Medical inspection. The instant we put foot on the deck of the _Lusitania_, this was our first business.
“Have your Inspection Tickets ready.” Before we could inquire what was going to happen, it was happening. We were passed in a slow trickle between two officials. “Take off your hat.” “Take off your glasses.” I stood blinking while the doctor deftly plucked up my eyelids. He waved me ahead, my ungranulated eyelids made harsh by the handling. Hundreds were before us on the deck, and those from behind began to press on our heels with the inevitable “myself first” impulse of human beings. We were a medley of races, Swedes, Greek, English and Welsh, Irish, Russian Jews, Poles, mute Lithuanian peasants, and men from a Northern race who turned out to be Finns. It was almost as cosmopolitan as the Third Avenue Elevated. We advanced with repeated hesitations and conscious slowness. A woman turned white in the crush and had to be helped to a seat near an open porthole. In front of me, a 12-year-old boy, dead beat, leaned against his big brother—and under his arm, if you please, wearily hugged a camp stool. “Why doesn’t he sit on the stool?” The mother, a thin, strained, admirable creature, whose face showed the fine wrinkles of a life too intent, allowed me to open the stool for him. From his low seat he rewarded me more than once with a look of confidence and smiling good-nature. They had travelled by rail all night, the mother volunteered, from a town in Wales. They were on their way at last to join the father in California. “I have two more in California”—the mother pointed to her children, who cheerfully smiled.
Women and children. During that weary wait I observed them here and there, standing submissively for three-quarters of an hour. At length, after the long halt, the tension was relieved, and we moved again, this time past another doctor. “Take off your hat.” The doctor had apparently to inspect the unnaturalized polls on which that morning we had paid a four dollar tax. He was a man of great perception, the doctor, and the actual examination was an affair of split seconds. On completing the circuit of the deck our yellow Inspection Tickets (given to us at the office in the morning when we had paid our $37.50 for the passage) received their first stamp. The Cunard Line accepted us as healthy live stock.