Harbor (9781101565681) (19 page)

“Of course I do,” she answered. Her low voice had a frankly intimate tone. “I did the moment I saw you. Besides, Sue told me about you.”

“She's been telling me quite a lot about
you
.”

“Has she? What?”

“That you know all about the harbor these days.”

“Sue's wonderful,” Eleanore murmured. “She's so sure her friends know everything.”

“Let's stick to the harbor.”

“All right, let's. I know enough about it to like it. Sue says you know enough to hate it. I wonder which of us knows more.”

“I do.”

“How do you know you do?”

“Because I've been here longer,” I said. “I've hated it for twenty odd years.”

She looked at me with interest. Her eyes were not at all like Sue's. Sue's eyes were always wrapped up in herself; Eleanore's in somebody else. They were as intimate as her voice.

“Don't you remember the evening when you took me down to the docks?” she asked.

“I do—very well,” I said.

“And do you mean to tell me you didn't like the harbor then?”

“I do—I hated the harbor then. I was scared to death that Sam and his gang would appear around the end of a car.”

“Who was Sam?” she asked me. “He sounds like a very dreadful small boy.”

Soon she had me telling her of Sam and his gang and the harbor of thrills, from the time of old Belle and the Condor.

“I was a toy piano,” I said. “And the harbor was a giant who played on me till I rattled inside. We had a big spree together.”

“Not a very healthy spree, was it?” she said quietly, turning her gray-blue eyes on mine. For some reason we suddenly smiled at each other. “You're a good deal like your father—aren't you?” she said. “The same nice twinkle in your eyes. Please go on. What did the harbor do to you next?”

I thought all at once of the August day when she had lain, a girl of twelve, in the fragrant meadow beside me. And as then, so now, the drunken woman's image rose for an instant in my mind.

“It wiped the thrills all out,” I said abruptly. I told how the place grew harsh and bare, how I could always feel it there stripping everything naked like itself, and how finally when later in Paris I felt I had shaken it off for life, it had now suddenly jerked me back, let me see what my father had really been, and had then repeated its same old trick, closing in on his great idea and making it look like an old man's hobby, crowding him out and handing us grimly two dull little jobs—one to live on and one to die on.

“It's getting monotonous,” I ended.

While I talked she had been watching it, now a bustling ferry crossing, now a tug with a string of barges working up against the tide.

“How do you know it's so bad for you to be brought back from Paris?” she asked me, without looking around.

“Have you ever been in Paris?”

“Yes—and I want to go again. But I don't believe it will ever feel as real to me as this place does. And I shouldn't think it would to you. Because you were born here, weren't you—and you've been so close to it most of the time that you're all mixed into it, aren't you? I mean you've got your roots here. Why don't you write about
them
for a while?”

“What?”

“Your roots.”

She turned and again her eyes met mine, and again for some reason or other we smiled.

“All right,” I assented gravely, “I'll buy a hoe and start right in.”

“That's it, hoe yourself all up. Get as far down as you can remember. Dig up Belle and Sam, and Sue and your mother and father. Then take a hoe to Paris and find out why you loved it so, and why you hate the harbor. Be sure you get all the hate there is, it makes such interesting reading. Besides, it may be just what you need—it may take the hate all out of your system.”

“Who'll print it?” I demanded.

“Oh, some magazine,” she said.

“Do you think this kind of thing would interest their readers?”

“It would interest
me——
”

“Thank you. I'll tell the editors that.”

“You'll do no such thing,” she said severely. “You'll tell the magazine editors, please, that I'm only one of thousands of girls who are getting sick and tired of the happy, cheery little tales they print for our special benefit. It's just about time they got over the habit of thinking of us as sweet, young things and gave us some roots we can grow on.”

Another modern girl, I thought.

“Do you, too, want to vote?” I asked her, with a fine, indulgent irony.

“Some day I do,” she answered. And then she added with placid scorn, “When I've learned all the political wisdom that
you
have to teach me.” And as if that were a good place to stop, she rose from her seat.

“The others seem to have left us,” she said. “I think I'd better be going home.”

“Wait a minute, please,” I cried. “When am I going to hear about you—and your side of this dismal body of water?”

She looked back at me serenely.

“Wait till you've got yours all written down,” she replied. “You see mine might only mix you up. Mine is so much pleasanter. Good night,” she added softly.

Until late that night, and again the next day at my desk down in the warehouse, my thoughts kept drifting back to our talk. With a glow of surprise I found I remembered not only every word she had said, but the tones of her voice as she said it, the changing expressions on her face and in her smiling gray-blue eyes. Her picture rose so vividly at times it was uncanny.

“What do you think of her?” asked Sue.

“Mighty little,” I replied. I did not care to discuss her with Sue, for I had not liked Sue's tone at all.

But how little I'd learned about Eleanor's life. Where did she live? I didn't know. When I had hinted at coming to see her she had smilingly put me off. What was this pleasant harbor of hers? “Wait till you've got yours all written down,” she had said, and had told me nothing whatever. Yes, I thought disgustedly, I was quite a smart young man. Here I had spent two years in Paris learning how to draw people out. What had she let me draw out of her? What hadn't I let her draw out of me? I wondered how much I had told that girl.

For some reason, in the next few days, my thoughts drifted about with astonishing ease and made prodigious journeys. I roved far back to my childhood, and there the most tempting incidents rose, and solemn little thoughts and terrors, hopes and plans, some I was proud of, some mighty ashamed of. Roots, roots, up they came, as though they'd just been waiting, down there deep inside of me, for that girl and her hoeing.

Presently, just to get rid of them all, I began writing some of them down. And again I was surprised to find that I was in fine writing trim. The words seemed to come of themselves from my pen and line themselves up triumphantly into scenes of amazing vividness. At least so they looked to me. How good it felt to be at it again. Often up in my room at night I kept on working till nearly dawn. I was getting on famously now.

 

And so now, as was his habit, Joe Kramer came crashing into my life and as usual put a stop to my work.

Having just landed from Russia, he had “breezed over” to our house, had had a talk with Sue downstairs and had then come up to my room to surprise me—just as I had a good firm grip on one of my most entrancing roots.

“Hello, Bill,” he cried. “What are you up to?”

“Hello, J.K. How are you?”

I knew that I ought to be genial, and for a few moments I did my best. I went through all the motions. I grabbed his hand, I smiled, I talked, I told him. I was tickled to death, I even tried pounding him on the back. But it was quite useless.

“Kid,” he said with that grin of his, “you're up to something idealistic and don't want to be disturbed. But I'm here and it can't be helped. So out with it—what have you gone and done?”

And he jerked my story out of me.

“All right,” he declared, “this has got to stop!”

“I knew it,” I said. I had known it the minute he came in the room.

“You've got to throw up your ten-dollar job, quit working all night on stuff that won't sell, and come on a paper and make some real money.”

“I can't do it,” I snapped.

“You can,” said J. K.

“But I tell you I tried! I went to a paper——”

“You'll go to a dozen before I get through!”

“J. K.—I won't do it!”

“Kid—you will!”

And he kept at me night after night. He was working for a New York paper now as a special correspondent. He had a talk with his editor and got me a chance to go on as a “cub” and write about weddings, describing the costume of the bride. At least it was a starter, he said, and would lead to divorces later on, and from there I might be promoted to graft. He talked to Sue and my father about it, persuading them both to take his side. Day by day the pressure increased. I set my young jaw doggedly and kept on writing about my roots.

“Look here,” said Joe one evening. “Your sister tells me you're sore on the harbor. Then have a look at this.” And he showed me a newspaper clipping headed, “Padrone System Under the Dumps.”

“Well, what about it?” I asked him.

“What about it? My God! Here's a chance to show up the harbor on one of its ugliest, rottenest ideas! A dump is a pier that sticks out in the river. We'll go there at night, get down underneath it and look at the kids—Dago child-slaves working like hell. You say that weddings are not in your line—all right, here's just the opposite—stuff that'll make your women readers sit right up and sob out aloud! I don't care for tear-jerkers myself,” he added. “But even tear-jerkers are better than Art.”

“All right,” I muttered savagely, “let's go and get a tear-jerker to write!”

If I must write of this modern harbor, at least it was some satisfaction to write about one of its ugliest sides.

We went the next night.

Joe had chosen a dump which jutted out from the Manhattan side of the river just about opposite our house. A huge, long, shadowy pile of city refuse of all kinds, we caught the sour breath of it as we drew near in the darkness. There was not a sound nor a light. We climbed down onto a greenish beam that ran along by the side underneath, about a foot from the water, and cautiously working our way outward for a hundred yards or more, we stopped abruptly and drew back.

For just before us under the dump was a cave with walls of papers and rags. A lantern hung from overhead, swung gently in the raw salt breeze, and by its light we could see a half dozen swarthy small boys. Five were intent on a game of dice, whispering fiercely while they played. Their boss lay asleep in a corner. The sixth, the smallest of them all, sat smoking in the mouth of the cave, his knees drawn up and his big dilated black eyes roving hungrily out over the water. All at once around the end of the pier, a dark, tall shadow like a spook swept silently out before him. He sprang back and fervently crossed himself, then grinned and drew on his cigarette hard. For the shadow was only a scow with a derrick. The imp continued his watching.

“Now,” said J. K. a few minutes later back on shore, “you want to get their hours and wages. You want to look up the fire law about lighted cigarettes and a lantern——”

“Oh, damn your fire law,” I growled. “I want to know where that kid with the cigarette was born, and what he thinks of the harbor!” Joe gave me one of his cheerful grins.

“You might get his views on the tariff,” he said.

“Look here, J. K.,” I implored him; “go home. Go on home and leave me alone. It's all right, I'm glad you brought me here—darned good of you, and I'll get a story. Only for God's sake leave me alone!”

“Sure,” said Joe. “Only don't try to talk to those little Guineys. Their boss wouldn't let 'em say a word and you'd lose your chance of watching 'em. Make it a kind of a mystery story.”

And a mystery story I made it.

Where had he been a year ago, this imp who had fervently crossed himself? In Naples, Rome or Venice, or poking his toes into the dust of a street in some dull little town in the hills? What great condor of to-day had picked him up and dropped him here? How did it look to him? What did he feel?

I came back to the dump night after night, and writing blindly in the dark I tried to jot down what he saw—gigantic shapes and shadows, some motionless, some rushing by with their dim spectral little lights, and over all the great arch of the Bridge rearing over half the sky. The lantern in the cave behind threw a patch of light on the water below, and across that patch from under the pier where the water was slapping, slapping, there came an endless bobbing procession—a whisky bottle, a broken toy horse, a bit of a letter, a pink satin slipper, a dirty white glove—things tossed out of people's lives. On and on they came. And I knew there were miles of black water like this all covered with tiny processions like this moving slowly out with the ebb tide, out from the turbulent city toward the silent ocean. One night the watchman on the dump showed me a heavy paper bag with what would have been a baby inside. Where had it come from? He didn't know. Tossed out of some woman's life, in a day it would be far out on the ocean, bobbing, bobbing with the rest. Water from here to Naples, water from here to heathen lands. Just here a patch of light from a lantern. That imp from Italy looking down—into something immense and dark and unknown.

He was having a spree with the harbor, as I had had when as small as he. I saw him watch the older boys and listen thrilled to their wonderful talk—as once I, too, had been thrilled by Sam. I watched him over a game of dice, quarreling, scowling, grabbing at pennies, slapped by some one, whimpering, then eagerly getting back to the game. It was “craps,” I had played it with Sam and the gang. One night he dropped a cigarette still lighted into the rags and was given a blow by his boss that knocked him into a corner. But presently he crawled cautiously forth, and again with both hands hugging his knees he sat and watched the harbor. What a big spree for a little boy.