Harbor (9781101565681) (23 page)

At once a vision opened of work with Eleanore's father, of long talks with Eleanore.

“I'll try to get ready for it,” I said.

“You've made a fine start,” he continued, “and I think you're going to make good. But first let's see what you'll do by yourself. Get your own view of this place as it is to-day before we talk about plans for to-morrow. And don't hurry. Take your time.”

As he said this quietly, I suddenly awoke to the fact that we were tearing down the river at a perfectly gorgeous speed. The river was crowding with traffic ahead, all was a rushing chaos of life and we were rushing worst of all. And yet we did not seem to hurry. Old Captain Arty sat at the wheel with the most resigned patient look in his eyes. And drawing lazily on his cigar Dillon was watching a new line of wharves.

“You know I've found,” he was saying, “the only way to live in this age and get any pleasure out of life is to always take more time than you need for every job you tackle. I'm taking at least seven years to this job. I might possibly do it as well in five, but I'd miss half the fun of it all, I'd be glaring at separate parts of it, each one as it came along, and I'd never have time to see it full size and let it carry me 'round the world—to that baby carriage, for instance, over in Lahore.”

We were rounding the Battery now. And in that sparkling morning light, with billowy waves of sea green all around us, sudden snowy clouds of spray, we watched for a moment the skyscraper group, the homes of the Big Companies. The sunshine was reflected from thousands of dazzling window eyes, little streamers of steam were flung out gaily overhead, streets suddenly opened to our view, narrow cuts revealing the depths below. And there came to our ears a deep humming.

“That's the brains of it all,” said Dillon. “In all you'll see while exploring the wharves you'll find some string that leads back here. And you don't want to let that worry you. Let the muckrakers worry and plan all they please for a sea-gate and a nation that's to run with its brains removed. You want to remember it can't be done. You want to look harder and harder—until you find out for yourself that there are men up there on Wall Street without whose brains no big thing can be done in this country. I'm working under their orders and some day I hope you'll be doing the same. For they don't need
less
publicity but
more.
”

He left me at the Battery, and as I stood looking after him I found myself feeling somewhat dazed. A question flashed into my mind. What would Joe Kramer say to this? I remembered what he had said to me once: “Tell Wall Street to get off the roof.” Well, that was
his
view. Here was another. And this man was certainly just as sincere and decidedly more wise and sane, altogether a larger size.

Besides, I was in love with his daughter.

On the Manhattan side of the North River, from Twenty-third Street down for a mile there stretches a deafening region of cobblestones and asphalt over which trucks by thousands go clattering each day. There are long lines of freight cars here and snorting locomotives. Along the shore side are many saloons, a few cheap decent little hotels and some that are far from decent. And along the water side is a solid line of docksheds. Their front is one unbroken wall of sheet iron and concrete.

I came up against this wall. Over the top I could see here and there the great round funnels of the ships, but at every passenger doorway and at every wide freight entrance I found a sign, “No Visitors Admitted,” and under the sign a watchman who would ungraciously take a cigar and then go right on being a watchman. There seemed no way to get inside. The old-fashioned mystery of the sea was replaced by the inscrutability of what some muckrakers called “The Pool.”

“Don't hurry,” Eleanore's father had said. All very well, but I needed money. While I had been making with Eleanore those long and delightful explorations of the harbor and ourselves, at home my father's bank account had been steadily dwindling, and all that I had been able to make had gone into expenses.

“I don't know what to do,” said Sue, alone with me that evening. “The butcher says he won't wait any longer. He has simply got to be paid this week.”

“I'll see what I can do,” I said.

I came back to my new hunting ground and all night long I prowled about. I sipped large schooners of beer at bars, listening to the burly dockers crowded close around me. I watched the waterfront, empty and still, with acres of spectral wagons and trucks and here and there a lantern. I had a long talk with a broken old bum who lay on his back in an empty truck looking up at the stars and spun me yarns of his life as a cook on ships all up and down the world. Now and again in the small wee hours I met hurrying groups of men, women and children poorly clad, and following them to one of the piers I heard the sleepy watchman growl, “Steerage passengers over there.” I saw the dawn break slowly and everything around me grow bluish and unreal. I watched the teamsters come tramping along leading horses, and harness them to the trucks. I heard the first clatter of the day. I saw the figures of dockers appear, more and more, I saw some of them drift to the docks. Soon there were crowds of thousands, and as stevedores there began bawling out names, gang after gang of men stepped forward, until at last the chosen throngs went marching in past the timekeepers. Hungrily I peered after them up the long cavernous docksheds. “No Visitors Admitted.”

Then I went into a lunchroom for ham and eggs and a huge cup of coffee. I ate an enormous breakfast. On the floor beside me a cross and weary looking old woman was scrubbing the dirty oil cloth there. But I myself felt no weariness. While all was still vivid and fresh in my mind, sitting there I wrote down what I had seen. A magazine editor said it would do. And so we paid the butcher.

The same editor gave me a sweeping letter of introduction to all ocean liners. This I showed to a dock watchman, who directed me upstairs. In the office above I showed it to a clerk, who directed me to the dock superintendent, who read it and told me to go downtown. I recalled what Dillon had said about strings. Here was string number one, I reflected, and I followed it down Manhattan into the tall buildings, only to be asked down there just what it was I wanted to know.

“I don't want to know anything,” I replied. “I just want permission to watch the work.”

“We can't allow that,” was the answer of this harbor of big companies.

At every pier that I approached I received about the same reply. At home Sue spoke of other bills. And now that I was in trouble, hard pressed for money and groping my way about alone, I found myself missing Eleanore to a most desperate degree. Her face, her smiling blue-gray eyes, kept rising in my mind, sometimes with memories and hopes that permeated my whole view both of the harbor and my work with a warm glad expectant glow, but more often with no feeling at all but one of sickening emptiness. She was not here. The only way to get back to her was to make good with her father. And so I would not ask his aid or even go to him for advice. Testing me, was he? All right, I would show him.

And I returned to my editor, whom my intensity rather amused.

“The joke of it is,” he said, “that they think down there you're a muckraker.”

“I'll be one soon if this keeps on.”

“But it won't,” he replied. “As soon as you've once broken in, and they see it's a glory story you want, you can't imagine how nice they'll be.”

“I haven't broken in,” I said.

“You will to-morrow,” he told me, “because Abner Bell will be with you. He's our star photographer. Wait till you see little Ab go to work. The place he can't get into hasn't been invented. Besides,” the editor added, “Abner is just the sort of chap to take hold of an author from Paris and turn him into a writer.”

And this Abner Bell proceeded to do. He was a cheerful, rotund little man with round simple eyes and a smile that went all over his face.

“You see,” he said, when I met him the next day down at the docks, “you can't ask a harbor to hold up her chin and look into your camera while you count. She's such a big fat noisy slob she wouldn't even hear you. You've got to run right at her and bark.”

“Look here, old man,” he was asking a watchman a few moments later. “What's the name of the superintendent on the next pier down the line?”

“Captain Townes.”

“Townes, Townes? Is that Bill Townes?”

“No, it's Ed.”

“I wonder what's become of Bill. All right, brother, much obliged. See you again.” And he went on.

“Say,” he asked the next watchman. “Is Eddy—I mean Captain—Townes upstairs?”

“Sure he is. Go right up.”

“Thank you.” Up we went to the office. “Captain Townes? Good-morning.”

“Well, sir, what can I do for you?” The captain was an Englishman with a voice as heavy and deep as his eyes.

“Why, Captain, I'm sent here by the firm that's putting Peevey's Paris Perfume on the market out in the Middle West. They're going in heavy on ads this Fall and I've got an order to hang around here until I can get a photo of one of your biggest liners. The idea is to run it as an ad, with a caption under it something like this: ‘
The Kaiser Wilhelm
reaching New York with twenty thousand bottles of Peevey's Best, direct from Paris.' ”

“
The Kaiser Wilhelm,
” said the captain ponderously, “is a German boat. She docks in Hoboken, my friend.”

“Of course she does,” said Abner. “And I can lug this heavy camera way over there if you say so, and hand ten thousand dollars worth of free ads to a German line, stick up pictures of their boat in little drugstore windows all up and down the Middle West. Do you know how to tell me to go away?”

Captain Townes smiled heavily.

“No,” he said, “I guess I don't. Here's a pass that'll give you the run of the dock.”

“Make it two,” said Abner, “and fix it so my friend and I can stick around for quite a while.”

“You're a pretty good liar,” I told him as we went downstairs.

“Oh, hell,” he answered modestly. “Let's go out on the porch and get cool.”

We went out on the open end of the pier and sat down on a wooden beam which Abner called a bulkhead.

“If we don't begin calling things names,” he remarked, “we'll never get to feeling we're here. Let's just sit and feel for a while.”

“I've begun,” I replied.

We sat in the shade of two wooden piles with the glare of a midsummer sun all around us. The East River had been like a crowded creek compared to this wide expanse of water slapping and gleaming out there in the sun with smoke shadows chasing over it all. There was the rough odor of smoke in the air from craft of all kinds as they skurried about. The high black bow of a Cunarder loomed at the end of the dock next ours. Far across the river the stout German liners lay at their berths—and they did not look like sea hogs. What a change had come over the harbor since I had met that motorboat. How all the hogs had waddled away, and the very smoke and the oil on the waves had taken on deep, vivid hues—as I had seen through Eleanore's eyes. “What a strange wonderful purple,” her low voice seemed to murmur at my side.

“She's going away from here,” said Ab. I started:

“Who is?”

“That Cunarder. Look at the smoke pour out of her stacks. Got a cigarette about you?”

“No,” I answered gruffly.

“Damn.”

In the slip on our other side a large freight boat was loading, and a herd of scows and barges were pressing close around her. These clumsy craft had cabins, and in some whole families lived. “Harbor Gypsies.” A good title. I had paid the butcher, but the grocer was still waiting. So I dismissed my motorboat and grimly turned to scows instead. Children by the dozen were making friends from barge to barge. Dogs were all about us and they too were busy visiting. High up on the roof of a coal lighter's cabin an impudent little skye-terrier kept barking at the sooty men who were shoveling down below. One of these from time to time would lift his black face and good-humoredly call, “Oh, you go to hell”—which would drive the small dog into frenzies. Most of the barges had derrick masts, and all these masts were moving. They rose between me and the sky, bobbing, tossing and crisscrossing, filling the place with the feeling of life, the unending, restless life of the sea.

An ear-shattering roar broke in on it all. Our Cunarder was starting. Smoke belching black from her funnels, the monster was beginning to move.

But what was this woman doing close by us? Out of the cabin of a barge she had dragged a little rocking chair, and now she had brought out a baby, all dressed up in its Sunday best, and was rocking expectantly, watching the ship. Thundering to the harbor, the Cunarder now moved slowly out. As she swept into the river the end of the pier was revealed to our eyes all black with people waving. They waved until she was out in midstream. Then, as they began to turn away, one plump motherly-looking woman happened to glance toward us.

“Why, the cute little baby,” we heard her exclaim. And the next minute hundreds of people were looking. The barge mother rocked serenely.

Abner grabbed his camera and jumped nimbly down on the barge, where he took the baby's picture, with the amused crowd for a background.

“The kid's name,” he remarked on his return, “is Violetta Rosy. She was born at two a. m. at Pier Forty-nine.” He was silent for a moment and then went on sententiously, “Think what it'll mean to her, through all the storm and stress of life, to be able to look fondly back upon the dear old homestead. There's a punch to Violetta. Better run her in.”