Harbor (9781101565681) (9 page)

“With the harbor.” I felt her hand slowly tighten on mine. Then all at once as we heard the first low grumble of the freight train coming, my mother's hold grew tighter and tighter. “Open your eyes.” I opened them quickly, for her voice was sharp and stern. She held me until the sound was gone.

“Do you hear it any longer?” she asked quietly at last.

“No,” I whispered. My breath still came fast.

“Neither do I.” There was another silence. “Let's go and sit by the window,” she said.

And there she talked to me of the stars. How great they were and how very quiet. She said that the greatest men in the world were almost always quiet like that. They never let their hands get cold.

Often after that in the evenings just before I went to bed we had these talks about the stars. And not only in the mountains. On sparkling frosty winter nights we watched them over the harbor. And the things she said about them were so utterly absorbing that I would never think to look down, would barely hear the toots and the puffings and grinding of wheels from that infernal region below. For always when she spoke of the stars my mother spoke of great men too, the men who had done the “finest” things—a few in the clash and jar of life like Washington and Lincoln, but most of them more quietly, by preaching, writing, painting, composing, sermons, books, pictures and music so “fine” that all the best people on earth had known about them and loved them.

As I grew older she read to me more and more about these men. And sometimes I would feel deeply content as though I had found what I wanted. But more often I would feel myself swell up big inside of me, restless, worrying, groping for something. I didn't know what I wanted then, but I do know now as I look back, and I think there are thousands of children like me, the kind who are called “queer kids” by their playmates, who are all groping for much the same thing.

“Where is the Golden Age to-day?” they are asking. “We hear of all this from our mothers. We hear of brave knights and warriors, of God and Christ as they walked around on earth like regular people, of saints and preachers, writers and painters. But where are the great men living now? Not in our house nor on our street, nor in school nor in our church on the corner. There is nothing there that thrills us. Why isn't there? What is the matter? We are no longer babies, we are becoming big boys and girls. What will we do when we are grown up? Has everything fine already been done? Is there no chance for us to be great and to do them?”

It was to questionings like these that my mother had led me up from the harbor.

And to such questionings I believe that for many children of my kind there is often some familiar place—a schoolroom or a commonplace street, or a dreary farm in winter, a grimy row of factories or the ugly mouth of a mine—that mutely answers,

“No. There are no more great men for you, nor any fine things left to be done. There is nothing else left in the world but me. And you'd better stop trying to find it.”

In my case this message came from the harbor, that one part of the modern world which looked up at me steadily day after day. Vaguely struggle as I would to build up fine things in the present from all that my mother brought out of the past, the harbor would not let me. For what I clothed it soon stripped naked, what I built it soon tore down.

“When you were little,” it seemed to say, “for you I was filled with thrilling idols—cannibals and condors, Sam, strange wonder-ships and sailors adventuring to heathen lands. But then I dragged these idols down and made you see me as I am. And as I showed myself to you, so I'll show up all other wonderful places or men that your mother would have you believe in.”

It did this, as I remember it, in the easiest most trivial ways, like some huge beast that flicks off a fly and then lumbers unconcernedly on.

My mother by years of patient work had built up my religion, filling it with the grand figures of God and Christ and his followers down to the present time, ending with Henry Ward Beecher. When this man died I felt awe at her silent grief. All at once the idea popped into my head that I too might become a great preacher. And still greater, I soon learned, I might become a preacher who went far off to heathen lands, braving cannibals and death and giving to thousands of heathen eternal happiness and life. Our church was sending out such a man. I heard him described as a hero of God, and I thought of pictures I had seen of saints and martyrs with soft haloes around their heads.

But this hero of God came down to the harbor. He was to sail for China from my father's dock. He wore, I remember, a brown derby hat and a little top coat. He was thin, with stooping shoulders, he was flustered in the excitement of leaving, nervously laughing as he shook hands with admiring women and talking fast in his high jerky voice. Two big dockers trundled his trunks. I saw them grin at the little man and spit tobacco juice his way. My father came by, shot one contemptuous glance, and then went on board to his business. I looked back at the hero. Off fell the halo from his head.

“No,” I said gloomily to myself, “I never want to be like you.” And drearily I looked around. What heaps and heaps of business here. What an immense gray harbor. I found no more thrills in church after that.

And as with religion, so with love. In reading of men of the Golden Age I came upon stories of high romance that made me strangely happy. But I saw no love of this kind in our house. I saw my mother and father living sharply separate lives, and I saw few kisses between them. I saw my father absorbed in his business, with little time for my mother. And I blamed this on the harbor. Long ago the same grim place had taught me something else about this many-sided passion between men and women, and one day it rose suddenly up in my mind:

I must have been about fifteen when my little friend Eleanore Dillon came back. Soon she and Sue were intimate chums, they went to school together. My mother invited her up to the mountains, and there I was with her a good deal. She was now nearly twelve years old, and the life in the West with her father had left her sturdy as you please. And yet somehow she still seemed to me the same feminine little creature, and as she told me stories of the life out West, where her father, who was an engineer, had built bridges, planned out harbors and new cities, I would wonder vaguely about her. What a fresh, clean little person to be talking of such places.

She was talking to me in this way one drowsy August afternoon. We had been fishing down on the river, and now on our way home up the long hot slope of the meadow we had stopped to cool ourselves in the shadow of a haystack. It was fragrant there. Presently, from the top of the stack close over our heads, a bird poured forth a ravishing song. And Eleanore with a deep “Oh-h” of delight threw both her hands behind her head, sank back in the hay and lay there close beside me. Her eyes were shut and she was smiling to herself. Then as the song of the bird bubbled on, I felt suddenly a little shock, a new disturbing feeling. Breathlessly I watched her face. The song stopped and Eleanore opened her eyes, met mine, and closed them quickly. I saw a slight tightening of her features. I grew anxious at once and awkward. I wanted to get away.

But as I made a first uneasy movement, a bit of bright color caught my eye. It was one of her red garters which had slipped down from beneath her skirt. And all at once out of my memory rose a picture of years ago, a picture from the harbor, of that fat drunken girl I had seen. She too had worn red garters—in fact, little else! With disgusting vividness up she came! And I jumped trembling to my feet.

“I'm going home,” I said roughly, and left my small companion.

I kept away from her after that. And even the following winter, when she came over often to our house to spend the night with Sue, I did my best to avoid her. I avoided all Sue's friends. I did not keep girls quite out of my thoughts, I had spells now and then when I would read about them in novels, papers and magazines, anything I could lay hands on. I would read hungrily, at times almost wistfully. But all the stories that I read, however romantic, could never quite overbalance for me that giggling woman I had seen.

“This is what love can be these days, foul as two pigs in a sty,” said the harbor.

The same thing happened again with war and the great idea of giving one's life for one's country.

By countless eager questionings I had forced my mother to include among our heroes men like Napoleon, Nelson and Grant, and after I gave up hopes of the church these men for a time became greatest of all. You needed no mother to help you here. It was the easiest thing in the world to picture yourself leading charges or standing high up on a hill like Grant, quietly smoking a black cigar and sending your orderlies on the mad gallop out to all corners of the field. My hill grew very real to me. It had three wind-swept trees on top and I stood just in front of them.

When the war with Spain broke out I was still in my 'teens, still rather thin and by no means tall, but I made up my mind to try to enlist. Even now I can shut my eyes and see again that long night on the docks when I watched two regiments embark on ships which were to sail at dawn. With the uniforms, the crash of bands, the flags, the cheers, the women laughing and crying, the harbor seemed all on my side that night.

“This is certainly what I want!” I thought.

But my father forbade my going. He was not only stern, he was savage. For once he came out of himself and talked. And his talk was not only against this war but against all wars. The Civil War was the worst of all. This was the more a surprise to me because I knew that he himself had been with the Boys of Sixty One, I had often boasted about it. But now I learned he had not fought at all, he had been a mere commissary clerk moving rations and blankets on freight trains!

“The business side of war,” he said. “And when you've seen that side of it you know how rotten a big war is! Men in the North made millions by sending such rotten meat to the front that we had to live on the people down South, we had to go into their farms and plantations and plunder defenseless women and children of all they had to eat! That's war! And war is filthy stinking camps where men die of fever and scurvy like flies—and war is field hospitals so rotten in their management that you see the wounded in long lines—packed together like bloody sardines—bleeding to death for the lack of care! When they're dead you dig big trenches and you pile 'em in like dogs! In time of war remember peace—and then you'll be ashamed you're there!”

For a moment I was struck dumb with surprise. What was this strange fire deep down within my father's soul that could give out such a flash? Confusedly I wondered. A sudden idea crossed my mind.

“But if that's how you feel,” I retorted, “why are you always talking about the battleships we need? You want a big navy——”

“Yes,” he snapped, “to keep this country
out
of war! If you live long enough you'll see what I mean—remember then what I'm telling you! This country needs a navy so big she can trade wherever she likes and make other nations leave her alone! But she doesn't want war! Sixty One was enough! Some day when you get a man's eyes in your head you'll see what that did to this harbor!”

I had it now, the cause of all his curious wrath! War had hurt his harbor! How or why I did not care. Could this harbor of his stand nothing heroic? Patriotism, religion, love—must they all be shoved aside to make way for his dull business?

 

About a year later I was torn for months between two careers. Should I become a great musician or a famous writer? The idea of writing came to me first, I got it from “Pendennis,” and for a time it took hold so hard I thought I was nicely settled for life. But then my mother read aloud “The Lives of Great Musicians,” and within a few weeks the piano lessons which for years I had thought so dull became an absorbing passion. My mother bought me a photograph of one of the Beethoven portraits, and around it over my desk I tacked up pictures of famous pianists that I cut from magazines. I went to concerts in New York. Better still, my teacher secured me admittance to some orchestra rehearsals, where like a real professional, all mere amateurs shut out, I could sit in the dark and listen, and shut my eyes and hold my head between my hands. I was composing! After a month or two of this feverish life I remember the pride with which I wrote “Opus 38” over my last composition. My rapidity was astounding!

But one day my teacher, a kind tactful German, told me that Beethoven, when he was composing, had not always shut himself up in a room and scowled with both hands to his head, as in the portrait of him I had, but had rather gone out into the world.

“The Master found his music,” he said, “by listening to the life close around him.”

“He did?” I became uneasy at once, for again I felt myself being pushed toward that eternal harbor.

“If I were you,” my relentless monitor went on, “and desired to become in music the great voice of my country”—I looked at him quickly but saw no smile—“I should watch the great ships down there below, I should listen to them with an artist's ears. They are here from all over the world, these ships, they are manned by men of all nations. I should listen to the songs of these men. I have heard,” he added reflectively, “that some of their songs are centuries old. Beethoven gathered only the folk songs of his country. But you in your city of all nations might gather the folk songs of all the seas.”

I turned quickly. I had been walking the room.

“I have heard the sailors sing,” I said, “ever since I was a little kid out there in the garden.” I scowled in the effort to search my soul, my artist's soul. “Yes,” I added triumphantly, “and sometimes it brought a lump in my throat!”