Harbor (9781101565681) (21 page)

Slowly and with elaborate caution the monkey crept forward over the cabin. For a moment up at the bow he paused, a ridiculous little dark-jacketed figure between the two white crests of our waves. Then with a spring he was up to his place on the top of the light, and there with gay gesticulations he greeted every vessel we passed.

I had taken a seat by Eleanore's side. She was driving her boat with eyes straight ahead. Now and then she would close them, draw in a deep breath of the rough salt air, and smile contentedly to herself. After a time I heard her voice, low and intimate as before:

“Finished up that hideous harbor of yours?”

“No,” I answered hungrily, “I think I've just begun.” I caught a gleam in her eyes.

“You'll be out of your rut in a moment,” she said.

“What do you mean, my rut?” I demanded.

“The East River, Stupid—wait and see.”

From the little East River corner I'd lived in, we sped far out on the Upper Bay, a rushing black speck on a dim expanse, with dark, empty fields of water around us, long, luminous paths stretching off to the shores, where the lights twinkled low for miles and miles and there were sudden bursts of flame from distant blast furnace fires.

“Tell me what you've been writing about this hideous place,” she said.

“Who said it was hideous at night? Of course if you wrap it all up in the dark, so that you can see none of its sea hogs——”

“What's a sea hog?”

“A sea hog is a wallowing boat with a long, black, heavy snout.” And mustering all that was left of my hatred I plunged into my picture. “The whole place is like that,” I ended. “Full of smoke and dirt and disorder, everything rushing and jamming together. That's how it looks to me in the daytime!”

“Are you sure it does—still?”

“I am,” I answered firmly. “And I'm going to write it just as it looks.”

“Then look back of you,” she suggested.

Behind us, at the tip of Manhattan, the tall buildings had all melted together into one tremendous mass, with only a pin point of light here and there, a place of shadowy turrets and walls, like some mediæval fortress. Out of it, in contrast to its dimness, rose a garish tower of lights that seemed to be keeping a vigilant watch over all the dark waters, the ships and the docks. The harbor of big companies.

“My father works up in that tower,” she said. “He can see the whole harbor spread out below. But he keeps coming down to see it all close, and I've steered him up close to everything in it. You've no idea how much there is.” She threw me a glance of pitying scorn. “There are over seven hundred miles of waterfront in this small port, and I'm not going to have you trudging around and getting lost and tired and cross and working off your grudge in your writing. You come with me some afternoon and I'll do what I can to open your eyes.”

“Please do it,” I said quickly.

 

She took me down to the sea gate at the end of a warm, still, foggy day. There in the deepening twilight we drifted without a sign of a world around us—till in from the ocean there came a deep billow, then another and another, and as our small craft darted off to one side a gigantic gray shadow loomed through the fog with four black towers of smoke overhead, lights gleaming from a thousand eyes.

“Another sea hog,” murmured a voice.

“I said in the daytime,” I replied.

We went out on another afternoon to watch the fisherman fleets at their work or scudding before a strong wind home with a great, round, radiant sun behind. She showed me fishers in the air, lonely fish hawks one by one flying in the late afternoon back to their nests on the Atlantic Highlands. And far out on the Lower Bay she knew where to stir up whole armies of gulls, till there seemed to be thousands wheeling in air with the bright sunshine on all the wings. The sunshine, too, with the help of the breeze, stole glinting deep into her hair. She watched me out of half-closed eyes.

“Is this daylight enough?” she demanded.

“This is simply absurd,” I answered. “You know very well that this harbor is ugly in places——”

“Only in places. That's better,” she said.

“In a great
many
places,” I rejoined. “Please take me to Bayonne some day—at two p. m.,” I added.

It seemed a good, safe, unmysterious hour, and as we neared the place next day my hopes mounted high, for there was a leaden sky overhead and loathsome blotches and streaks of oil on the gray water around us—while ahead on the Jersey shore, from two chimneys that rose halfway to the clouds, poured two foul, sluggish columns of smoke.

“Still New York harbor, I believe?” I inquired maliciously. But Eleanore was smiling. “What's the joke?” I demanded.

“The southwest wind,” she softly replied. I could feel it coming as she spoke. As I watched I saw it take that sky and tear jagged rifts in it for the sun, and then as those two columns of smoke began twisting and writhing like monster snakes they took on purple and greenish hues and threw ghostly reflections of themselves down on the oily water around us, filled with blue and gold shimmerings now.

“What a strange, wonderful purple,” murmured a quiet voice by my side.

Stubbornly I resisted conversion. I wanted more afternoons in that boat.

“Now it's blowing that oily odor our way,” I declared in sudden annoyance. “I no sooner get to enjoying myself when along comes one of the smells of this place. And where's the beauty in
them?
Can you show me? Here's a place that should be a great storehouse of pure fresh air for the city to breathe, and—”

“Oh, hush up!” said Eleanore.

But I doggedly found other blemishes here—swamps, railroad yards and sooty tracks that filled the waterfront for miles where there should have been parks and boulevards. At the same time I assumed the tone of one who tries to be fair and patient. Whenever she showed me some new beauty in water or sky I took great pains to look at it well. When an angry little squall of wind came ruffling over the sunny waves in sweeping bands of deep, soft blues, I gazed and gazed at its wonder as though I could never have enough. And so gazing I spied floating there a sodden old mattress, a fleet of tin cans. And I said that it seemed an unhealthy thing to dump all our refuse so close to the city.

“They don't!” she retorted indignantly. “They take it out miles beyond the Hook!”

In short, I considered myself mighty clever. Day by day I prolonged my conversion, holding obstinately back—while Eleanore revealed to me the miracles worked by the sunset here, and by the clouds, the winds, the tides, the very smoke and the ships themselves, all playing weird tricks on each other. Slowly the crude glory of it stole upon me unawares—until to my own intense surprise the harbor now became for me a breathing, heaving, gleaming thing filled deep with the rush and the vigor of life. A thing no longer sinister, crushing down on a man's old age—but strangely deeply stirring.

“Look out, my friend,” I warned myself. “This is no harbor you're falling in love with.”

Although at such lucid moments I would sometimes go a-soaring up into the most dazzling dreams, more often I would plunge in gloom. For Eleanore's dreams and all her thoughts seemed centered on her father. From each corner of that watery world, no matter how far we wandered, the high tower from which he looked down on it all would suddenly loom above the horizon. Over the dreariest marshes it peeped and into all our talk he came. A marsh was a place that he was to transform, oily odors were things he would sweep away. For every abuse that I could discover her father was working out some cure. With a whole corps of engineers drafting his dreams into practicable plans, there was no end to the things he could do.

“Here is a girl,” I told myself, “so selfishly wrapped up in her father she hasn't a thought for anyone else. She's using me to boom his work, as she has doubtless used writers before me and will use dozens more when I'm gone. No doubt she would like to have
dozens of me
sitting right here beside her now! It's not at all a romantic thought, but think how she could use me then!” And I would glower at her.

But it is a lonely desolate job to sit and glower at a girl who appears so placidly unaware of the fact that you are glowering. And slowly emerging from my gloom I would wonder about this love that was in her. At times when she talked she made me feel small. My own love for my mother, how utterly selfish it had been. Here was a passion so deep and real it made her almost forget I was there, asking questions, hungrily watching her, trying to learn about her life.

“While I was in school,” she said, in that low deliberate voice of hers, “my father and I went abroad every summer. We tramped in the Alps for weeks at a time, keeping way off the beaten paths to watch the work of the Swiss engineers. One of them was a woman. We saw the bridge she'd built over a gorge, and I became deeply excited. Until then I had never had any idea that I could go into my father's work. But now I wondered if I could. That winter in school I really worked. I was dreadfully dull at mathematics, but I wouldn't see it. I made up my mind to go to Cornell for the course on engineering. I worked like a slave for two years to get ready and just succeeded in getting in.

“Then toward the middle of Freshman year I realized that I was becoming a quite absurdly solemn young grind. There were over a hundred girls in college but I had made barely any friends. And so I firmly resolved to be gay. I made a regular business of it and worked my way into clubs and dances, hunting for the girls I liked and scheming to make them like me too. By May I was way behind in my work. I tried to make up, I began cramming every night until one or two in the morning. And I passed my examinations—but that summer I broke down. My father had to drop his work and take me abroad for an operation, and by the time we got back he had lost nearly six months of his time. I decided that as an engineer I was a dismal failure. I'd much better give my father a chance.

“So when he took up this work in New York I spent all my time on our new apartment. I loved fussing with it, I shopped like a bee, and this kept me busy all Autumn. Besides I was going about with Sue. She had managed me long ago at school and I was glad to let her now, for I was hunting for new ideas. But Sue put me on so many committees that by Spring my nerves were in shreds, and again for weeks I was flat on my back.

“One evening then—when my father came home and sat down by my bedside—it came over me all of a sudden—the wonderful quiet strength in his hand, in the look of his eyes.

“ ‘Where have you been?' I asked him.

“ ‘Down on the harbor,' he told me. Since eight in the morning he'd been in a launch exploring it all. I shut my eyes—my wretched eyelids quivering—and I made him describe the whole day's trip while I tried to see it all in my mind. Soon I was feeling deliciously quiet. ‘I'm going down there too,' I thought.

“By the next evening I had the idea for this boat. When I told him he was delighted, and we both grew excited over the plans—which he drew by my bed, I made him draw dozens. At last it was built and lay at its dock, and I packed all I needed into a trunk and we came down in a taxi. It was a lovely May afternoon and we had a beautiful ride up the Hudson. And from then on through the Summer I hardly went ashore at all, I knew if I did it would spoil it all.

“Every night we slept on board in those two cozy little bunks. I learned to cook here. Soon I was able to run the boat and even to help my father a little. I knew just enough about his work to go places for him and save his time. I'd forgotten I ever had any nerves, for I felt I belonged to something now that got way down to the roots of things. Do you see what I mean? This harbor isn't like a hotel, or an evening gown or Weber and Fields. I love pretty gowns, and my father and I wouldn't miss Weber and Fields for worlds. But they're all on top, this is down at the bottom, it's one of those deep places that seem to make the world go 'round. It's right where the ocean bumps into the land. You can get your roots here, you can feel you are real.

“You see what my father is doing is to take this whole harbor and study it hard—not just the water, the shipping and docks, for when he says ‘the port of New York' he means all the railroads too—and he's studying how they all come in and why it is that everything has become so frightfully snarled. A lot of big shipping men are behind him, and he's to draw up a plan for it all which they're going to give to the city to use, to make this port what it's got to be, the very first in the ocean world. It's one of those slow tremendous pieces of work, it will take years to carry it out and hundreds of millions of dollars. My father thinks there's hardly a chance that he'll ever live to see it all done. I know he will, I'm sure he will, he's the kind of a man who keeps himself young. But whether he really sees it or not, or gets any credit, he doesn't care.

“That's the kind of a person my father is,” Eleanore added softly.

 

“My father wants to meet you,” she told me toward the end of June, at one of those times when she let the boat drift while we had long absorbing talks. “He has read that thing you wrote about the German sea hog, and he thinks it's awfully well done.”

“That's good of him,” I said gruffly.

Somehow or other it always makes me uncomfortable when people talk about my work. When they criticize I am annoyed and when they praise I am uneasy. What do they know about it? They spent an hour reading what it took me weeks to write. They don't know what I
tried
to do, nor do they care, they haven't time. I never feel so cut off from people, so utterly alone in the world, as when some benevolent person says, “I liked that little story of yours.” Instantly I shut up like a clam.