Harbor (9781101565681) (37 page)

“You don't see how it can happen,” said Marsh, with one of those keen sudden looks that showed he was aware of my presence. “You admit this place is a watery hell, but you don't believe we can change it. You don't see how ignorant mobs of men can rise up and take the whole game in their hands. Do I get you right?”

“You do,” I said.

“Look over there.”

I followed his glance to the doorway. It was filled with a group of big ragged men. Some of the faces were black with soot, some were smiling stolidly, some scowling in the effort to hear. All eyes were intent on the face of the man who had never been known to lose a strike.

“That's the beginning,” Marsh told me. “You keep your eyes on their faces—from now on right into the strike—and you may see something grow there that'll give you a new religion.”

As the day wore into evening the crowd from outside pressed into the room until they were packed all around us.

“Let's get out of this,” said Joe at last. We went to a neighboring lunchroom and ate a hasty supper. But as here, too, the crowd pressed in to get a look at Marsh, Joe asked us to come up to his room.

“They
know
your room,” Marsh answered. His tone was grim, as though he had been accustomed for years to this ceaselessly curious pressing mass, pressing, pressing around him tight. “Suppose we go up to mine,” he said. “I want you fellows to meet my wife. She has never met any writers before,” he added to me, “and she's interested in that kind of thing. She was a music teacher once.”

I was about to decline and start for home, but suddenly I recalled Eleanore's saying that she would like to meet Mrs. Marsh. So I accepted his invitation. And what I saw a few minutes later brought me down abruptly from these world-wide schemes for labor.

We entered a small, cheap hotel, climbed a flight of stairs and came into the narrow bedroom which was for the moment this notorious wanderer's home. A little girl about six years old lay asleep on a cot in one corner, and under the one electric light a woman sat reading a magazine. She had a strong rather clever face which would have been appealing if it were not for the bitter impatient glance she gave us as we entered.

“Talk low, boys, our little girl's asleep,” Marsh said. “Say, Sally,” he continued, with his faint, derisive smile, “here's a writer come to see you.”

“Pleased to meet you, I'm sure,” she said, then relapsed into a stiff silence. I tried to break through her awkwardness but entirely without avail. I grew more and more sure of my first impression, that this woman hated her husband's friends, his strikes, his “pro-letariate.” She was smart, pushing, ambitious, I thought, just the kind that would have got on in any middle western town. Eleanore must meet her.

Then presently I noticed that only Marsh was talking. I glanced at Joe and was startled by the intensity in his eyes.

For Joe was watching his leader's wife. And watching, he appeared to me to be seeing her in a dreary succession of rooms like these, in cities, towns and mining camps, wherever her husband was leading a strike—and then trying to see his own home in such rooms, and Sue in his home, a wife like this. The picture struck me suddenly cold. Sue pulled into this for life! Again I remembered Eleanore's words—“Drawn into revolution.”

“Say, Joe,” drawled Marsh, with a sharp look at him. “Got any of that typhoid left?”

Joe laughed quickly, confusedly.

Soon after that I left them.

The next day I went to the editor for whom I was doing most of my work. When I told him I wanted to try Jim Marsh, the editor looked at me curiously.

“Why?” he asked.

I spoke of the impending strike.

“Have you met Marsh?” he inquired.

“Yes.”

“Do you like him?”

“No.”

“But he struck you as big.”

“Yes—he did.”

“Are you getting interested in strikes?”

“I want to see a big one close.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” I retorted. “They're getting to be significant, aren't they? I want to see what they're like inside.” The editor smiled:

“You'll find them rather hot inside. Don't get over-heated.”

“Oh you needn't think I'll lose my head.”

“I hope not,” he said quietly. “Go ahead with your story about Marsh. I'll be interested to see what you do.”

I went out of the office in no easy frame of mind. The editor's inquisitive tone had started me thinking of how J. K. had been shut out by the papers because he wrote “the truth about things.”

“Oh that's all rot,” I told myself. “Joe's case and mine are not the same. The magazines aren't like the papers and I'm not like Joe. His idea of the truth and mine will never be anywhere near alike.”

But what would Eleanore think of it? I went home and told her of my plan. To my surprise she made no objection.

“It's the best thing you can do,” she said. “We're in this now—on account of Sue—we can't keep out. And so long as we are, you might as well write about it, too. You think so much better when you're at work—more clearly—don't you—and that's what I want.” She was looking at me steadily out of those gray-blue eyes of hers. “I want you to think yourself all out—as clearly as you possibly can—and then write just what you think,” she said. “I want you to feel that I'm never afraid of anything you may ever write—so long as you're really sure it's true.”

I held her a moment in my arms and felt her tremble slightly. And then she said with her old quiet smile:

“Sue has asked us over to Brooklyn to-night—Joe Kramer is to be there, too.”

“That affair is moving rather fast.”

“Oh yes, quite fast,” she said cheerfully.

“How will Dad look at it?” I asked.

“As you did,” said Eleanore dryly. “He'll look at it and see nothing at all.”

“I've half a mind to tell him!”

“Don't,” she said. “If you did he would only get excited, become the old-fashioned father and order Sue to leave Joe alone—which would be all that is needed now to make Sue marry Joe in a week.”

“Sue is about as selfish,” I said hotly, “about as wrapped up in her own little self——”

“As any girl is who thinks she's in love but isn't sure,” said Eleanore. “Sue isn't sure—poor thing—she's frightfully unsettled.”

“But why drag Joe way over there?”

“Because she wants to look at him there. It's her home, you know, her whole past life, all that she has been used to. It's the place where she has breakfast. She wants to see how Joe fits in.”

“But they'd never live
there
if they married!”

“Nevertheless,” said Eleanore, “that's one of the ways a girl makes up her mind.” She looked pityingly into my eyes. “Women are beyond you—aren't they, dear?” she murmured.

“J. K. isn't,” I rejoined. “And I can't see him in
any
home!”

“Can't you? Then watch him a little closer the next time he comes to ours.”

I went out for a walk along the docks and tried to picture the coming strike. When I came home I found Joe there, he had come to go with us to Brooklyn. He was sitting on the floor with our boy gravely intent on a toy circus. Neither one was saying a word, but as Joe carefully poised an elephant on the top of a tall red ladder, I recalled my wife's injunction. By Jove, he did fit into a home, here certainly was a different Joe. He did not see me at the door. Later I called to him from our bedroom:

“Say, Joe. Don't you want to come in and wash?”

He came in, and presently watching him I noticed his glances about our room. It was most decidedly Eleanore's room, from the flowered curtains to the warm soft rug on the floor. It was gay, it was quiet and restful, it was intimately personal. Here was her desk with a small heap of letters and photographs of our son and of me, and here close by was her dressing-table strewn with all its dainty equipment. A few invitations were stuck in the mirror. Eleanore's hat and crumpled white gloves lay on our bed. I had thrown my coat beside them. There were such things in this small room as Joe had never dreamed of.

“Oh Joe,” said Eleanore from the hall. “Don't you want to come into the nursery? Somebody wants a pillow fight.”

“Sure,” said Joe, with a queer little start.

“By the way,” I heard her add outside. “Billy told me he saw Mrs. Marsh, and I should so like to meet her, too. Couldn't you have us all down to your room some evening?”

“If you like,” he answered gruffly.

“I'm honestly curious,” Eleanore said, “to see what kind of a person she is. And I'm sure that Sue is, too. May we bring her with us?”

“Of course you may—whenever you like.”

“Would Friday evening be too soon?”

“I'll see if I can fix it.”

When Eleanore came in to me, her lips were set tight as though something had hurt her.

“That was pretty tough,” I muttered.

“Yes, wasn't it,” she said quickly. “I don't care, I'm not going to have him marrying Sue. I'm too fond of both of them. Besides, your father has to be thought of. It would simply kill him!”

 

“Yes,” I thought to myself that night. “No doubt about that, it would kill him.”

How much older he looked, in the strong light of the huge old-fashioned gas lamp that hung over the dining-room table. He was making a visible effort to be young and genial. He had not seen Joe in several years, and he evidently knew nothing whatever of what Joe was up to, except that he had been ill at our home. Joe spoke of what we had done for him, and Sue eagerly took up the cue, keeping the talk upon us and “the Indian,” to my father's deep satisfaction. From this she turned to our childhood and the life in this old house. Dad pictured it all in such glowing colors I recognized almost nothing as real. But watching Sue's face as she listened, she seemed to me trying to feel again as she had felt here long ago when she had been his only chum. Every few moments she would break off to throw a quick, restless glance at Joe.

When the time came for us to go, my father assured us warmly that he had not felt so young in years. He said we had so stirred him up that he must take a book and read or he wouldn't sleep a wink all night. Joe did not come away with us. As we stood all together at the door, I saw Eleanore glance into Dad's study where his heavy leather chair was waiting, and then into the room across the hall where Sue had drawn up two chairs to the fire. And I thought of the next hour or two. My father already had under his arm a book on American shipping, which told about the old despotic sea world of his day, in which there had been no strikers but only mutineers.

 

“There's very little time to lose,” said Eleanore on the way home.

“Look here,” I suggested. “Why don't you talk this out with Sue, and tell her just what you think of it all?”

“Because,” said Eleanore, “what I think and what you think has nothing whatever to do with the case. Sue would say it was none of our business. And she'd be quite right. It isn't.”

“Aren't we making it our business?” My wife at times gets me so confused.

“I'm not
telling
them anything,” she rejoined. “I'm only trying to
show
them something and let the poor idiots see for themselves. If they won't see, it's hopeless.”

On Friday evening Sue sent word that she would be late and that she would meet us at Joe's room. So we went down without her.

His room had changed since I'd seen it last, I took in at once his pathetic attempts to fix it up for our coming. Gone were the dirty curtains, the dirty collars and shirts, and the bed was concealed by an old green screen borrowed from his landlady, the German saloon-keeper's wife below. The same woman had scrubbed the floor and put down a faded rag carpet in front of the old fireplace, in which now a coal fire was burning. Poor Joe had turned up all the lights to make things bright and cheerful, but it only showed things up as they were. The room was glaringly forlorn.

And now that Eleanore had come, her presence made him feel at once what a wretchedly dreary place it was. Eleanore knew what she wanted to do and she had dressed herself for the part. And as Joe took in the effect of her smart little suit, and waited for Sue and Mrs. Marsh, he became so anxious and gloomy that he could only speak with an effort. He kept glancing uneasily at the door.

“I don't like the idea,” said Eleanore, “of Sue's coming down here alone at night through this part of town.” Joe looked around at her quickly. “But I suppose,” she added thoughtfully, “that she'd have to get used to queer parts of towns if she ever took up the life you spoke of.”

“I don't think that would bother her,” Joe answered gruffly. Presently there was a step on the stairs. He jumped up and went to the door, and a moment later Sue entered the room.

Immediately its whole atmosphere changed. Sue was plainly excited. She, too, had dressed herself with care—or rather with a careful neglect. She wore the oldest suit she had and a simple blouse with a gay red tie. With one sharp glance at Eleanore, she took in the strained situation and set about to ease it.

“What a nice old fireplace,” she exclaimed. “Let's turn down the lights and draw 'round the fire. You need more chairs, Joe; go down and get some.”

And soon with the lights turned low and the coals stirred into a ruddy glow, we were sitting in quite a dramatic place, the scene was set for “revolution.” The curtainless windows were no longer bleak, for through them from the now darkened room we looked out on the lights of the harbor. Sue thought the view thrilling, and equally thrilling she found the last issue of Joe's weekly paper,
War Sure
, which lay on the table. It was called “Our Special Sabotage Number,” and in it various stokers and dockers, in response to an appeal from Joe, had crudely written their ideas upon just how the engines of a ship or the hoisting winches on a dock could be most effectively put out of order in time of strike. “So that the scabs,” wrote one contributor, “can see how they like it.”