by Celia Hayes
“At the time, we did not know of all that,” Lottie said. “It just seemed like one of Onkel Hansi’s notions—just more splendid than any of the others. To go to Europe, for a grand tour with the family, to travel in splendid luxury, and remain there for almost a year, seeing all those sights that we had only read of! It was like a dream come true!”
“Yes, you and Grete and Horrie were beside yourselves with excitement,” Magda smiled, reminiscently. “And I admit that for me, it was terribly exciting. The very journey itself was so different. Such a contrast between our first arrival in this country, and our return to where we started, could scarcely be credited. Still,” the light fled from her face, and she looked quite melancholy for a moment, “I found myself thinking constantly of your father—what he would have thought and said. He was so much a man of this place, of the frontier as it once was! What would he have thought of matters so new and foreign to him?!”
“I am certain his opinions would have been quite diverting,” Lottie allowed. “And rather akin to what Dolph or Cousin Peter felt on most matters.”
“Ah, but your brother usually kept his thoughts to himself,” Magda pointed out.
Lottie giggled fondly. “Most of the time and in courtesy, Mama—lest they scorch the walls and furniture!”
* * *
They took passage on a Morgan steamship from Indianola, early in the summer after Marie’s wedding and Hannah’s decision to enter the religious life; Hansi and Liesel with Grete, Magda with Dolph and Lottie, and Peter and Anna with their two boys and Horrie. Magda had thought sure that Sam would accompany her, but at the last he declined, saying that he had the ranch to oversee.
Fredi had declined at the very first when Hansi broached the subject a week after Marie’s wedding. He sat in the parlor of Hansi’s grand painted mansion, turning his hat in his hands and looking at his sisters and brother-in-law with worried eyes in a weather-burned face.
“It’s not a place that means much to me any more. Sorry, Hansi, Magda. I’ve got too much on my plate here. I want to take one more herd up the trail this season—I can’t let the lads down, now that the arrangements are all made. Sorry, Hansi.”
Sam did accompany them as far as Indianola, though, by coach as far as Cuero and then the train. “Maybe I’ll regret not seeing all the noble paintings and art collections,” he said, as he came with them to the long dock reaching out into the gray-blue waters of Matagorda Bay. “But I can’t see getting a proper enjoyment of them while hand-holding Auntie Liesel and fetching her smelling salts and handkerchief.”
“Don’t be silly, she has a maid to do all that,” Magda said.
Dolph grinned. “And Onkel’s manly shoulder to cry on whenever necessary.”
“Well, you and Peter don’t buy any three-legged horses while you are at it,” Sam advised. “I’ll go myself next year, maybe—the museums and statues and all, they’ll still be there!”
Over their heads the warning steam whistle blew, startling the gulls soaring on still wings on updrafts of warm air in the brilliant summer sky. Under their feet the wooden dock seemed to tremble with the force of the engine that turned the steamship’s great wheels. At their back, Indianola sprawled along that brilliant white shell-sand beach, pastel colored houses with their ocean-front galleries and balconies like some kind of wooden Venice on the sea. The ice warehouse loomed like some strange fortress tower at the edge of town.
“Don’t worry.” Dolph took up the small grip which was his personal luggage in one hand and Magda’s elbow with the other. “And don’t lose any of my cows, little brother. It’s time, Mama. We’ll see you in the spring!”
“Bon voyage!” Sam shouted from the dock, waving his hat. Magda could see her son’s fair hair and the pale straw of his summer hat for a long time, as the band of water widened between dockside and ship. She and her children, with Anna and Peter and their sons, remained on deck for as long as the town could be seen.
Peter and Anna each had a firm grip on the backs of the boys’ coats. Anna sighed with a look of mock despair. “Auntie, I am going to be run ragged, long before we reach New York. Harry makes a bee-line straight for every dangerous thing imaginable. What are we going to do?”
“Tie a lariat to each of them,” Peter said with an air of practicality, “with one of us or Horrie holding the other end!” He hoisted Christian up underneath one arm, holding him with his head down, while the child wiggled and squirmed.
Anna laughed. “Don’t tempt me with that thought,” she said.
“How is Ma’am Richter holding up?” Peter turned Christian upright and set him on his feet—but maintained a strong one-handed grip on his collar. The freshening sea breeze ruffled the boy’s hair, and the ends of Anna’s and Magda’s bonnet ribbons.
“She had a bad moment on the dock,” Magda answered, for Liesel had turned deathly pale as she stepped out of the closed coach which had carried them from the Casimir House. “Hansi picked her up and carried her straightaway below to their cabin. I think she shall stay there until we reach New York.”
“Pity, that.” Peter sniffed the salt-smell of the ocean with relish. “It’s a guarantee for the worst sort of seasickness, to stay below all the time. A brisk turn around the deck in any weather is the best cure for it.”
“Don’t I know that!” Magda answered feelingly and shuddered, remembering the dank and reeking passenger deck of the brig Apollo, how she and Anna and the rest of her family had lain on their open shelf-bunks as a fierce winter storm violently pitched the ship, as roughly as a dog tossing a toy. How dark, how filthy that cramped space soon became; the wooden timbers creaking and groaning as a thing alive, while the wooden hull sweated moisture and radiated sea-cold upon them. She had held the three-year-old Anna in her arms during that long dark purgatory, praying for survival, dreaming of sitting by a river in a green meadow while birds sang in the trees overhead. “I swore after we landed in Galveston, that I would have to stay in Texas, for never again would I set foot on a ship to cross that ocean,” she recalled.
Anna briefly set her arm around Magda’s waist. “This is not anything like the old Apollo,” she said to be comforting. “I have been reading the circulars; we have private cabins with every possible modern convenience and adornment, quite as fine as the best sort of hotel. And the Hamburg-America is even more luxurious. We shall all have private cabins. The ship companies now spare no expense when it comes to seeing to the passengers’ comforts!”
“They certainly took no effort in that respect before!” Magda observed with some asperity. “Save for offering fresh straw for our beds, halfway through the voyage, and to sew the dead up in canvas for burial at sea! Oh, yes, our comforts were very well seen to!”
“It’s not like that now, Auntie,” Anna reassured her. “Papa says there is much competition between the steamship companies, offering luxuries to the traveler, especially those who travel for pleasure or enlightenment, and not because they must emigrate. Every care must be taken, lest we unhappy travelers go elsewhere, or stay at home!”
“That would have suited me,” Magda said and when Lottie and Anna chorused their dismay, she smiled and added, “Oh, do not chide me! It has just been so long since we departed from Germany! So much has changed since our coming here, I am sure that what we left behind has changed as well! I do wonder if I shall see anything familiar at all.”
“Ne’er mind, Mama,” Lottie said with exuberant affection. “It will all be new to me, and I will enjoy it at least!”
They reached New York in good time, but waited there almost a week, for the regular packet-liner to Hamburg upon which Hansi had arranged passage did not depart until Thursday. Hansi booked a suite of rooms for them in a hotel recommended by a fellow passenger. Magda had been dreading to find that the hotel would be a low, dirty place, for she was not impressed at first by the city; so crowded, the streets piled with every sort of filth, with grimy tenement buildings leaning over streets that seemed like canyons teeming w
ith people.
“As awful as the beach at Karlshaven was,” she said to Hansi, “I rejoice now that we went there, and not here! Can you imagine Vati and the boys and I, marooned in this awful place?”
“Grim, is it not?” Hansi agreed. “Yet there would have been something for us to have made, through coming here. This is the fountainhead, where all the markets flow. I daresay I ought to know it better.”
Magda shuddered. “I cannot imagine seeing only this dull grey sky and nothing of wildflowers.”
“Well, there are sights to be seen, and many fine shops,” Hansi told her. “Take notes and do not let Lise and the girls spend too much money!”
Peter and Dolph came back from an excursion to a bookseller in a state of amused disbelief. “You would not believe the dime novels which they represent to be about the West,” Dolph said, shaking his head.
Peter added, “Utter bosh, every word of it! Apparently we cattle drovers spend all of our time in gunfights with the Indians or bandits or some such!” Peter chuckled, shaking his head. “Aside from shooting into the air to head off a stampede, I don’t think I’ve ever had much other use for my six-shooter!”
“I killed a rattlesnake with mine,” Dolph added, self-deprecatingly. “And I tried to tell them that there are probably more dangerous bandits around these parts than there ever are in old Abilene or Dodge, but I don’t think they believed a word of it.”
“Well, Cuz,” Peter was still laughing, “do you think they’d have believed it if you told them that the only one among us who has ever faced down an armed desperado was your mother?!”
“You did not make mention of that, surely?” Magda pleaded.
Both Peter and Dolph laughed again. Dolph replied, “No, Mama, but I spun them some other fine yarns, since they were so disposed to believe them. I would have shown them some roping tricks, also, but I did not have my lariat with me.”
“Good thing Papa Richter was not there,” Peter added. “He would have seen there was money to be made in an exhibition! He would have hired a hall and some horses and put us both to work at it before we could count to five!”
With but a few days before their ship departed, Magda and the children went for many long walks in the nearby city park; at least there was something of the sky to be seen. The park was a grand creation which had only been lately finished; Magda privately thought that although the landscaped paths were very fine and the trees and plantings cunningly arranged, the meadows and banks of flowers thus displayed were not half as beautiful as the flower meadows in the valley of the Guadalupe in springtime, nor the ponds and streamlets nearly so fair as the clear green waters flowing over banks of white gravel.
In the evenings, she and Anna went to lectures, to concerts and once to the opera. “It’s all very fine,” she mused thoughtfully afterwards, “but I almost think we had just as fine in Friedrichsburg—certainly for music and concerts. And we did not have to dress up so much for it!” She added, with a sigh, they all felt very much at a disadvantage, comparing themselves to that portion of the bon ton of New York who attended such. Magda had always thought she was dressed plainly but elegantly enough for San Antonio, but in New York she felt quite as drab as a country sparrow.
“East or west, home is the best,” Anna remarked, sinking into a soft chair in their little shared sitting room, and carefully unpeeling her long gloves. “Here, Auntie—I’ll undo your buttons, if you undo mine. Thank God we are on our way tomorrow—if we stay here much longer, we shall have to hire a maid.”
“I wouldn’t mind, someone to see to laying out my clothes, and the laundry and that,” Magda said. “But I hate to think of myself as so helpless that I must have someone help me put on my clothes.”
The packet-steamer was larger than the steamship that brought them from Indianola, roomy and every bit as luxurious as Anna had promised it would be. Magda shook her head, thinking that it must be fully three or four times the length of the Apollo—and that the first class salon was itself as large as the Apollo’s passenger deck. No expense had been spared when it came to fitting out the first-class cabins, even if the considerable luxury of the appointments did not make them seem any larger. She and Lottie shared a tiny bedroom with Grete, and Hansi and Liesel shared another, with a miniscule sitting room in between. Horrie and Dolph shared a similar suite with Anna and Peter and the children. As soon as they were conducted aboard, a hovering steward, a deferential middle-aged man in a tidy white uniform, made sure to point out that the doors between the two suites were unlocked, so that they might come and go as they pleased. He brought them little cups of broth and some biscuits on a silver tray, pointed out the electric bell to summon assistance, and showed the children where the wash basin and the other facility was cunningly built into the wall, concealed by a carved wooden panel that pulled down to make a washstand above and a close-stool below. Daylight streamed in through small round windows set into the ship’s side; nothing of their accommodations hinted that they were on a ship, save for the gentle, almost imperceptible motion of the deck under their feet.
“Not much like the Apollo, eh?” Hansi remarked with a broad grin, as Harry and his brother romped throughout the suite of connected rooms. “Did you notice? Our accommodations are amid-ships, so as to reduce the noise from the steam engine. What an invention! If we run into a storm, we’ll just barrel straight through, like shit through a goose! None of this being tossed about by storms for weeks on end, at the mercy of every wind that blows! We’ll be in Hamburg before another week is past. Think on that! What marvelous times we live in, not so?”
“Mama!” Lottie called from the other room, as she bounced on the edge of her bed. “The mattress is so soft and springy and the coverlet feels like silk!”
No, thought Magda that night, as she lay under her own coverlet, rocked into a pleasant drowse by the motion of the ship as she had never been on the Apollo, thirty years before. This is not anything like it was before. We are lapped in comfort, every need attended to and every discomfort swiftly banished. This is not anything like that dark and protracted misery that was their passage before. She had wept to remember it, sitting on the bank of a green river not long after her arrival in Texas, that new land. She had sat beside Carl Becker and poured out all her fear and grief while he listened quietly, cleaning and oiling those old Paterson revolvers that he carried as a Ranger at Captain Jack’s bidding. And when she was finished, he handed her a bit of calico to dry her face with and shared an apple. She had loved him from that moment but not realized it for some time afterwards. Now she felt his loss so very keenly! What would he have thought of all this—fine mattresses and silk coverlets, an electric bell to summon a steward with a tray of china cups of tea and a plate of sandwiches cut into fancy shapes—that soft-spoken man who thought nothing of venturing into the Llano for months on end with no more than a single Mexican blanket and sufficient ammunition?
Oh, he would have been mightily amused, she told herself. In the darkness she reached out across the bed, across that place where he would have lain. What an adventure it would have been, this journey to the country where his people had come from, to show him those places that she could barely remember herself. And what an adventure it would have been to grow old with him. On that thought, she fell asleep, dreaming of flower meadows and a clear stream of water that wound through a grove of golden-leafed sycamore trees, through which she walked, never quite catching up to the man who was always just ahead of her.
On the morning of the tenth day after departing New York, they arrived in Hamburg, going from one marvel—the speed of their passage—to another: the modern and orderly bustle of a harbor that made Indianola seem as primitive and simple as an Indian skin lodge by comparison. Street after street of tall terraced houses surrounded the harbor basin, as forests of masts and spindly cranes darkened the sky. The main avenues within the city afforded a princely prospect, lined with imposing stone and plastered buildings. Prosperity hung like a fog in the ai
r, along with smoke from unimaginable numbers of households burning coal.
“There are ever so many soldiers,” Horrie remarked interestedly from the coach that bore them all from quay to railway station. “Is there a war going on, Uncle Peter?”
“Not at present that I know of,” Peter answered.
Hansi snorted contemptuously. “There was a war, once King William of Prussia had finished uniting all Germany under one ruling house. Against the French, so it turned out to be very short.”
“Who won?” Horrie asked.
Hansi snorted again. “The Prussians, of course—and now a united Germany has a place in the sun. So many of our folk in America were cock-a-whoop over that! For the life of me, boy, I couldn’t think why. We left thirty years ago, not wanting anything more to do with kings and conscription. My father’s house was about the size of the garden shed, and as hard as we worked, we couldn’t get a scrap of land any bigger than a lady’s pocket handkerchief—and on top of that, I had to go and spend two years of my life being a toy soldier so that the sons of the Firsts could swank around in a fancy uniform and pretend to be Julius Caesar. The only thing I wanted from Germany was out; the only thing they gave us freely was permission to leave.”