Harbor (9781101565681) (32 page)

That was it, I told myself, these people were all friends of revolutions. Vaguely as I watched them now I felt I was seeing the parlor side, the light and fluffy outer fringe, of something rather dangerous. I thought again of that parade and my impression of mass force. No danger in that, it was dressy and safe. But some of these youngsters did not stop there, they went in for stirring up people in rags, mass force of a very different kind. Here was a sculptor socialist who openly bragged that he'd had a hand in filling Union Square one day with a seething mass of unemployed, and then when some poor crazed fanatic threw a bomb, our socialist friend, as he himself smilingly put it, never once stopped running until he reached his studio.

It was this kind of thing that got on my nerves. For I pitied the unwieldy poor, the numberless muddle-headed crowds down there in the tenements, and it seemed to me perfectly criminal that a lot of these young highbrows should be allowed to stir them up. Their own thinking was so muddled, their views of life so out of gear.

I a radical? No chance!

While they chattered on excitedly, I thought of my trip uptown on the “El” that afternoon, a trip that I had made hundreds of times. Coming as I usually was from some big man or other, whose busy office and whose mind was a clean, brilliant illustration of what efficiency can be, I would sit in the car and idly watch the upper story windows we passed, with yellow gas jets flaring in the cave-like rooms behind them. There I had glimpses of men and girls at long crowded tables making coats, pants, vests, paper flowers, chewing-gum, five-cent cigars. I saw countless tenement kitchens, dirty cooking, unmade beds. These glimpses followed one on the other in such a dizzying torrent they merged into one moving picture for me. And that picture was of crowds, crowds, crowds—of people living frowzily.

This was poverty. And it was like some prodigious swamp. What could you do about it? You could pull out individuals here and there, as Eleanore did. I considered that a mighty fine job—for a woman or a clergyman. But to go at it and drain the swamp was a very different matter. You couldn't do it by easy preaching of patent cure-alls, nor by stirring up class hatred through rabid attacks upon big men. No, this was a job for the big men themselves, men who would go at this human swamp as Eleanore's father had gone at the harbor—quietly and slowly, with an engineer's precision. He had been at it six solid years, but he still remarked humbly, “We've only begun.”

Then from thinking of big men I thought of the one I had seen that day, and of my story about him. It was just in the stage I liked, where I could feel it all coming together. Incidents, bits of character and neat little turns of speech rose temptingly before my mind.

Presently, through the clamor around me, I heard “the Indian” crying. All this chatter had waked him up. I saw Eleanore go in to him and soon I heard the crying stop, and I knew she was telling him a story, a nice sleepy one to quiet him down.

What an infernal racket these people were making about the world. I went on thinking about my work.

“You two,” said Sue, when at last her friends had gone away, “have built up a wall of contentment around you a person couldn't break through with an axe.”

“Have a little,” I suggested.

“Stay all night,” said Eleanore.

“No, thanks,” said Sue. “I promised Dad that I'd be home.”

And then instead of going home she sprawled lazily on the sofa with her head upon one elbow, and settled in for some more talk. But her talk was different tonight. She usually talked about herself, but to-night she talked of us instead, of our contemptible content. And presently through her talk I felt that she had some surprise to spring. In a few moments Eleanore felt it too, I could tell that by the vigilant way she kept glancing up from her knitting.

“I think,” I was remarking, “we're a pretty liberal-minded pair.”

“That's it,” said Sue. “You're liberals!” What utter disdain she threw into the word. “And what's more you're citizens. In all these movements,” she went on, “you always find two classes—citizens and criminals. You two are both born citizens.”

“What's the difference?” I inquired.

“Citizens,” said Sue impressively, “are ready to
vote
for what they believe in. Criminals are ready to get arrested and go to jail.”

Eleanore looked up at her.

“Who gave you that?” she asked. Sue looked a little taken back, but only for a moment.

“One of the criminals,” she said. Her voice was carefully casual now but her eyes were a little excited. “He's a man who made up his mind that he wanted to get way down to the bottom, and see how it feels to be down there. So he took the very worst job he could find. For two years he was a stoker—on ships of all kinds all over the world. And now that he knows just how it feels, he has an office down on the docks where he's getting the stokers and dockers together—getting them ready for a strike—on your beloved harbor.”

“Joe Kramer,” said Eleanore quietly. Sue gave a sudden, nervous start.

“Eleanore,” she severly rejoined, “sometimes you're simply uncanny—the way you quietly jump at a thing!”

Eleanore had gone on with her knitting. I rose and lit a cigarette. I could feel Sue's eyes upon me. So
this
was her infernal surprise! J. K. banging into my life again!

“How long has Joe been here?” I asked.

“About five months,” Sue answered.

“He might have looked me up,” I said.

“He doesn't want to look anyone up, I've only seen him once myself. He has simply buried himself down there. Why don't you go and see him, Billy?” she added, with a quick glance at Eleanore. “He won't amuse you the way we do. He's one of the real criminals now.”

Still Eleanore did not look up.

“What's his address?” I asked gruffly. Sue gave it to me and good-humoredly yawned and said she must be getting home.

“Good-night, dear,” said Eleanore. She had risen and come to the door. “What a love of a hat you're wearing. It's a new one, isn't it? I caught sight of it in the parade.”

But the smile which my tall sister threw back at us from the doorway had nothing whatever to do with hats. It said as plainly as in words:

“Now, you cozy liberals, go over and touch
that
spot if you dare.”

When she had gone I took up a book and tried to read. But I soon gloomily relapsed. Would J. K. never leave me alone? What was he doing with my harbor? Why should I look him up, confound him—he hadn't bothered his head about me. But I knew that I
would
look him up and would find him more disturbing than ever. How he did keep moving on. No, not on, but down, down—until now he had bumped the bottom!

“Are you going to see him?”

Glancing sharply up, I saw Eleanore carefully watching my face.

“Oh, I suppose so,” I replied. She bent again to her knitting.

“He must be a strange kind of a person,” she said.

I slept little that night, and my work the next morning went badly. So, after wasting an hour or two, I decided to stop. I would go and see Joe and be done with it.

What was he doing with my harbor? The address Sue had given me was down on the North River, my old hunting ground. The weather had turned cold over-night, and when I came to the waterfront I felt the big raw breath of the sea. I had hardly been near the harbor in years. It had become for me a deep invisible cornerstone upon which my vigorous world was built. I had climbed up into the airy heights, I had been writing of millionaires. And coming so abruptly now from my story of life in rich hotels, the place I had once glorified looked bleak and naked, elemental. Down to the roots of things again.

I came to a bare wooden building, climbed some stairs and entered a large, low-ceilinged room which was evidently a meeting hall. Chairs were stacked along the walls and there was a low platform at one end. As I lingered there a moment, by habit my eyes took in the details. The local color was lurid enough. On the walls were foreign pictures, one of the anarchist Ferrer being executed in Spain, and another of an Italian mob shaking their fists and yelling like demons at a bloated hideous priest. There were posters in which flaming torches, blood-red flags and barricades and cannon belching clouds of smoke stood out in heavy blacks and reds. And all this foreign violence was made grimly real in its purpose here by the way these pictures centered around the largest poster, which was of an ocean liner with all its different kinds of workers gathered together in one mass and staring fixedly up at the ship.

Through a door in a board partition I went into a narrow room from which two dirty windows looked out upon the docks below. This room was cramped and crowded. Newspapers and pamphlets lay heaped on the floor, and in the corners were four desks, at one of which three men, whom I learned later to be an Italian, an Englishman and a Spaniard, were talking together intensely. They took no notice of my entrance, for many other visitors, burly, sooty creatures, were constantly straggling in and out.

I saw Joe at a desk in one corner. Looking doubly tall and lean and stooped, and with a tired frown on his face, he sat there with his sleeves rolled up slowly pounding out a letter on the typewriter before him. On top of his desk were huge ledgers, and over them upon hooks on the wall hung bunches of letters from other ports. It all gave me a heavy impression of dull daily drudgery. And in this Joe was so absorbed that he took no notice of my presence, although I now stood close behind him. When at last he did look up and I got a full view of his face, with its large, familiar features, tight-set jaw and deep-set eyes, I was startled at its gauntness.

“Hello, Joe——”

“Hello.” A dullish red came into his face and then a slight frown. He half rose from his seat. “Hello, Bill,” he repeated. “What's brought you here?”

He appeared a little dazed at first, then anything but glad to see me. The thought of our old college days flashed for a moment into my mind. How far away they seemed just now. Through our first few awkward remarks he lapsed back into such a tired, worn indifference that I was soon on the point of leaving. But that bony gauntness in his face, and all it showed me he had been through, gave him some right to his rudeness, I thought. So I changed my mind and stuck to my purpose of having it all out with Joe and learning what he was about. Persisting in my friendliness my questions slowly drew him out.

Since I had seen him five years ago he had continued his writing, but as he had grown steadily more set on writing only what he called “the truth about things,” the newspapers had closed their doors. While I had gone up he had gone down, until finally throwing up in disgust “this whole fool game of putting words on paper,” he had made up his mind to throw in his life with the lives of the men at the bottom. So for two years he had shoveled coal in the stokeholes of ships by day and by night, he had mixed with stokers of every race, from English, French and Germans to Russians and Italians, Spaniards, Hindus, Coolies, Greeks. He had worked and eaten and slept in their holes, he had ranged the slums of all the seas. And of all this he spoke in short, commonplace phrases, still in that indifferent tone, as though personal stories were a bore.

“But look here, Joe,” I asked at the end, “what's the good of living like this? What the devil can you do?”

I still remember the look he gave me, the weary remoteness of it. But all he said was,

“Organize strikes.”

“Here?”

“Everywhere.”

“Of stokers?”

“No, of all industries.”

“For higher pay, eh, and shorter hours.”

Another brief look.

“No, for revolution,” he said.

Briefly, in reply to my questions, he explained how he and his friends had already induced some twelve thousand stokers and dockers to leave their old trade unions and enroll themselves as members of this new international body, which was to embrace not only one trade but all the labor connected with ships—ships of all nations. He was here doing the advance work. As soon as the ground was made ready, he said, some of the bigger leaders would come. Then there would be mass meetings here and presently a general strike. And as the years went on there would be similar strikes in all trades and in all countries, until at some time not many years off there would be such labor rebellions as would paralyze the industrial world. And out of this catastrophe the workers would emerge into power to build up a strange new world of their own.

This was what Joe saw ahead. He seemed to be seeing it while he spoke, with a hard, clear intensity that struck me rather cold. Here was no mere parlor talk, here was a man who lived what he said.

“You comfortable people,” he said, “are so damn comfortable you're blind. You see nothing ahead but peace on earth and a nice smooth evolution—with a lot of steady little reforms. You've got so you honestly can't believe there's any violence left in the world. You're as blind as most folks were five years before the Civil War. But what's the use talking?” he ended. “You can't understand all this.” Again my irritation rose.

“No, I can't say I do,” I replied. “To stir up millions of men of that kind and then let 'em loose upon the world strikes me as absolutely mad!”

“I knew it would.”

“Look here, Joe, how are
you
so sure about all this? Hasn't it ever struck you that you're getting damnably narrow?” He smiled.

“I don't care much if I'm narrow,” he said.

“You think it's good for you, being like this?”