Harbor (9781101565681) (48 page)

He must have caught the look in my eyes.

“You're thinking that I'm getting old,” he said softly. “I and all the men like me who have been building up this country. You're thinking that we're all following on after your father into the past.” As I looked back I felt suddenly humble. Dillon's voice grew appealing and kind. “But you belong with us, Billy,” he said. “It was under us you won your start. And what I want now,” he added, “is not only for Eleanore's sake, but your own. I want you to try to write again about all the work we are doing and see what it will do for you. Why not give it another chance? You're not afraid of it, are you?”

“No,” I said, “I'm not afraid—and I'll give it another chance if you like—I don't want to be narrow about it, God knows. But before I tackle anything else I'll finish my story of the strike.”

“All right,” he agreed. “That's all I ask. Now suppose you take Eleanore up to the mountains and write your strike article up there. Let me loan you a little just at the start.”

“How much money have
you
in the bank?”

“Enough to send Eleanore where she belongs.”

“Eleanore belongs right here,” said a voice from the other room, and presently Eleanore appeared. She surveyed us both with a scorn in her eyes that made us quake a little. “I never heard,” she went on calmly, “of anything quite so idiotic. Go home, Dad, and go to bed, and please drop this insane idea that I'm afraid of July in New York, or of August or September. Do you know what you're going to do to-morrow, both of you poor foolish boys? You're going sensibly to work and worry about nothing at all. And to-morrow night we're all three of us going to forget how it feels to work or think, and get on an open trolley and go down and hear Harry Lauder. Thank Heaven he happens to be in town. To hear you talk you'd think the whole American people had forgotten how to laugh.

“Now Billy,” she ended smoothly, “go to the icebox and get two bottles of nice cool beer—and make me a tall glass of lemonade. And don't use too much sugar.”

The next day and the next evening Eleanore's program was carried out. But after that night the laughing stopped. For Joe Kramer was coming to trial.

I had not seen Joe for over two weeks, and I had taken his view of his case, that there was no serious danger. But now I learned from a good source that Joe and both his colleagues were to be brought to trial at once, while the public feeling was still hot against them. As the time of the trials drew near every paper in town took up the cry. Let these men be settled once and for all, they demanded. Let them not be set free for other strikes, for wholesale murder and pillage. Let them pay the full penalty for their crimes!

In the face of this storm, I found myself on Joe's defense committee, the best part of my time each day and evening taken up with raising money, helping to find witnesses and doing the press work for parades and big mass meetings of labor.

Through this work, in odd hours, I finished my story of the strike. It all came back to me vividly now and I tried to tell what I had seen. I took it to my editor.

“Print that?” he said when he'd read it. “You're mad.”

“It's the truth,” I remarked.

“As you see it,” he said. “And you've seen it only from one side. If this story had been written and signed by Marsh or your friend Kramer, we might have run it, with a reply from the companies. But I don't want to see
you
stand for this—in our magazine or anywhere else—it means too much to you as a writer. Look out, my boy,” he added, with a return to the old brusque kindliness which he had always shown me in the years I had worked under him. “We think a lot of you in this office. For God's sake don't lose your head. Don't be one more good reporter spoiled.”

I took my story of the strike to every editor I knew, and it was rejected by each in turn. They thought it all on the side of the crowd, an open plea for revolution. Then I took it to Joe in the Tombs.

“Will you sign this, Joe?” I asked, when he had read it.

“No,” he replied. “It's too damn mild. You've given too much to the other side. All these bouquets to efficiency and all this about the weak points of the crowd. The average stoker reading this would think that the revolution won't come till we are all white-haired.”

“I don't believe it will,” I said.

“I know you don't. That's why you're no good to us,” he said. “We want our stuff written by men who are sure that a big revolution is just ahead, men who are certain that a strike, to take in half the civilized world, is coming in the next ten years.”

“I don't believe that.”

“I know. You can't. You're still too soaked in the point of view of your efficiency father-in-law.”

“So you don't feel you can sign this?”

“No.”

That day I sent my story to a small magazine in New England, which from the time of the Civil War had retained its traditions of breadth of view. Within a week the editor wrote that he would be glad to publish it. “Our modest honorarium will follow shortly,” he said at the end. The modest honorarium did. Meanwhile I had sent him a sketch of Nora Ganey which I had written just after the strike. I received a letter equally kind, and another honorarium. I began to see a future of modest honoraria.

In the meantime, to meet our expenses at home, I had borrowed money and given my note. And the note would soon fall due. Those were far from pleasant days. On the one side Joe in his cell waiting to be tried for his life; on the other, Eleanore at home waiting for a new life to be born. By a lucky chance for me, Joe's trial was again postponed, so I could return to my own affairs. I had to have some money quick. I went back to my magazine editor and asked for a job in his office.

“I'm ready now to be sane,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” he replied. “I'll give you a steady routine job where you can grind till you get yourself right.”

“Till I get back where I was, you mean?”

“Yes, if you can,” he answered.

I went for a walk that afternoon to think over the proposition he'd made.

“I have seen three harbors,” I said to myself. “My father's harbor which is now dead, Dillon's harbor of big companies which is very much alive, and Joe Kramer's harbor which is struggling to be born. It's an interesting age to live in. I should like to write the truth as I see it about each kind of harbor. But I need the money—my wife is going to have a child. So I'll take that steady position and try to grind part of the truth away.”

 

“What have you been doing?” Eleanore asked when I came home. “You look like a ghost.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “I've been getting a job.”

“Tell me about it.”

I told her part. She went and got her sewing, and settled herself comfortably for a quiet evening's work. Eleanore loved baby clothes.

“Now begin again and tell me all,” she ordered. And she persisted until I did.

“It won't do,” she said, when I had finished.

“It will do,” I replied decidedly. “It's the best thing in sight. It will see us through till the baby is born. After all, it's only for a year.”

“It's a mighty important year for you, my love,” said Eleanore. She thoughtfully held up and surveyed a tiny infant's nightgown. “If you do this you'll be giving up. It's not writing your best. It's giving up what you think is the truth. And that's a bad habit to get into.”

“It's settled now. Please leave it alone.”

“Oh very well,” she said placidly. “Let's talk of what I've been doing.”

“What
you've
been doing?”

“Precisely. I've taken a little apartment downtown, over by the river. The rent is twenty-eight dollars a month. It's on the top floor and has plenty of air, and there's a nice roof for hot summer evenings. You're to carry two wicker chairs up there each night after supper.”

“I'll do nothing of the kind,” I rejoined indignantly. “You're going to pack up at once and go to the mountains! And when you come back you're coming right here!”

“Oh no I'm not,” she answered.

“Don't be an idiot, Eleanore! Think of moving out of here now! In your condition!”

“It's better than moving out of your work. Dad has kept right on with his, even when they stopped his pay. Well, now they've stopped your pay, that's all, and we've got to do the best we can. We've simply got to live for a while on modest honorariums. Now don't talk, wait till I get through. You've got to work harder than ever before but for much less money. But with less money than before we're going to be happier than we've ever been in all our lives. And you can't do a thing to stop it. If you do take that office work and bring a lot of money home, do you know what I'll do? I'll move to that little flat just the same, and all the extra money you bring will go to Mrs. Bealey.”

“Who in God's name is Mrs. Bealey?”

“One of my oldest charity cases. She was here this afternoon. The trouble with you is, my dear,” my wife continued smoothly, “that you've been so wrapped up in your own little changes you haven't given a thought to mine. Well, I've done some changing, too. Every time that Sue or you have taken up a new idea I've taken up a Mrs. Bealey. I did the same thing in the strike. I went with Nora Ganey into the very poorest of all the tenements down by the docks. I saw the very worst of it all—and I tried to do what I could to help. But I felt like a drop in the ocean. And that's how I've changed. Things are so wrong in the tenements that big reforms are needed. I don't know what they are and I'm not sure anyone else does. But I'm sure that if any reforms worth while are to be made, we've got to see just where we are. And that means that quite a number of people—you for instance—have got to tell the truth exactly as they see it. So I'd rather put our money in that and let old Mrs. Bealey forget our address. That's another reason for moving.

“There's nothing noble about it at all,” she said as she threaded her needle. “I mean to be perfectly comfortable. I saw this coming long ago, and since the strike was over I've spent weeks picking out a nice place where we can get the most for our money. About thirty thousand babies, I'm told, are to be born in the city this summer—and their mothers aren't going first to the mountains or even for a walk in the Park. I don't see why I shouldn't be one. As a matter of fact I won't be one, my baby won't be born until Fall, and I'll have a clean, comfortable flat with one maid instead of a dirty tenement with all the cooking and washing to do. You'll probably find magazines who'll pay enough honorariums to make a hundred dollars a month, which is just about three times as much as Mrs. Bealey lives on. So that's settled and we move this week.”

We moved that week.

One night about a month later, when we had ensconced ourselves for the evening out on the roof of our new home, where the summer's night was cooled by a slight breeze from the river, our maid came up and told me there was a strange gentleman below. I went down and brought him up, I was deeply pleased and excited. For he was the English novelist whom I most admired these days. He had come to me during the strike and had been deeply interested in the great crowd spirit I had found. He was going back to England now.

“I'm curious,” he told me, “to see how much your striker friends have kept of what they got in the strike—what new ideas and points of view. How much are they really changed? That, I should think, is by far the most valuable part of it all.”

“It's just what I've been trying to find out for myself,” I replied.

“Really? Will you tell me?”

I told him how on docks, on tugs and barges, in barrooms and in tenements, I was having talks with various types of men who had been strikers, how I was finding some dull and hopeless, others bitter, but more who simply felt that they had bungled this first attempt and were already looking forward to more and greater struggles. The socialists among them were already hard at work, urging them to carry their strike on into the political field, vote together in one solid mass and build up a government all their own. Through this ceaseless ferment I had gone in search of significant characters, incidents, new points of view. I was writing brief sketches of it all.

“How did you feel about all this,” the Englishman asked, “before you were drawn into the strike?” And turning from me to Eleanore, “And you?” he added.

Gradually he got the stories of our lives. I told how all my life I had been raising up gods to worship, and how the harbor had flowed silently in beneath, undermining each one and bringing it down.

“It seems to have such a habit of changing,” I ended, “that it won't let a fellow stop.”

“Lucky people,” he answered, smiling, “to have found that out so soon—to have had all this modern life condensed so cozily into your harbor before your eyes—and to have discovered, while you are still young, that life is growth and growth is change. I believe the age we live in is changing so much faster than any age before it, that a man if he's to be vital at all must give up the idea of any fixed creed—in his office, his church or his home—that if he does not, he will only wear himself out butting his indignant head against what is stronger and probably better than he. But if he does, if he holds himself open to change and knows that change is his very life, then he can get a serenity which is as much better than that of the monk as living is better than dying.”