CHAPTER I

Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Woodie4 and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced

from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American

Libraries.)

THE HARBOR

THE HARBOR

BY

ERNEST POOLE

[Illustration: Publishers mark]

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with The Macmillan Company.

COPYRIGHT, 1915,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1915 Reprinted February,

1915 Twice. March, 1915 Three Times. April, 1915 Twice May, 1915. Twice

June, 1915. Twice July, 1915. August, 1915. September, October,

November, December, 1915. January, 1916. March, 1916

_TO M. A._

THE HARBOR

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

"You chump," I thought contemptuously. I was seven years old at the

time, and the gentleman to whom I referred was Henry Ward Beecher. What

it was that aroused my contempt for the man will be more fully

understood if I tell first of the grudge that I bore him.

I was sitting in my mother's pew in the old church in Brooklyn. I was

altogether too small for the pew, it was much too wide for the bend at

my knees; and my legs, which were very short and fat, stuck straight out

before me. I was not allowed to move, I was most uncomfortable, and for

this Sabbath torture I laid all the blame on the preacher. For my mother

had once told me that I was brought to church so small in order that

when I grew up I could say I had heard the great man preach before he

died. Hence the deep grudge that I bore him. Sitting here this morning,

it seemed to me for hours and hours, I had been meditating upon my hard

lot. From time to time, as was my habit when thinking or feeling deeply,

one hand would unconsciously go to my head and slowly stroke my bang. My

hair was short and had no curls, its only glory was this bang, which was

deliciously soft to my hand and shone like a mirror from much reflective

stroking. Presently my mother would notice and with a smile she would

put down my hand, but a few moments later up it would come and would

continue its stroking. For I felt both abused and puzzled. What was

there in the talk of the large white-haired old man in the pulpit to

make my mother's eyes so queer, to make her sit so stiff and still? What

good would it do me when I grew up to say that I had heard him?

"I don't believe I will ever say it," I reasoned doggedly to myself.

"And even if I do, I don't believe any other man will care whether I say

it to him or not." I felt sure my father wouldn't. He never even came to

church.

At the thought of my strange silent father, my mind leaped to his

warehouse, his dock, the ships and the harbor. Like him, they were all

so strange. And my hands grew a little cold and moist as I thought of

the terribly risky thing I had planned to do all by myself that very

afternoon. I thought about it for a long time with my eyes tight shut.

Then the voice of the minister brought me back, I found myself sitting

here in church and went on with this less shivery thinking.

"I wouldn't care myself," I decided. "If I were a man and another man

met me on the street and said, 'Look here. When I was a boy I heard

Henry Ward Beecher before he died,' I guess I would just say to him,

'You mind your business and I'll mind mine.'" This phrase I had heard

from the corner grocer, and I liked the sound of it. I repeated it now

with an added zest.

Again I opened my eyes and again I found myself here in church. Still

here. I heaved a weary sigh.

"If you were dead already," I thought as I looked up at the preacher,

"my mother wouldn't bring me here." I found this an exceedingly cheering

thought. I had once overheard our cook Anny describe how her old father

had dropped dead. I eyed the old minister hopefully.

But what was this he was saying! Something about "the harbor of life."

The harbor! In an instant I was listening hard, for this was something I

knew about.

"Safe into the harbor," I heard him say. "Home to the harbor at last to

rest." And then, while he passed on to something else, something I

_didn't_ know about, I settled disgustedly back in the pew.

"You chump," I thought contemptuously. To hear him talk you would have

thought the harbor was a place to feel quite safe in, a place to snuggle

down in, a nice little place to come home to at night. "I guess he has

never seen it much," I snorted.

For I had. From our narrow brownstone house on the Heights, ever since I

could remember (and let me tell you that seems a long time when you are

seven years old), I had looked down from our back windows upon a harbor

that to me was strange and terrible.

I was glad that our house was up so high. Its front was on a sedate old

street, and within it everything felt safe. My mother was here, and Sue,

my little sister, and old Belle, our nurse, our nursery, my games, my

animals, my fairy books, the small red table where I ate my supper, and

the warm fur rug by my bed, where I knelt for "Now I lay me."

But from the porch at the back of our house you went three steps down to

a long narrow garden--at least the garden seemed long to me--and if you

walked to the end of the garden and peered through the ivy-covered bars

of the fence, as I had done when I was so little that I could barely

walk alone, you had the first mighty thrill of your life. For you found

that through a hole in the ivy you could see a shivery distance straight

down through the air to a street below. You found that the two iron

posts, one at either end of the fence, were warm when you touched them,

had holes in the top, had smoke coming out--were chimneys! And slowly it

dawned upon your mind that this garden of yours was nothing at all but

the roof of a gray old building--which your nurse told you vaguely had

been a "warehouse" long ago when the waters of the harbor had come 'way

in to the street below. The old "wharves" had been down there, she said.

What was a "wharf?" It was a "dock," she told me. And she said that a

family of "dockers" lived in the building under our garden. They were

all that was left in it now but "old junk." Who was Old Junk, a man or a

woman? And what in the world were Dockers?

Pursuing my adventurous ways, I found at one place in the garden, hidden

by flowers near a side wall, a large heavy lid which was painted brown

and felt like tin. But how much heavier than tin. Tug as I might, I

could not budge it. Then I found it had an iron hook and was hooked down

tight to the garden. Yes, it was true, our whole garden was a roof! I

put my ear down to the lid and listened scowling, both eyes shut. I

heard nothing then, but I came back and tried it many times, until once

I jumped up and ran like mad. For faintly from somewhere deep down under

the flower beds I had heard a baby crying! What was this baby, a Junk or

a Docker? And who were these people who lived under flowers? To me they

sounded suspiciously like the goblins in my goblin book. Once when I was

sick in bed, Sue came shrieking into the house and said that a giant had

heaved up that great lid from below. Up had come his shaggy head, his

dirty face, his rolling eyes, and he had laughed and laughed at the

flowers. He was a drunken man, our old nurse Belle had told her, but Sue

was sure he was a giant.

"You are wrong," I said with dignity. "He is either a Junk or a Docker."

The lid was spiked down after that, and our visitor never appeared

again. But I saw him vividly in my mind's eye--his shaggy wild head

rising up among our flowers. Vaguely I felt that he came from the

harbor.

As the exciting weeks of my life went on I discovered three good holes

in that ivy-covered fence of ours. These all became my secret holes, and

through them I watched the street below, a bleak bare chasm of a street

which when the trucks came by echoed till it thundered. Across the

street rose the high gray front of my father's warehouse. It was part

of a solid line of similar gray brick buildings, and it was like my

father, it was grim and silent, you could not see inside. Over its five

tiers of windows black iron shutters were fastened tight. From time to

time a pair of these shutters would fly open, disclosing a dark cave

behind, out of which men brought barrels and crates and let them down by

ropes into the trucks on the street below. How they spun round and round

as they came! But most of the trucks drove rumbling into a tunnel which

led through the warehouse out to my father's dock, out to the ships and

the harbor. And from that mysterious region long lines of men came

through the tunnel at noontime, some nearly naked, some only in shirts,

men with the hairiest faces. They sat on the street with their backs to

the warehouse wall, eating their dinners out of pails, and from other

pails they took long drinks of a curious stuff all white on top. Some of

them were always crossing the street and disappearing from my view into

a little store directly underneath me. Belle spoke of this store as a

"vile saloon" and of these men as "dockers." So I knew what Dockers were

at last! In place of the one who lived under our garden and had burst up

among the flowers, I saw now that there were hundreds and thousands of

men like him down there on the docks. And all belonged to the harbor.

Their work I learned was to load the ships whose masts and spars peeped

up at me over the warehouse roofs. From my nursery window above I could

see them better. Sometimes they had large white sails and then they

moved off somewhere. I could see them go, these tall ships, with their

sails making low, mysterious sounds, flappings, spankings and deep

boomings. The men on them sang the weirdest songs as they pulled all

together at the ropes. Some of these songs brought a lump in your

throat. Where were they going? "To heathen lands," Belle told me. What

did she mean? I was just going to ask her. But then I stopped--I did not

dare! From up the river, under the sweeping arch of that Great Bridge

which seemed high as the clouds, came more tall ships, and low

"steamers" belching smoke and "tugs" and "barges" and "ferry boats." The

names of all these I learned from Belle and Anny the cook and my mother.

And all were going "to heathen lands." What in the world did Belle mean

by that?

Once I thought I had it. I saw that some of these smaller boats were

just going across the river and stopping at the land over there, a land

so crowded with buildings you could barely see into it at all. "Is that

a heathen land?" I asked her. "Yes!" said Belle. And she laughed. She

was Scotch and very religious. But later I heard her call it "New York"

and say she was going there herself to buy herself some corsets. And so

I was even more puzzled than ever. For some deep instinct told me you

could buy no corsets in "heathen land"--least of all Belle's corsets.

She often spoke of "the ocean," too, another place where the tall ships

went. But what was the ocean? "It's like a lake, but mightier," Belle

had said. But what was a lake? It was all so vague and confusing. Always

it came back to this, that I had no more seen the "ocean" than I had

seen a "heathen land," and so I did not know them.

But I knew the harbor by day and by night, on bright sunny days and in

fogs and rains, in storms of wind, in whirling snow, and under the

restful stars at night that twinkled down from so far above, while the

shadowy region below twinkled back with stars of its own, restless,

many-colored stars, yellow, green and red and blue, moving, dancing,

flaring, dying. And all these stars had voices, too. By night in my bed

I could hear them--hoots and shrieks from ferries and tugs, hoarse

coughs from engines along the docks, the whine of wheels, the clang of

bells, deep blasts and bellows from steamers. And closer still, from

that "vile saloon" directly under the garden, I could hear wild shouts

and songs and roars of laughter that came, I learned, not only from

dockers, but from "stokers" and "drunken sailors," men who lived right

inside the ships and would soon be starting for heathen lands!

"I wonder how I'd feel," I would think, "if I were out in the garden

now--out in the dark all by myself--right above that vile saloon!"

This would always scare me so that I would bury my head in the covers

and shake. But I often did this, for I liked to be scared. It was a game

I had all by myself with the harbor.

* * * * *

And yet this old man in the pulpit called it a place where you went to

rest!

Twenty-five years have gone since then, and all that I can remember now

of anything Henry Ward Beecher said was this--that once, just once, I

heard him speak of something that I knew about, and that when he did he

was wrong.

And though all the years since then have been for me one long story of a

harbor, restless, heaving, changing, always changing--it has never

changed for me in this--it has never seemed a haven where ships come to

dock, but always a place from which ships start out--into the storms and

the fogs of the seas, over the "ocean" to "heathen lands." For so I saw

it when I was a child, the threshold of adventures.

CHAPTER II

As I walked home from church with my mother that day the streets seemed

as quiet and safe as her eyes. How suddenly tempting it seemed to me,

this quiet and this safety, compared to the place where I was going. For

I had decided to run away from my home and my mother that afternoon,

down to the harbor to see the world. What would become of me 'way down

there? What would she do if I never came back? A lump rose in my throat

at the thought of her tears. It was terrible.

"All the same I am going to do it," I kept thinking doggedly. And yet

suddenly, as we reached our front steps, how near I came to telling her.

But no, she would only spoil it all. She wanted me always up in the

garden, she wanted me never to have any thrills.

My mother knew me so well. She had seen that when she read stories of

fairies, witches and goblins out of my books to Sue and me, while Sue,

though two years younger, would sit there like a little dark imp, her

black eyes snapping over the fights, I would creep softly out of the

room, ashamed and shaken, and would wait in the hall outside till the

happy ending was in plain view. So my mother had gradually toned down

all the fights and the killings, the witches and the monsters, and much

to my disappointment had wholly shut out the gory pirates who were for

me the most frightfully fascinating of all. Sometimes I felt vaguely

that for this she had her own reason, too--that my mother hated

everything that had to do with the ocean, especially my father's dock

that made him so gloomy and silent. But of this I could never be quite

sure. I would often watch her intently, with a sudden sharp anxiety,

for I loved my mother with all my soul and I could not bear to see her

unhappy.

"Never on any account," I heard her say to Belle, "are the children to

go down the street toward the docks."

"Yes, ma'am," said Belle. "I'll see to it."

At once I wanted to go there. The street in front of our house sloped

abruptly down at the next corner two blocks through poorer and smaller

houses to a cobblestone space below, over which trucks clattered,

plainly on their way to the docks. So I could go down and around by that

way. How tempting it all looked down there. Above the roofs of the

houses, the elevated railroad made a sharp bend on its way to the

Bridge, trains roared by, high over all the Great Bridge swept across

the sky. And below all this and more thrilling than all, I caught

glimpses of strange, ragged boys. "Micks," Belle sometimes called them,

and sometimes, "Finian Mickies." Up here I had no playmates.

From now on, our garden lost its charms. Up the narrow courtway which

ran along the side of the house I would slip stealthily to the front

gate and often get a good look down the street before Belle sharply

called me back. The longest looks, I found, were always on Sunday

afternoons, when Belle would sit back there in the garden, close to the

bed of red tulips which encircled a small fountain made of two white

angels. Belle, who was bony, tall and grim, would sit by the little

angels reading her shabby Bible. Her face was wrinkled and almost brown,

her eyes now kind, now gloomy. She had a song she would sing now and

then. "For beneath the Union Jack we will drive the Finians back"--is

all I can remember. She told me of witches in the Scotch hills. At her

touch horrible monsters rose in the most surprising places. In the

bathtub, for example, when I stayed in the bath too long she would jerk

out the stopper, and as from the hole there came a loud gurgle--"It's

the Were-shark," Belle would mutter. And I would leap out trembling.

This old "Were-shark" had his home in the very middle of the ocean. In

one gulp he could swallow a boy of my size, and this he did three times

each day. The boys were brought to him by the "Condor," a perfectly

hideous bird as large as a cow and as fierce as a tiger. If ever I dared

go down that street and disobey my mother, the Condor would "swoop" down

over the roofs, snatch me up in his long yellow beak with the blood of

the last boy on it, and with thunder and lightning would carry me off

far over the clouds and drop me into the Were-shark's mouth.

Then Belle would sit down to her Bible.

Sunday after Sunday passed, and still in fascinated dread I would steal

quietly out to the gate and watch this street forbidden. Pointing to it

one day, Belle had declared in awful tones, "Broad is the way that

leadeth to destruction." But it was not broad. In that at least she was

all wrong. It was in fact so narrow that a Condor as big as a cow might

easily bump himself when he "swooped." Besides, there were good strong

lamp-posts where a little boy could cling and scream, and almost always

somewhere in sight was a policeman so fat and heavy that even two

Condors could hardly lift him from the ground. This policeman would come

running. My mother had said I must never be scared by policemen, because

they were really good kind men. In fact, she said, it was foolish to be

scared by anything ever. She never knew of Belle's methods with me.

* * * * *

So at last I had decided to risk it, and now the fearful day had come. I

could barely eat my dinner. My courage was fast ebbing away. In the

dining-room the sunlight was for a time wiped out by clouds, and I grew

suddenly happy. It might rain and then I could not go. But it did not

rain nor did anything I hoped for happen to prevent my plan. Belle sat

down by the angels and was soon so deep in her Bible that it was plain I

could easily slip up the path. Sue never looked up from her sand-pile

to say, "Stop Billy! He's running away from home!" With a gulp I passed

my mother's window. She did not happen to look out. Now I had reached

the very gate. "I can't go! I can't open the gate!" But the old gate

opened with one push. "I can't go! There is no policeman!" But yes,

there he was on my side of the street slowly walking toward me. My heart

thumped, I could hardly breathe. In a moment with a frantic rush I had

reached the nearest lamp-post and was clinging breathless. I could not

scream, I shut my eyes in sickening fear and waited for the rushing of

enormous wings.

But there came no Condor swooping.

Another rush--another post--another and another!

"What's the matter with you, little feller?"

I looked up at the big safe policeman and laughed.

"I'm playing a game," I almost shouted, and ran without touching another

post two blocks to the cobblestone space below. I ran blindly around it

several times, I bumped into a man who said, "Heigh there! Look out!"

After that I strutted proudly, then turned and ran back with all my

might up the street, and into our house and up to my room. And there on

my bed to my great surprise I found myself sobbing and sobbing. It was a

long time before I could stop. I had had my first adventure.

* * * * *

I made many Sunday trips after that, and on no one of them was I caught.

For delighted and proud at what I had done I kept asking Belle to talk

of the Condor, gloomily she piled on the terrors, and seeing the awed

look in my eyes (awe at my own courage in defying such a bird), she felt

so sure of my safety that often she would barely look up from her Bible

the whole afternoon. Even on workdays over her sewing she would forget.

And so I went "to destruction."

At first I stayed but a little while and never left the cobblestone

space, only peering up into the steep little streets that led to the

fearsome homes of the "Micks." But then I made the acquaintance of Sam.

It happened through a small toy boat which I had taken down there with

the purpose of starting it off for "heathen lands." As I headed across

the railroad tracks that led to the docks, suddenly Sam and his gang

appeared from around a freight car. I stood stock-still. They were

certainly "Micks"--ragged and dirty, with holes in their shoes and soot

on their faces. Sam was smoking a cigarette.

"Heigh, fellers," he said, "look at Willy's boat."

I clutched my boat tighter and turned to run. But the next moment Sam

had me by the arm.

"Look here, young feller," he growled. "You've got the wrong man to do

business with this time."

"I don't want to do any business," I gasped.

"Smash him, Sam--smash in his nut for him," piped the smallest Micky

cheerfully. And this Sam promptly proceeded to do. It was a wild and

painful time. But though Sam was two years older, he was barely any

larger than I, and when he and his gang had gone off with my boat, as I

stood there breathing hard, I was filled with a grim satisfaction. For

once when he tried to wrench the boat from me I had hit him with it

right on the face, and I had had a glimpse of a thick red mark across

his cheek. I tasted something new in my mouth and spit it out. It was

blood. I did this several times, slowly and impressively, till it made a

good big spot on the railroad tie at my feet. Then I walked with dignity

back across the tracks and up "the way of destruction" home. I walked

slowly, planning as I went. At the gate I climbed up on it and swung.

Then with a sudden loud cry I fell off and ran back into the garden

crying, "I fell off the gate! I fell on my face!" So my cut and swollen

lip was explained, and my trips were not discovered.

I felt myself growing older fast. For I knew that I could both fight and

tell lies, besides defying the Condor.

In the next years, for weeks at a time my life was centered on Sam and

his gang. How we became friends, how often we met, by just what means I

evaded my nurse, all these details are vague to me now. I am not even

sure I was never caught. But it seems to me that I was not. For as I

grew to be eight years old, Belle turned her attention more and more to

that impish little sister of mine who was always up to some mischief or

other. There was the corner grocer, too, with whom I pretended to be

staunch friends. "I'm going to see the grocer," I would say, when I

heard Sam's cautious whistle in front of the house--and so presently I

would join the gang. I followed Sam with a doglike devotion, giving up

my weekly twenty-five cents instead of saving it for Christmas, and in

return receiving from him all the world-old wisdom stored in that

bullet-shaped head of his which sat so tight on his round little

shoulders.

And though I did not realize it then, in my tense crowded childhood,

through Sam and his companions I learned something else that was to

stand me in good stead years later on. I learned how to make friends

with "the slums." I discovered that by making friends with "Micks" and

"Dockers" and the like, you find they are no fearful goblins, giants

bursting savagely up among the flowers of your life, but people as human

as yourself, or rather, much more human, because they live so close to

the harbor, close to the deep rough tides of life.

Into these tides I was now drawn down--and it did me some good and a

great deal of harm. For I was too little those days for the harbor.

Sam had the most wonderful life in the world. He could go wherever he

liked and at any hour day or night. Once, he said, when a "feller" was

drowned, he had stayed out on the docks all night. His mother always let

him alone. An enormous woman with heavy eyes, I was in awe of her from

the first. The place that she kept with Sam's father was called "The

Sailor's Harbor." It stood on a corner down by the docks, a long, low

wooden building painted white, with twelve tight-shuttered, mysterious

windows along the second story, and below them a "Ladies' Entrance." In

front was a small blackboard with words in white which Sam could read.

"Ten Cent Dinners" stood at the top. Below came, "Coffee and rolls."

Next, "Ham and eggs." Then "Bacon and eggs." And then, "To-day"--with a

space underneath where Sam's fat father wrote down every morning still

more delicious eatables. You got whiffs of these things and they made

your mouth water, they made your stomach fairly turn against your

nursery supper.

But most of our time we spent on the docks. All were roofed, and

exploring the long dock sheds and climbing down into the dark holds of

the square-rigged ships called "clippers," we found logs of curious

mottled wood, huge baskets of sugar, odorous spices, indigo, camphor,

tea, coffee, jute and endless other things. Sam knew their names and the

names of the wonder-places they came from--Manila, Calcutta, Bombay,

Ceylon. He knew besides such words as "hawser," "bulkhead" and

"ebb-tide." And Sam knew how to swear. He swore with a fascinating ease

such words as made me shiver and stare. And then he would look at me and

chuckle.

"You think I'll go to hell for this, don't you," he asked me once. And

my face grew hot with embarrassment, for I thought that he assuredly

would.

I asked him what were heathen lands, and he said they were countries

where heathen lived. And what were heathen? Cannibals. And what were

they?

"Fellers that eat fellers," he said.

"Alive?" I inquired. He turned to the gang:

"Listen to the kid! He wants to know if they eat 'em alive!" Sam spat

disgustedly. "Naw," he said. "First they roast 'em like any meat. They

roast 'em," he added reflectively, "until their skin gets brown and

bubbles out and busts."

One afternoon a carriage brought three travelers for one of the ships, a

man, his wife and a little girl with shining yellow pig-tails. "To be

et," Sam whispered as we stood close beside them. And then, pointing to

some of the half-naked brown men that made the crew of the ship near

by--"cannibals," he muttered. For a long time I stared at these eaters,

especially at their lean brown stomachs.

"We're safe enough," Sam told me. "They ain't allowed to come ashore." I

found this very comforting.

But what a frightful fate lay in store for the little girl with

pig-tails. As I watched her I felt worse and worse. Why couldn't

somebody warn her in time? At last I decided to do it myself. Procuring

a scrap of paper I retired behind a pile of crates and wrote in my

large, clumsy hand, "You look out--you are going to be et." Watching my

chance, I slipped this into her satchel and hoped that she would read it

soon. Then I promptly forgot all about her and ran off into a warehouse

where the gang had gone to slide.

These warehouses had cavernous rooms, so dark you could not see to the

ends, and there from between the wooden columns the things from the

ships loomed out of the dark like so many ghosts. There were strange

sweet smells. And from a hole in the ceiling there was a twisting chute

of steel down which you could slide with terrific speed. We used to

slide by the hour.

Outside were freight cars in long lines, some motionless, some suddenly

lurching forward or back, with a grinding and screeching of wheels and a

puffing and coughing from engines ahead. Sam taught me how to climb on

the cars and how to swing off while they were going. He had learned from

watching the brakemen that dangerous backward left-hand swing that lands

you stock-still in your tracks. It is a splendid feeling. Only once

Sam's left hand caught, I heard a low cry, and after I jumped I found

him standing there with a white face. His left hand hung straight down

from the wrist and blood was dripping from it.

"Shut up, you damn fool!" he said fiercely.

"I wasn't saying nothing," I gasped.

"Yes, you was--you was startin' to cry! Holy Christ!" He sat down

suddenly, then rolled over and lay still. Some one ran for his mother,

and after a time he was carried away. I did not see him again for some

weeks.

We did things that were bad for a boy of my size, and I saw things that

I shouldn't have seen--a docker crushed upon one of the docks and

brought out on a stretcher dead, a stoker as drunk as though he were

dead being wheeled on a wheelbarrow to a ship by the man called a

"crimp," who sold this drunken body for an advance on its future pay.

Sam told me in detail of these things. There came a strike, and once in

the darkness of a cold November twilight I saw some dockers rush on a

"scab," I heard the dull sickening thumps as they beat him.

And one day Sam took me to the door of his father's saloon and pointed

out a man in there who had an admiring circle around him.

"He's going to jump from the Bridge on a bet," Sam whispered. I saw the

man go. For what seemed to me hours I watched the Great Bridge up there

in the sky, with its crawling processions of trolleys and wagons, its

whole moving armies of little black men. Suddenly one of these tiny

specks shot out and down, I saw it fall below the roofs, I felt Sam's

hand like ice in mine. And this was not good for a boy of ten.

But the sight that ended it all for me was not a man, but a woman. It

happened one chilly March afternoon when I fell from a dock into water

covered with grease and foam, came up spluttering and terrified, was

quickly hauled to the dock by a man and then hustled by Sam and the gang

to his home, to have my clothes dried and so not get caught by my

mother. Scolded by Sam's mother and given something fiery hot to drink,

stripped naked and wrapped in an old flannel nightgown and told to sit

by the stove in the kitchen--I was then left alone with Sam. And then

Sam with a curious light in his eyes took me to a door which he opened

just a crack. Through the crack he showed me a small back room full of

round iron tables. And at one of these a man, stoker or sailor I don't

know which, his face flushed red under dirt and hair, held in his lap a

big fat girl half dressed, giggling and queer, quite drunk. And then

while Sam whispered on and on about the shuttered rooms upstairs, I felt

a rush of such sickening fear and loathing that I wanted to scream--but

I turned too faint.

I remember awakening on the floor, Sam's mother furiously slapping Sam,

then dressing me quickly, gripping me tight by both my arms and saying,

"You tell a word of this to your pa and we'll come up and kill you!"

That night at home I did not sleep. I lay in my bed and shivered and

burned. My first long exciting adventure was over. Ended were all the

thrills, the wild fun. It was a spree I had had with the harbor, from

the time I was seven until I was ten. It had taken me at seven, a plump

sturdy little boy, and at ten it had left me wiry, thin, with quick,

nervous movements and often dark shadows under my eyes. And it left a

deep scar on my early life. For over all the adventures and over my

whole childhood loomed this last thing I had seen, hideous, disgusting.

For years after that, when I saw or even thought of the harbor, I felt

the taste of foul, greasy water in my mouth and in my soul.

So ended the first lesson.

CHAPTER III

The next morning as I started for school, suddenly in the hallway I

thought of what my mother had told me--always when I was frightened to

shut my eyes and speak to Jesus and he would be sure to make everything

right. I had not spoken to Jesus of late except to say "Holy Christ!"

like Sam. But now, so sickened by Sam and his docks, my head throbbing

from the sleepless night, on the impulse I kneeled quickly with my face

on a chair right there in the hall. But I found I was too ashamed to

begin.

"If he would only ask me," I thought. Why didn't he ask me, "What's the

matter, little son?" or say, "Now, you must tell me and then you'll feel

better"--as my mother always did. But Jesus did not help me out. I could

not even feel him near me. "I will never tell anyone," I thought. And I

felt myself horribly alone.

Help came from a quite different source.

"There he is! Look!"

I heard Sue's eager whisper. Jumping quickly to my feet, I saw in the

library doorway Sue's dark little figure and her mocking, dancing eyes

as she pointed me out to our father, her chum, whose face wore a smile

of amusement. In a moment I had rushed out of doors and was running

angrily to school, furious at myself for praying, furious at Sue for

spying and at my father for that smile. My terror was forgotten. No more

telling Jesus things! I retreated deep inside of myself and worked out

of my troubles as best I could.

From that day the harbor became for me a big grim place to be let

alone--like my father. A place immeasurably stronger than I--like my

father--and like him harsh and indifferent, not caring whether when I

fell into it I was pulled up to safety or drawn far down into grease and

slime. It made no difference. I was nothing to it one way or the other.

And I was nothing to my father.

Of course this was by no means true. As I look back now I know that

often he must have tried to be kind, that in the jar and worry of his

own absorbing troubled life he must have often turned to me and tried to

make himself my friend. But children pass hard judgments. And if my

father was friendly at times it did no good. For he was a man--big and

strong--and I was a small boy craving his love.

Why couldn't he really love me? Why couldn't he ask me how I felt or

pull my ear and say "Hello, Puss?" He was always saying these things to

Sue, and caring about her very hard and trying to understand her,

although she was nothing but a girl, two years younger and smaller than

I and far less interesting. And yet with her he was kind and tender,

curious and smiling, he watched her with wholly different eyes. My

father was a short, powerful man, and though he was nearly fifty years

old his hair was black and thick and coarse. At night he would rub his

unshaven cheek on Sue's small cheek and tickle her. She would chuckle

and wriggle as though it were fun. I used to watch this hungrily, and

once I awkwardly drew close and offered my cheek to be tickled. My

father at once grew as awkward as I, and he gave me a rub so rough it

stung. And this wasn't fair--I had hoped for a cuddle. Besides, he was

always praising Sue when I knew she didn't deserve it. He called her

brave. Once when he took us duck shooting together a squall came up and

he rowed hard, and Sue sat with her eyes on his, smiling and quite

unafraid. At home that night I heard him tell my mother how wonderfully

brave she had been, and of how I, on the other hand, had gripped the

boat and turned white with fear, while little Sue just sat and smiled.

"We'll see how brave she is," I thought, and the next day I hit her in

Sam's best style, fairly "knocked her nut off," in fact, with one quick

blow. "There," I said to myself while she screamed. "I guess that shows

how brave you are. I didn't scream when Sam hit me."

He said she was quicker than I at her lessons. And this rankled the

deeper because it was true. But I would never admit it.

"Of course she's quick, when he's always helping her. Why doesn't he

ever come and help me?" I would burst into tears of vexation. My father

was unfair!

More than that, it was he and his dock and his warehouse, in the years

that followed my thrills with Sam, that stripped all these thrills away.

A great ship with her spreading, booming white sails might move up the

river from heathen lands as wonderful and strange as you please. But the

moment she reached my father's dock she became a dirty, spotted thing,

just a common every-day part of his business.

He himself was nothing but business. His business was with ships and the

sea, and yet he had never once in his life taken a long sea voyage. "Why

doesn't he? Why does he like only tiresome things?" I argued secretly to

myself. "Why does he always come ashore?" He always did. In my memories

of ships sailing I see him always there on deck talking to the captain,

scowling, wrinkling his eyes over the smoke of his cigar, but always

coming down the gang-plank at the end, unconcernedly turning his back on

all the excitement and going back to his warehouse.

He could get excited about ships, but only in the queerest way that had

something to do with his business. Late one night from my bed I heard

his voice downstairs, cutting and snarling through other voices. I got

out of bed and stole downstairs and along the half-lit hall to the

library door, and there from behind the curtain I watched what was going

on inside. The library was full of men, grave, courteous-looking

gentlemen, some of them angry, some merely amused. My father was leaning

over his table talking of ships, of mysterious things that he said must

be done with battleships and tariffs.

"And mark me, gentlemen," he cried. "If we don't do these things in time

American sails will be swept from the seas!"

Listening, I got a picture of an immense broom reaching out of the

clouds and sweeping American ships off the ocean. But I could make

nothing of this at the time. I only watched his face and eyes and his

fist that came down with a crash on the table. And I was afraid of my

father.

When ships lay at his dock the captains often came up to dinner. But

even these marvelous creatures lost in my father's presence all that Sam

had given them in my eyes. They did not like my mother, they ate in

uneasy silence, or spoke gruffly of their dull affairs. Once or twice I

heard talk of mutinies, of sailors shot down or put in irons, but all in

a matter-of-fact sort of way. Mere grunts came from my father. Steadily

drearier grew the ocean, flatter all the heathen lands.

One stout, red-faced captain, jovial even in spite of my mother, would

annoy me frightfully by joking about my going to sea. He was always

asking me when I meant to run away and be "a bloody pirate." He took it

for granted I liked the sea, was thrilled by the sea, when the truth of

it was that I hated the sea! It was business now, only business!

My father's warehouse, too, lost its mystery as I grew older. For

exploring into its darkness I found that of course it did have walls

like any common building. The things in it, too, lost their wonder. It

was as though my father had packed all the rich and romantic Far East

into common barrels and crates and then nailed down the covers. And he

himself became for me as common as his warehouse. For in his case, too,

I could see the walls.

"I know you now," I thought to myself. He could sit through supper

night after night and not utter a word in his gloom. But the mystery in

him was gone. Business, nothing but business. A man and a place to be

let alone.

* * * * *

But it was my mother more than anyone else who drew me away from the

harbor. All through those early years she was the one who never changed,

the strong sure friend I could always come back to. My mother was as

safe as our house.

She was a small, slender woman grown bodily stronger year by year by the

sheer force of her spirit. I remember her smoothly parted hair, brown

but showing gray at forty, the strong, lined face and the kindly eyes

which I saw so often lighted by that loving smile of hers for me. If my

father didn't care for me, I was always sure she did. I could feel her

always watching, trying to understand what I was thinking and feeling.

As when I was very small she toned down the stories she read, so she did

in everything else for me, even in her religion. Though she was a strong

church woman, I heard little from her of the terrors of hell. But I

heard much of heaven and more still of a heaven on earth. "Thy will be

done on earth as it is in heaven." I can never forget how she spoke

those words as I knelt and repeated them after her--not so much in the

tone of a prayer to a higher being as in one of quiet resolve to

herself. To do her share, through church and hospital and charity work

and the bringing up of her children, her share in the establishment of a

heaven upon the earth, this was her religion.

And this heaven on earth of my mother's was made up of all that was

"fine" in humanity past and present. "Fine, fine!" she would say of some

kind deed, of some new plan for bettering life, or of some book she was

reading, some music she had heard, or of a photograph of some great

painting over in Europe. All her life she had wanted to go abroad.

My mother was one of those first American women who went to college, and

one of that army sent out from college as school teachers all over the

land. She had taught school in frontier hamlets far out West, homesick

she had looked back on the old college town in New England, and those

ten years of her life out West had been bare and hard, an exile. At last

she had secured a position in an expensive girls' school in New York,

and from there a few years later she had married my father. I think they

had been happy at first, I think that his work with the ships had seemed

to her a gateway leading out to Europe, to all the very "finest" things.

But later, as he set his whole mind upon his warehouse worries, upon his

fight for Yankee ships, a navy, subsidies, tariffs, and shut out all

thought of travel, culture, friends, all but the bare, ugly business of

life--my mother had rebelled against this, had come to hate his harbor,

and had determinedly set herself to help me get what she had missed.

I don't mean that she babied me. She was too good a teacher for that. I

mean she steered me through hard work away from what she saw in the

harbor up toward what she felt was fine. She began when I was very

little giving me daily lessons at home in the brief time she had to

spare from her house and charity work. She made me study and she studied

me. My mother, sooner or later, seemed to find out all I did or felt.

Often I would hold stubbornly back. While I was going with Sam to the

docks I never once gave her a hint of my rovings. It was not until two

years after that drunken woman disaster that I suddenly told my mother

about it. I remember then she did not chide. Instead she caught the

chance to draw out of me all I had learned from the harbor. I talked to

her long that night, but she said little in reply. I can vividly

remember, though, how she came to me a few days later and placed a "book

for young men" in my hands.

"You are only twelve," she said. "It's a pity. But after what you have

seen, my son, it is better that you know."

She did this twenty years ago. It was far in advance of what most

parents did then or are doing even now for their children. And it threw

a flood of light into the darkest place in my mind, swept away endless

forebodings, secret broodings over what until then had seemed to me the

ugliest, the dirtiest, the most frightening thing I had found in life.

"When you meet anything ugly or bad," she told me, "I don't want you to

turn away at once, I want you to face it and see what it is. Understand

it and then leave it, and then it won't follow you in the dark."

"Keep clean," she said. And understanding me as she did, I think she

added to herself, "And I must keep you quiet." She once told me she

hoped that when I grew up I might become a professor in one of those

college towns she loved, where I might work all my life in peace.

Although she never said anything to me against the harbor, I knew that

my mother put all the ugliest things in life down there. And the things

that were fine were all up here.

"I always like the front door of a house," she used to say, "to be wide

and low with only a step or two leading up. I like it to look

hospitable, as though always waiting for friends to come in."

Our front door was like that, and the neighborhood it waited for was one

of the quietest, the cleanest and the finest, according to her view, of

any in the country. The narrow little street had wide, leisurely

sidewalks and old-fashioned houses on either side, a few of red brick,

but more of brown stone with spotless white-sashed windows which were

tall and narrow and rounded at the top. There were no trees, but there

were many smooth, orderly vines. Almost all the houses had wide,

inviting doorways like ours, but the people they invited in were only

those who lived quietly here, shutting out New York and all the toots

and rumblings of the ships and warehouses and docks below, of which they

themselves were the owners.

These people in their leisurely way talked of literature and music, of

sculpture and painting and travel abroad, as their fathers and even

grandfathers had done--in times when the rest of the country, like one

colossal harbor, changing, heaving, seething, had had time for only the

crudest things, for railroads, mining camps, belching mills, vast herds

of cattle and droves of sheep, for the frontier towns my mother had

loathed, for a Civil War, for a Tweed Ring, for the Knights of Labor, a

Haymarket riot, for the astounding growth of cities, slums, corporations

and trusts, in this deep turbulent onward rush, this peopling of a

continent.

And because my father, crude and self-made and come out of the West, was

of this present country, he was an intruder politely avoided by these

people of the past. The men would come sometimes at night, but they came

only on business. They went straight through to the library, whence I

could hear my father's voice, loud, impatient, angry, talking of what

must be done soon, or Germany and England would drive the American flag

from the ocean and make us beggars on the seas, humbly asking the ships

of our rivals to give us a share in the trade of the world. To such

disturbing meetings these grave and courteous gentlemen came less and

less as the years went by.

And so that hospitable front door of ours waited long for neighbors.

CHAPTER IV

But if my father was an intruder, a disturber of the peace of these

contented gentlemen, my mother was more and more liked by their wives.

As time wore on they came to our house in the afternoons, upon hospital

and church affairs. And first in the church and then in a private school

near by I grew to be friends with their children.

Across the street from us at the corner there stood a huge, square

brownstone house with a garden and a wide yard around it. Two boys and a

little girl lived here, and about them our small circle centered. Here

we played hockey in winter, part of the yard being flooded for our use;

and in Spring and Autumn, ball, tag, I spy, prisoner's base and other

games. They were all well enough as far as they went, but all were so

very young and tame compared to my former adventures with Sam.

Adventures, that was the difference. These were only games.

I felt poor beside these boys, in this ample yard by their grandfather's

house. I often saw his great carriage roll out of the stable behind the

yard. "Coach," they called it. It had rich silver trimmings and a red

thing called a "crest," and a footman and coachman in top boots. Inside

the house was a butler who was still more imposing, and a lofty room

with spacious windows called the picture gallery. But by far the most

awesome of all was the white-headed grandfather of these boys, who had

been to Europe twenty-eight times and could read and speak "every

language on earth," as I was told in whispers while we peeped in through

his library door. There he sat with all his books, a man so rich he

never even went to his office, a man who had owned not only warehouses

but hundreds of ships and had sent them to every land in the world!

While, as for me, my grandfather was not even alive. I felt poor and

small, and I did not like it.

Besides, these unadventurous boys all put me down as "a queer kid." I

was middling good at most of their games and would get sudden spurts

when I would become almost a leader. But at other times, often right in

the middle of a game, I would suddenly forget where I was and would

think of Sam, of the cannibals that I had seen, of the man who had

jumped from the Great Bridge, or of that drunken woman. They would catch

me at it and call me queer. And I would grow hot and feel ashamed.

On the other hand, poor and queer as I felt at times, at others I would

swell with my wisdom and importance. For what did they know, these

respectable boys, about the docks and the gangs of "Micks" deep down

there below us all as we played about in our nice little gardens. When

they called me queer, sometimes I would retort with dark hints, all

games would stop, they would gather close, and then I would tell these

intense eager boys the things I had learned from the harbor. And I had

the more pleasure in the telling from the feeling of relief that now I

was safe away from it all.

"That's the real thing, that is," I would declare impressively. But how

good it felt to me to be free of such reality.

* * * * *

At such times we made "the Chips" stay over on their side of the yard.

"The Chips" were three small admiring girls. One was my young sister

Sue, who was then about nine years old, long-legged, skinny and quick as

a flash, her black hair always flying. The second, a plump freckled

girl, was the younger sister of the boys who lived here. And the third

was a quiet little thing who lived around the corner. We called them

"Chips" to annoy them. We got the term from the stout coachman in the

barn who used it with a fine sweeping contempt that included all his

lady friends. We ourselves had the most profound contempt for these

girls who kept poking into our games. At times we would stop everything

and take the utmost pains to explain to them that they were nothing

whatever but girls. And this would make Sue furious. She would screw up

her snapping black eyes and viciously stick out her tongue and stamp her

foot and say "darn!" to show she could swear like a regular kid. And

still they hung around us.

But as time wore on we grew more indulgent, we included them more and

more. And this was largely due to me. For I took a vague curious

interest in the one who lived around the corner.

Her name was Eleanore Dillon and her age was eight, and she had

attractions that slowly grew. To begin with, as I became gradually

aware, she was much the prettiest of the three. She had light curly hair

tied up in red ribbons, always _fresh_ red ribbons. Everything about her

was always fresh and clean. She had the most serious blue eyes, which at

times would grow intent on what a tall chap of twelve like myself

condescended to tell her, and at other times wondrously confiding.

Eleanore first attracted me by making me a hero. It was a warm May

afternoon and she was sitting on the grass with her doll and her two

companions. Sue had stolen some matches and was using them as

Jackstraws. Suddenly I heard a scream, then I saw Sue racing like mad

toward the garden hose, and I saw that the white skirt of Eleanore's

dress had caught fire. As yet there was only a little flame. She was

sitting still motionless on the grass, hugging her doll, with scared

round eyes. I got to her first and with my cap I beat out the flame. I

was suddenly panting, my hands were cold. But a few moments later, when

Sue and two of the boys came tugging the hose, it as suddenly flashed

upon me that I had done a heroic thing.

"Get out!" I shouted scornfully, as they started to play the hose on

her. "Can't you see the whole fire is out?"

And then while the plump freckled girl came screeching out of the

kitchen with half the servants behind her, and presently these servants

all called me "a little heero"--the one whom I had rescued looked up at

me very gratefully and said,

"Thank you, Boy, for not letting them squirt water on my dolly's clean

dress."

"Aw, what do I care for a doll?" I retorted ungraciously.

But I liked her from that day. She was not at all like Sue. She was

quiet and knew her place. She knew that she was only a girl, how

thoroughly well she knew it. And yet, although so feminine, so

deliberate and sedate, she had "a pile of ginger" deep down inside of

her. In our games, whenever allowed to play, with a dogged resolution

she would come pegging along in the rear, she was a sticker, she never

gave up. In winter when they flooded the yard she was the poorest skater

of all, but patiently plodding along on the ice, each time she fell down

she would pick herself up with such determination that at last with a

jerk at her arm I said,

"Here, Chip, come on and I'll teach you."

She came on. I can still feel her soft determined clutch on my elbow.

When I said, "That's enough," she said, "Thank you, Boy," and went

quietly on alone.

After that I taught her many times. One afternoon when there was a thaw,

I said,

"Gee, but this ice is rotten." And then Eleanore asked me placidly,

"Do you like my pretty new shoes?"

"What's that got to do with it?" I demanded indignantly.

"Nothing, I guess," she said meekly.

This girl was full of mysteries. One great point in her favor was that

she had a mother "at death's door." This appealed to me tremendously.

It was so unusual.

"How's your mother?" I would ask her often, just for the pleasure of

hearing her answer softly,

"She's at death's door, thank you."

She soon learned to skate much better, and I remember quite vividly

still the January afternoon when as the darkness deepened a silvery moon

appeared overhead. I had not skated with her for a week, but now we'd

been skating for nearly an hour. One by one the others went home, and

the plump girl turned at the kitchen door to call back to Eleanore

tauntingly,

"You'll catch it, going home so late!"

"Never mind," said a gentle voice at my side, and round and round we

skated. The moon grew steadily brighter. Still that soft steady clutch

on my arm.

"Now you'd better go home," I said gruffly at last.

"What time is it?" she asked me. I looked at my watch.

"Gee! It's nearly seven o'clock!"

"What a pretty watch that is," she said in a pleased, quiet voice, but I

was not to be diverted.

"Go on home, I tell you. Sit down and I'll take off your skates." She

sighed regretfully but obeyed.

"What'll they do to you?" I asked her when we stopped in front of her

house.

"They'll try to punish me," she answered. I looked down at her

anxiously.

"Hard?" I inquired. She smiled at me.

"What time is it now?" she asked.

"Ten minutes after seven."

"Then they won't punish me," she said. "My father always comes home at

seven." And she went placidly into the house.

"A mighty smart Chip," I said to myself.

I had told her a little about the docks, and one day she asked me to

take her there. I promptly refused, but patiently from time to time she

repeated her request. She wanted me to take her "just for a little

walk" down there, or she would run if I preferred. She wanted to come

out after supper into her garden, which was only the third from ours,

and then she would sing and I would whistle. Then I would come around by

the street and she would meet me at her front gate. I don't know how she

ever persuaded me, but she did, and the plan worked splendidly. At the

gate without a word I took her hand and ran down the street. Soon we

were flying. Down to the open space we came, and around across the

railroad tracks. In and out among grimy freight cars we sped. I would

not stop.

"Christ!" I thought in terror. "Suppose Sam and the gang come around

this way!" I had not seen them now for years. What might not they do to

her?

But she made me stop by my father's dock. She was gasping and her face

was red, but with her hand like a little vise on mine she stood there

staring at the ship.

"Where are the heathen?" she asked at last, in a queer choking voice.

"There." I pointed to a small brown man with a white skull-cap on his

head. "There's one. See him? Now come home!"

"Wait a minute, please," she begged very softly. A moment longer she

stared at him. "All right, now we'll go," she said.

When I got her safe inside my gate I was in a cold sweat. This

adventure, to my surprise, had been one of the most thrilling of all.

And who'd have thought _her_ an adventurer?

Her mother died that summer while we were up in the mountains, and when

we came back we found the house empty. Her father had taken her out

West.

I remember being distinctly relieved when I heard that she had gone

away. For now there was something uncanny about her. It was one thing to

have a mother "at death's door." That had been quite exciting. But to

have one dead! There was something too awful about it. I would not have

known what to say to the girl. And, besides, the thought suddenly

entered my mind--suppose my own mother were to die!

* * * * *

We had been splendid chums, my mother and I, that long delightful summer

up in the White Mountains. The mountains, we had decided together, were

our favorite place to live in. "I will lift up mine eyes unto the

hills," was the part of the Bible which she liked best. She loved these

hills for their quiet, I loved them for the exciting adventures I had

with Sue and "Stouty," the son of the farmer with whom we stayed. But

these adventures were of a kind that my mother warmly approved of for

me. They were not like those on the harbor.

An adventure to climb with Stouty and Sue up through the resinous

branches of an enormous pine on the mountainside to the hawk's nest in

the bare top branches, snatch the eggs and smash them, while Stouty with

a big thick stick would beat off the mother hawk. An adventure to

clamber half the day up a bouldery path through firs and birches,

looking into black caves, peeping over steep cliffs, and at last

reaching the wind-swept summit to look off through miles of emptiness.

An adventure, coming home from a picnic as evening was falling, to sit

snug in that creaking capacious wagon which belonged to Stouty's father,

and to watch the lights and shadows that darted in and out of the pines

as the lantern swung beneath our wheels.

But even up here in the mountains the harbor reached with its cold

embrace. For at night it was an adventure hurriedly to undress and bury

myself in the covers in time to hear the first low rumble of "the night

freight" that went by some five miles distant. It made me think of the

trains on the docks, whose voices I had heard at night, and of the

things I had done with Sam. I would hear the mountain engine come

panting impatiently up the grade. As it reached the top I would rise

from my bed and soar off into space, in one swift rushing flight through

the darkness I would be there in the nick of time, I would swing on to a

freight car in the way Sam had shown me, climb to the top and crouching

there I would watch the dark roadway open ahead through the silent

forest. Lower would sink the voice of the engine until it became a faint

confused mutter. And the rest was dreamland.

This was one of those secret games I never told my mother about--until,

to my own surprise, in one of those long talks at night when she seemed

drawing me to her right out through my eyes, I blurted this out. My

mother wanted to know all about it. Did my hands get cold? Yes, colder

and colder, as listening here in bed I heard the first muttering of the

train and knew that in a few moments more I would take that five-mile

flight, right through the window and over the trees to the distant

track, to be there just ahead of the on-puffing engine. My voice

quivered excitedly as I spoke.

"I see--I see," she said soothingly. "And when you are riding on top of

a car--aren't you ever frightened?"

"No--because all the time I know that I am back there at home in my bed.

I can see myself back there behind me."

"Do you fall asleep in bed--or are you still on the top of the car the

last thing you can remember?"

"Most always on the top of the car."

"And when you sleep--do you always dream?"

"Yes--that's the finest part of it."

"Do you ever dream of Sam?"

"Yes."

"And all those things you did on the harbor?"

"Yes--all."

For some moments she sat by my bedside quietly stroking one of my hands.

"Billy."

"Yes, mother." I was growing impatient, I wished she would go, for now

it was nearly time for the train.

"Have you ever played other games like that? I mean where you leave

yourself and look back--and see your own body behind you."

"Yes--in bed in Brooklyn when I was quite little."

"Where did you go from your bed?"

"I went to the end of the garden. I heard drunken sailors and dockers

shouting in that vile saloon below." This was not true. What I had

really done was to lie in bed and whisper, "_Suppose_ I were out

there"--which is very different. I was too young then to have learned

the real trick. But now I was so proud of it that I honestly thought I

had always known how. "It was a game I had with the harbor," I said.

"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.

CHAPTER V

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!"

"Ah! Now you are a musician!"

"I will see what I can do," I said.

So again I tackled the harbor. By day it was quite impossible, all toots

and blares, the most frightful discords--but at night its vulgar

loudness was toned down sufficiently so that a fellow with artist's ears

could really stand listening to its life, especially if I did not go too

close but listened from my window. Here with uglier sounds subdued I

could catch low voices, snatches of song and now and then a chorus. "The

folk songs of the Seven Seas!" How that phrase took hold of me!

I went for information to an old dock watchman who had been a sailor.

"Songs? Why sure!" he answered. "It must be the chanties ye mean."

"Chanties?"

"That's it. I've been told the word's French."

"Oh! Chanter!"

"No--chanty. An' the man that sings the verses, he's called the

chantyman. He sings while the crew heaves on the ropes an' they all come

in on the chorus. If he's a real good chantyman he makes up new verses

every time, a kind of a yarn he spins while he sings."

Soon after this, toward the end of a warm, windy April night, I awoke

and heard them singing. I jumped up and went to my window. From the dock

next to my father's, over the line of warehouse roofs, I could see the

immense white sails already slowly rising into the starlit night.

Quickly I threw on some clothes and hurried down to the docks. The

waterfront was empty, swept clean of all that I disliked. Only overhead

a few billowy clouds, the soft rush of the wind, a slight flush in the

east, it was almost dawn. Here and there gleamed a light, red, green or

yellow, with a phantom tug or barge around it, moving over the black of

the water. Not silence but something richer was here--the confused

mysterious murmuring, the creaking and the breathing of the sleeping

port. And out of this those voices singing.

I drew nearer slowly. Hungrily I tried to take in the details of color

and sound. And I felt suddenly such a deep delight as I had never

dreamed of. To look around and listen and gather it into me and

remember. This was great, no doubt about it--it fitted into all that was

fine!

"This is really what I want to do--I'd like to learn to do it well--I'd

like to do it all my life!"

Slower, more fearfully, I drew near. Would anything happen to spoil it

all? There she lay, the long white ship, laden deep, settled low in the

water. I could see the lines of little dark men heaving together at the

ropes. Each time they hove they sang the refrain, which, no doubt, was

centuries old, a song of the winds, the big bullies of the ocean,

calling to each other as in some wild storm at sea they buffeted the

tiny men who clung to the masts and spars of ships:

"Blow the man down, bullies,

Blow him right down!

Hey! Hey! Blow the man down!

Give us the time to blow the man down!"

But what were the verses? I could hear the plaintive tenor voice of the

chantyman who sang them--now low and almost mournful, now passionate,

thrilling up into the night, as though yearning for all that was hid in

the heavens. Could a man like that feel things like that? But what were

the words he was singing, this yarn he was spinning in his song?

I came around by the foot of the slip and walked rapidly up the dockshed

toward one of its wide hatchways. The singing had stopped, but as I drew

close a rough voice broke the silence:

"Sing it again, Paddy!"

I looked out. Close by on the deck, in the hard blue glare of an

arc-light, were some twenty men, dirty, greasy, ragged, sweating, all

gripping the ropes and waiting for Paddy, who rolled his quid in his

mouth, spat twice, and then began:

"As I went awalking down Paradise Street

A pretty young maiden I chanced for to meet."

A heave on the ropes and a deafening roar:

"Blow the man down, bullies,

Blow him right down!

Hey! Hey! Blow the man down!"

Again the solo voice, plaintiff and tender:

"By her build I took her for Dutch.

She was square in the stuns'l and bluff in the bow."

The rest was a detailed account of the night spent with the maiden. Roar

on roar rose the boisterous chorus: "Blow the man down, bullies, blow

him right down!" The big patched, dirty sails went jerking and flapping

up toward the stars, which from here were so faint they could barely be

seen. And the ship moved out on the harbor.

"There go the folk songs of the seas," I thought disgustedly, looking

out on the water now showing itself grease-mottled in the first raw

light of day.

I tried other songs with my artist's ears and found them all much like

the first, the music like the very stars, the words like the grease and

scum on the water. I was about giving up my search when I met my old

friend, the watchman.

"Well, did ye find the chanties?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "They can't be printed." His old eyes twinkled merrily:

"Of course they can't. An' _most_ songs an' stories can't. But I'll give

ye a nice little song ye can print. It's the oldest chanty of 'em all.

I'll try to remember an' write it down."

Here is the song he gave me:

ROLLING HOME

To Australia's fair-haired maidens

We will bid our last good-bye.

We are going home to England,

We may never more see you.

Rolling home, rolling home,

Rolling home across the sea,

Rolling home to merry England,

Rolling home dear land to thee.

We will leave you our best wishes

As we leave your rocky shores,

We are going home to England,

We may never see you more.

Rolling home....

Up aloft amidst her rigging

Spreading out her snow white sails,

Like a bird with outstretched pinions,

On we speed before the gale.

Rolling home....

And the wild waves, as we leave them,

Seem to murmur as they roll;

There are hands and hearts to greet thee

In that land to which you go.

Rolling home....

Cheer up, Jack, fond hearts await thee,

And kind welcomes everywhere;

There are hands and hearts to greet thee,

Kind caresses from the fair.

Rolling home, rolling home,

Rolling home across the sea,

Rolling home to merry England,

Rolling home dear land to thee.

"Do they ever sing those words?" I asked suspiciously. The old Irishman

looked steadily back.

"Sure they sing 'em--sometimes," he said. "It's the same thing as them

other songs--only nicer put. Put to be printed," he added.

He found me others "put to be printed." Soon I had quite a collection.

And with the help of my German teacher I wrote down the music.

"There are not enough for a book," he said. "Why don't you write an

article, tell where you found them, put them in, and send it to a paper?

So you can give them to the world."

This I at once set out to do. In the writing I found again that deep

delight I had had on the dock, just far enough off to miss the dirt, the

sweat and the words of the song. I showed the article to my mother, and

she was surprised and delighted. Working together, in less than a week

we had polished it off. I heard her read it aloud to my father, I

watched his face, and I saw the grim smile that came over it as he asked

me,

"Are those the words you heard them sing?"

"Not all of them are," I answered. And suddenly, somehow or other, I

felt guilty, as though I had done something wrong. But angrily I shook

it off. Why should I always give in to his harbor? This that I had

written was fine! This was Art! At last in spite of him and his docks I

had found something great that I could do!

When the article was taken by a Sunday paper in New York and a check for

eight dollars was sent me with a brief but flattering letter, my pride

and hopes rose high. The eight dollars I spent on a pin for my mother,

as "Pendennis" or some other boy genius had done. When the article

appeared in the paper my mother bought fifty copies and gave them out to

our neighbors. There was nothing to shock such neighbors here, and they

praised me highly for what they called my "real descriptive power."

"That boy will go far," I heard one cultured old gentleman say. And I

lost no time in starting out. No musical career for me, down came

Beethoven from my wall, for I was now a writer. And not of mere

articles, either. Inside of six months I had written a dozen short

stories, and when each of these in turn was rejected I began to plan out

a five-act play. But here my mother stopped me.

"You're trying to go too fast," she said. "Think of it, you are barely

nineteen. You must give up everything else just now and spend all your

time getting ready for college. For if you are going to be a strong

writer, as I hope, you need to learn so many things first. And you will

find them all in college--as I did once when I was young," she added a

little wistfully.

CHAPTER VI

The first thing I needed in college was a good thorough dressing down.

And this I got without any delay. In the first few weeks my artist's

ears and eyes and soul were hazed to a frazzle. From "that boy who will

go far" I became "you damn young freshman." I was told to make love to a

horse's hind leg, I was made to perch on a gatepost and read the

tenderest passages of "Romeo and Juliet," replacing Romeo's name by my

own, and Juliet's by that of stout Mrs. Doogan, who scrubbed floors in a

dormitory close by. Refusals only made matters painful. Besides, I was

told by a freshman friend that I'd better fit in or I'd "queer" myself.

This dread of "queering" myself at first did me a world of good. Dumped

in this community of over a thousand callow youths, three hundred in my

class alone and each one absorbed in getting acquainted, fitting in,

making friends and a place for himself, I was soon struggling for a

foothold as hard as the rest. Within a month the thing I wanted above

all else was to shed my genius and become "a good mixer" in the crowd.

This drew me at first from books to athletics. Though still slight of

build I was wiry, high-strung and quick of movement. I had a snub nose

and sandy hair, and I was tough, with a hard-set jaw. And I now went

into the football world with a passion and a patience that landed me at

the end of the season--one of the substitute quarterbacks on the

freshman team. I did not get into a single game, I was only used on the

"scrub" in our practice. This made for a wholesome humility and a real

love of my college.

The football season over, I tried for the daily paper. One of the

freshman candidates for the editorial Spring elections, I became a daily

reporter slave. Here at first I drew on my "queer" past, turning all my

"descriptive powers" to use. But a fat senior editor called "Pop"

inquired one day with a sneer, "For God's sake, Freshman, why these

flowers?" And the flowers forthwith dropped out of my style. At all

hours, day and night, to the almost entire neglect of studies, I went

about college digging up news--not the trivial news of the faculty's

dull, puny plans for the development of our minds, but the real vital

news of our college life, news of the things we were here for, the

things by which a man got on, news of all the athletic teams, of the

glee, mandolin and banjo clubs, of "proms," of class and fraternity

elections, mass meetings and parades. Ferreting my way into all nooks

and crannies of college life, ears keen for hints and rumors, alert to

"scoop" my eighteen reporter rivals--the more I learned the better I

loved. And when in the Spring I was one of the five freshman editors

chosen, the conquest was complete. No more artist's soul for me. I was

part and parcel of college life.

Together with my companions I assumed a genial tolerance toward all

those poor dry devils known to us as "profs." I remember the weary sighs

of our old college president as he monotoned through his lectures on

ethics to the tune of the cracking of peanuts, which an old darky sold

to us at the entrance to the hall. It was a case of live and let live.

He let us eat and we let him talk. With the physics prof, who was known

as "Madge the Scientist," our indulgence went still further. We took no

disturbing peanuts there and we let him drone his hour away without an

interruption, except perhaps an occasional snore. We were so good to

him, I think, because of his sense of humor. He used to stop talking now

and then and with a quizzical hopeless smile he would look about the

hall. And we would all smile broadly back, enjoying to the full with

him the droll farce of our presence there. "Go to it, Madge," someone

would murmur. And the work of revealing the wonders of this material

universe would limp quietly along. In examinations Madge gave no marks,

at least not to the mass of us. If he had, over half of us would have

been dropped, so he "flunked" the worst twenty and let the rest through.

The faculty, as a whole, appeared to me no less fatigued. Most of them

lectured as though getting tired, the others as though tired out. There

were a few lonely exceptions but they had to fight against heavy odds.

The hottest fighter of all against this classic torpor was a tall,

joyous Frenchman who gestured not only with his hands but with his

eloquent knees as well. His subject was French literature, but from this

at a moment's notice he would dart off into every phase of French life.

There was nothing in life, according to him, that was not a part of

literature. In college he was considered quite mad.

I met him not long ago in New York. We were both hanging to straps in

the subway and we had but a moment before he got off.

"I have read you," he said, "in the magazines. And from what you write I

think you can tell me. What was the trouble with me at college?" I

looked into his black twinkling eyes.

"Great Scott!" I said suddenly. "You were alive!"

"Merci! Au revoir, monsieur!"

What a desert of knowledge it was back there. Our placid tolerance of

the profs included the books they gave us. The history prof gave us ten

books of collateral reading. Each book, if we could pledge our honor as

gentlemen that we had read it, counted us five in examination. On the

night before the examination I happened to enter the room of one of our

football giants, and found him surrounded by five freshmen, all of whom

were reading aloud. One was reading a book on Russia, another the life

of Frederick the Great, a third was patiently droning forth Napoleon's

war on Europe, while over on the window-seat the other two were racing

through volumes one and two of Carlyle's French Revolution. The room was

a perfect babel of sound. But the big man sat and smoked his pipe, his

honor safe and the morrow secure. In later years, whatever might happen

across the sea would find this fellow fully prepared, a wise,

intelligent judge of the world, with a college education.

"This reminds me," he said, "of last summer--when I did Europe in three

weeks with Dad."

The main idea in all courses was to do what you had to but no more. One

day an English prof called upon me to define the difference between a

novel and a book of science.

"About the same difference," I replied, "as between an artist's painting

and a mathematical drawing."

"Bootlick, bootlick," I heard in murmurs all over the hall. I had

answered better than I had to. Hence I had licked the professor's boots.

I did not offend in this way again.

* * * * *

But early in my sophomore year, when the novelty had worn away, I began

to do some thinking. Was there nothing else here? My mother and I had

had talks at home, and she had told me plainly that unless I sent home

better reports I could not finish my four years' course. And after all,

she wasn't a fool, there was something in that idea of hers--that here

in this quiet old town, so remote from the harbor and business, a fellow

ought to be getting "fine" things, things that would help him all his

life.

"But look what I've got!" I told myself. "When I came here what was I? A

little damn prig! And look at me now!"

"All right, look ahead. I'm toughened up, I've had some good things

knocked into me and a lot of fool things knocked out of me. But that's

just it. Are all the fine things fool things? Don't I still want to

write? Sure I do. Well, what am I going to write about? What do I know

of the big things of life? I was always hunting for what was great. I'm

never hunting for it now, and unless I get something mighty quick my

father will make me go into his business. What am I going to do with my

life?"

At first I honestly tried to "pole," to find whether, after all, I

couldn't break through the hard dry crust of books and lectures down

into what I called "the real stuff." But the deeper I dug the drier it

grew. Vaguely I felt that here was crust and only crust, and that for

some reason or other it was meant that this should be so, because in the

fresh bubbling springs and the deep blazing fires whose presence I could

feel below there was something irritating to profs and disturbing to

those who paid them. These profs, I thought confusedly, had about as

much to do with life as had that little "hero of God" who had cut such a

pitiful figure when he came close to the harbor. And more pitiful still

were the "polers," the chaps who were working for high marks. They

thought of marks and little else. They thrived on crust, these fellows,

cramming themselves with words and rules, with facts, dates, theorems

and figures, in order to become professors themselves and teach the same

stuff to other "polers." There was a story of one of them who stayed in

his room and crammed all through the big football game of the season,

and at night when told we had won remarked blithely,

"Oh, that's splendid! I think I'll go out and have a pretzel!"

God, what a life, I thought to myself! None of that for me! And so I

left the "polers."

But now in my restless groping around for realities in life that would

thrill me, things that I could write about, I began trying to test

things out by talking about them with my friends. What did a fellow want

most in life--what to do, what to get and to be? What was there really

in business beside the making of money? In medicine, law and the other

professions, in art, in getting married, in this idea of God and a

heaven, or in the idea I vaguely felt now filtering through the nation,

that a man owed his life to his country in time of peace as in time of

war. The harbor with rough heavy jolts had long ago started me thinking

about questions of this kind. Now I tackled them again and tried to talk

about them.

And at once I found I was "queering" myself. For these genial companions

of mine had laid a most decided taboo upon all topics of this kind. They

did so because to discuss them meant to openly think and feel, and to

think or feel intensely, about anything but athletics and other things

prescribed by the crowd, was bad form to say the least.

Bad form to talk in any such fashion of what we were going to make of

our lives. Nobody cared to warm up on the subject. Many had nothing at

all in sight and put off the whole idea as a bore. Others were already

fixed, they had positions waiting in law and business offices, in

factories, mines, mills and banks, and they took these positions as

settled and sure.

"Why?" I would argue impatiently. "How do you know it's what you want

most?"

"Oh, I guess it'll do as well as another."

"But damn it all, why not have a look? We can have a big look now, we've

got a chance to broaden out before we jump into our little jobs--to see

all the jobs and size 'em up and look at 'em as a part of the world!"

"Oh, biff." I got little or no response. The greater part of these

decent likable fellows could not warm up to anything big, they simply

hadn't it in them.

"Why in hell do you want me to get all hot?" drawled one fat sluggard of

a friend. "I'll keep alive when the time comes." And he and his kind set

the standard for all. Sometimes a chap who could warm up, who had the

real stuff in him, would "loosen up" about his life on some long tramp

with me alone. But back in college his lips were sealed. It was not

exactly that he was ashamed, it was simply that with his college friends

such talk seemed utterly out of place.

"Look out, Bill," said one affectionately. "You'll queer yourself if you

keep on."

The same held true of religion. An upper classman, if he felt he had to,

might safely become a leader of freshmen in the Y. M. C. A. But when one

Sunday evening I disturbed a peaceful pipe-smoking crowd by wondering

why it was that we were all so bored in chapel, there fell an

embarrassing silence--until someone growled good-humoredly, "Don't bite

off more'n you can chew." Nobody wanted to drop his religion, he simply

wanted to let it alone. I remember one Sunday in chapel, in the midst of

a long sermon, how our sarcastic old president woke us up with a start.

"I was asked," he said, "if we had any free thinkers here. 'No,' I

replied. 'We have not yet advanced that far. For it takes half as much

thinking to be a free thinker as it does to believe in God.'"

And I remember the night in our sophomore club when the news came like a

thunderclap that one of our members had been killed pole-vaulting at a

track meet in New York. It was our habit, in our new-found manliness, to

eat with our hats on, shout and sing, and speak of our food as

"tapeworm," "hemorrhage," and the like. I remember how we sat that

night, silent, not a word from the crowd--one starting to eat, then

seeing it wasn't the thing to do, and staring blankly like the rest.

They were terrible, those stares into reality. That clutching pain of

grief was real, so real it blotted everything out. Later some of us in

my room began to talk in low voices of what a good fellow he had been.

Then some chap from the Y. M. C. A. proposed timidly to lead us in

prayer. What a glare he got from all over the room! "Damn fool," I heard

someone mutter. Bad form!

Politics also were tabooed. Here again there were exceptions. A still

fiery son of the South could rail about niggers, rapes and lynchings and

the need for disenfranchising the blacks. It was good fun to hear him.

Moreover, a fellow who was a good speaker, and needed the money, might

stump the state for either political party, and his accounts were often

amusing. But to sit down and talk about the trusts, graft, trade unions,

strikes, or the tariff or the navy, the Philippines, "the open door," or

any other of the big questions that even then, ten years ago, were

beginning to shake the country, and that we would all be voting on soon?

No. The little Bryan club was a joke. And one day when a socialist

speaker struck town the whole college turned out in parade, waving red

sweaters and firing "bombs" and roaring a wordless Marseillaise! We

wanted no solemn problems here!

Finally, it was distinctly bad form to talk about sex. Not to tell

"smutty stories," they were welcomed by the average crowd. But to look

at it squarely, as I tried to do, and get some light upon what would be

doubtless the most vital part of our future lives--this simply wasn't

done. What did women mean to us, I asked. What did prostitutes mean at

present? What would wives mean later on? And all this talk about

mistresses and this business of free love, and easy divorces and

marriage itself--what did they all amount to? Was love really what it

was cracked up to be, or had the novelists handed us guff? When I came

out with questions like these, the chaps called "clean" looked rather

pained; the ones who weren't, distinctly bored.

For this whole intricate subject was kept in the cellars of our minds,

cellars often large but dark. Because "sex" was wholly rotten. It had

nothing to do, apparently, with the girls who came chaperoned to the

"proms," it had to do only with certain women in a little town close by.

Plenty of chaps went there at times, and now and then women from over

there would come to us on the quiet at night. But one afternoon I saw a

big crowd on the front campus. It grew every moment, became a mob,

shoving and surging, shouting and jeering. I climbed some steps to look

into the center, and saw two painted terrified girls, hysterical,

sobbing, swearing and shrieking. So they were shoved, a hidden

spectacle, to the station and put on the train. Nothing like that on our

front campus! Nothing like "sex" in the front rooms of our minds. The

crowd returned chuckling. Immoral? Hell, no. Simply bad form.

* * * * *

"What am I going to write about?"

"Games," said the college. "Only games. Don't go adventuring down into

life."

CHAPTER VII

Then I found Joe Kramer.

He had "queered" himself at the beginning in college. I had barely known

him. He belonged to no fraternity, and except on the athletic field he

kept out of all our genial life. And this life of ours, for all its

thoughtlessness, was so rich in genuine friendships, so filled and

bubbling over with the joy of being young, that we could not understand

how any decent sort of chap could deliberately keep out of it. We put

Joe Kramer down as a "grouch."

But now that I too was "queering" myself, our queerness drew us

together, or rather, Joe's drew mine. In the ten years that have gone

since then I have never met any man who drew me harder than he did, than

he is drawing me even still--and this often in spite of my efforts to

shake him off, and later of his quite evident wish to be rid of me. For

Joe had what is so hard to find among us comfortable mortals, a

sincerity so real and deep that it absolutely ruled his life, that it

kept him exploring into things, kept him adventuring always.

In long tramps over the neighboring hills, on our backs in the grass

staring up at the clouds, or in winter hugging a bonfire in the shelter

of a boulder, or back in college over our beer or over countless pipes

in our rooms, together we adventured through books and long hungry talks

down into life--and of the paths we discovered I see even now no end.

Joe was tall and lean, with heavy shoulders stooping slightly. He was

sallow, he never took care of himself. He ate his meals at all hours at

a small cheap restaurant, where he bought a bunch of meal tickets each

week. His face was obstinate, honest, kindly, his features were as blunt

as his talk. He was the first to understand what I was so vaguely

looking for, and to say, "All right, Kid, you come right along." And as

he was farther along than I, he pulled me after him on the hunt after

what he called "the genuine article" in this bewildering modern life.

His own life, to begin with, was a tie with this real modern world that

had forced itself on me long ago through the harbor. For Joe had been

"up against it" hard. Though blunt and frank about most things he talked

little about himself, but I got his story bit by bit. "Graft" had come

into it at the start. In a town of the Middle West his father had been a

physician with a good practice, until when Joe was eleven years old a

case of smallpox was discovered. Joe's father vaccinated about a score

of children that week. The "dope" he used was mailed to him by a drug

firm in Chicago. It was "rotten." Over half the children were

desperately ill and seven of them died. Joe's father, his mother and

both older sisters did duty as nurses day and night. After that they

left town, moved from town to town, that story always following, and

finally both parents died. Since then Joe had been a teamster, a clerk

in a hardware store, a brakeman, a telegrapher, and last, the assistant

editor of a paper in a small town. He had scraped and slaved and studied

throughout with the idea of coming East to college. He had come at

twenty-two, beating his way on freight trains. On the top of a car one

night he had fallen asleep and been knocked on the head by a steel beam

jutting down under a bridge. Then, after two weeks on a hospital bed, he

had arrived at college.

Here he had earned a meager way by writing football and baseball news

for a string of western papers. Here he had looked for an education, and

here "a bunch of dead ones" had handed him "news from the graveyard"

instead.

I can still see him in classroom, head cocked to one side, grimly

watching the prof. And once during a Bible course lecture I heard his

voice blandly ironic behind me:

"Will somebody ask Mister Charley Darwin to be so good as to step this

way?"

"We've been cheated, Bill," he told me. "We've been cheated right along.

Take history, for instance, the kind of stuff we were handed in school.

I got onto it first when I was fourteen. It was a rainy Saturday and my

mother told me to go and clean out an old closet up in the attic. Well,

I found my German grandfather's diary there, written when he was in

college in Leipsic, in 1848. The way those kids jumped into things! The

way they got themselves mixed up in the Revolution of Forty Eight! To

hear my young grandfather talk, that year was one of the biggest times

in European history. Our school history gave it five pages and then

druled on about courts and kings. 'I'll go to college,' I made up my

mind. 'College will put me next to the truth.' So I saved my little

nickels and came. But college," he added moodily, "ain't advanced as far

as it was in my young grandfather's time."

"Do you know who's to blame for this stuff?" he said. "It's not the

profs, I've nothing against them, all they need is to be kicked out. No,

it's us, because we stand for their line of drule. If we got right up on

our honkeys and howled, all of us, for a real education, we'd get it by

next Saturday night. But we don't care a damn. Why don't we? Are we all

of us dubs? No we're not. Go down to the football field and see. There's

as much brains in figuring out those plays as there is in mathematics.

Would we stand for coaches like our profs? But that's just it. It's the

thing to be alive in athletics and a dub in everything else. And because

it's the thing, every fellow fits in. On the whole," he added

reflectively, "I think it's this 'dear old college' feeling that's to

blame for it all."

"My God, Joe!" This was high treason!

"Sure it is," he retorted. "It _is_ your god and the god of us all. This

dear old college feeling. It's got us all stuck together so close that

nobody dares to be himself and buck against its standards."

This from Joe Kramer! How often, in a football game, have I seen him on

the reporter's bench, his sallow face now all a-scowl, now beaming

satisfaction as he pounded his neighbor on the back.

In pursuit of "a real education" we got into the habit of spending

almost every evening in the college library, where except at examination

times there was nobody but a few silent "polers."

I grew to love this place. It was so huge and shadowy, with only shaded

lights here and there. It had such tempting crannies. I loved its deep

quiet, so pleasantly broken now and then by a step, a whisper, the sound

of a book being moved from its shelf where perhaps it had stood unread

for years, or occasional voices passing outside or snatches of song from

the campus. And here I thought I was finding myself. That French prof

had introduced me to Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant and others who

were becoming my new idols. This was art, this was beauty and truth,

this was getting at life in a way that thrilled.

But now and then looking up from my book I would see Joe prowling about

the place, taking down a book, then shoving it back and scowling as he

ran his eyes along whole rows of titles.

"This darned library shut its doors," he would growl to himself, "just

as the real dope was coming along. But there's been such a flood of it

ever since that some leaked in in spite of 'em."

Joe would search and search until he found "it" on back shelves or stuck

away in corners. Angrily he would blow off the dust and then settle

himself with a sigh to read. There was always something wistful to me in

the way Joe opened each new book. But what a joy when he found

"it"--Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Walt Whitman, Zola, Samuel

Butler. What a sudden sort of glee the night he discovered Bernard Shaw!

When the library closed we adjourned for beer and a smoke, and often we

would argue long about what we had been reading. Joe had little use for

the stuff I liked. Beauty and form were nothing to him, it was "the

meat" he was after. My mother's idols he laid low.

"The first part was big," he said one night of a recent English novel.

"But the last part was the kind of thing that poor old Thackeray might

have done."

In an instant I was up in arms, for to my mother and me the author of

"Pendennis" had been like a great lovable patron saint, a refuge from

all we abhorred in the harbor. To slight him was a sacrilege. But

reverence to Joe Kramer was a thing unknown. "Show me," he said, in

reply to my outburst, "a single thing he ever wrote that wasn't

sentimental bosh!" And we went at it hammer and tongs.

It was so in all our talks. Nothing was too sacred. Joe always insisted

on "being shown."

He had a keen liking but little respect for the nation built by our

fathers. From his own father's tragedy, caused by graft, his own hard

struggles in the West and the Populist doctrines he had imbibed, he had

come East with a deep conviction that "things in this country are one

big mess with the Constitution sitting on top." And when the term

"muckraker" came into use, I remember his deep satisfaction. "Now I know

my name," he said.

He was equally hard on the church. How he kicked against our compulsory

chapel. "Broad, isn't it, scientific," he growled, "to yank a man out of

bed every morning, throw him into his seat in chapel and tell him,

'Here. This is what you believe. Be good now, take your little dose and

then you can go to breakfast.'"

"I'm no atheist," he remarked. "I'm only a poor young fellah who asks,

'Say, Mister, if you _are_ up there why is it that no big scientist has

brains enough to see you?'"

"Look here, J. K., that isn't so!"

"Isn't it? Show me!" And we would start in. I had a deep repugnance for

his whole materialistic view. But I liked the way he jarred me.

"What I want to do," he said, "is to bust every hold that any creed ever

had on me. I don't mean only creeds in churches, I mean creeds in

politics, business and everywhere else. I want to get 'em all out of my

eyes so I can see what's really here--because I'm so sure there's an

awful lot here and an awful lot more that's coming. If I make a noise

like a knocker at times you don't want to put me down as any

Schopenhauer fan. None of that pessimistic dope for little Joey Kramer.

I never open a new book without hoping I'll find the real stuff I want,

and I never open a paper without hoping that some more of it will be

right here in the news of the day. Kid," he ended intensely, "you can

take it from me there are going to be big doings soon in this little old

world, big doings and great big ideas, as big as what caused the Civil

War and a damn sight more scientific. And the thing for you and me to do

is to get ourselves in some kind of shape so we can shake hands with 'em

when they arrive, and say, 'Hello, fellahs, come right in. You're just

what we've been waiting for.'"

When Joe gave up college at the end of the junior year, he left a small

group of us behind. "The Ishmaelites," we called ourselves. For though

most of us "couldn't quite go Joe," we had all "queered" ourselves in

college through the influence on us he had had.

There are thousands of Joe Kramers now in colleges scattered all over

the land. Each year their numbers grow, each year more deep their vague

conviction that somehow they've been cheated, more harsh and insistent

every year their questioning of all "news from the graveyard," whether

it comes from old fogey professors or from parents or preachers, eminent

lawyers or business men, great politicians or writers of books. Arrogant

and sweeping, sparing nothing sacred--young. Ignorant, confused and

groping, almost wistful--new. They are becoming no insignificant part in

this swiftly changing national life.

Joe Kramer was one of the pioneers.

CHAPTER VIII

It was with an unpleasant shock of surprise that I found Joe liked the

harbor.

When I took him home for Christmas he spent half his time down there on

the docks. He explored the whole region for miles around, in a week he

spoke in familiar terms of slips and bays and rivers that to me were

still nothing but names. Moreover, he liked my father. And my father,

opening up by degrees, showed an unmistakable relish for Joe.

They had long talks in the study at night, where I could hear them

arguing about the decline of our shipping, the growth of our trusts and

railroads, graft and high finance and strikes, the swift piling up of

our troubles at home--and about the great chance we were losing abroad,

the blind weak part we were playing in this eager ocean world where

every nation that was alive was rushing in to get a place. As their

voices rose loud and excited, even my young sister Sue, who was just out

of high school now and doing some groping about of her own, would go

into the study to listen at times. But I kept out. For already I was

tired again of all these harbor problems, I wanted to get at life

through Art! And I felt besides that if I entered into long talks with

my father, sooner or later he would be sure to bring up the dreaded

question of my going into his business. And this I was firmly resolved

not to do. For my dislike of all his work, his deepening worries, his

dogged absorption in his tiresome hobby of ships, was even sharper than

before.

"That dad of yours," Joe told me, "is a mighty interesting old boy. He

has had a big life with a big idea."

"Has he?" said I. "Then he's lost it."

"He hasn't! That's just the trouble. He thinks he's a comer when he's a

goer--he can't see his idea is out of date. It's a pity," he added

sadly. "When a man can spend his days and nights hating the trusts and

the railroads as he does, it's a pity he's so darned old in his views of

what ought to be done about it. Your father believes that if only we'd

get a strong navy and a large mercantile marine----"

"Oh, cut it, J. K.," I said pettishly. "I tell you I don't care what he

believes! The next thing you'll be telling me is that I ought to take a

job in his warehouse!"

"You might do worse," said Joe.

"What?" I demanded indignantly.

"That's just what I said. If you'd go on a paper and learn to write like

a regular man I'd be tickled to death. But if all you want to be in life

is a young Guy de Maupassant and turn out little gems for the girls,

then I say you'd be a lot better off if you went into your father's

warehouse and began telling Wall Street to get off the roof!"

"Thank you," I said stiffly.

From that talk Joe and I began drifting apart. I never brought him home

again, I saw less of him at college. And at the end of the college year

he went to New York, where he found a job on a paper.

And so all through my senior year I was left undisturbed to "queer"

myself in my own sweet way, which was to slave for hours over Guy de

Maupassant and other foreign authors, write stories and sketches by the

score, and with two other "Ishmaelites" plan for a year's work in Paris.

The French prof was delighted and spurred us on with glowing accounts of

life in "the Quarter." One of us wanted to be a painter. No place for

that like Paris! Another an architect--Paris! Myself a writer--Paris!

For what could American writers to-day, with their sentimental little

yarns covering with a laugh or a tear all the big deep facts of life,

show to compare to the unflinching powerful work of the best writers

over in France? In Paris they were training men to write of life as it

really is! How that prof did drum it in. Better still, how he talked it

up to my mother--the last time she came to college.

I soon found she was on my side. If only she could bring father around.

I still remember vividly that exciting night in June when the three of

us, back there at home, sat on the terrace and fought it out. I remember

the beauty of the night, I mean of the night up there in the garden

under the stars, my mother's garden and her stars, and of the hideous

showing put up by my father's harbor below.

Of course he opposed my going abroad. His old indifference to me had

vanished, I saw he regarded me now as worth while, grown up, a business

asset worth fighting for. And my father fought. He spoke abruptly,

passionately of the great chance on the docks down there. I remember

being surprised at his talk, at the bigness and the intensity of this

hunger of his for ships. But of what he said I remembered nothing, I did

not hear, for I was eyeing my mother.

I saw she was watching him pityingly. Why? What argument had she still

to use? I waited in increasing suspense.

"So that's all there is to it," I heard him end. "You might as well get

it right out of your head. You're not going over to Europe to fool away

any more of your time. You're going to buckle down right here."

"Billy, leave us alone," said my mother.

What in the name of all the miracles did she do to him that night--my

mother so frail (she had grown so of late), my father so strong? The

next day she told me he had consented.

I saw little of him in the next two weeks. He left me alone with her

every evening. But when I watched him he looked changed--beaten and

broken, older. In spite of myself I pitied him now, and a confused

uneasiness, almost remorse, came over me at the way I had opposed him.

"What's come over Dad?" I wondered. Once I saw him look at my mother,

and his look was frightened, crushed. What was it she had told him?

Those evenings I read "Pendennis" aloud for the third time to my mother.

It had been our favorite book, and I took anxious pains to show her how

I loved it still. But once chancing to look quickly up, I caught my

mother watching me with a hungriness and an utter despair such as I'd

never seen before. It struck me cold, I looked away--and suddenly I

realized what a selfish little beast I was, beside this woman who loved

me so and whom I was now leaving. My throat contracted sharply. But when

I looked back the look was gone, and in its place was a quiet smile.

"Oh, my boy, you must do fine work," she said. "I want it so much more

than anything else in my whole life. In my whole life," she repeated. I

came over to her chair, bent over her and kissed her hard.

"I'm sorry I'm going! I'm sorry!" I whispered. "But mammy! It's only for

a year!"

Why did that make her cling to me so? If only she had told me.

But what young egotists we sons are. It was only a few days later that

with my two college chums, from the deck of an ocean liner, I said

good-by to the harbor.

"Thank God I'm through with you at last."

CHAPTER IX

I was in Paris for two years.

In those first weeks of deep delight I called it, "The Beautiful City of

Grays." For this town was certainly mellowed down. No jar of an ugly

present here, no loud disturbing harbor. But on the other hand, no

dullness of a fossilized past. What college had been supposed to do this

city did, it took the past and made it alive, richly, thrillingly alive,

and wove it in with the present. In the first Sorbonne lectures, even

with my meager French, I felt this at once, I wanted to feel it. These

profs were brilliant, sparkling, gay. They talked as though Rousseau and

Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert, Maupassant and all the rest were

still vital dazzling news to the world, because these men were still

molding the world. And from here exploring out over the town, I was

smilingly greeted everywhere by such affable gracious old places, that

seemed to say:

"We've been written about for a thousand years, and now you also wish to

write. How charming of you. Please sit down. Garcon, un bock."

And I sat down. Scenes from the books of my great idols rose around

every corner, or if they didn't I made them rise. There was pride in the

process. To go to the Place de la Republique, take a seat before some

cheap, jolly cafe, squint out at the Place with an artist's eye,

reconstruct the Bastille, the Great Revolution, dream back of that to

Rousseau and Voltaire and the way they shook the world by their

writings--and then wake up and find that I had been at it for three

mortal hours! What a chap I was for dreams. I must be quite a genius.

There were hours with Hugo in Notre Dame in one of its most shadowy

corners; with Zola on top of a 'bus at night as it lumbered up into the

Belleville slums; with Balzac in an old garden I found; with Guy de

Maupassant everywhere, in the gay hum and lights of those endless cafes,

from bridges at sunset over the Seine, or far up the long rich dusk of

the Champs Elysees, lights twinkling out, and _his_ women laughing,

chattering by.

Nothing left in this rich old world but the harbor? Nothing beautiful,

fine or great for an eager, hungry, happy young man? I could laugh! I

knew now that the harbor had lied! For into this radiant city not only

the past but the whole present of the earth appeared to me to be pouring

in. Painters, sculptors, writers and builders were here from all

nations, with even some Hindus and Japs thrown in, young, bringing all

their dreams and ambitions, their gaiety, their vigor and zest.

"Young men are lucky. They will see great things."

Voltaire had said that about thirty years before the French Revolution.

It had been true then, true ever since, it was true to-day and

here--though _our_ great things I felt very sure were not to come in

violence--the world had gone beyond all that. No, these immense

surprises that were lurking just before us, these astounding miracles

that were to rise before our eyes, would come in the unfolding of the

powers in men's minds, working free and ranging wide, with a deep

resistless onward rush--in the stirring times of peace!

And we were not only to see great things but we were all to do them!

That was the very keynote of the place. Here a fellow could certainly

write if only he had it in him. Impatiently I slaved at my French. Five

hours sleep was plenty.

In the small apartment we had taken just on the edge of the Luxembourg

Gardens, on the nights when we were working at home, one of us at his

easel, another at his drafting board, myself at my desk, we would knock

off at about eleven o'clock and come down for beer and a long smoke in

front of the cafe below. A homely little place it was, with two rows of

small iron tables in front, and at one of these we would seat ourselves.

Behind us in the window was a long glass tank of gold fish, into which

from time to time a huge cat would reach an omnivorous paw. Often from

within the cafe we would hear Russian folk songs played on balalaikas by

a group of Russian students there. And between the songs a low hubbub

rose, in French and many other tongues, for here were French and

Germans, English and Bohemians, Russians and Italians, all gathered here

while they were young.

How serene the old city seemed those nights. The street outside was

quiet. The motor 'bus, that pest of Paris, had not yet appeared. Only an

occasional cab would come tinkling on its way. Our street was absurdly

short. At one end was a gay cluster of lights from the crowded cafes of

the "Boul' Mich'," at the other were the low lighted arches at the back

of the Odeon, from which when the play was over fluffy feminine figures

would emerge from the stage entrance; we would hear their low musical

voices as they came merrily by us in cabs. Other figures would pass.

Across the street before us rose the trees and the lofty iron fence of

the Gardens, with a rich gloom of shrubs behind, and against this

background figures in groups and alone and in couples would come

strolling by with their happiness or hurrying eagerly toward it. Or to

what else were they hurrying? From what were they coming so slowly away?

These strangers in this setting thrilled me. Comedy, tragedy, character,

plot--there seemed nothing in life but the writing of tales--watching,

listening, dreaming, finding, then becoming deeply excited, feeling them

grow inside of you, planning them out and writing them off, then working

them over and over and over, little by little building them up. What a

rich absorbing life for a fellow, and for me it still lay all ahead. I

had used but twenty-two years of my life, there were fifty left to write

in, and what couldn't you write in fifty years!

Often, sitting here at night, I would get an idea and begin to work, and

I would keep on until at last the enormous old woman who kept the

cafe--we called her "The Blessed Damozel"--would come lumbering out and

good humoredly growl,

"Couches-toi donc. Une heure vient de sonner."

* * * * *

There came a brief interruption. Into our street's procession one

evening, over its round cobblestones on a bicycle that wearily wobbled,

there came a lean dusty figure with something distinctly familiar in the

stoop of the big shoulders.

"Hello, boys," said a deep gruff voice.

"J. K.!"

It was. Joe Kramer arriving in Paris at midnight on a punctured tire,

and cursing the cobblestone pavements over which he had hunted us out.

A hot supper, a bottle of wine, a genial beam on all three of us, and

Joe told his story. After leaving college, from New York he had gone to

Kansas City, and by the "livest paper" there he had been sent abroad

with a bike to do a series of "Sunday specials." He had come over

steerage and written an expose of his passage. He had two weeks for

Paris and then was off to Berlin and Vienna.

"I'm just breaking ground this time, boys," he said. "I want to get the

hang of the countries and a start in their infernal languages."

The next day he began to break ground in our city. Early the next

morning I found Joe propped up in bed scowling into _Le Matin_ as he

tried to butt his way through the language into the news events of the

day. What I tried to tell him of the Paris I had found made no appeal

whatever.

"All right, Kid," he said indulgently. "If I had a dozen lifetimes I

might be a poet. But I haven't, so I'll just be a reporter."

And he and his bike plunged into the town. He found its "newspaper row"

that day and a Frenchman to whom he had a letter. With this man Joe went

to the Bourse and that night to the Chamber of Deputies. He got "Sunday

specials" out of them both, and then went on to the Bourse de Travail.

And in the few spare moments he had, Joe told us of the things he had

seen. Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage

burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor!

_This_ was not my Paris!

"It is," said J. K. stoutly. "There's no place like a newspaper office

to put you right next to the heart of a town."

He would not hear to our seeing him off. I remember him that last night

after supper strapping his bag onto his bike and starting off down our

quiet old street on his way to the station.

"To-morrow," he said, "I'll stop off in Leipsic. I want to have a look

at the college that stirred my young grandfather up for life. I've got

his diary with me."

Again, in spite of the gruffness, I felt that wistful quality in him.

J. K. was hunting for something too.

CHAPTER X

But what a relief to see him go, to forget his loud disturbing Paris and

again drink deep of mine, the city of great writers.

"I'll never really know them," I thought, "until I can not only talk but

think and feel in their language."

So I drudged for hours a day in my room. I inflicted my French on my

chums at meals, on defenseless drivers of 'buses who could not rise and

go away, and on the Blessed Damozel, who said:

"Va donc, cherches-toi une fille. C'est la seule maniere d'apprendre le

Francais."

I was vaguely thrilled by this idea, the more because so far in my life

I had had no experience of the kind. On the streets, in cabs, and in

cafes I began watching women with different eyes, more eagerly selecting

eyes that picked out of the throng the one _her_ of the moment so that

for me she was quite alone. She was alone for a thousand reasons,

different ones in every case. She was of many ages, rich and poor, now

gorgeous and now simply dressed, now a ravishing creature that took your

breath and again just funny and very French with a saucy way of wearing

her clothes. Her fascinations were always new. I watched her twinkling

earrings, her trick of using her lips when she smiled, her hands, her

silk clad ankles, her swelling young bust, the small coquettish hat she

wore, her shoulders, their expressive shrugs, her quick vivacious

movements--and I watched her eyes. Her eyes would meet mine now and

then, often with only a challenging smile but again in an intimate

dazzling way that gave me a deep swift shock of delight and left me

confused and excited.

"In a little while," I thought. I decided to wait till I knew more

French. "She'll be strange enough, God knows," I thought half

apprehensively, "even when I can talk her language." And with a feeling

almost of relief I would plunge back into my work and forget her. For me

she was only an incident in this teeming radiant life.

I must learn French! I strained my ears at lectures, at plays from the

top gallery, I hired a tutor to hurry it on. Years later in New York I

met a Russian revolutionist come to raise money for his cause. "Three

weeks have I been in this country," he said in utter exasperation. "And

not yet do I speak fluently the English!" That was how I felt about

French. What a delight to begin to feel easy, to catch the fine

shadings, the music and color of words and of phrases. How much more

pliant and smooth and brilliant than English. How remote from the

harbor.

I could study my models now, not only their construction but their small

character touches as well. De Maupassant was still first for me. So

simple and sure, with so few strokes but each stroke counting to the

full, one suggestive sentence making you imagine the rest, everything

else in the world shut out, your mind gripped suddenly and held,

focussed on this man and this woman who a moment before had been nothing

to you but were now more real than life itself. Especially this woman,

what an absorbing creature he made her--and the big human ideas he

injected into these petites histoires.

I wrote short stories by the score. Each one had a perfectly huge idea

but each seemed worse than the one before. I took to myself the advice

of Flaubert, and from a table before a cafe I would watch the people

around me and jot down the minutest details, I filled whole pages with

my strokes. But which to choose to make this person or this scene like

no other in the world? There came the rub. How had De Maupassant done

it? The answer came to me one night:

"Not only by watching people. He talked to 'em, lived with 'em, knew

their lives!"

The very thing my music teacher had said about Beethoven. How uneasy I

had been then, how absurdly young and priggish then in the gingerly way

I had gone at the harbor. Thank heaven there was no harbor here. I could

enter this life with a wholehearted zest.

I began with one of my roommates. He was to be an architect. A

hard-working little chap, his days were filled with sharp suspense. The

Beaux Arts entrance examinations were close ahead. If he did not pass,

he told me, his parents in Ohio were too poor to give him another

chance.

"If I have to go back to Ohio now," he said in that soft reflective

voice of his, "I'll put up cowsheds--later on, barns--and maybe when I'm

fifty, a moving picture theater. If I stay here and go back a Beaux Arts

man, I can go to New York or Chicago and get right into the center of

the big things being done."

With a wet towel bound around his head he used to sit at his work half

the night. I watched the lines tighten about his thin lips and between

his gray eyes, grew to know the long weariness in them over some

problem, the sudden grim joy when the problem worked out. One day he

came home early.

"Queer," he said simply. "I can see one side of your face, one side of

your body, one leg and one arm. But the other side don't seem to be

there." I looked up at him a moment.

"Let's go out for a walk," I suggested. We went for a stroll in the

Gardens. And here I was surprised and just a bit ashamed to find that

while I had a real sympathy for him I had just as real curiosity. For

here was a living illustration of the horror of going blind. I could see

his jaws set like a vise, I could hear his low voice talking steadily on

as though to keep from thinking. What was he thinking? What was he

feeling? We talked of the most commonplace things. But moment by moment,

through his voice and his grip on my arm, those sudden waves now of

sickening fear, now of keen suspense, now of angry groping around for a

foothold, seemed pouring from him right into me, became part of

me--while the other part of me stood off and listened.

"By God, this is life!" said one part of me. "No, it isn't; it's hell,"

growled the other part. "This thing has got to be settled!"

I took him to an oculist, and there I had another close view, this time

of intense relief.

"Blind? Why, no, you're not going blind," said the oculist kindly. "All

you need is"--I heard nothing more. I had never had any idea before of

how swift and deep relief could be. On the street outside I heard it not

only in his unsteady laugh but in my own as well. We celebrated long

that night, and very late he took me to his favorite place down on the

lower quay of the river, where with the lights and the sounds of the

city far off it felt like some old dungeon. But just over our heads hung

the heavy black arch of a stone bridge, and looking up through this arch

as a frame we could see close above a gray, luminous mass rising and

rising in great sweeping lines till it filled half the sky--silent,

tremendous, Notre Dame. From down here the old edifice seemed alive. And

though my friend talked little here, I felt him again coming into me.

And this time it was his religion that came, his curious passion for

building.

When at last we went home he could see my whole body, and I felt as

though I had seen his whole soul.

Then I carefully wrote this down on paper. I put in every touch that I

could remember. I rewrote it to make it big, and I made it so big I

spoiled it all. I tore this up and began again. For about two weeks I

wrote nothing else. But at last I tore up everything. After all, he was

a friend of mine.

"But where's the harm," I argued, "so long as I always tear it up? This

is real stuff. I'll get somewhere this way if I keep on."

And I did keep on. Shamelessly I wormed my way into friends by the

dozen. I found it such an absorbing pursuit I could hardly wait to

finish up one before I went on to another. There were such a bewildering

lot of them, now that I had pried open my eyes. Would-be painters,

sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, rich and poor, tragic ones and

comic ones, with the meanest pettiest jealousies, the most bumptious

self-conceits, the blindest worship of masters, the most profound

humility, ambition so savage it made men inhuman. Many were starving

themselves to death.

There was a little Hungarian Jew, an ardent follower of Matisse.

"Technique?" he cried. "It is nothing! To grip your soul in your two

hands and press it on your canvas--that is art, that is Matisse!"

He took me night after night through old buildings up in Montparnasse,

immense and dismal rookeries crowded with Poles, Bohemians and God knows

what other races, all feverish post-impressionists. Often we would find

three together close around one candle, scowling and squinting at their

easels, gaunt, silent, eager. Matisse--Matisse!

"Most of them," said my guide, "are just mad. They cannot paint. All

think they are going to do great things, but all they are going to do is

to die."

It was through this little Hungarian that I made my first study of

female life.

Why delay any longer? I had been in Paris over six months, and I had

qualms almost of guilt at the thought of this chastity of mine. At first

I said, "Art is a jealous mistress." And this did splendidly for a time.

But then a stout German youth came along and laid it down as an absolute

law that no writer could do a woman right until he had lived with a

dozen. Hence that scented little cat with whom he had lived for the past

year. She was the first of the dozen, eh? Damn the fellow, how much was

there in it? De Maupassant certainly hadn't held off. In fact there were

few of my idols who had. Why not be brave and take the plunge? It need

not be such a terrific plunge; no doubt if I went at it right I could

find a safe, easy kind of a _her_, friendly and confiding, a thoroughly

good fellow with none of these wild ups and downs. The less temperament

the better; she must have a good quiet head on her shoulders; no doubt

we would need it. And she must not be too young. Let her have had

affairs enough to know that ours was only one more and would probably be

as brief as the rest--the briefer the better.

So tamely I pictured my first love. And the gay old city of Paris

smiled, and in that bantering way of hers she brought to me in a cafe

one night a perfect young tigress of a girl, a lithe, dusky beauty with

smouldering eyes, and said:

"Without doubt this one is better for you. Regard what loveliness, what

fire! Oh, my son, why not be brave?"

I was not brave, I barely spoke, and my friend the little Hungarian Jew

who had brought her to my table was forced to do the talking. For she,

too, was silent. But how different was her silence from the quiet I had

pictured. Presently, however, I became a little easier, and by degrees

we began to talk. She told me she was a painter. An Armenian by birth,

she had run away from home at eighteen, and here for two years in

Julien's she had tried to paint till she felt she'd go mad. She talked

in abrupt, eager sentences, breaking off to watch people around us. How

her big eyes fastened upon them. "To watch faces until you are sure--and

then paint! There is nothing else in the world!" she said. And I found

this reassuring.

After that I saw her many nights. And from time to time breaking that

silence of hers, she became so fiercely confiding, not only about her

painting, but about what she called her innermost soul, that soon I

could look my De Maupassant square in the face, man to man, for I was

learning a lot about women. As yet we were friends and nothing more, but

I could feel both of us changing fast. "In a little while," I thought.

But alas. One night she took me up to her room and showed me her

paintings. They were bad. They were fearfully bad, and my face must have

shown the impression they made.

"You consider them frightful!" she exclaimed. I stoutly denied it, but

things only went from bad to worse. Here was that temperament I had

dreaded. Now she was clutching both my arms.

"Mon dieu! Why not say it? Why cannot you say it?"

"No," I replied. "You have done some extremely powerful work!" Anything

to quiet her nerves. "Especially this one--look--over here!" And I

pointed to one of her pictures.

"I will show you how I shall look at it!" she cried in a perfect frenzy

of tears. She snatched up a knife that lay on her table, a very old,

curved, Armenian knife, and went at the painting and slashed it to

shreds, and then scattered the shreds all over the room.

And watching this little festival, I thought to myself excitedly,

"I know enough about this girl!"

My retreat was so precipitate as to appear almost a flight.

"Yes," I said to myself, outside, "De Maupassant knew women. And he went

insane at forty-five."

And so my next case was a chap from Detroit, whose aim, he told me, was

no less than to make himself "by the sheer force of my will a perfect,

all-round, modern man."

It was over his case that I lost what was left of my sense of honor. For

I not only wrote him down, I kept what I had written. "Ten years from

now," I said in excuse, "I won't believe him unless he's on paper." But

having kept this, I began keeping others, until my locked drawer was

filled with the dreams and ambitions and even the loves of my confiding,

innocent friends. At last I was a writer.

What a relief when my mother wrote that my father had consented to a

second year abroad for me. In my gratitude I even grew just a trifle

homesick.

"Hadn't I better come home for the summer?" I wrote her.

"No," she replied, "we cannot afford it. I want you to keep right on

with your work. I feel so sure you are working hard and will do things I

shall be proud of."

I was not only working, but living, feeling, listening hard, under the

stimulus day and night of the tense, rich life around me. About this

time I made a friend of a gaunt, bearded Russian chap, whose dream for

years had been, like mine, to become a writer of fiction. His god had

been Turgenief. And a year ago, leaving his home, a little town near

Moscow, with forty roubles in his purse he had set out on foot with a

pack on his back to tramp the long and winding road that stretched away

two thousand miles to the distant city of Paris, the place where his

idol had lived and studied and written for so many years. Through this

young Russian pilgrim I came to know the books of some of his

countrymen, and through him I caught glimpses down into the vast,

mysterious soul of that people in the North.

Through other chaps I met those days, other deep, tremendous vistas

opened up as backgrounds for these Paris friends of mine. Half the

night, in that cafe endeared to so many youths of all nations under its

name of "The Dirty Spoon," I heard talk about all things under the sun,

talk that was a merry war of words, ideas and points of view as wide

apart as that of a Jap and a German. For every land upon the earth had

sent its army of ideas, and they all charged together here, and the

walls of the Dirty Spoon resounded with the battle--with roars of

laughter and applause. For we were of free, tolerant minds. We were gay,

young dogs of war who had left our tails behind us--our tails of

prejudice, distrust--and our emancipated souls had only scorn for

hatreds born of race or creed. Like J. K., we had rid ourselves of all

creeds past and present--but J. K. had always been free with a scowl,

his feet set grimly on the ground--we here were free with a verve and a

dash that took us careering up into the stars to laugh at the very

heavens.

There was breadth in our very manner of speech. For here were we from

all over the earth, all speaking one tongue, the language in which half

the things that had moved the world had been said by men before us. And

what sparkling things there were still to be said, what dazzling things

we would see and do, in this prodigious onward march of the armies of

peace, out of all dark ages into a glad new world for men, where our

great smiling goddess of all the arts would reign supreme, where we

would dream mighty visions of life and all these visions would come

true.

So we saw the world those days in the radiant city on the Seine.

And meanwhile far up in the North, the Russian Czar, having started with

loud ostentation the movement for a world-wide peace, was swiftly

completing his preparations to strike with his armies at Japan. And the

other nations of Europe, jealous and suspicious of each other's every

secret plan--they, too, were making ready for what the future years

might bring.

"Young men are lucky. They will see great things."

And these young men have seen great things. But they have not been

lucky.

CHAPTER XI

It was about a year after this that again Joe Kramer broke in on my

dreams.

He arrived early on a raw, wet morning in the following winter. His

all-night ride from Cherbourg had left him disheveled, unshaven and

hungry.

"Well, boys," he asked when our greetings were over, "what do you think

of the news?"

"What news?"

Joe gave us a grim, fatherly smile.

"Say. Do I have to come all the way from Chicago to tell you what's

happening down the street? Well, you young beauty boosters, there's a

panic on the Bourse this week that's got your fair city flat on her

back. And the cause of the said panic is that France is in deep on

Russian bonds, which are now worth about a cent to the dollar. Because

the Russian people--already dead sick of the war with Japan--have risen

in a howling mob against their government. See?"

"I did hear of that," said the painter among us. "A Polish chap in the

studio said something about it yesterday."

"Now, did he?" said the ironical Joe. "Just kind of murmured it, I

suppose, while bending reverently over his art." He rose. "Well, boys,

I'm sorry for you, but I've only got a day in this town, I'm off for

Russia on the night train. Bill, I wish you'd help me here. I've got an

awful lot to do and my French is still a little weak."

It was not at all weak, it was strong and loud. I can hear it still, Joe

Kramer's French, and it is a fitting memory of that devastating day.

The day began so splendidly, so big with promise of great ideas. I grew

quite excited about it. Here was Joe on his way to a real revolution.

Sent out by his Chicago paper, he was going to Russia to see a whole

people fight to be free--a struggle prophesied long ago by Turgenief,

Tolstoy and other big Russians whose work I admired. And now it was

actually coming off--and Joe, the lucky devil, was going to be right on

hand! From some mysterious source in New York he had secured a letter to

a Russian revolutionist leader who for many years had been an exile here

in Paris. Joe was anxious to see him at once.

"All right," I said eagerly. "Give me his address."

"Hold on," J. K. retorted. "It's not so easy as all that. I want to get

into Russia. This man's house in Paris is watched day and night by the

Russian secret police, and nobody who's seen with him has a chance of

crossing the frontier. We've got to go slow."

"What'll we do?"

"I want you to steer me first to a Frenchman. He's an anarchist. Here's

his address."

The anarchist was a bit disappointing. A mild little man, we found him

in an attic room receiving a vigorous scolding from the huge blonde with

whom he lived. But after reading Joe's letter, he, too, took on a

mysterious air. He came with us in our cab, and off we went over Paris

until I thought we should never end. Again and again the cab would stop

and our guide would darkly disappear. But from one of these trips he

returned triumphant.

"I have found his wife," he announced. "But she says she must have a

look at you first." The cab rattled off, and the next stop was in front

of a public library.

"Now," said our guide, "go in and sit down at a table and pretend you

are reading."

We went in and did as he said. Soon a middle-aged woman in black sat

down at the other side of the table. She stared at us gloomily a

moment; then with a yawn she opened a book and calmly started making

notes. Presently, scowling over her work, she began muttering to

herself.

"You must not look up," I heard in French. "A Russian spy sits over

there. You wish to see my husband. Come to-night at nine o'clock to the

second floor of the Cafe Voltaire. He will be at the top of the stairs.

Good-by." And she yawned again over her writing.

"Now, this," I thought, "is a revolution!" I thoroughly approved of

this. The Cafe Voltaire was an excellent choice, an almost perfect

mise-en-scene. It had long been one of my favorite haunts. A tall white

wooden building, so toned down, so tumbled down, so heavy laden with

memories of poets, dramatists, pamphleteers and fiery young orators, who

had sat here and conspired and schemed and exhorted over human rights.

It had well lived up to its glorious name. What great ideas had started

from here! Here French history had been made!

But alas! Into this hallowed spot that night, at nine o'clock on his way

to his train, came Joe in a yellow mackintosh with a brand-new suitcase

in his hand--and showed me history in the making. It was made in a

small, stuffy room upstairs. On the one side J. K. with a million

American readers behind him, on the other this revolutionist whose name

that week had been in newspapers all over the world. So far, so good.

But look at him, look at this history maker. Tall, sallow and dyspeptic,

a professor of economics. Romance, liberty, history, thrill? Not at all.

They talked of factories, wages, strikes, of railroads, peasants' taxes,

of plows and wheat and corn and hay! They got quite excited over hay.

And all this had to come through their defenseless interpreter--me. My

head ached, one foot fell asleep. The Social Democratic Party, the

Social Revolutionist Party, the Constitutional Democrats, in and out of

my head they trooped. If this be revolution, then God save the king!

Crushed to earth, as we left at last, my head still buzzing with

economics, I looked dismally back on my poor cafe, on liberty, justice

and human rights. There was something as bad as the harbor in Joe; he

was always spoiling everything.

"Why don't you take Carlyle's French Revolution along?" I suggested

forlornly. "You might read it on the train."

"Because, you poor kid, he's way out of date."

It took me days to get into my work.

* * * * *

About two months later, back he came. From one of our front windows he

looked down into the old Gardens, into all the loveliness the April

twilight was bringing there, and,

"Where can I get a typewriter?" he asked. "I've got such an awful lot of

stuff that I want to dictate it right off the bat."

This was _literature_ in the making. For hours in Joe's room that week I

sat and heard him make it. In one corner lay a heap of dirty shirts and

collars, in another a stack of papers and books. An English stenographer

sat at the window, J. K. strode up and down and talked. It was real

enough, this narrative. Facts and figures, he had them down cold, to

back up with a crushing force the points he was making against the Czar.

Poverty, tyranny, bloody oppression, wholesale slaughter of a people in

a half-mad monarch's war--Joe pounded them in with sledgehammer blows.

He not only made you sure they were true, he made you sure that these

things must be stopped and that you as a decent American certainly

wanted to help with your money. And as for the revolution itself, he

left no doubt in your mind about that. It was there all right, Joe had

seen people give up their lives, he had seen men and women clubbed and

shot down, he had been so near he had seen the blood. (But he made human

blood so darned commonplace, curse him!) And in Petersburg for two long

nights he had gone about a city in darkness, every street light put out

by the strikers, the streets filled with surging black masses of

figures. Yes, Joe had certainly seen big things.

Then what was the matter with me, I thought, that all this did not

thrill me? "Young men are lucky. They will see great things." All right,

here was one of _my_ great things, a whole nation rising to throw off

its chains, to show the world that wars must cease--and to me it didn't

seem great at all, it seemed only big, and there was a world of

difference. Big? It was enormous, not only what Joe had seen up there,

but what he was doing right here in this room. He was talking to a

million people, damn him, and doubtless this was just the kind of

writing that would appeal to them. Thousands of his commonplace readers

would send their dollars to Russia, where dyspeptic professors of

economics would use the money to hire halls, into which millions of

commonplace Russians would crowd to hear about strikes, wages, taxes and

hay! And then some more commonplace blood would be shed, the dyspeptic

professors would be put in office--and this was a modern revolution!

Was everything modern only big? Must I always have that feeling the

harbor used to give me?

"No!" I decided angrily. The fault didn't lie in me nor in Russia, but

in J. K. and the way he was writing. As I followed that blunt narrative

of his journey through cities and factory towns, into deep forests,

across snowy plains and through little hamlets half buried in snow and

filled with the starving families of the men who had gone to the war, I

tried to picture it all to myself--not as he described it, confound him,

but with all the beauty which must have been there. Ye Gods of the Road,

what a journey! What tremendous canvases teeming with life, such

strange, dramatic significant life! What a chance for a writer!

One night on a train whose fifth-class cars, cattle cars and nothing

more, were packed with wounded men from the front, out of one of those

traveling hells Joe had pulled a peasant boy half drunk, and by the

display of a bottle of vodka had enticed him into his own compartment in

a second-class car ahead. The boy's right arm was a loathsome sight,

festering from a neglected wound. Amputation was plainly a matter of

days. But it was not to forget that grim event that the boy had jumped

off at each little station to spend his few kopecks on vodka. No, he was

stolidly getting drunk because, as he confided to Joe, at dawn he would

come to his home town and there he knew he was going to tell twenty-six

wives that their men had been killed. He laboriously counted them off on

his fingers--each wife and each husband by their long, homely Russian

names. Then he burst into half-drunken sobs and pounded the window ledge

with his fist. It was the fist of his right arm, and the kid gave a

queer, sharp scream of pain.

If Voltaire had been there he would have come back and described that

peasant boy he'd seen in a way that would have gripped men's souls and

sent a great shudder over the world at war and what it meant to

mankind--while Joe was simply slapping it down like some hustling, keen

reporter.

"Look here, Joe; you make me sick!" I exploded at last. "You ought to

stick right here for months and work on this wonderful stuff you've got

till there's nothing left you can possibly do!"

"Be an artist, eh, a poet, a great writer." He gave me one of those

fatherly smiles. "I've got some things to say to _you_, Kid. I don't

like the life you're leading."

"Don't you? Why don't you?" I rejoined. And so began a fight that lasted

as long as he was in Paris.

Nothing that I had been doing here made any appeal whatever to Joe. I

showed him my sketch of Notre Dame from under that old bridge at night.

"Yes," he said, "this is fine writing, awful fine. But it has about as

much meaning to me as a woman's left ear. What's the use of sitting down

under a bridge and looking up at an ancient church and trying to feel

like a two-spot? For God's sake, Bill, get it out of your system, quit

getting reverent over the past. You're sitting here at the feet of the

Masters, fellahs who were all right in their day, but are now every one

of 'em out of date. And you're so infernally busy copying their

technique and style and trying to learn just how to write, that you're

getting nothing to write about. Why can't you go to life for your

stuff?"

"Go to life?" I said indignantly. "I've done nothing else for over a

year!"

"Show me."

"Here!"

He read more of my sketches.

"But damn it, Bill, these people aren't alive. They're only a bunch of

artist kids as reverent over the past as yourself, they have about as

much connection with anything live and vital to-day as so many mediaeval

monks. You fellahs think you're free of creeds. You're the creediest

kids I ever saw, your religion is style, technique and form. For God's

sake lose it and use your own eyes, forget you're an artist and be a

reporter, come out in the world and have a try. You'll find so much

stuff you won't need any plots, you'll simply report events as they

happen. And you won't have any time for technique, the next event will

be tuning up before you've got to the end of the last. With a big daily

paper behind him a good reporter can follow the front page around the

world. Russia's on the front page now. All right, you can go to Russia.

By June it may be Hindustan, or Pittsburgh, Turkey or China. Believe me,

Bill, the nations of this planet are working themselves into a state

where they're ready to do things you never dreamed of. I'm not talking

of kings and governments, I'm talking of the people themselves, the

people in such excited crowds that nobody knows who's who or what's

next.

"I saw my first crowd in Petersburg the very day I got off the train.

They filled a street from wall to wall and as far as you could see. They

weren't saying a word or singing a song, and there wasn't even a drum to

keep time. But they moved along with their wives and kids as though

they'd left home, job and church, and were looking for something else so

hard they didn't care for bullets. I saw 'em shot down like so many

sheep. But bullets won't stop what I saw in their eyes. God knows I

don't want a religion. I'm no socialist nor anarchist. But if there's

one thing I want to hang on to it's my belief in the common crowd.

They've had a raw deal since the world began. They can have the whole

earth whenever they want it. And they're beginning to want it hard!

"Forget your own name and jump into the crowd, write and don't stop to

remember you're writing! The place _you_ need is the U. S. A.--and the

work you need is a job on a paper!"

"Are you through?" I snapped.

"I am!"

"All right," said I. "I'm going to stay just where I am! I'm not going

to be yanked by you all over the earth, to write news articles on the

run! I'm going to stick in one place--right here--and take my time and

learn my job. I don't want to write news, I want to write books. I'd

rather write one good novel than all the headline stuff in the world.

It's books that make the headlines."

"_Books?_" Joe's look was funny.

"Sure they do. Take Russia. What started this whole revolution! Books.

It didn't start with your common crowds--they were all eating fried

onions. It started with a few writers of novels!"

"Who left their little mahogany desks," said Joe, "got into peasant

clothes and went to live with the peasants!"

"Oh no they didn't. Only a few. Turgenief didn't. Tchernichefsky didn't.

Dostoiefsky----"

"Say. Are they Russians? I never heard their names up there."

I looked at J. K. thoughtfully.

"No," I said. "You wouldn't. As yet they're not quite crowdy enough. But

they are Russians and their ideas made most of the first revolutionists.

The whole revolution was started by books."

"It wasn't," snapped Joe. "It was taxes. Their taxes were doubled

because of the war, and----"

"Oh, damn your war taxes, and damn your plows and your corn and hay!

You've got a hay mind, that's the trouble with you! You've got so you

think that hay and bread and pork and beans are all men live and die

for! They don't, Mister Reporter, they die for ideals--freedom,

democracy, human rights--which are in 'em so deep that when a big writer

sees 'em there and brings 'em out and holds 'em up and says, 'Here! This

is you, this is what you want, this is what you believe in!'--your crowd

says, 'Sure! Why didn't we see it long ago?' And then they do things that

go into headlines! But to be able to write like that a man can't go

chasing all over the earth, he's got to quit sneering at art and

technique, he's got to learn how to make characters real and build plots

that make readers sit up all night to see what becomes of the people

he's made! If believing that is a creed, then I'm creedy! I'm willing to

throw over everything else, but I'll hang on to this one thing all my

life--the fact that big art means working like hell!"

"Gee," said J. K. "What an artist."

These fights of ours left me weak and sore, as though I'd been back on

the terrace at home, listening to my father talk and looking at his

harbor.

CHAPTER XII

When Joe left me in peace at last, just for the sake of the rest and

change I turned my attention to music, or, rather, to a musical friend,

a young Bohemian composer who lived wholly in a world of his own. I

explored this musical world of his, by his side in dark top galleries,

in the Cafe Rouge on concert nights, in his room at his piano. How

deliciously far away from hay was this chap's feeling for Mozart. With

him I could feel sure of myself, of the way I was living for my art, of

what my mother way back at the start had called the "fine things" in

humanity.

I remember the night we heard "Boheme" from the gallery of the Opera

Comique. I remember the talk we had late that night, and my walk by the

edge of the Gardens home--and the letter and the cable that I found

waiting on my desk. The letter was from my father and told me that my

mother was dying. The cable told me she was dead.

I remember learning that letter by heart on that long ocean voyage home.

This was no sudden illness, I learned, my mother had known of it while I

was home, known that she had it and that it was fatal. That was the news

she had told my father alone that night on the terrace! That was why she

had been so eager to get me away to Paris; that was why she had kept me

abroad!

"She did not want you to see how she looked," my father wrote. "She

wanted you to remember her always as she was when you saw her last."

I remembered her now. What a young beast I had been to forget her, to

drop her so utterly out of my thoughts in that selfish happy Paris life,

when it was she who had sent me there, when it was she who had set me

free for a time from the harbor which was now dragging me back, when it

was she from the very start who had fostered this passion for "all that

is fine." I remembered her now--remembered and remembered--until her

dear image filled me.

My father's letter went on to tell how she had fought for her life.

Three operations, all three of them failures, but still she had held

bravely on in hopes of some new discovery which science might make and

so bring her a cure. A thought suddenly gripped me and struck me cold.

It had all depended on science, on men working calmly and coldly along

in laboratories all over the world, while my mother had held to her

thread of life and hoped that these laboratory gods would hurry, hurry

while yet there was time! How many thousands like her every day, every

hour all over the world were watching those gods with that awful

suspense. For they were the only gods that were left, and a comfortless

set of gods they were! They were like J. K., they had hay minds! They

were businesslike, relentless, cold, they belonged to the world of the

harbor! My mother's kind god was a myth and a joke, with no power here

one way or the other. I _felt_ that now, I had _thought_ it before, only

thought it, with that gay freedom of thought we had aired back there in

Paris. But I knew now that deep underneath I had believed all along in

this god of hers, as I had in my beautiful goddess of art and in all the

things that were fine. It had taken this news from the harbor to bring

him tottering, crashing down. For no god like hers would have let her

die! And I felt fear now, the fear of Death, whom I'd never really

noticed before and who now seemed to say to me,

"She is nothing--has gone nowhere--she is only dead!"

And fiercely in a bewildered way I rebelled against this emptiness. I

rebelled against this world of hay that was so abruptly dragging me back

to a sense of its almighty grip on my life. When my ship came up the

Bay, the world looked harsh and gray to me, though there was a bright

and sunny glare on the muddy waves of the harbor.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

My mother had been buried several days before I reached home.

I found Sue waiting on the dock, and I saw with a little shock of

surprise that my young sister was grown up. I had never noticed her much

before. Sue and I had never got on from the start. She had been my

father's chum and I had been my mother's. I had always felt her mocking

smile toward me and all my solemn thoughts. And after that small

catastrophe which I had had with Eleanore, I had more than ever avoided

Sue and her girl friends. Then I had gone to college, and each time that

I came home she had seemed to me all arms and legs, fool secrets and

fool giggles--a most uninteresting kid. I remember being distinctly

surprised when I brought Joe home for Christmas to find that he thought

her quite a girl. But now she was all different. She had grown tall and

graceful, lithe, and in her suit of mourning she looked so much older,

her face thin and worn, subdued and softened by all she'd been through.

For the weight of all those weary weeks had been upon her shoulders.

There was something pitiful about her. I came up and kissed her

awkwardly, then found myself suddenly holding her close. She clung to me

and trembled a little. I found it hard to speak.

"I wish I'd been here, too," I said gruffly.

"I wish you had, Billy--it's been a long time."

All at once Sue and I had become close friends.

We had a long talk, at home that day, and she told me how our parents

had drawn together in the last years, of how my poor mother had wanted

my father close by her side and of how he had responded, neglecting his

business and spending his last dollar on doctors, consultations and

trips to sanitariums, anything to keep up her strength. He had even read

"Pendennis" aloud. How changed he must have been to do that. I knew why

she had wanted to hear it again. It had been our favorite book. I

remembered how I had read it to her just before I went abroad, and how I

had caught her watching me with that hungry despairing look in her eyes.

What a young brute I had been to go!... For a time Sue's voice seemed

far away. Then I heard her telling how over that story of a young author

my mother had talked to my father of me.

"He's going to try to know you, Billy, and help you," said Sue. "He

promised her that before she died. And I hope you're going to help him,

too. He needs you very badly. You never understood father, you know. I

don't believe you have any idea of what he has gone through in his

business."

"What do you mean? Have things gone wrong?"

"I don't understand it very well. He hardly ever speaks of it. I think

he'd better tell you himself."

* * * * *

That evening in his library, from my seat by the table, I furtively

watched my father's face. He sat in a huge chair against the wall, with

a smaller chair in front for his feet, his vest unbuttoned, his short

heavy body settled low as he grimly kept his eyes on his book. The

strong overhead light which shone on his face showed me the deeper

lines, all the wrinkles, the broad loose pouch of skin on the throat,

the gray color, the pain, the weakness and the age in his motionless

eyes. What was going on in there? Sometimes it would seem an hour before

he turned another page. All afternoon he had been at her grave.

He had given her no happy life. Was it of that he was thinking? I felt

ashamed to be wondering, for he seemed so weak and old in his grief. Two

years ago his hair had been gray, but he had still looked strong and

hale. I could hardly feel now that he was the same man. I felt drawn to

him now, I wished he would put down his book and talk and tell me

everything about her.

But what an embarrassing job it is to get acquainted with one's father.

When Sue had left us after dinner, there had been a few brief remarks

and then this long tense silence. I, too, pretended to be reading.

"Your mother thought a lot of you, boy." He spoke at last so abruptly

that I looked up at him with a start, and saw him watching me anxiously.

"Yes, sir." I looked quickly down, and our eyes did not meet again after

that.

"It was her pluck that kept you in Paris--while she was dying."

I choked:

"I know."

"You don't know--not how she wanted you back--you'll never know. I

wanted to write you to come home."

"I wish you had!"

"She wouldn't hear of it!"

"I see." Another silence. Why couldn't I think of something to say?

"She kept every letter you wrote her. They're up there in her bureau

drawer. She was always reading 'em--over and over. She thought a lot of

your writing, boy--of what you would do when--when she was dead." The

last came out almost fiercely. I waited a moment, got hold of myself.

"Yes, sir," I brought out at last.

"I hope you'll make it all worth while."

"I will. I'll try. I'll do my best." I did not look up, for I could

still feel his anxious eyes upon my face.

"Do you want to go back to Paris?"

"No, sir! I want to stay right here!" What was the matter with my fool

voice?

"Have you got any plans for your writing here? How are you going about

it to start?"

"Well, sir, to begin with--I've got some stuff I did abroad."

"Stories?"

"Not exactly----"

"Poems?" My father's look was tragic.

"No."

And I tried to explain what I had been doing. But my attempts to tell

him of my work in Paris were as forced and as pathetic as his efforts to

attend. More and more halting grew our talk, and it ended in a silence

that seemed to have no end. Then I went to the fireplace, knocked the

ashes out of my pipe, refilled it and relit it. When I returned he was

reading his book, and with deep relief I took up mine. That much of it

was over.

But again I found myself watching him. What was in my father's mind? Why

this anxious almost humble tone? It made me wince, it made me ashamed. I

sat there all evening pretending to read and feeling that he was doing

the same.

"Good night, dad--I think I'll go to bed." Even this little came

clumsily. I had never called him "dad" before.

"Good night, my boy. See you at breakfast."

"Yes, sir."

I glanced back as I turned down the hall and saw him staring after me.

What was it he was thinking?