On the following Saturday, when I met her boat at an East River dock, at once I felt a difference. We were waiting for her father. The moments dragged and I grew glum, try as I would to be pleasant.
"Here he is," she said at last.
Tall, rather lank and loosely clothed, Dillon was coming down the pier in easy leisurely fashion, talking to a man by his side. His face lighted up when he saw us.
"Just a minute," he said.
His voice was low but it had a peculiar carrying quality. His rugged face was deeply lined, and I noticed a little gray in his hair. He was smiling straight down into the eyes of his companion, a much younger man, thin and poorly dressed, whose face looked drawn and tired.
"When I was your age," I heard Dillon remark, "I got into just the same kind of a snarl." And he began telling about it. A frightfully technical story it was, full of engineer slang that was Greek to me, but I saw the younger man listen absorbed, his thin lips parting in a smile. I saw him come out from under his worries, I saw his chief watching him, pulling him out.
"All right, Jim," he ended. "See what you can do."
"Say, Chief, just you forget this, will you?" the other said intensely. "Don't give it a thought. It's go'n' to be done!"
"It's forgotten."
Another easy smile at his man, and then Eleanore's father turned to us. I could feel him casually take me in.
"The thing I liked most in that sketch of yours," he was saying a few minutes later, when our boat was onher course, "was the way you listed that Dutchman's cargo. 'One baby carriage—to Lahore.' A very large picture in five little words. I can see that Hindu baby now—being wheeled in its carriage to Crocodile Park and wondering where the devil this queer new wagon came from. I've been nosing around these docks for years, but I missed that part of 'em right along—that human part—till you came along with your neat writer's trick. 'One baby carriage—to Lahore.' You ought to be proud, young man, at your age to have written one sentence so long that it goes half way around the world."
As he talked in that half bantering tone I tried to feel cross, but it wouldn't do. That low voice and those gray eyes were not making fun of me, they were making friends with me, they were so kindly, curious, so open and sincere. Soon he had lighted a cigar and was telling Eleanore gravely just how she ought to run her boat.
"Why be so busy about it?" he asked.
"Oh, you be quiet!" she replied, as she sharply spun her wheel. Like an automobile in a crowded street our craft was lurching its way in short dashes in and out of the rush hour traffic. The narrow East River was black with boats. Ferries, tugs and steamers seemed to be coming at us from every side. Now with a leap we would be off, then abruptly churning the water behind us we would hold back drifting, watching our chance for another rush. Eleanore's face was glowing now, her hat was off, her neck was tense—and her blue-gray eyes, wide open, fixed on the chaos ahead, were shining with excitement. Now and then a long curling wisp of her hair would get in her eyes and savagely she would blow it back. And her lank quiet father puffed his cigar, with his gray eyes restfully on her. "The serenity of her," he murmured to me.
"Oh, now, my dear," he said gently, as we careened to starboard, "thatwas a slip. I can't say I would have done it like that."
"Have you ever run a boat in your life?" came back the fierce rejoinder.
"No," said Dillon calmly, "I can't exactly say I have. Still"—he relapsed and enjoyed his cigar.
Just a short time after this, we had the only ugly moment that I had been through in all our rides. A huge Sound steamer was ahead. Dashing close along under her port, we came suddenly out before her and met a tug whose fool of a captain had made a rush to cross her bow. It was one of those sickening instants when you see nothing at all to do. But Eleanore saw. A quick jerk on her lever, a swift spinning of her wheel, and with a leap we were right under the steamer's bow. It missed our stern by a foot as it passed and then we were safe on the other side. She made a low sound, in a moment her face went deathly white, her eyes shut and she nearly let go the wheel. But then, her slight form tightening, slowly opening her eyes she turned toward her father.
"Now?" he asked very softly. And there passed a look between them.
"All right," she breathed, and turned back to her wheel. And for some time very little was said.
But I understood her love for him now. These two were such companions as I had never seen before. And though I myself felt quite out of it all, this did not bother me in the least. For watching her father and feeling the abounding reserve of force deep under his quiet, I told myself that here was a big man, the first really big one I'd ever come close to. And I was so eager to know him and see just what he was like inside, that I had no room for myself or his daughter—because I wanted to write him up. What a weird, curious feeling it is, this passion for writing up people you meet.
On the remainder of the ride, and at supper that night on the porch of their cottage, a little house perched on a rocky point directly overlooking the water, I did my best to draw him out, and Eleanore seemed quite readyto help me. And later, when he went inside to do some work, I went on with the same eagerness, obliterating my own small self, exploring this feeling of hers for him and his dream of a future harbor.
Soon she was doing all the talking, her voice growing lower and more intense as she tried to make me feel all he meant when he said, "It's going to be the first port in the world." She told how up in his tower he made you see the commerce of this whole mighty world of peace converging slowly on this port. She told of the night two years before when he had come home "all shaken and queer" and had said to her huskily, "Eleanore, child, at last it's sure. There's to be a Panama Canal." Of other nights when he didn't come home and at last she went down to his office to fetch him and found him at midnight there with his men, "all working like mad and gay as larks!"
"When it comes to millions of dollars for his work," she said, "he's so very keen that he makes you feel like a little child. But when it's merely a question of dollars for himself to live on, he's a perfect baby. He won't look at a bill, he always turns them over to me. He won't enter a shop, he won't go to a tailor. One ready-made clothing store has his measure and twice a year I order his clothes and then have a fight to get him to wear them. He never knows what he eats except steak. One night when we had been having steak six evenings in succession I tried chicken for a change. At first he didn't know what was wrong. Every now and then he would seem to notice something. 'What's the matter with me?' I could see he was asking. Then all at once he had it. 'My dear,' he said, very coaxingly, 'could we have a nice juicy porterhouse steak for supper to-morrow evening?'"
From these and many other details slowly I got the feel of my man. Closer, more intimate he grew. All the work I had done in Paris, questioning, drawing outmy friends until I could feel their inner selves coming out of them into me, was counting now. I had never done so well before, I was sliding my questions in just right, very cautiously turning her memory this way and that on her father's life, watching her grow more and more unaware of my presence beside her, although now I had her bending toward me, eagerly, close.
"And she thinks she's doing it all by herself," I thought exultingly.
But as there came a pause in our talk, she turned slightly in her seat and glanced in through the window into the lighted room behind. And instantly her expression changed. A swift look of surprise, a puzzled frown and a moment of hard thinking—and then with a murmured excuse she rose and went away quickly into the house. In the meantime I had followed her look. Sitting close by the lamp, in the room inside, Dillon was staring straight at this spot where I was invisible in the dark. And he looked old—and rigid, as though he'd been staring like that for some time. I caught just a glimpse. Then he heard her step and turned hastily back to his work. I looked at my watch. It was after twelve.
"And he never knew it was all about him," I said to myself disgustedly. "I hope this doesn't spoil it all."
But that is precisely what it did. The next morning she was coolly polite and Dillon determinedly genial. I could feel a silent struggle between them as to what should be done with me. She wanted to get rid of me, he wanted to keep us together. Gone was all his quiet strength, in its place was an anxious friendliness. He made me tell him what I was writing. He said he was glad that his press agent daughter had taken me 'round and opened my eyes. And as soon as she got through with me he himself would do all he could.
"I'm through with him," said Eleanore cheerfully. "I've shown him all I possibly can. What you neednow," she added, turning to me in her old easy manner, "is to watch the harbor all by yourself and get your own feelings about it. You might begin at the North River docks."
I spent a wretched afternoon. All my plans for my work and my life assumed the most gray and desolate hues. Eleanore was taking a nap. At last she came down and gave me some tea.
"May I come out and see you now and then?" I asked her very humbly. "It would help me so much to talk over my work."
"No," she answered kindly, "I think you'd better not."
"Why not?" I blurted. "What have I done?"
She hesitated, then looked at me squarely.
"You've made my absurd young father," she said, "think that he is no longer young."
I lost just a moment in admiration. There wasn't one girl in a hundred who would have come out with it like that. Then I seized my chance.
"Why, it's perfectly idiotic," I cried. "Here's a man so big he's a giant beside me, so full of some queer magnetic force that on the way up here in the boat he made me forget that I was there. I forgot thatyouwere there," I threw in, and I caught just the sign of a gleam in her eyes. "No longer young?" I continued. "That man will be young when you and I are blinking in our dull old age! He's the biggest man I ever met! And I want to know him, I want to know how he thinks and feels, I want that more than anything else! And now you come between us!"
"Are you real?" asked Eleanore. I looked back unflinchingly.
"Just you try me," I retorted.
"No," she replied with a quiet smile.
She said good-by to me that night.
The next morning at seven o'clock I met her fatherdown at the boat. We had a quick swim together and then climbed on board. And the next minute, with a sober old seaman called "Captain Arty" at the wheel, the boat was speeding for New York while we dressed and cooked and breakfasted.
"This was Eleanore's idea," Dillon said. "It gets me to town by nine o'clock and takes me back each day at five. So I hardly miss a night at home.... Did she ever tell you," he went on, "about the first week she spent in this boat?"
"She said it was a wonderful time."
"It was a nightmare," Dillon said. I looked at him quickly:
"What do you mean?"
"Her fight for her strength. She looked like a ghost—with a stiff upper lip. She fainted twice. But she wouldn't give up. She said she knew she could do it if I'd only let her stick it out. She has quite a will, that daughter of mine," he added quietly.
"You know," he went on, "that idea of hers that you tackle the North River piers isn't bad. Why don't you put in the whole Summer there, watching the big liners? I won't ask you to come to my office now, for our work is still in that early stage where we don't want any publicity." I could feel his casual glance, and I wondered whether he noticed my sharp disappointment. "When we are ready," he resumed, "we're sure to be flooded with writers. I hope there'll be one man in the lot who'll stick to the work for a year or more, a man with a kind of a passion in him for the thing we're trying to do. There's nothing we wouldn't do for that man. I hope he's going to be you."
At once a vision opened of work with Eleanore's father, of long talks with Eleanore.
"I'll try to get ready for it," I said.
"You've made a fine start," he continued, "and I think you're going to make good. But first let's see what you'lldo by yourself. Get your own view of this place as it is to-day before we talk about plans for to-morrow. And don't hurry. Take your time."
As he said this quietly, I suddenly awoke to the fact that we were tearing down the river at a perfectly gorgeous speed. The river was crowding with traffic ahead, all was a rushing chaos of life and we were rushing worst of all. And yet we did not seem to hurry. Old Captain Arty sat at the wheel with the most resigned patient look in his eyes. And drawing lazily on his cigar Dillon was watching a new line of wharves.
"You know I've found," he was saying, "the only way to live in this age and get any pleasure out of life is to always take more time than you need for every job you tackle. I'm taking at least seven years to this job. I might possibly do it as well in five, but I'd miss half the fun of it all, I'd be glaring at separate parts of it, each one as it came along, and I'd never have time to see it full size and let it carry me 'round the world—to that baby carriage, for instance, over in Lahore."
We were rounding the Battery now. And in that sparkling morning light, with billowy waves of sea green all around us, sudden snowy clouds of spray, we watched for a moment the skyscraper group, the homes of the Big Companies. The sunshine was reflected from thousands of dazzling window eyes, little streamers of steam were flung out gaily overhead, streets suddenly opened to our view, narrow cuts revealing the depths below. And there came to our ears a deep humming.
"That's the brains of it all," said Dillon. "In all you'll see while exploring the wharves you'll find some string that leads back here. And you don't want to let that worry you. Let the muckrakers worry and plan all they please for a sea-gate and a nation that's to run with its brains removed. You want to remember it can't be done. You want to look harder and harder—until you find out for yourself that there are men up thereon Wall Street without whose brains no big thing can be done in this country. I'm working under their orders and some day I hope you'll be doing the same. For they don't needlesspublicity butmore."
He left me at the Battery, and as I stood looking after him I found myself feeling somewhat dazed. A question flashed into my mind. What would Joe Kramer say to this? I remembered what he had said to me once: "Tell Wall Street to get off the roof." Well, that washisview. Here was another. And this man was certainly just as sincere and decidedly more wise and sane, altogether a larger size.
Besides, I was in love with his daughter.
On the Manhattan side of the North River, from Twenty-third Street down for a mile there stretches a deafening region of cobblestones and asphalt over which trucks by thousands go clattering each day. There are long lines of freight cars here and snorting locomotives. Along the shore side are many saloons, a few cheap decent little hotels and some that are far from decent. And along the water side is a solid line of docksheds. Their front is one unbroken wall of sheet iron and concrete.
I came up against this wall. Over the top I could see here and there the great round funnels of the ships, but at every passenger doorway and at every wide freight entrance I found a sign, "No Visitors Admitted," and under the sign a watchman who would ungraciously take a cigar and then go right on being a watchman. There seemed no way to get inside. The old-fashioned mystery of the sea was replaced by the inscrutability of what some muckrakers called "The Pool."
"Don't hurry," Eleanore's father had said. All very well, but I needed money. While I had been making with Eleanore those long and delightful explorations of the harbor and ourselves, at home my father's bank account had been steadily dwindling, and all that I had been able to make had gone into expenses.
"I don't know what to do," said Sue, alone with me that evening. "The butcher says he won't wait any longer. He has simply got to be paid this week."
"I'll see what I can do," I said.
I came back to my new hunting ground and all nightlong I prowled about. I sipped large schooners of beer at bars, listening to the burly dockers crowded close around me. I watched the waterfront, empty and still, with acres of spectral wagons and trucks and here and there a lantern. I had a long talk with a broken old bum who lay on his back in an empty truck looking up at the stars and spun me yarns of his life as a cook on ships all up and down the world. Now and again in the small wee hours I met hurrying groups of men, women and children poorly clad, and following them to one of the piers I heard the sleepy watchman growl, "Steerage passengers over there." I saw the dawn break slowly and everything around me grow bluish and unreal. I watched the teamsters come tramping along leading horses, and harness them to the trucks. I heard the first clatter of the day. I saw the figures of dockers appear, more and more, I saw some of them drift to the docks. Soon there were crowds of thousands, and as stevedores there began bawling out names, gang after gang of men stepped forward, until at last the chosen throngs went marching in past the timekeepers. Hungrily I peered after them up the long cavernous docksheds. "No Visitors Admitted."
Then I went into a lunchroom for ham and eggs and a huge cup of coffee. I ate an enormous breakfast. On the floor beside me a cross and weary looking old woman was scrubbing the dirty oil cloth there. But I myself felt no weariness. While all was still vivid and fresh in my mind, sitting there I wrote down what I had seen. A magazine editor said it would do. And so we paid the butcher.
The same editor gave me a sweeping letter of introduction to all ocean liners. This I showed to a dock watchman, who directed me upstairs. In the office above I showed it to a clerk, who directed me to the dock superintendent, who read it and told me to go downtown. I recalled what Dillon had said about strings. Here wasstring number one, I reflected, and I followed it down Manhattan into the tall buildings, only to be asked down there just what it was I wanted to know.
"I don't want to know anything," I replied. "I just want permission to watch the work."
"We can't allow that," was the answer of this harbor of big companies.
At every pier that I approached I received about the same reply. At home Sue spoke of other bills. And now that I was in trouble, hard pressed for money and groping my way about alone, I found myself missing Eleanore to a most desperate degree. Her face, her smiling blue-gray eyes, kept rising in my mind, sometimes with memories and hopes that permeated my whole view both of the harbor and my work with a warm glad expectant glow, but more often with no feeling at all but one of sickening emptiness. She was not here. The only way to get back to her was to make good with her father. And so I would not ask his aid or even go to him for advice. Testing me, was he? All right, I would show him.
And I returned to my editor, whom my intensity rather amused.
"The joke of it is," he said, "that they think down there you're a muckraker."
"I'll be one soon if this keeps on."
"But it won't," he replied. "As soon as you've once broken in, and they see it's a glory story you want, you can't imagine how nice they'll be."
"I haven't broken in," I said.
"You will to-morrow," he told me, "because Abner Bell will be with you. He's our star photographer. Wait till you see little Ab go to work. The place he can't get into hasn't been invented. Besides," the editor added, "Abner is just the sort of chap to take hold of an author from Paris and turn him into a writer."
And this Abner Bell proceeded to do. He was a cheerful, rotund little man with round simple eyes and a smile that went all over his face.
"You see," he said, when I met him the next day down at the docks, "you can't ask a harbor to hold up her chin and look into your camera while you count. She's such a big fat noisy slob she wouldn't even hear you. You've got to run right at her and bark."
"Look here, old man," he was asking a watchman a few moments later. "What's the name of the superintendent on the next pier down the line!"
"Captain Townes."
"Townes, Townes? Is that Bill Townes?"
"No, it's Ed."
"I wonder what's become of Bill. All right, brother, much obliged. See you again." And he went on.
"Say," he asked the next watchman. "Is Eddy—I mean Captain—Townes upstairs?"
"Sure he is. Go right up."
"Thank you." Up we went to the office. "Captain Townes? Good-morning."
"Well, sir, what can I do for you?" The captain was an Englishman with a voice as heavy and deep as his eyes.
"Why, Captain, I'm sent here by the firm that's putting Peevey's Paris Perfume on the market out in the Middle West. They're going in heavy on ads this Fall and I've got an order to hang around here until I can get a photo of one of your biggest liners. The idea is to run it as an ad, with a caption under it something like this: 'The Kaiser Wilhelmreaching New York with twenty thousand bottles of Peevey's Best, direct from Paris.'"
"The Kaiser Wilhelm," said the captain ponderously, "is a German boat. She docks in Hoboken, my friend."
"Of course she does," said Abner. "And I can lug this heavy camera way over there if you say so, and handten thousand dollars worth of free ads to a German line, stick up pictures of their boat in little drugstore windows all up and down the Middle West. Do you know how to tell me to go away?"
Captain Townes smiled heavily.
"No," he said, "I guess I don't. Here's a pass that'll give you the run of the dock."
"Make it two," said Abner, "and fix it so my friend and I can stick around for quite a while."
"You're a pretty good liar," I told him as we went downstairs.
"Oh, hell," he answered modestly. "Let's go out on the porch and get cool."
We went out on the open end of the pier and sat down on a wooden beam which Abner called a bulkhead.
"If we don't begin calling things names," he remarked, "we'll never get to feeling we're here. Let's just sit and feel for a while."
"I've begun," I replied.
We sat in the shade of two wooden piles with the glare of a midsummer sun all around us. The East River had been like a crowded creek compared to this wide expanse of water slapping and gleaming out there in the sun with smoke shadows chasing over it all. There was the rough odor of smoke in the air from craft of all kinds as they skurried about. The high black bow of a Cunarder loomed at the end of the dock next ours. Far across the river the stout German liners lay at their berths—and they did not look like sea hogs. What a change had come over the harbor since I had met that motorboat. How all the hogs had waddled away, and the very smoke and the oil on the waves had taken on deep, vivid hues—as I had seen through Eleanore's eyes. "What a strange wonderful purple," her low voice seemed to murmur at my side.
"She's going away from here," said Ab. I started:
"Who is?"
"That Cunarder. Look at the smoke pour out of her stacks. Got a cigarette about you?"
"No," I answered gruffly.
"Damn."
In the slip on our other side a large freight boat was loading, and a herd of scows and barges were pressing close around her. These clumsy craft had cabins, and in some whole families lived. "Harbor Gypsies." A good title. I had paid the butcher, but the grocer was still waiting. So I dismissed my motorboat and grimly turned to scows instead. Children by the dozen were making friends from barge to barge. Dogs were all about us and they too were busy visiting. High up on the roof of a coal lighter's cabin an impudent little skye-terrier kept barking at the sooty men who were shoveling down below. One of these from time to time would lift his black face and good-humoredly call, "Oh, you go to hell"—which would drive the small dog into frenzies. Most of the barges had derrick masts, and all these masts were moving. They rose between me and the sky, bobbing, tossing and criss-crossing, filling the place with the feeling of life, the unending, restless life of the sea.
An ear-shattering roar broke in on it all. Our Cunarder was starting. Smoke belching black from her funnels, the monster was beginning to move.
But what was this woman doing close by us? Out of the cabin of a barge she had dragged a little rocking chair, and now she had brought out a baby, all dressed up in its Sunday best, and was rocking expectantly, watching the ship. Thundering to the harbor, the Cunarder now moved slowly out. As she swept into the river the end of the pier was revealed to our eyes all black with people waving. They waved until she was out in midstream. Then, as they began to turn away, one plump motherly-looking woman happened to glance toward us.
"Why, the cute little baby," we heard her exclaim.And the next minute hundreds of people were looking. The barge mother rocked serenely.
Abner grabbed his camera and jumped nimbly down on the barge, where he took the baby's picture, with the amused crowd for a background.
"The kid's name," he remarked on his return, "is Violetta Rosy. She was born at two a. m. at Pier Forty-nine." He was silent for a moment and then went on sententiously, "Think what it'll mean to her, through all the storm and stress of life, to be able to look fondly back upon the dear old homestead. There's a punch to Violetta. Better run her in."
"I will," I said.
"And that little thing of mine," he queried modestly, "about the dear old homestead."
"I've got it," I replied.
"I hand quite a few little things to writers," Ab continued cheerfully. "If you'll just give me some idea of what it is you're looking for——"
"I'm looking for the punch," I answered promptly.
"Then we'll get on fine," he said. "The editor got me worried some. He said you'd trained in Paris."
"Oh, that was only a starter," I told him.
Presently he went into the dockshed on his unending quest of "the punch." And left to myself I got thinking. What did Paris know about us? De Maupassant's methods wouldn't do here. I noticed two painters in overalls at work on that large freighter. With long brooms that they held in both hands they were slapping a band of crude yellow paint along her scarred and rusted side. That was what I needed, the broom! All at once the harbor took hold of me hard. And exulting in its bigness, the bold raw splattering bigness of my native Yankee land, "Now for some glory stories," I said.
I went into the dockshed, and there I stayed right through until night, till my mind was limp and battered from the rush of new impressions. For in this long seastation, under the blue arc-lights, in boxes, barrels, crates and bags, tumbling, banging, crashing, came the products of this modern land. You could feel the pulse of a continent here. From the factories, the mines and mills, the prairies and the forests, the plantations and the vineyards, there flowed a mighty tide of things—endlessly, both day and night—you could shut your eyes and see the long brown lines of cars crawl eastward from all over the land, you could see the stuff converging here to be gathered into coarse rope nets and swept up to the liners. The pulse beat fast and furious. In gangs at every hatchway you saw men heaving, sweating, you heard them swearing, panting. That day they worked straight through the night. For the pulse kept beating, beating, and the ship must sail on time!
And now I too worked day and night. In the weeks that followed, Abner Bell came and went many times, but for me it was my entire life. Though small of build I was tough and hard, I had not been sick for a day in years, and now I easily stood the strain. Day by day my story grew, my glory story of world trade. Watching, questioning, listening here, making notes, writing hasty sketches to help keep us going at home—slowly I could feel this place yielding up its inner self, its punch and bigness, endless rush, its feeling of a nation young and piling up prodigious wealth. From the customhouse came fabulous tales of millionaires ransacking the world. Rare old furniture, rugs and tapestries, paintings, jewels, gorgeous gowns poured in a dazzling torrent all that summer through the docks. One day on a Mediterranean ship, in their immaculate "stalls de luxe," came two black Arab horses, glistening, quivering creatures, valued by the customhouse at twenty thousand dollars each. And into the same ship that week, as though in payment for these two, in dust and heavy smell of sweat I saw a thousand cattle driven, bellowing and lowing.
I exulted in these symptoms of our crude and lustyyouth. I watched my countrymen going abroad. Not only through the Summer but straight on into the Fall they came by tens of thousands out of the West, people who had made some money and were going to blow it in, to buy things and to see things, to learn things and to eat things. One day at noon, on the end of a dock, when the ship was already far out in midstream and all the crashing music and cheers had died away, a meek old lady wiped her eyes and murmured very tearfully, "I suppose they'll be eating their luncheon soon." And then the loud voice of her daughter replied:
"Eat? Why, ma, God bless their hearts, they'll sit on that boat and eat all day!"
And I echoed her wish with a keen delight. God bless their hearts and stomachs. Oh, hungry vigorous Yankee land, so mightily young—eat on, eat on!
And the land ate on.
My work here rose to a climax a week or two before Christmas, when the newest liner of them all pulled off a new world's record for speed. With the company's publicity man, who had become a friend of mine, I went on the health officer's tug down the Bay to meet her, on the coldest, darkest night I've ever known on water. Shortly after nine o'clock the big boat's light gleamed off the Hook and she bore down upon us. She came close, slowed down and towered by our side, weird as a ghost with snow and ice in glimmering sheets on her steel sides. She did not stop. We caught a rope ladder and scrambled up, and at once we felt her speeding on.
And she was indeed a story that night. Bellowing hoarsely now in warning to all small craft to get out of her way, she was rushing into the harbor. Suddenly she slowed again, and three dark mail tugs ranged alongside, and through canvas chutes four thousand sacks of Christmas mail began to pour down while the ship moved on. Up her other side came climbing gangs of men who beganto make ready her winches and open up her hatches. Now we were moving in close to the pier, with a whole fleet of tugs around us. Faint shouts rose in the zero night, toots and sharp whistles. One of the gang-planks was down at last and two hundred dockers came up on the run. Off went the passengers and the luggage, reporters skurrying through the crowds. But the ship did not rest. For she was to sail again the next night. This was to be a world's record for speed!
All night long the work went on, and I watched it from a deck above, going in now and then for food and hot drinks. On her dock side, forward, Christmas boxes, bales and packages were being whipped up out of her hold to the rattle of her winches. One sharp whistle and up they shot into the air till they swung some seventy feet above. Another whistle and down they whirled into the dockshed far below from which a blaze of light poured up. At the same time she was coaling. Along the black wall of her other side, as I peered over the rail above, I saw far below a row of barges crowded with Italians. Powerful lights swung over their heads in the freezing wind, swung above black coal heaps and the lapping water. It was an inferno of shifting lights and long leaping shadows.
I watched till daylight blotted out the yellow glare of the lanterns. Then I went home to get some sleep. And late that night when I came back I found her almost ready to sail.
Out of taxis and automobiles chugging down in front of the pier, the passengers were pouring in. Many were in evening clothes, some just come from dinners and others from box parties. The theaters had just let out. The rich warm hues of the women's cloaks, the gay head dresses here and there and the sparkling earrings, immaculate gloves and dainty wanton slippered feet, kept giving flashes of color to this dark freezing ocean place. Most of these people went hurrying up into thewarm, gorgeous café of the ship, which was run from a hotel in Paris. What had all this to do with the sea?
"Come on," said the genial press agent. "You're the company's guest-to-night."
And while we ate and drank and smoked, and the tables around us filled with people whose ripples and bursts of laughter rose over the orchestra's festive throb, and corks kept popping everywhere, he told me where they were going, these gay revellers, for their Christmas Day—to London, Brussels, Berlin and Vienna, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Algiers.
"Now come with me," he said at last, and he took me along warm passageways to the row of cabins de luxe.
First we looked into the Bridal Suite, to which one of the Pittsburgh makers of steel, having just divorced a homely old wife, was presently to bring his new bride, a ravishing young creature of musical comedy fame. They had been married that afternoon. A French maid was unpacking dainty shimmering little gowns, soft furry things and other things of silk and lace, and hanging them up in closets. It was a large room, and there were other rooms adjoining and two big luxurious baths. The cost of it all was four thousand dollars for the five days. There were tall mirrors and dressing tables, there were capacious easy chairs. Low subdued lights were here and there, and a thick rug was on the floor. Over in one corner was a huge double bed of cream colored wood with rich soft quilts upon it. Beside the bed in a pink satin cradle there lay a tiny Pekinese dog.
"Next," he whispered. We peeped into the next stateroom, and there divided from her neighbors by only one thin partition, a sober, wrinkled little old lady in black velvet sat quietly reading her Bible. Soon she would be saying her prayers.
"Next," he whispered. And in the cabin on her other side we caught a glimpse of two jovial men playing cards in gay pajamas with a bottle of Scotch between them.
"Next." And as we went on down the row he gave me the names of an English earl, a Jewish clothing merchant, a Minnesota ranchman, a banker's widow from Boston, a Tammany politician, a Catholic bishop from Baltimore, a millionaire cheese maker from Troy and a mining king from Montana.
"How about that," he asked at the end, "for an American row de luxe?"
"My God, it's great," I whispered.
"There's only one big question here," he added. "Your long respectable pedigrees and your nice little Puritanical codes can all go to blazes—this big boat will throw 'em all overboard for you—if you can answer, 'I've got the price.'"
Meanwhile, in the late Autumn, Eleanore had come back to town. I had a note from her one day.
"Come and tell me what you are writing," she said.
I went to see her that afternoon, and I was deeply excited. I had often felt her by my side when I was watching the harbor life and as often behind me while I wrote. We had had long talks together, absorbing talks about ourselves. And though now in her easy welcome and through all her cheerful questions there was not a suggestion that we two had been or ever would be anything but genial friends, this did not discourage me in the least. No fellow, I thought, could be happy as I and have nothing better than friendship ahead. The Fates could never be so hard, for certainly now they were smiling.
Here was her apartment, just the place I had felt it would be, only infinitely more attractive. High up above the Manhattan jungle, it was quiet and sunny and charming here. From the low, wide living-room windows you could see miles out over the harbor where my work was going so splendidly, and all around the room itself I saw what I was working for. Eleanore's touch was everywhere. An intimate, lovable feminine home with man-sized views from its windows—just like Eleanore herself, from whom I found it difficult to keep my hungry eyes away. To that soft bewildering hair of hers she had done something different—I couldn't tell what, but I loved it. I loved the changing tones of her voice—I hate monotonous voices. I watched the smiling lights in her eyes. She was at her small tea table now. Hermotorboat, thank Heaven, was laid up for the winter, and I had her right here in a room, with nothing to do with her eyes but pay a decent amount of attention to me. Then by some chance remark I learned that she had been reading what I wrote, almost all of it, in fact. And at the slight exclamation I made I saw her color slightly and bite her lip as though she were angry with herself for having let that secret out.
"What do you want to write," she asked, "when you get through with the harbor?"
"Fiction," I said. "I want it so hard sometimes that it seems like a long way ahead. It seems sometimes," I added, "like a girl I'd fallen in love with—but I couldn't even ask her—because I'm so infernally poor."
Over the tea cup at her lips Eleanore looked thoughtfully straight into and through and behind my eyes.
"Fiction is such a broad field," she remarked. "What kind do you think you're going to try?"
"I don't know," I answered. "It still seems so far ahead. You see, I have no name at all, and this harbor at least is a good safe start. I'm afraid I'm rather a cautious sort. When I find what I want—and want so hard that it's the deepest part of me—I like to go slow. I'm afraid to risk losing it all—deciding my life one way or the other—by taking a chance." I made a restless movement. "I wasn't speaking of my work just then," I added gruffly.
I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror back of Eleanore's chair. And I glared at myself for the fool that I was to have said all that. I hadn't meant to—not in the least! What a paltry looking cuss I was—small, tough and wiry, hair sandy, eyes of no color at all, snub nose and a jaw shut tight as in pain.
"You're a queer person," said a voice.
"I am," I agreed forlornly. "I'm the queerest fellow I ever met." I caught a grim twinkle in my eyes. Thank God for a sense of humor.
"Sometimes," she went on, reflectively, "you seem to me as old as the hills—and again so young and obvious. I'm so sorry to hear you say that you weren't talking of your work. I like to hear men talk of their work."
"I know you do," I said hungrily. "And that's one of the reasons why you're going to mean so much some day—to somebody's work—and to his whole life."
Why couldn't I stop? Had I gone insane? I rose and moved about the room. A low rippling laugh brought me back to my senses.
"But how aboutmeandmylife?" she asked. "That ought to be thought of a little, you know."
I came close beside her:
"Let me say this. Won't you? I'll promise never to say it again. Your life is going to be all right. It's going to be quite wonderful—you'll be tremendously happy. I'm sure of that. It's not only the way you always—look—it's the way you always think and feel. It's everything about you."
She had looked down at her hands for a moment. Now she looked up suddenly.
"Thank you," she said smiling, in a way that told me to smile too. I obeyed.
"I did that rather badly, didn't I," I said.
"No, you did that rather well. Especially the first part—I think I liked that best of all—the part where you promised so solemnly that you'd never do it again."
I went indignantly back to my chair.
"Do you know," I said, "I feel sometimes when I'm with you as though I were being managed! Absolutely managed!"
"I should think you wouldn't like that," she replied. Her hands were peacefully folded now and she looked at me serenely: "I should think you'd rather manage yourself."
I took the hint. From, that day on, each time I came to see her, I managed myself severely. And this apparently pleased her so much that she seemed no longer the least afraid to let me know her as well as I liked. Her father, too, when I met him now and then in the evenings, was most kindly in his welcome. And as winter wore on, my hopes rose high.
But one evening, after Dillon had read my story about the Christmas Boat, he gave me a bitter disappointment.
"I like it," he said, as he handed it back. "It's a fine dramatic piece of work. But it's only a starter here. To get any idea of our problem you'll have to go all over the harbor. When you've done that for a few months more, and I get back from my trip abroad, I'll be glad to help you."
"You're going abroad?" I asked abruptly.
"Next month," he said, "with Eleanore. She seems to think I need a rest."
Back came the old feeling of emptiness. And gloomily at home that night I wondered if it was because she knew she was leaving so soon that she had been so intimate lately. How outrageous women are.
They sailed the middle of March.
It is easy to look back now and smile at my small desolate self as I was in the months that followed. But at the time it was no smiling matter. I was intensely wretched and I had a right to be, for I could see nothing whatever ahead but the most dire uncertainties. Did Eleanore really care for me? I didn't know. When could I ask her? I didn't know. For when would I be earning enough to ask any girl to marry me? At present nearly all I earned was swallowed up by expenses at home, and I knew that in all likelihood this drain would soon grow heavier.
For we could not count much longer on my father's salary. Already I had done my best to make him give up his position. He stubbornly resisted.
"I'm strong as I ever was," he declared, and he took great pains to prove it. He would sit down to dinner, his face heavy and gray with fatigue, but by a hard visible effort slowly he would throw it off, keenly questioning me about my work, more often quizzing me about it, or Sue about her "revolooters." He had a stock of these dry remarks and he used them over and over. When the same jokes came night after night we knew he was very tired. After dinner on such evenings, when I went with him into his study to smoke, he would invariably settle back in his chair with the same loud "Ah!" of comfort, and he would follow this up as he lit his cigar with the most obvious grunts expressive of health to prove to me how strong he was. He was always grimly delighted when I spent these evenings with him, but always before hiscigar was out his head would sink slowly over his book and soon he would be sound asleep. Then as I sat at my writing I would glance over from time to time. I could tell when he was waking, and at once I would grow absorbed in my work. Soon I would hear a slight snort of surprise, I would hear him stealthily feel for his book, and then presently out of the silence——
"This is a devilish good piece of writing, boy," he would announce abruptly. "Whenyoulearn to hold your reader like this I'll begin to think you're a writer."
Yes, my father was aging fast, I would soon be the only breadwinner here. Sue fought hard against this idea, she was still set on finding work for herself, but each time she proposed it Dad would rise so indignantly, with such evident pain in his glaring old eyes, that she would be forced to give up her plan. In such talks I supported him, and in return when we two were alone Sue would revenge herself on me by the most cutting comments on "this inane habit of looking at girls as fit for nothing better than marriage."
These comments, I was well aware, were aimed at my feeling for Eleanore, for whom Sue had no longer any good word but only a smiling derision. Her remarks were straight out of Bernard Shaw's most ribald works, and they left me miserably wondering whether any man had ever loved in any way that wasn't the curse or the joke of his life. Sue dwelt on this glorious age of deep radical changes going on, she spoke of Joe Kramer, with whom she still corresponded, and enlarged on the wonderful freedom he had to go anywhere at any time. Thank a merciful heavenhewasn't tied down! And if Joe would only keep his head and not marry, not get a huge family on his hands——
Sue made me perfectly wretched.
In this frame of mind I again tackled the harbor. Dillon had told me to cover it all, and this I now setout to do. On warm muggy April days I tramped what appeared to me hundreds of miles. But the regions that from Eleanore's boat had somehow had a feeling of being one great living thing, now on these dreary trudging days fell apart into remote bays and slips and rivers, hours of weary travel apart and each without any connection with any other that I could see. Railroad tracks wound in and out with no apparent purpose, dirty freight boats crawled helter-skelter this way and that. All seemed a meaningless chaos and jam.
And still worse, as I wrestled with this confusion I found it was growing stale to me. In those Spring days I was fagged and dull, my imagination would not work. And this gave me a scare. I mustnotgrow stale, I must keep right on making money to meet the bills that were still piling up at home. And so for a Sunday paper I undertook a series on "The Harbor from a Police Boat." This sounded rather exciting and I hoped that it might restore the lost thrill. The harbor that it showed me made fine Sunday reading. Out of its grim waters dead bodies bobbed, dead faces leered, the sodden ends of mysteries. I wrote them and got paid for them. And I felt no thrill but only disgust. I made some more money out of rats—rats in countless ravenous hordes that had a harbor world of their own. This world extended for hundreds of miles in the dark chill places under the wharves. And the rats kept gnawing, gnawing, and slowly with the help of the waves they wore away to splinters and pulp the millions of beams and planks and piles. I found that entire mountains were denuded each year of their forests to supply food for the rats and the ocean here. I was almost a muckraker now.
Meanwhile I had gone in June to the South Brooklyn waterfront and had taken a room in a tenement near the end of a dock peninsula which jutted out into the bay. For I wanted to live in the very heart of the big port's confusion, to grapple alone with the chaos out of whichDillon's engineers were striving to bring order. Here I lived for weeks by myself, taking my meals in a barroom below.
There were no stately liners here. The North River piers with their rich life had been like a show room. I had come down into the factory now. I could see them still, those liners, but only in the distance steaming through the Narrows. Eleanore had gone that way. Here close around me were grimy yards with heaps of coal, enormous sheds, and inland one of the two narrow mouths of the crowded Erie Basin, out of which slid ugly freighters through the dirty water.
Like the Ancient Mariner I sat there dully on the pier watching the life of the ocean go past, and I would try to jot it down. But soon I would stop. "All right—who cares?" The punch was gone. It grew hot and the water smelt. And I was as blue a reporter of life as ever chewed his pencil.
But life has a way of punching up even a stale young writer. In the rooms above mine lived a man and wife who quarreled half way through the night. Night after night they railed at each other, until one horrible night of screams, in the middle of which I heard the man come running downstairs. He banged at my door.
"Come in," I cried morosely. A big figure entered the dark room.
"Look here," said a rough frightened voice. "Get up and get dressed and run for a doctor. Will you, son? I'm in a hell of a hole!"
"What's the matter!"
"My woman is havin' a baby, that's what," he answered fiercely. "We wasn't expectin' it so soon! An' there ain't a single doctor in miles! But there's a night watchman with a 'phone down there in the dockshed!"
"All right, old man, I'll do my best."
"Say!" he shouted after me, as I hurried down the stairs. "If you know a damn thing about this businesscome back here the minute you've 'phoned! I'm in a hole, brother, a hell of a hole!"
I came back soon, and within a few minutes after I came I saw a baby born.
I did not sleep that night. My mind was curiously clear. I had had the jolt that I needed from life—its agony and bloody sweat, its mystery. It was not dull, it was not stale. The only trouble lay in me. I must find a new angle from which to write.
Why not try becoming one of the workers? The man upstairs was a tug captain, and grateful to me for what help I had given; he now agreed to take me on his tug, where there was plenty of simple work which I did for a dollar a day and my board. And at once I felt a difference. The light work steadied my overwrought nerves and unlocked my mind which had set tight. And now at last I began to see my way out of the jungle.
For the tug belonged to a row of piers about a mile to the southward. Brand new gigantic piers they were, with solid rows of factory buildings on the shore behind them, all owned by one great company, which rented floors or parts of floors to hundreds of manufacturers here. The raw materials they required were landed from barges or ships at the piers and delivered to their doors at once, and their finished products were conveyed in the same way to all parts of the world. Here was a key to the future port of ordered combination that Eleanore's father was working toward. Here was the place I must write up before he came back from abroad, to show him that I had found it.
And the very certainty of this increased my exasperation. For even still I could not write. Doggedly I worked at night up there in my room in the tenement, but I wrote the most tedious dismal stuff which I would tear up savagely. Inanely I would pound my head as though to put punch into it.
But another miracle happened to me.
On one of those enormous piers, roofed over, dim and cool inside, I stood one day looking out on the deck of an East Indian freighter, where two half-naked Malays were polishing the brasswork. One of them was a boy of ten. His small face was uncouth and primitive almost as some little ape's, but I saw him look up again and again with a sudden gleaming expectancy. I grew curious and waited. Now the looks came oftener, his every move was restless. And after a time another boy, a little New York "newsie," with a pack of evening papers, came loitering along the pier. Unconcernedly up the gang-plank he went, while the Malay crouched in his corner, rigid and tense, his black eyes fixed. The white boy took no notice. Climbing up a ladder he sold a couple of papers to some officers on a deck above, and then he went down again to the dock. Presently one of the officers yawned and threw his paper over the rail, and as it fell to the lower deck in an instant the Malay boy was upon it, devouring its headlines and its pictures with his animal eyes, with one of his small bare brown feet upon the jeweled bosom of the latest Fifth Avenue divorcee.
"Where does that kid sleep?" I asked an officer. I was shown his bunk below, and there I found I had guessed right. For the side and the top and both ends of his bunk were lined with red headlines and newspaper pictures all carefully cut and pasted on. Five of the New York "Giants" were there.
And as though the fresh fierce hungriness had passed from that small heathen's soul into my own, that day I again became a reporter of things to be seen in the port of New York.
Back into the dockshed I went, and all up and down and in and out among piles of strange and odorous stuffs. And once more I felt the wonder of this modern ocean world. I followed this raw produce of Mother Earth's four corners back into those factory buildings ashore. Isaw it made into chewing-gum, toys, sofas, glue, curled hair and wall-paper. I saw it made into ladles' hats, corks, carpets, dynamos, stuffed dates. I saw it made into dirt-proof collars and shirt bosoms, salad dressing, blackboards, corsets and the like. Again I fairly reveled in lists of things and the places they came from and the places to which they were going. I saw chewing-gum start for Rio and Quaker Oats for Shanghai, patent medicine for Nabat, curled hair for Yokohama, "movy" theater seats for Sydney, tomato soup for Cape Town and corsets for Rangoon.
"From Everywhere to Anywhere" was the title of my article. It took only a week to write, and was ready when the Dillons came home.
They landed toward the end of July and I went to the dock to meet them.
Elated over my finished story, which I had in my pocket, and made absurdly happy by the sight of Eleanore smiling down at me over the rail, I was surprised at the greeting she gave me.
"Why, you poor boy. How terribly hard you've been working," she said. And she looked at me as though I were sick and worn to the bone. The end of it was that I accepted delightedly an invitation to spend a week up at their cottage on the Sound.
Those were seven vivid glowing days. I could not relax, I was too intensely happy, I had too much to tell her, not only about my work but about a host of other things that without rhyme or reason popped into my mind and had to be said. The range of our talk was tremendous, and the wider we ranged the closer we drew. For she too was telling things, and her things were as unexpected as mine and infinitely more absorbing. Her manner toward me had quite changed. It was that of a nurse with an invalid, she frankly ordered me about.
"Why can't you lie back on those cushions?" she asked one morning when we were out in her boat. "You ought to be dozing half the day—and instead you're as wide awake as an owl."
"I am," I admitted happily. "I'm trying to see everything." The chic little hat and the blouse she wore were adorably fresh from Paris, and as I watched her run her boat I could feel flowing into my body and soul a perfectly boundless store of new life.
"I've been thinking you over," she said.
"Have you?" I asked delightedly. I had often wondered if she had. "What do you think?" I inquired.
Eleanore frowned perplexedly.
"You're such a queer combination," she said. "You have such ridiculous ups and downs. To-day you're way up, aren't you."
"I am," I said very earnestly. She looked off placidly over the Sound.
"You're so very sensitive," she went on. "You let things take hold of you so hard. And yet on the other hand you seem to be so very——" she hesitated for a word.
"Tough," I suggested cheerfully.
"No—hungry," Eleanore said. "You're always reaching out for things—you jump right into them so hard. And even when they hurt you—and you're hurt quite easily—you hang on and won't let go. Look at the way you've gone at the harbor right from the start. And you're doing it still—you've done it all summer until it has made you look like a ghost. And I guess you'll keep on all your life. There are harbors everywhere, you know—in a way the whole world is a harbor—and unless you change a lot you're going to be hurt a good deal."
"My mother agreed with you," I said. "She wanted me to be a professor in a quiet college town."
"Please stop twinkling your eyes," Eleanore commanded. "Your mother knew you very well. You might have done that—and settled down—with some nice quiet college girl—if you had done it years ago. As it is, of course you're hopeless."
"I am not hopeless," I declared indignantly. "If I can only get what I want I'll be the happiest fellow alive!"
"I know," she answered thoughtfully. "You told me that before. You want fiction, don't you."
"Yes, fiction," I said wrathfully. "I want thatmore than anything else. But I don't want any quiet kind, and I don't want any quiet town," I went on, leaning forward intensely. "I want the harbor and the city—I want it thick and heavy, and just as fast as it will come. I want all the life there is in the world—all the beauty—all the happiness! And I can't wait—I want it soon!"
From under the brim of her soft white hat her blue-gray eyes were fixed intently on the shore, which was miles away. But watching her I saw she knew that all the time I was saying desperately, "I want you."
I knew she did not want me to say anything like that out loud, and I felt myself that I had no right—not until I had done so much more in my writing. But I kept circling around it. Half the time on purpose and as often quite unconsciously, in all we talked about those days I kept eagerly filling in the picture of the life we two might lead. When in one of her cool hostile moods—moods which came over her suddenly—she told me almost jealously how happy she'd been with her father abroad and how together they had planned to go to India, China, Japan in the years to come, I brought her back to my subject by saying: "I mean to travel a lot myself."
"That's one advantage I have as a writer," I continued earnestly. "I'll never be tied down to one place. All my life—whenever I choose—I can pick up my work and go anywhere."
She looked straight back into my eyes.
"I wish my father could," she said.
"Look here," I said indignantly. "Your father has been four months abroad while I have been in Brooklyn! Isn't it only fair and square to letmetravel this afternoon?" She looked at me reluctantly.
"Yes," she agreed. "I suppose it is."
"Come along," I urged, and off we went. While our boat drifted idly that long, lazy afternoon, we wentcareering all over the world and I kept doggedly by her side. Every now and then I would make her stop while we had a good look at each other, exploring deep into the old questions, "What are you and what do you want?"
"You can't run a motorboat all your life," I reminded her. "What are you going to tackle next?"
"Our living-room," she answered. "I'm going to have it done over next month."
That took us into house furnishings, and I gave her ideas by the score. I had never thought about this before, but now I thought hard and eagerly—until she brought me up with a jerk, by pityingly murmuring:
"What perfectly frightful taste you have. It's funny—because you're an artist—you really write quite beautiful things."
"I don't care," I answered grimly. "I can see that living-room——"
"So can I," she said cheerfully. "But so long as you like it, that's all there is to be said. You're the one who has to live in it, you know. Now my father likes a room——"
And while I looked gloomily over the water she told me what her father liked.
He came out from the city each evening by train. He refused to use the boat these days, he said he was so infernally busy that he could not spare the time. He brought out stacks of papers and plans which had piled up while he was abroad, and with these he busied himself at night. And though Eleanore from the veranda glanced in at him frequently, she never again caught him looking old. And when she went in to make him stop working he smilingly told her to leave him alone. He smoked many cigars with apparent enjoyment, his lean face wrinkling over the smoke as he turned over plan after plan for the harbor. His manner to me was if anything even kindlier than before. He began calling me "Billy" now.
On the last night of my stay he said:
"I think you're the man I've been looking for. I've just read your story and you've done exactly what I hoped. You've pictured one spot of efficiency in a whole dreary desert of waste. Come up to my office to-morrow at ten."