for nervousness. But now, we are escorted, we are well-armed, and the worst we need fear is a few hours in the boats.
There is much speculation as to our destination. Is it the Mersey; the Clyde; Queenstown? Or France direct? Where are we now, anyway? Each noon, when the ship’s officers appear upon the bridge in a body, and perform mysterious sun-worshipping rites with sextants, the amateur experts look knowing, and refer darkly to probable latitudes and longitudes. One, diagnosing the present commotion of billows as a “ground-swell,” announces positively that we are just off the Bay of Biscay. Another, basing his conclusions upon the lengthening hours of daylight and the presence in our wake of certain sea-birds (herring-gulls, really) which he describes as “penguins,” announces confidently that we are now well within the Arctic Circle and will ultimately fetch a compass to Aberdeen, _via_ Iceland. The battle rages between these two extremes: probably a carefully worked-out average of opinion would bring us somewhere near the truth. Gunners are quite familiar with the process: they call it “bracketing.” But it does not matter. The real fun will begin when we sight land, and the authorities upon the subject start in to identify it.