Until late that night, and again the next day at my desk down in the
warehouse, my thoughts kept drifting back to our talk. With a glow of
surprise I found I remembered not only every word she had said, but the
tones of her voice as she said it, the changing expressions on her face
and in her smiling gray-blue eyes. Her picture rose so vividly at times
it was uncanny.
"What do you think of her?" asked Sue.
"Mighty little," I replied. I did not care to discuss her with Sue, for
I had not liked Sue's tone at all.
But how little I'd learned about Eleanor's life. Where did she live? I
didn't know. When I had hinted at coming to see her she had smilingly
put me off. What was this pleasant harbor of hers? "Wait till you've got
yours all written down," she had said, and had told me nothing whatever.
Yes, I thought disgustedly, I was quite a smart young man. Here I had
spent two years in Paris learning how to draw people out. What had she
let me draw out of her? What hadn't I let her draw out of me? I wondered
how much I had told that girl.
For some reason, in the next few days, my thoughts drifted about with
astonishing ease and made prodigious journeys. I roved far back to my
childhood, and there the most tempting incidents rose, and solemn little
thoughts and terrors, hopes and plans, some I was proud of, some mighty
ashamed of. Roots, roots, up they came, as though they'd just been
waiting, down there deep inside of me, for that girl and her hoeing.
Presently, just to get rid of them all, I began writing some of them
down. And again I was surprised to find that I was in fine writing
trim. The words seemed to come of themselves from my pen and line
themselves up triumphantly into scenes of amazing vividness. At least so
they looked to me. How good it felt to be at it again. Often up in my
room at night I kept on working till nearly dawn. I was getting on
famously now.
* * * * *
And so now, as was his habit, Joe Kramer came crashing into my life and
as usual put a stop to my work.
Having just landed from Russia, he had "breezed over" to our house, had
had a talk with Sue downstairs and had then come up to my room to
surprise me--just as I had a good firm grip on one of my most entrancing
roots.
"Hello, Bill," he cried. "What are you up to?"
"Hello, J. K. How are you?"
I knew that I ought to be genial, and for a few moments I did my best. I
went through all the motions. I grabbed his hand, I smiled, I talked, I
told him I was tickled to death, I even tried pounding him on the back.
But it was quite useless.
"Kid," he said with that grin of his, "you're up to something idealistic
and don't want to be disturbed. But I'm here and it can't be helped. So
out with it--what have you gone and done?"
And he jerked my story out of me.
"All right," he declared, "this has got to stop!"
"I knew it," I said. I had known it the minute he came in the room.
"You've got to throw up your ten-dollar job, quit working all night on
stuff that won't sell, and come on a paper and make some real money."
"I can't do it," I snapped.
"You can," said J. K.
"But I tell you I tried! I went to a paper----"
"You'll go to a dozen before I get through!"
"J. K.--I won't do it"
"Kid--you will!"
And he kept at me night after night. He was working for a New York paper
now as a special correspondent. He had a talk with his editor and got me
a chance to go on as a "cub" and write about weddings, describing the
costume of the bride. At least it was a starter, he said, and would lead
to divorces later on, and from there I might be promoted to graft. He
talked to Sue and my father about it, persuading them both to take his
side. Day by day the pressure increased. I set my young jaw doggedly and
kept on writing about my roots.
"Look here," said Joe one evening. "Your sister tells me you're sore on
the harbor. Then have a look at this." And he showed me a newspaper
clipping headed, "Padrone System Under the Dumps."
"Well, what about it?" I asked him.
"What about it? My God! Here's a chance to show up the harbor on one of
its ugliest, rottenest ideas! A dump is a pier that sticks out in the
river. We'll go there at night, get down underneath it and look at the
kids--Dago child-slaves working like hell. You say that weddings are not
in your line--all right, here's just the opposite--stuff that'll make
your women readers sit right up and sob out aloud! I don't care for
tear-jerkers myself," he added. "But even tear-jerkers are better than
Art."
"All right," I muttered savagely, "let's go and get a tear-jerker to
write!"
If I must write of this modern harbor, at least it was some satisfaction
to write about one of its ugliest sides.
We went the next night.
Joe had chosen a dump which jutted out from the Manhattan side of the
river just about opposite our house. A huge, long, shadowy pile of city
refuse of all kinds, we caught the sour breath of it as we drew near in
the darkness. There was not a sound nor a light. We climbed down onto a
greenish beam that ran along by the side underneath, about a foot from
the water, and cautiously working our way outward for a hundred yards
or more, we stopped abruptly and drew back.
For just before us under the dump was a cave with walls of papers and
rags. A lantern hung from overhead, swung gently in the raw salt breeze,
and by its light we could see a half dozen swarthy small boys. Five were
intent on a game of dice, whispering fiercely while they played. Their
boss lay asleep in a corner. The sixth, the smallest of them all, sat
smoking in the mouth of the cave, his knees drawn up and his big dilated
black eyes roving hungrily out over the water. All at once around the
end of the pier, a dark, tall shadow like a spook swept silently out
before him. He sprang back and fervently crossed himself, then grinned
and drew on his cigarette hard. For the shadow was only a scow with a
derrick. The imp continued his watching.
"Now," said J. K. a few minutes later back on shore, "you want to get
their hours and wages. You want to look up the fire law about lighted
cigarettes and a lantern----"
"Oh, damn your fire law," I growled. "I want to know where that kid with
the cigarette was born, and what he thinks of the harbor!" Joe gave me
one of his cheerful grins.
"You might get his views on the tariff," he said.
"Look here, J. K.," I implored him; "go home. Go on home and leave me
alone. It's all right, I'm glad you brought me here--darned good of you,
and I'll get a story. Only for God's sake leave me alone!"
"Sure," said Joe. "Only don't try to talk to those little Guineys. Their
boss wouldn't let 'em say a word and you'd lose your chance of watching
'em. Make it a kind of a mystery story."
And a mystery story I made it.
Where had he been a year ago, this imp who had fervently crossed
himself? In Naples, Rome or Venice, or poking his toes into the dust of
a street in some dull little town in the hills? What great condor of
to-day had picked him up and dropped him here? How did it look to him?
What did he feel?
I came back to the dump night after night, and writing blindly in the
dark I tried to jot down what he saw--gigantic shapes and shadows, some
motionless, some rushing by with their dim spectral little lights, and
over all the great arch of the Bridge rearing over half the sky. The
lantern in the cave behind threw a patch of light on the water below,
and across that patch from under the pier where the water was slapping,
slapping, there came an endless bobbing procession--a whisky bottle, a
broken toy horse, a bit of a letter, a pink satin slipper, a dirty white
glove--things tossed out of people's lives. On and on they came. And I
knew there were miles of black water like this all covered with tiny
processions like this moving slowly out with the ebb tide, out from the
turbulent city toward the silent ocean. One night the watchman on the
dump showed me a heavy paper bag with what would have been a baby
inside. Where had it come from? He didn't know. Tossed out of some
woman's life, in a day it would be far out on the ocean, bobbing,
bobbing with the rest. Water from here to Naples, water from here to
heathen lands. Just here a patch of light from a lantern. That imp from
Italy looking down--into something immense and dark and unknown.
He was having a spree with the harbor, as I had had when as small as he.
I saw him watch the older boys and listen thrilled to their wonderful
talk--as once I, too, had been thrilled by Sam. I watched him over a
game of dice, quarreling, scowling, grabbing at pennies, slapped by some
one, whimpering, then eagerly getting back to the game. It was "craps,"
I had played it with Sam and the gang. One night he dropped a cigarette
still lighted into the rags and was given a blow by his boss that
knocked him into a corner. But presently he crawled cautiously forth,
and again with both hands hugging his knees he sat and watched the
harbor. What a big spree for a little boy.
I put my own childhood into this imp, into him my first feelings toward
this place. And so I came again to my roots. How the memories rose up
now--the fascinations and terrors that I, too, had felt before something
immense and dark and unknown.
Thank heaven J. K. had given me up and gone to Colorado--so I was left
to work in peace. I called my sketch "A Patch of Light," and sent it to
a magazine. It came back with a note explaining that, while this was a
fine little thing in its way, its way wasn't theirs, it was neither an
article full of facts nor a story full of romance. In short, I told
myself savagely, it was neither hay nor tears! Again it went forth and
again back it came. Then Sue gave it to one of her writer friends who
said he knew just the place for it.
"No, you don't," I thought drearily. "Nobody knows--in this whole
damnable desolate land."
But Sue's friend sold my story--for twenty-two dollars and fifty cents!
And he said that the editor wanted some more!
It was curious, from my window that night, what a different harbor I saw
below. Ugly still? Of course it was. But what a _rich mine_ of ugliness
for the pen of a rising young author like me!