I exulted in these symptoms of our crude and lusty youth. 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 began to 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 the warm, 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. Her motorboat, 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 about me and my life?" 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 his cigar 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. "When you learn 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 heaven he wasn'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 set out 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 must not grow 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 which Dillon'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 business come 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. I saw 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 that more 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 let me travel 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 went careering 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."
So at last I went up to the tower.
His office took up an entire floor near the tapering top of the building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon, and through Dillon's powerful field glass I saw pictures of all I had seen before in my weary weeks of trudging down there in the haze and dust. Down there I had felt like a little worm, up here I felt among the gods. There all had been matter and chaos, here all was mind and a will to find a way out of confusion. The glass gave me the pictures in swift succession, in a moment I made a leap of ten miles, and as I listened on and on to the quiet voice at my elbow, the pictures all came sweeping together as parts of one colossal whole. The first social vision of my life I had through Dillon's field glass.
"To see any harbor or city or state as a whole," he said, "is what most Americans cannot do. And it's what they've got to learn to do."
And while I looked where he told me to, like a surgeon about to operate he talked of his mighty patient, a giant struggling to breathe, with swollen veins and arteries. He made me see the Hudson, the East River and the railroad lines all pouring in their traffic, to be shifted and reloaded onto the ocean vessels in a perfect fever of confusion and delay. Far below us you could see long lines of tiny trucks and wagons waiting hours for a chance to get into the docksheds. New York, he said, in true Yankee style had developed its waterfront pell mell, each railroad and each ship line grabbing sites for its own use, until the port was now so clogged, so tangled and congested that it was able to grow no more.
"And it's got to grow," he said. The old helter-skelter method had served well enough in years gone by, for this port had been like this whole bountiful land, its natural advantages had been so prodigious it could stand all our blind and hoggish mistakes. But now we were rapidly nearing the time when every mistake we made would cost us tens of millions of dollars. For within a few years the Big Ditch would open across Panama, and the commerce of South America, together with that of the Orient, would pour into the harbor here to meet the westbound commerce of Europe. Ships of all nations would steam through the Narrows, and we must be ready to welcome them all, with an ample generous harbor worthy of the world's first port.
"To get ready," he said, "what we've got to do is to organize this port as a whole, like the big industrial plant it is."
He began to show me some of the plans in blue-print maps and sketches. I saw tens of thousands of freight cars gathered in great central yards at a few main strategic points connected by long tunnels with all the minor centers. I saw the port no longer as a mere body of water, but with a whole region deep beneath of these long winding tunnels through which flowed the traffic unseen and unheard. I saw along the waterfronts continuous lines of docksheds where by huge cranes and other devices the loading and unloading could be done with enormous saving of time. Along the heavy roofs of steel of these continuous lines of buildings stretched wide ocean boulevards with trees and shrubs and flowers to shut out the clamorous life below. Warehouses and factory buildings rose in solid rows behind. The city was to build them all, and the city as the landlord was to invite the ships and railroads, and the manufacturers too, to come in and get together, to stop their fighting and grabbing and work with each other in one great plan.
"That's what we mean nowadays by a port," he told me at the end of our talk. "A complicated industrial organ, the heart of a country's circulation, pumping in and out its millions of tons of traffic as quickly and cheaply as possible. That's efficiency, scientific management or just plain engineering, whatever you want to call it. But it's got to be done for us all in a plan instead of each for himself in a blind struggling chaos."
I came down from the tower with a dazed, excited feeling which lasted all the rest of the day. That harbor of confusion had been for months my entire world, it had baffled and beaten me till I was weak. And now this man had swept together all its parts and showed me one immense design.
He had promised me the first use of his plans. With this to go on I drafted a scheme for a series of magazine articles on "The First Port of the World," and I soon placed it in advance at four hundred dollars an article. At last I was coming up in life, my first big story had begun!
I went with Dillon each week-end up to the cottage on the Sound. Here he talked in detail of his dreams, and Eleanore with her old passion and pride delighted to draw him out for me. And not only her father—for to help me in my work she invited out here in the evenings many of his engineer friends.
"It has always been awfully hard for me," she confided, "to understand big questions by reading about them out of books. But I love to hear about them from men who are living and working right in them. I love to feel a little how it must be to be living their lives."
She was a wonderful listener, for she had quietly studied each man until now she had a kind of an instinct for drawing the very best of him out. While he talked she would sit with her sewing, now and then putting in a question to help. Often I would glance at her there and see in her slightly frowning face how intently she was listening, thinking and planning to help me. Sometimes she would meet my look. I would grow tremendously happy.
"In a little while," I thought. But then I would pull myself up with a jerk: "Stop looking at her, you young fool, keep your mind on this engineer. You've got the chance of your life right now to make good in your work and be happy. Don't fall down! Get busy!"
And I did. I threw myself into the lives of these men who were the living embodiments of all that bigness, boldness, punch that had so gripped and thrilled me. The harbor had drawn them around it out of the hum and rush of the country, and here they were in its service, watching it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast populations, plant millions of people this way and that.
But against these men of the tower, with their wide, deliberate views ahead, embracing and binding together not only this port but the whole western world depending upon it, I found in the city jungle innumerable petty men, who could see only their own narrow interests of to-day, and who fought blindly any change for a to-morrow—fellows in such mortal fear of some possible benefit to their rivals that they could see none for themselves. They were hopelessly used to fighting each other. And I came to feel that all these men, though many were still young in years, belonged to a generation gone by, to the age of individual strife that my father had lived and worked in—and that like him they were all soon to be swept to one side by the inexorable harbor of to-day, which had no further use for them.
It needed bigger men. It needed men like Dillon and behind him those mysterious powers downtown, the men he had called the brains of the nation, who read the signs of the new times, who saw that the West was now fast filling up, that the eyes of the nation were once more turning outward, and that untold resources of wealth were soon to be available for mighty sea adventures, a vast fleet of Yankee ships that should drive the surplus output of our teeming industries into all markets of the world. And the men who saw these things coming were the only ones who were big enough to prepare the country to meet them. My father's dream was at last coming true—too late for him to play a part. He had been but a prophet, a lonely pioneer.
My view of the harbor was different now. I had seen it before as a vast machine molding the lives of all people around it. But now behind the machine itself I felt the minds of its molders. I saw its ponderous masses of freight, its multitudes of people, all pushed and shifted this way and that by these invisible powers. And by degrees I made for myself a new god, and its name was Efficiency.
Here at last was a god that I felt could stand! I had made so many in years gone by, I had been making them all my life—from those first fearful idols, the condors and the cannibals, to the kind old god of goodness in my mother's church and the radiant goddess of beauty and art over there in Paris. One by one I had raised them up, and one by one the harbor had flowed in and dragged them down. But now in my full manhood (for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a god that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its head were all the brains of all the strong men at the top.
And all the multitudes below seemed mere pigmies to me now. I remember one late twilight, coming back from a talk with an engineer, I boarded a ferry at the rush hour and watched the people herd on like sheep. How small they seemed, how petty their thoughts compared to mine, how blind their views of the harbor.
Here was a little Italian bride, just landed, by the looks of her. She kept her face close to her lover's, smiling dazedly into his eyes. And she saw no harbor. Here near by was a fat old gentleman with a highly painted young lady who laughed and swore softly at him as I passed. I sat down beside them a moment and listened. The old gentleman seemed quite mad with desire. He was pleading eagerly, whining. And he saw no harbor. Close by sat two tall serious men. One was deep in a socialist book, the other in news of the Giants. Both seemed equally absorbed. And they saw no harbor. I moved on to another spot, and sitting down by a thin seedy-looking Irish girl I heard her talk to her husband about having their baby's life insured according to a wonderful plan an agent had described to her. As she spoke she was frowning anxiously—and she saw no harbor. Not far away a plump flashy young creature was smiling down on the bootblack who was busily shining her small patent leather shoes. Her bright blue petticoat lifted high displayed the most enticing charms, and as now she turned to look off toward the lights of the city ahead, she smiled gaily to herself. And she saw no harbor. And alone up at the windy bow I found a squat husky laborer with his dirty coat and shirt thrown open wide, the wind on his bare hairy chest, hungrily watching the dock ahead as though for his supper—seeing no harbor, no world's first port, no plans for vast fleets or a great canal, none of the big things shaping his life.
But I saw. Orders had gone out from the tower east and west and south and north to show me every courtesy. And with a miraculous youthful ease I understood all that I saw and heard. The details all fitted right into the whole, or if they didn't I made them fit. Here was a splendid end to chaos and blind wrestling with life. And feeling stronger and more sure than ever in my life before, I set out to build my series of glory stories about it all, laying on the color thick to reach a million pigmy readers, grip them, pull them out of their holes, make them sit up and rub their eyes.
For I was now a success in life! The exuberant joy of youth and success filled the whole immense region for me. In those Fall days there was nothing too hard to try, no queer hours too exhausting, no deep corner too remote, in the search for my material. I saw the place from an old fisherman's boat and from a revenue launch at night, with its searchlight combing the waters far and wide for smugglers. I saw it from big pilot boats that put far out to sea to meet the incoming liners. I ate many good suppers and slept long nights on a stout jolly tug called The Happy, where from my snug bunk at the stern through the open door I could watch the stars. I went down into tunnels deep beneath the waters. I went often to the Navy Yard. I dined many nights on battleships, where the talk of the naval officers recalled my father's picture of a fighting ocean world. They too talked of the Big Canal, but in terms of war instead of peace. I went out to the coast defenses, and with an army major I made a tour of the lights and buoys.
And perhaps more often than anywhere else, I went to a rude log cabin on the side of a wooded hill high up on Staten Island, where lived a Norwegian engineer. He had a cozy den up there, with book-shelves set into the logs, two deep bunks, a few bright rugs on the rough floor, some soft, ponderous leather chairs and a crackling little stove on which we cooked delicious suppers. Later out on the narrow porch we would puff lazy smoke wreaths and watch the vast valley of lights below, from the distant twinkling arch of the Bridge to the sparkling towers of old Coney. Down there like swarms of fire-flies were countless darting skurrying lights, red and blue and green and white. Far off to the south flashed the light of the Hook, and still other signals gleamed low from the ocean.
Here I came often with Eleanore, for she had now come back to town. In her boat we went to many new spots and back to all the old ones. We found new beauties in them all. At home in the evenings we had long talks. And all the time I could feel that we two both knew what was coming, that steadily we were drawing together, that all my work and my view of the harbor took its joy and its glory from this.
"In a little while," I thought.
I had been little at home those days, for the house in Brooklyn disturbed me now. Poor old Dad. Since I had secured my contract he had tried so hard to help me, to be eager, interested, alive, to talk it all over with me at night. And this I did not like to do. A vague feeling of guilt and disloyalty would creep into my now boundless zest for the harbor that had crowded him out. And I think that he suspected this. One night, when with this feeling I stupidly tried to talk as though I still hated all its ugliness, its clamor, smoke and grime, I caught a twinkle of pain in his eyes.
"Boy," he broke in roughly, "I hope you'll always talk and write what you believe and nothing else! I wouldn't give a picayune for any chap who didn't!"
I could feel him watching anxiously my affair with Eleanore. In the days when she had come to the house he had grown very fond of her, and now by frequent questions, slipped in with a studied indifference, he showed an interest which in time became a deep suspense.
"Out again this evening, son?" he called in one night from the bathroom where he was washing his hands and face before going down to supper. In my room adjoining I was dressing to go out.
"Yes, Dad."
"What for?"
"Some work."
"Be out for dinner too?"
"Yes."
"Who with?"
"Oh, a pilot," I answered abstractedly. I was wondering if she would wear her blue gown. She had asked quite a number of people that night. Then I saw Dad in the doorway. Briskly rubbing his gray head with a towel, he was eyeing my evening clothes.
"Devilish polished chaps these days—pilots," he commented. I heard a low snort of glee from his room.
My sister, on the other hand, had no more patience than before with this fast deepening love of mine, which had drawn me away from her radical friends up to the men of the tower who worked for the big companies. By the most vigorous ironies, the most industrious witty remarks, she made me feel how thoroughly she disapproved of anything so deadening as marriage, home and settling down, in this glorious age of new ideas.
One morning at breakfast, when I remarked as I commonly did that I would be out for dinner that night,
"Where are you going?" she asked abruptly.
"To Eleanore Dillon's," I replied. Our eyes met squarely for a moment.
"Do you know what it means to go there so often, almost every night?" she asked.
"I do," I answered bluntly. I would finish this meddling once and for all. But Sue did not look finished.
"You'd better stay home to-night, Billy," she said.
"Why?"
"Joe Kramer is coming."
"What?"
"He telephoned me late last night. He's just come from Colorado and he sails to-morrow for England. He's awfully anxious to see you."
Of course he was, and I knew what about! I saw at once by the look on her face that Sue had told him all about me and had begged him to see what he could do. Why couldn't they leave a fellow alone, I said wrathfully to myself.
But my ire softened when I met Joe. In the year and a half since I had seen him the lines in his face had deepened, the stoop of his big shoulders had grown even more pronounced, and again I felt that wistful, frowning, searching quality in him. Beneath his gruffness and his jeers he was so honestly pushing on for what he could find most real in life. A wave of the old affection came over me suddenly without warning. Vaguely I wondered about it. Why did he always grip me so?
My father too appeared at first delighted to see him. He had shown a keen relish for J. K. from that first time in college when I had brought him home for Christmas. Since then, whenever Joe had come, he and Dad had always managed to retreat to the study together and smoke and have long dogged arguments. But to-night it was not the same. For in his growth as a radical, Joe had gone beyond all arguing now. Lines of deep displeasure slowly tightened on Dad's face. All through dinner he kept attempting to turn the talk from Joe's work to mine. But this I would have none of, I wanted to be let alone. So I nervously kept the conversation on what Joe was up to. And Sue seemed more than eager to learn.
J. K. was up to a good deal.
"This muckraking game is played out," he said. "We all know how rotten things are. All we want to know now is what's to be done." And he himself had become absorbed in what the working class was doing. As a reporter in the West he had been to strike after strike, ending with a long ugly struggle in the Colorado mines. He talked about it intensely, the greed of the mine owners, the brutality of the militia, the "bull pens" into which strikers were thrown. Vaguely I felt he was giving us a most distorted picture, and glancing now and then at my father I saw that he thought it a pack of lies. Joe made all the strikers the most heroic figures, and he spoke of their struggle as only a part of a great labor war that was soon to sweep the entire land.
Sue excitedly drew him out, and I felt it was all for my benefit. Joe said that he was going abroad in order that he might write the truth about the labor world over there. The American papers and magazines would let you write the truth, he said, about labor over in Europe, because it was at a safe distance. But they wouldn't allow it here. And then Sue looked across at me as though to say, "It's only stuff like yours they allow."
"Why don't you two go out for a walk?" she suggested sweetly after dinner. And I consented gladly, for there are times when nothing on earth can be worse than your own sister.
We went down to the old East River docks and walked for some time with little said. Then Joe turned on me abruptly.
"Well, Bill," he said, "I've read your stuff. It's damn well written."
"Thanks," I replied.
"If I've got any knocking to do," he went on with a visible effort, "I know you'll give me credit for not knocking out of jealousy. I'm not jealous, I'm honestly tickled to death. I was wrong about you in Paris. You and me were different kinds. What you got over there was just what you needed, it has put you already way out of my class, and it's going to give you a lot of power as a spreader of ideas. That's why I hate so like the devil to see you starting out like this, with what I'm so sure are the wrong ideas."
"How are they wrong?"
"Think a minute. Why is your magazine pushing you so? The first story of your series is only just out and they've already boomed you all over the country. Why, Bill, I saw your picture in a trolley car in Denver—and you're only twenty-five years old! It's damn fine writing, I'll say it again, but that's not reason enough for this. You've got to go down deeper and look into your magazine's policy—which is to strike a balance for all kinds of middle-class readers and for their advertisers too. They've run some radical stuff this year, and they're booming you now to balance off, to show how 'safe and sane' they can be in the way they look at life, at big business and at industry—as you do here in the harbor. You're making gods out of the men at the top, you've seen 'em as they see themselves, and you've only seen what they see here. You've missed all the millions of people here who depend on the place for their jobs and their lives. They don't count for you——"
"That's not true at all!" I interrupted hotly. "It's just for them and their children that fellows like Dillon are on the job—to make a better harbor!"
"For them, for the people!" said Joe. "That's what I'm kicking at in you, Bill—you treat us all like a mass of dubs that need gods above to do everything for us because we can't do it all by ourselves!"
"I don't believe the people can," I retorted. "From what I've seen I honestly don't believe they count. The fellows that count in a job like this are the fellows with punch and grit enough to fight their way up out of the ranks——"
"I know, and be lieutenants and captains in a regular army of peace, with your friend Dillon in command and Wall Street in command of him! Isn't that your view?"
"All right, it is! I don't see any harm in that. It's the only safe way that I can see out of this mess of a harbor we've got. These men are the efficient ones—they're the fellows that have the brains and that know how to work—to use science, money, everything—to get a decent world ahead. What's the matter with efficiency?"
"Your latest god," sneered J. K.
"Suppose it is! What's wrong with it? What's the matter with Dillon? Is he a crook?"
"No," said Joe, "that's just the worst of him. He's so damned honest, he's such a hard worker. I've met men like him all over the country, and they're the most dangerous men we've got. Because they're the real strength of Wall Street—just as thousands of clean hard working priests are the strength of the Catholic church! They keep their church going and Dillon keeps his—he's a regular priest of big business! And he takes hold of kids like you and molds your views like his for life. Look at what he has done with you here. Does he say a word to you about Graft? Does he talk of the North Atlantic Pool or any one of the other pools and schemes by which they keep up rates? Does he make you think about low wages and long hours and all the fellows hurt or killed on the docks and in the stoke holes? Does he give you any feeling at all of this harbor as a city of four million people, most of 'em getting a raw deal and getting mad about it? That's more important to you and me than all the efficiency gods on earth. You've got to decide which side you're on. And that's what's got me talking now. I see so plain which way you're letting yourself be pulled. I've seen so many pulled the same way. It's so pleasant up there at the top, there's so much money and brains up there and refinement—such women to get married to, such homes to settle down in. Sometimes I wish every promising radical kid in the country could get himself into some scandal that would cut him off for life from any chance of being received by this damned respectable upper class!"
He stopped for a moment, and then with a gruff intensity:
"We need you, Bill," he ended. "We need you bad. We don't want you to marry a girl at the top. We don't want you anchored up there for life."
We were standing still now, and I was looking out on the river. Through the grip of his hand on my arm I could feel his body taut and quivering, his whole spirit hot with revolt. The same old Joe, but tenser now, strained almost to the breaking point. But I myself was different. In college he had appealed to me because there I was groping and had found nothing. But now I had found something sure. And so, though to my own surprise a deep emotional part of me rose up in sudden response to Joe and made me feel guilty to hold back, it was only for a moment, and then my mind told me he was wrong. Poor old J. K. What a black distorted view he had—grown out of a distorted life of traveling continually from one center of trouble to another. How could he be any judge of life?
"Look here, Joe," I said. "I'm a kid, as you say, and some day I may see your side of this. But I don't now, I can't—for since I left Paris I've been through enough to make me feel what a job living is, I mean really living and growing. And I know what a difference Dillon has made. He has been to my life what he is to this harbor. And I'm not old enough nor strong enough to throw over a man as big as that and as honest and clean in his thinking, and throw myself in with your millions of people, who seem to me either mighty poor thinkers or fellows who don't think at all. They're not in my line. I believe in men who can think clean, who have trained their minds by years of hard work, who don't try to tear down and bring things to a smash, but are always building, building! You talk about this upper class. But they're my people, aren't they, that's where I was born. And I'm going on with them. I believe they're right and I know they're strong—I mean strong enough to handle all this—make it better."
"They'll make it worse," Joe answered. And then as he turned to me once more he added very bitterly, "You'll see strength enough in the people some day."
A few moments later he left me.
I looked at my watch and found it was not yet nine o'clock. I went to Eleanore Dillon. And within an hour Joe and his world of crowds and confusion were swept utterly out of my mind.