Harbor (9781101565681) (41 page)

These tragic people gripped me hard. The stokers down in their foul hole in the bottom of the ship had only disturbed and repelled me. But these crippled dockers in their homes, with their women and their children, their shattered lives, their agony, starvation looming up ahead—they brought a tightening at my throat—nor was it all of pity. For these labor victims were not dumb, I heard the word “strike!” spoken bitterly here, and now I felt that they had a right to this bitter passion of revolt.

But still I felt their way was wrong. How could any real good, any sure intelligent remedies for all this fearful misery, come out of the minds of such people as these, who were rushing so blindly into revolt? I went into saloons full of dockers and stokers, and out of the low harsh hubbub there the word “strike!” came repeatedly to my ears, recklessly from drunken tongues. Wherever I went I heard that word. I heard it spoken in many languages, in many tones. Anxious old women said “strike!” with fear. Little street urchins shouted it joyously. Even the greenest foreigner understood its meaning. A little Greek, who had broken his arm and was one of the cases I traced home, understood none of my questions. “You speak no English?” He shook his head. “Strike!” I ventured. Up he leaped. “Yo' bet!” he cried emphatically.

What was it deep within me that leaped up then as though to meet that burning passion in his eyes?

“Keep your head,” I warned myself. “To change all this means years of work—thinking of the clearest kind. And what clear thinking can these men do? The ships have got them down so low they've no minds left to get out of their holes!”

And yet—as now on every dock, that “strike feeling” in the air kept growing tenser, tenser—its tensity crept into me. What was it that lay just ahead? I felt like a man starting out on a journey—a journey from which when he comes back he will find nothing quite the same.

I had a talk about the strike one day with Eleanore's father. I can still see the affectionate smile on his face, he looked as though he were seeing me off.

“My dear boy,” he said, in his kind quiet voice, “don't forget for even a minute that the men who stand behind my work are going to stamp out this strike. This modern world is too complex to allow brute force and violence to wreck all that civilization has done. I'm sorry you've gone into this—but so long as you have, as Eleanore's father, I want you now to promise you won't write a line until the strike is over and you have had plenty of time to get clear. Don't let yourself get swamped in this—remember that you have a wife and a small son to think of.”

My father had put it more sharply. He was out of bed now and he seemed to take strength from the news reports that he eagerly read of the struggle so fast approaching.

“At sea,” he said, “when stokers try to quit their jobs and force their way on deck, they're either put in irons or shot down as mutineers. You'll see your friend Kramer dead or in jail. No danger to your sister now. Only see that
you
keep out of it!”

I did not tell him of my work, for I knew it would only excite him again, and excitement would be dangerous.

“Now you and Eleanore must go home,” said Sue that night. “You'll have enough to think of. I'll be all right with father—he knows there's nothing to do but wait, and he's so kind to me now that it hurts. Poor old Dad—how well he means. But he's the old and we're the new—and that's the whole trouble between us.” A sudden light came in her eyes. “The new are bound to win!” she said.

But I was not so sure of the new. To me it was still very vague and chaotic. After we had moved back to New York, at the times when I came home to sleep, Eleanore was silent or quietly casual in her remarks, but I felt her always watching me. One night when I came in very late and thought her asleep, being too tired to sleep myself, I went to our bedroom window and stood looking off down into the distant expanse of the harbor. How quiet and cool it seemed down there. But presently out of the darkness behind, Eleanore's arm came around me.

“I wonder whether the harbor will ever let us alone,” she said. “It was so good to us at first—we were getting on so splendidly. But it's taking hold of us now again—as though we had wandered too far away and were living too smoothly and needed a jolt. Never mind, we're not afraid. Only let's be very sure we know what we are doing.”

“We'll be very sure,” I whispered, and I held her very close.

“Let's try to be sure together,” she said. “Don't leave me out—I want to be in. I want to see as much as I can—and help in any way I can. If you make any friends I want to know them. Remember that whatever comes, thy people shall be mine, my dear.”

 

The next day the strike began.

Out of the docks at nine in the morning I saw dockers pour in crowds. They moved on to other docks, merged themselves in other crowds, scattered here and gathered there, until at last a black tide of men, here straggling wide, here densely massed, moved slowly along the waterfront.

In and out of these surging throngs I moved, so close that in the quiver of muscles, the excited movements of big limbs, the rough eagerness of voices that spoke in a babel of many tongues, such a storm of emotions beat in upon me that I felt I had suddenly dived into an ocean of human beings, each one of whom was as human as I. I caught a glimpse of Joe hurrying by. And I thought of Sue, and of Joe's appeal to her and to me to throw in our lives with such strangers as these whose coarse heavy faces were pressing so close. And I thought of Eleanore at home. “Thy people shall be mine, my dear.”

Teamsters drove clattering trucks through the crowds. Some of them did not unload, but others dumped piles of freight by the docks. The dam had begun. All day long the freight piled up, and by evening the light of a pale moon shone down upon acres of barrels and boxes. Then the teamsters unharnessed their teams, left the empty trucks with poles in air, and the teamsters and their horses and all the crowds of strikers scattered by degrees up into the tenement regions. Bursts of laughter and singing came now and then out of the saloons.

Silence settled down over the docks. Walking now down the waterfront I met only a figure here and there. A taxi came tearing and screeching by, and later down the long empty space came a single wagon slowly. A smoky lantern swung under its wheels, and its old white horse with his shaggy head down came plodding wearily along. He alone had no strike feeling.

Battered and worn from the day's impressions I wanted to be alone and to think. I made my way in and out among trucks and around a dockshed out to a slip. It was filled with barges, tugs and floats jammed in between the two big vessels that loomed one at either pier. It was a dark jumble of spars and masts, derricks, funnels and cabin roofs, all shadowy and silent. A single light gleamed here and there from the long dark deck of the Morgan coaster close to my right. She was heavily loaded still, for she had come to dock too late. Smoke still drifted from her stout funnel, steam puffed now and then from her side. Behind her, reaching a mile to the North, were ships by the dozen, coasters and great ocean liners, loaded and waiting to discharge or empty and waiting to reload. And to the South were miles of railroad sheds already packed to bursting. I thought of the trains from all over the land still rushing a nation's produce here, and of the starlit ocean roads, of ships coming from all over the world, the men in their fiery caverns below feeding faster the fires to quicken their speed, all bringing cargoes to this port. More barrels, boxes, crates and bags to be piled high up on the waterfront. For the workers had gone away from their work, and the great white ships were still.

“What has all this to do with me?”

There came into my mind the picture of a little man I had seen that day, a suburban commuter by his looks, frowning from a ferryboat upon a cheering crowd of strikers. I laughed to myself as I thought of him. He had seemed so ludicrously small.

“Yes, my friend,” I thought, “you and I are a couple of two-spots here, swallowed up in the scenery.”

I thought of what Joe had said that day: “When you see the crowd, in a strike like this, loosen up and show all it could be if it had the chance—that sight is so big it blots you out—you sink—you melt into the crowd.”

Something like that happened to me. I had seen the multitudes “loosen up,” I had felt myself melt into the crowd. But I had not seen what they could be nor did I see what they could do. Far to the south, high over all the squalid tenement dwellings, rose that tower of lights I had known so well, the airy place where Eleanore's father had dreamed and planned his clean vigorous world. It was lighted to-night as usual, as though nothing whatever had happened. I thought of the men I had seen that day. How crassly ignorant they seemed. And yet in a few brief hours they had paralyzed all that the tower had planned, reduced it all to silence, nothing. Could it be that such upheavals as these meant an end to the rule of the world from above, by the keen minds of the men at the top? Was that great idol which had been mine for so many glad years, that last of my gods, Efficiency, beginning to rock a little now upon its deep foundations?

What could these men ever put in its place? I recalled the words of an old dock watchman with whom I had talked the evening before. From the days of the Knights of Labor he had been through many strikes, and all had failed, he told me. His dog sat there beside him, a solemn old red spaniel, looking wistfully into his master's face. And with somewhat the same expression, looking out on the moonlit Hudson, the old striker had said slowly:

“Before these labor leaders will do half of what they say—a pile of water will have to go by.”

A sharp slight sound behind me jerked me suddenly out of my thoughts. I jumped as though at a shot. How infernally tight my nerves were getting. The sound had come from a mere piece of paper blown by the wind—a rough salt wind which now blew in from the ocean as though impatient of all this stillness. From below came a lapping and slapping of waves. Above me a derrick mast growled and whined as it rocked. And now as I looked about me all those densely crowded derricks moved to and fro against the sky. I had never felt in this watery world such deep restlessness as now.

“I wonder if you'll ever stop heaving,” I thought half angrily. “I wonder what I'll be like when you finally get through with me. When will you ever let me stand pat and get things settled for good and all? When stop this endless starting out?”

What could such men as these raise up in place of the mighty life they had stilled?

At first only chaos.

As I went along the waterfront I felt a confused disappointment. Deep under all my questioning there had been a vague subconscious hope that I would see a miracle here. I had looked for an army. I saw only mobs of angry men. They were “picketing” the docks, here making furious rushes at men suspected of being “scabs,” there clustering quickly around some talker or some man who was reading a paper, again drifting up into the streets of teeming foreign quarters, jamming into barrooms, voicing wildest rumors, talking, shouting, pounding tables with huge fists. And to me there was nothing inspiring but only something terrible here, an appalling force turned loose, sightless and unguided. What a fool I had been to hope. The harbor held no miracles.

The strike leaders seemed to have little control. Headquarters were in the wildest disorder. Into the big bare meeting hall and through the rooms adjoining drifted multitudes of men. There were no inner private rooms and Marsh saw everyone who came. He was constantly shaking hands or drawling casual orders, more like suggestions than commands. I caught sight of Joe Kramer's face at his desk, where he was signing and giving out union cards to a changing throng that kept pressing around him. Joe's face was set and haggard. He had been at that desk all night.

“It's hopeless. They can do nothing,” I thought.

But when I came back the next morning I felt a sudden shock of surprise. For in some mysterious fashion a crude order had appeared. The striker throng had poured into the hall, filled all the seats and then wedged in around the walls. They were silent and attentive now. On the stage sat Marsh and his fellow leaders. Before them in the first three rows of seats was the Central Committee, a rough parliament sprung up over night. Each member, I found, had been elected the night before by his “district committee.” These district bodies had somehow formed in the last two days and in them leaders had arisen. The leaders were here to plan together, the mass was here to make sure they planned right. And watching the deep rough eagerness on all those silent faces, that vague hope stirred again in my breast.

Presently I caught Joe's eye. At once he left his platform seat and came to me in the rear of the hall.

“Come on, Bill,” he said. “We want you up here.” And we made our way up to the platform. There Marsh reached over and gripped my hand.

“Hello, Bill, glad you're with us,” he said. I tingled slightly at his tone and at a thousand friendly eyes that met mine for an instant. Then it was over. The work went on.

What they did at first seemed haphazard enough. Reports from the districts were being read with frequent interruptions, petty corrections and useless discussions that strayed from the point and made me impatient. And yet wide vistas opened here. Telegrams by the dozen were read from labor unions all over the country, from groups of socialists East and West, there were cables from England, Germany, France, from Russia, Poland, Norway, from Italy, Spain and even Japan. “Greetings to our comrades!” came pouring in from all over the earth. What measureless army of labor was this? All at once the dense mass in the rear would part to let a new body of men march through. These were new strikers to swell the ranks, and at their coming all business would stop, there would be wild cheers and stamping of feet, shrill whistles, pandemonium!