The Stoker (Chapter One)

Karl Rossmann was sixteen; his poor parents had sent him to America because a servant girl had seduced him and borne him a child. As his ship, already slowing, moved into the harbour of New York, he saw the Statue of Liberty, which he had been watching for a long time, as if in sunlight that had suddenly grown stronger. Her arm holding the sword reached up as though it had only just been raised, and the open air blew freely around her.

"So high!" he said to himself; and, with no thought yet of going ashore, he let the stream of porters pushing past him carry him slowly to the rail.

A young man he had met on the voyage reminded him that they were landing; Karl, smiling, swung his trunk to his shoulder — and remembered that he had left his umbrella below. He asked the young man to watch his trunk for a moment, and ran down. He lost his way in the corridors and stairways of the huge ship; and at last knocked at a little door, and found himself in a tiny cabin with a big man in it, lying on a bunk: a stoker.

The stoker was a German, and he was angry. He had been working on the ship for years, and now he was being treated unjustly by the second engineer, a Romanian named Schubal, who favoured the foreigners on board and persecuted the German stokers; he wanted to complain, and no one would listen to him. Karl sat on his bunk and listened. He was moved; and he forgot his umbrella, and his trunk. He decided that the stoker must take his complaint straight to the captain, and that he, Karl, would go with him and help him.

And Karl, sitting on the bunk in the little cabin, looking at the stoker's great fists and his unhappy face, felt that he had found in him a kind of friend, and that he, Karl, was the only person on the whole ship who would help him. He forgot that he was a passenger and the stoker a stoker; he forgot that he himself was going ashore to a strange country with nothing but a trunk. He was full of the feeling of justice.

They went up to the captain's office, a fine room with windows looking out on the harbour, where ships of every size passed, and little boats darted, and the city rose behind, with its countless windows. There were officials there, with papers, and the captain, in his uniform, and a gentleman in civilian clothes with a bamboo cane. The stoker began to speak, and became confused, and complained of everything at once, and the officers grew impatient; Schubal himself was sent for, and came in, calm, with his witnesses, and seemed in the right. Karl tried to help the stoker, to put his case in order; he grew excited; he spoke eloquently of justice; he took the stoker's hand.

Then the gentleman with the bamboo cane asked Karl his name. "Karl Rossmann," said Karl. "Then," said the gentleman, "I am your uncle Jakob, your mother's brother." He was Senator Edward Jakob, a rich and powerful man in America. He had received a letter from the servant girl, Johanna Brummer, telling him about Karl, and the child, and the ship; and he had come to meet him. He told the whole story to the officers, laughing, to Karl's shame. The captain congratulated Karl; everyone congratulated him; and the uncle took him by the arm to go ashore in the captain's own boat.

Karl turned back to the stoker. "You must defend yourself," he said. "You must tell them the truth." But the stoker only looked at him, and did not seem to understand any longer what Karl was saying; and Karl kissed his hand, and wept, and was led away. In the boat, rowing towards the land, Karl looked up at the ship and the captain's windows, and wondered whether his uncle would ever take the place of the stoker for him. And his uncle sat looking at the rowers, and the waves rocked the boat.