Harbor (9781101565681) (18 page)

“Oh, yes, she'll marry soon enough,” I thought. “This talk of a job for life is a joke.”

Some nights I would listen to her for hours. It was so good to come back to life, to feel younger than my worries, to forget for a little while that stark heavy certainty that poor old Dad would soon be a burden in spite of himself, and that with a family on my hands I'd have to spend the best years of my life slaving for a little hay.

I took the same delight in her friends.

Starting with her classmates in a Brooklyn high school, most of whom were working over in New York, Sue had followed in their trail, and at settlements, in studios and in girl bachelor flats she had picked up an amazing assortment of friends. “Radicals,” they called themselves. Nothing was too wild or new for these friends of Sue's to jump into—and what was more, to tie themselves to by a regular job in some queer irregular office. “Votes for Women” was just starting up, and one of this group, a stenographer in a suffragette office, had been in the first small parade. Another, a stout florid youth who wrote poems for magazines, had paraded bravely in her wake. Here were two girls who lived in a tenement, did their own cooking and pushed East Side investigations that they said would soon “shake up the town.” There were several rising muckrakers, too, some of whom did free work on the side for socialist papers. There was one real socialist, a painter, who had a red membership card in his pocket to prove that he belonged to “the Party.” Others were spreading music and art and dramatics through the tenements—new music, new art and new dramatics. One young husband and wife, intensely in love with one another, were working together night and day for easier divorces which would put an end to the old-fashioned home.

These people seemed to me to be laughing at a different old thing every time. But when they weren't laughing they were scowling, over some new attack upon life—and when they did that they were laughable. At least so they were to me. Not that I minded attacking things, I had done plenty of that myself in Paris. But how different we had been back there. We, too, had thrown old creeds to the winds, but with how much more finesse and art. And there had been a large remoteness about it. Each one had tossed his far-away country into the cosmopolitan pot, our talk had been on a world-wide scale. But this crude crowd, except for occasional mental flights, kept all its attention, its laughs and its jeers, its attacks and exposures centered on this one mammoth town, against which as a background they seemed the merest pigmies. Three little muckrakers loomed against Wall Street, one small, scoffing suffragette against a hundred and eighty thousand solid stolid Brooklyn wives. They had posed themselves so absurdly close to the world of things as they are.

And they were in such a rush about their work. Over there in Paris, with all our smashing of idols, we had at least held fast to our one great goddess of art, we had slaved like dogs at the hard daily labor of honestly learning our various crafts. But here they stopped for nothing at all. The magazine writers were “tearing off copy,” the painters were simply “slapping it down.” One of them told me he “painted the real stuff right out of life”—dashed it off with one hand, so to speak, while he shook his fist at the town with the other. Everyone wanted to see something done—and done damn quick—about this, that or the other.

My artist's eyes surveyed this group and twinkled with amused surprise. But I could sit by the hour and listen to their talk. I found it mighty refreshing, after those bills in the hardware shop, that monotonous martyr feeling of mine and those worries down by the harbor.

But I felt the harbor always there, slowly closing in on my father, who looked older day by day, slowly bringing things to a crisis. In the garden behind our house on warm September evenings when these pigmies gathered to chatter reforms, the harbor hooted at their little plans as it had hooted at my own. One evening, I remember, when the talk had waxed hot and loud in favor of labor unions and strikes, Sue left the group and with a friend strolled to the lower end of the garden. There I saw them peer over the edge and listen to the drunken stokers singing in the barrooms deep under all these flower beds and all this adventurous chatter of ours. I thought of the years I had spent with Sam—and Sue, too, seemed to me to be having a spree. Poor kid, what a jolt she would get some day. She called me “our dreamer imported from France.” But I was far from dreaming.

Presently the harbor just opened one of its big eyes and sent up by a messenger a little grim reality.

A Russian revolutionist had appeared among us with a letter to Sue from Joe Kramer. Joe, I found to my surprise, had seen quite a little of Sue over here while I had been in Paris—and from the various ships and hotels that had been his “home” of late, he had written her now and then. Through him Sue had joined a society known as “The Friends of Russian Freedom,” and Joe wrote now from Moscow urging her to “stir up the crowd and lick this fellow into shape to talk at big meetings and raise some cash. He has the real goods,” Joe added. “All he needs is the English language and a few points about making it yellow. If handled right he'll be a scream.”

He was handled right and he was a scream. Three months later he finished a tour that had netted over ten thousand dollars. Now to buy guns and ship them to Russia—where in the awful poverty bequeathed to them by the war with Japan, a bitter people was still fighting hard to make an end of autocracy.

“I think I can help you, Puss,” said Dad.

I looked at him with interest. I knew he had been as tickled as I by these astonishing friends of hers. “Revolooters,” he called them. He was a great favorite with the girls.

“I once knew a man in a business way who dealt in guns,” he explained to Sue. “He shipped some to Bolivia from my dock. I'll have him up to meet your friend.”

So this messenger from the harbor, a keen lean man of business, gave one hour of his time to the problem in which the Russian dreamer had been absorbed for fifteen years. And the hour made the fifteen years look decidedly dreamy.

“Guns for Russia, eh?” he said. “How'll you get 'em into your country? Where's your frontier weakest? You don't know? Then I'll tell you.” And the man of business did. “Now what kind of guns do you want? You hadn't thought? Well, my friend, you want Mausers. They happen to be cheap just now in Vienna. You should have looked into that before you traipsed way over here. You can get 'em there for three twenty apiece—they dropped three cents last Tuesday.”

The dreamer dreamed hard and fast for a moment.

“Then,” he cried triumphantly, “wit' ten t'ousand dollairs I can buy over t'ree t'ousand guns!”

The gunman's look was patient.

“Don't you want to shoot 'em off?” he inquired. “Because if you do you'll need ammunition. You ought to have a thousand rounds, which will come to a little over three times the actual cost of the guns themselves. You see when you shoot off a gun at an army you want to have plenty of cartridges or else be ready to run like hell.

“On second thought,” he added, “I advise you to give up the Mausers and go in for Springfields over here—old ones—you can get 'em cheap. They're no good at over a mile, but for the first few months your fellahs will be lucky if they hit a man at a hundred yards. And there's one good point about Springfields, they make a devil of a noise—and that's all you need for a starter, noise enough to break into headlines all over the world as a ‘Brave Little Rebel Army.' If you can do that, and the word goes around on the quiet that you're using American rifles—well, there's a kind of a sentiment in our trade—you'll find us all behind you. We'll even
lose
money. We're a queer bunch.”

“But wait!” cried the Russian. “Dere ees a trouble! Your tr-reaty wit' Russia! Have you not a tr-reaty which makes it forbidden to sell to me guns?”

Again that look of patience:

“Yes, General, we have a tr-reaty. But we'll ship your guns as grand pianos to Naples, from there by slow boat down to Brazil and then up to the Baltic, where they'll arrive with their pedigrees lost. Our agent will be there ahead, he'll have found a customhouse man he can fix, he'll cable us where—and when those fifty pianos are landed the said official will open the box marked twenty-two. It'll take him over an hour to do it, the boards will be nailed so cussedly tight. And he'll find a real piano inside. Then he'll look at the other forty-nine crates and say, ‘Oh, Hell!' in Russian. Then they'll go on to wherever you want 'em—and you'll rev-olute. But don't forget that what you need most is the livest press agent you can find. I've got to go now. Think it over. And if you want to do business with me come to my office to-morrow at ten.”

The man of business left us. And while the dreamer talked like mad and finally decided that as Mausers were “shoot farther guns” he had better go to Vienna, I watched the twinkle in Dad's gray eyes and thought of the cool contempt in his friend's. And from being amused I became rather sore. For, after all, this little Russian cuss had risked his life for fifteen years and expected to lose it shortly. (As a matter of fact, he was stood up against a wall and shot the following April.) Why make him look so small?

Was there nothing under the heavens that this infernal harbor didn't know all about, and “do business with” so thoroughly that it could always smile?

As I drudged on down there in the warehouse, my bitterness became an obsession. I even talked about it to Sue.

“Oh, Billy, you make me tired,” she said. “Here I've taken the trouble to bring to the house every magazine writer I know. And they're all ready to help you break in—but you won't write, you won't even try!”

“How do you know I haven't tried?” I retorted hotly. “But I'm working all day as it is—and four nights a week besides. And the other three nights, when I try to think of the kind of thing that I could sell to the magazines—well, I simply can't do it, that's all—it's not my way of writing!”

“Then your way is just plain morbid,” she said, “and it's about time you dropped it.” She seemed to get a sudden idea. “I know the person
you
ought to meet——”

“Do you? What's his name?” I inquired.

“Eleanore Dillon,” she answered. I looked up at her with a start.

“Eleanore Dillon? Is she still around?”

I hadn't thought of that girl in years.

“She is—and she's just what you need,” said Sue, with that know-it-all smile of hers. Her head was now cocked a bit to one side. “Your little friend of long ago,” she added sympathetically. I eyed Sue for a moment. I did not care at all for her tone.

“What do I need
her
for?” I asked.

“To talk to you of the harbor, of course—that's her especial line these days.”

“The harbor?” I demanded. “That girl?”

“Yes—the harbor, that girl.” Sue seemed to be having quite a good time. My jaw set tight.

“What does she do down there?” I asked.

“She worships her father. Don't you remember? An engineer. He's doing a big piece of work on the harbor and Eleanore is wrapped up in his work, she's a beautiful case of how a fond parent can literally swallow up his child. There used to be nothing whatever that Eleanore Dillon wasn't going to do in life. Don't you remember, when she was small, that little determined air she had in the way she went at every game? Well, she grew even more like that. From school she went to college and worked herself to a frazzle. Then she broke down and had to drop out, and now that she's strong again she's changed. She used to go in for everything. Now she goes in for nothing at all except her father and his work. She thinks we're all a lot of young fools.”

“Oh, now, Sue,” I put in derisively. “You people fools? How could she?”

“You'll see,” my sister sweetly replied, “for she'll probably think you're another. She detests morbid people, they're not her kind. But if she'll give you a talking to it may do you a lot of good.”

 

She did give me a talking to and it did do me a lot of good, although when I came to think of it I found she had barely talked at all.

She wasn't the sort who liked to talk, she was just as quiet as before. When she arrived rather late one evening and Sue brought her out on the verandah into a group of those radical friends who were a committee for something or other, after the general greetings were over she settled back in a corner with the air of one who likes just to listen to people, no matter whether they're fools or not. But as I watched her I decided she did not consider these people fools. That quiet smile that came on her face showed a comfortable curiosity and now and then a gleam of amusement, but no contempt whatever. She seemed a girl so well pleased with her life that she could be pleased with the world besides and keep her eyes open for all there was in it. Although she was still rather small and still demurely feminine, with the same grave sweetness in her eyes, that same enchanting freshness about everything she wore, she struck me at once as having changed, as having grown tremendously, as having somehow filled herself deep with a quiet abundant vitality. “Where have
you
been,” I wondered.

There came a loud blast from the harbor. At once I saw her turn in her chair and look down to the point below where a river boat was just leaving her slip, sweeping silently out of the darkness into the moonlit water. My curiosity deepened. Where
had
she been, and what was she doing, what queer kind of a girl was this? I took a seat beside her.

“Don't you remember me?” I asked. She turned her head with a quiet smile.