"I'm closing out my business, son," he told me the next morning. Here
was another sharp surprise. I did not look at him as I asked:
"Why are you doing that, sir?"
"It's a long story. Times have changed and I'm getting old."
Again I felt suddenly drawn to him. He was old and no mistake. Why had I
never known him till now?
"Look here--Dad." The last word still came awkwardly. "Can't I possibly
be any help down there?" He shot an anxious look at me:
"Why, yes. Glad to have you. I still have a young clerk, but I'd rather
have you."
Only one clerk! What had gone wrong with his business?
But that day in his warehouse, which was empty now and silent, the mere
ghost of what it had been, he seemed in no hurry to show me. On the
contrary, he went back to the ledgers of his earliest years in business,
on the flimsy pretext of looking up certain figures and dates. He did
not need me here, the work he gave me was absurd, I was simply taking
the musty books from their piles in the closet and arranging them by
years on the floor. "To save time," he said. But he himself was still on
that first ledger, stopping to talk, to ramble off from the pages before
him. What did it mean? As the days wore on and he still delayed and at
night that strange humility crept again into his eyes, with a slowly
deepening suspense I came to feel that instead of saving time my father
was trying to make it, to go far back into his vigorous past for
strength to meet his present--because he dreaded what we would find at
the end of our work on these dusty books, the last grim figure in
dollars and cents that would stand there as the result of his life, as
the stepping-stone for Sue's and mine. And that was why he wanted me
here, this was his way of telling me the story of his business
life--before I saw what lay at the end. And as in our work that story
unfolded, though at times it cast its spell on me hard, revealing what a
man he had been, there were other times when from somewhere deep inside
of me a small selfish voice would ask:
"What is left? How much has he saved from the wreck? What is this going
to mean to my life?"
In the ledgers his story was still alive. Yellow and dusty as they were,
for me day by day they revivified that still odorous old warehouse until
I saw it as it had been, a huge dim caravansary for the curious products
of all the earth. And that trick of feeling a man, which I had learned
in Paris, made me keenly sensitive now to this lonely old stranger by my
side with whom I was becoming acquainted. I could feel the pull of these
books upon him, pulling him out of his cramped old age back to his glad
boundless youth. How suddenly spacious they became as he slowly turned
the pages. Palm oil from Africa, cotton from Bombay, coffee from Arabia,
pepper from Sumatra. Turn the page. Ivory from Zanzibar, salt from Cadiz
and wines from Bordeaux. Turn the page. Whale oil from the Arctic, iron
from the Baltic, tortoise shell from the Fiji Islands. Turn the page!
India silks and rugs and shawls, indigo, spices! Turn the page!
I began to see the sails speed out along those starlit ocean roads. I
began to feel the forces that had shaped my father's life. And little by
little I saw in those days what not even my mother had understood, that
in my father's business life there had been more than dollars, that what
to us had seemed only a hobby, a dull obstinate fixed idea, had been for
him a glorious vision--the white sails of American clippers dotting all
the seven seas.
So they were in the late Fifties, when leaving the farm in Illinois he
came at sixteen to New York and found a job as time clerk in one of the
ship yards along the East River. They are all gone now, but then they
were humming and teeming with work. And my young father was deeply
excited. He told me of his first day here, when he stood on the deck of
a ferry and watched three great clippers go out with the tide, bound for
Calcutta. There were pictures of these vessels on the walls of his
office, stately East Indiamen bearing such names as _Star of Empire_,
_Daniel Webster_, _Ocean Monarch_, _Flying Cloud_--ships known in every
port of the world for their speed. He told how a British vessel, her
topsails reefed in a gale of wind, would see a white tower of swelling
canvas come out of the spray behind her, come booming, staggering,
plunging by--a Yankee clipper under royals. Press of sail? No other
nation knew what it meant! Our owners took big chances, it was no trade
for nervous men!
He found a harbor that welcomed young men, where cabin boys rose to be
captains, and clerks became owners of hundreds of ships. To work! To
rise! To own yards like these, build ships like these and send them
rushing on their courses out to all parts of the ocean world! This had
been his vision, at the time when it was bright and clear. And as now he
made me feel it, the crude vital force that had been in his dream poured
into me deep, made me feel how shut in and one-sided had been my own
vision and standards of life, gave me that profound surprise which many
sons, I suppose, never have:
"My father was once young like me--wiry, straight and tough like me, and
as full of dreams of the things he would do."
But then had come the Civil War. Although only nineteen when the war
broke out, he was already the head clerk in his office. "But like every
other young fool those days," he said, "I was caught by the noise of a
brass band!" Down South as a commissary clerk he found himself a tiny
pawn in that gigantic game of graft which made fat fortunes in the North
and cost tens of thousands of soldiers their lives. He himself took
typhoid, and when the war was over he returned to New York, weak,
penniless, to find his old work gone.
"For the war," he said, "had busted American shipping sky high. Even
before it began it had made the South so bitter that just for the sake
of attacking the North the Solid South in congress had joined the damn
fool Farmer West and attacked our mail subventions. 'No more of the
nation's money,' they said, 'for ship subsidies for New York and New
England!' And so all government protection of our shipping was
withdrawn. And when the war ended, with forty per cent of our ships
grabbed, sunk or sold, it was ruination to build any more, for the
British and German governments were pouring millions of dollars a year
into the Cunard and the North German Lloyd, and we couldn't compete
against them.
"Still a few of the ship yards kept on, and in one of these at last I
got a job at eight dollars a week. 'The war is over,' we told ourselves,
'and the government can't stay blind forever. They'll see what they've
done, and within a few months they'll go back to the old policy.'
Months? I stuck to that job and waited five years--and still no news
from Washington. 'My boy,' said a doddering Brooklynite, 'the nation has
turned her face westward.'"
Then he left the ship yards and went into a warehouse, where the work
lay mainly in handling cargoes of foreign ships. And starting life all
over again he tried to make up for lost time. The first year he was a
shipping clerk; the second, a bookkeeper; the third, he kept two sets of
books for two different docks, one by day and the other at night. And by
forty he had become a part owner in the old warehouse in which he now
sat grimly reading the record of his life--of a long stubborn losing
fight, for he stuck to his dream of Yankee sails.
He married my mother when he was still strong and full of hope. He must
have been so much kindlier then and brighter, more human to live with.
They bought that pleasant house of ours with its hospitable front door.
My father's doddering Brooklynites seemed wonderful neighbors to his
young wife. And so that front door waited for friends. As the years
dragged on and they did not come, she blamed it all on the harbor. She
saw what it was making him, jealous of every dollar and every hour spent
at home. He worked all day and half the night. It took him into
politics, on countless trips to Washington, and she knew he spent
thousands of dollars there in ways that were by no means "fine." It made
him morose and gloomy, a man of one idea, to be shunned.
And she no more saw behind all this than I did when I was a boy. For his
vision was neither of pirates nor of bringing the heathen to Christ, but
of imports and of exports. He dreamed in terms of battleships and of a
mercantile marine. Each year he watched the chances grow, vast
continents opening up to commerce with hints of such riches as staggered
the mind. He saw the ocean world an arena into which rushed all nations
but ours.
"Everyone but us," he said, "had learned the big lesson--that you can
get nothing on land or sea unless you're ready to fight for it hard!"
He saw other nations get ready to fight. He watched them build huge
navies and grant heavy subsidies to their fast growing merchant fleets,
send vessels by thousands over the seas. He saw their shipowners draw
swiftly together in great corporations. Here was an age for immense
adventures in this growing trade of the world. To wait, to hold on
grimly, to keep up the fight at Washington for that miracle, Protection,
which would start the boom. To see the shipping yards teeming again with
the building of ships by the hundreds and thousands, to see them go out
again over the seas with our flag at the mast and our sailors below. To
feel the new call go over the nation--"Young men, come east and west,
come out! The first place on the oceans can still be yours!" This was my
father's great idea.
Ship subsidies and battleships, discriminating tariffs. What a religion.
But it was his. Of the miracles these things would work my father was
more sure than of a god in heaven. For he had thought very little about
a god, and all his life he had thought about this. For this he had spent
at least half his wealth on the congressmen that he despised. Bribery?
Yes. But for a religion.
"Go all around South America and to the Far East," he told me. "And
you'll see the flags at sea of England, Germany, Austria, France, of
Russia, Norway, Spain, Japan. But if you see the American flag you'll
see it waved by a little girl from the deck of a British liner. This
means that we are losing in marine freights and foreign trade billions
of dollars every year. And it means more and worse than that. For it's
ship building and ship sailing that take a nation's men out of their
ruts, whip up their minds and imaginations, make 'em broad as the seven
seas. And we've lost all that, we've thrown it away, to breed a race of
farmers--of factory hands and miners and anarchists in slums. We've
built a nation of high finance--and graft--and a rising angry mob. But
sooner or later, boy, this country will wake up to what it has done. And
with our grip on both oceans and the blood we've still got in our veins,
we'll reach out and take what is ours--as soon as we're ready to fight
for it hard--the mastery of the ocean world!"
For this idea he had lived his life. For this he had neglected his
business, for this he had lost favor with the usurping foreign
ships--until his dock and his warehouse were often idle for weeks at a
time.
And the very bigness of things, the era of big companies which at forty
had thrilled him by the first signs of its coming, now crushed down
upon his old age. Vaguely he knew that the harbor had changed and that
he was too old to change with it. An era no longer of human adventures
for young men but of financial adventures for mammoth corporations,
great foreign shipping companies combining in agreements with the
American railroads to freeze out all the little men and take to
themselves the whole port of New York. My father was one of these little
men. The huge company to which he was selling owned the docks and
warehouses for over two miles, and this was only a part of their
holdings.
"Nothing without fighting." That had been his motto. And he had fought
and he had lost. And so in this new harbor of big companies my father
was now closing out. Too late for any business here, too late for life
up there in his home. He had kept my mother waiting too long, he was
ready at last but she was dead. Too late. He had been born too late, had
dreamed his dream of sails too late, and now he was too late in dying.
There was nothing left to live for. How much better for him to be dead.