They sailed the middle of March.
It is easy to look back now and smile at my small desolate self as I was
in the months that followed. But at the time it was no smiling matter. I
was intensely wretched and I had a right to be, for I could see nothing
whatever ahead but the most dire uncertainties. Did Eleanore really care
for me? I didn't know. When could I ask her? I didn't know. For when
would I be earning enough to ask any girl to marry me? At present nearly
all I earned was swallowed up by expenses at home, and I knew that in
all likelihood this drain would soon grow heavier.
For we could not count much longer on my father's salary. Already I had
done my best to make him give up his position. He stubbornly resisted.
"I'm strong as I ever was," he declared, and he took great pains to
prove it. He would sit down to dinner, his face heavy and gray with
fatigue, but by a hard visible effort slowly he would throw it off,
keenly questioning me about my work, more often quizzing me about it, or
Sue about her "revolooters." He had a stock of these dry remarks and he
used them over and over. When the same jokes came night after night we
knew he was very tired. After dinner on such evenings, when I went with
him into his study to smoke, he would invariably settle back in his
chair with the same loud "Ah!" of comfort, and he would follow this up
as he lit his cigar with the most obvious grunts expressive of health to
prove to me how strong he was. He was always grimly delighted when I
spent these evenings with him, but always before his cigar was out his
head would sink slowly over his book and soon he would be sound asleep.
Then as I sat at my writing I would glance over from time to time. I
could tell when he was waking, and at once I would grow absorbed in my
work. Soon I would hear a slight snort of surprise, I would hear him
stealthily feel for his book, and then presently out of the silence----
"This is a devilish good piece of writing, boy," he would announce
abruptly. "When _you_ learn to hold your reader like this I'll begin to
think you're a writer."
Yes, my father was aging fast, I would soon be the only breadwinner
here. Sue fought hard against this idea, she was still set on finding
work for herself, but each time she proposed it Dad would rise so
indignantly, with such evident pain in his glaring old eyes, that she
would be forced to give up her plan. In such talks I supported him, and
in return when we two were alone Sue would revenge herself on me by the
most cutting comments on "this inane habit of looking at girls as fit
for nothing better than marriage."
These comments, I was well aware, were aimed at my feeling for Eleanore,
for whom Sue had no longer any good word but only a smiling derision.
Her remarks were straight out of Bernard Shaw's most ribald works, and
they left me miserably wondering whether any man had ever loved in any
way that wasn't the curse or the joke of his life. Sue dwelt on this
glorious age of deep radical changes going on, she spoke of Joe Kramer,
with whom she still corresponded, and enlarged on the wonderful freedom
he had to go anywhere at any time. Thank a merciful heaven _he_ wasn't
tied down! And if Joe would only keep his head and not marry, not get a
huge family on his hands----
Sue made me perfectly wretched.
* * * * *
In this frame of mind I again tackled the harbor. Dillon had told me to
cover it all, and this I now set out to do. On warm muggy April days I
tramped what appeared to me hundreds of miles. But the regions that from
Eleanore's boat had somehow had a feeling of being one great living
thing, now on these dreary trudging days fell apart into remote bays and
slips and rivers, hours of weary travel apart and each without any
connection with any other that I could see. Railroad tracks wound in and
out with no apparent purpose, dirty freight boats crawled helter-skelter
this way and that. All seemed a meaningless chaos and jam.
And still worse, as I wrestled with this confusion I found it was
growing stale to me. In those Spring days I was fagged and dull, my
imagination would not work. And this gave me a scare. I must _not_ grow
stale, I must keep right on making money to meet the bills that were
still piling up at home. And so for a Sunday paper I undertook a series
on "The Harbor from a Police Boat." This sounded rather exciting and I
hoped that it might restore the lost thrill. The harbor that it showed
me made fine Sunday reading. Out of its grim waters dead bodies bobbed,
dead faces leered, the sodden ends of mysteries. I wrote them and got
paid for them. And I felt no thrill but only disgust. I made some more
money out of rats--rats in countless ravenous hordes that had a harbor
world of their own. This world extended for hundreds of miles in the
dark chill places under the wharves. And the rats kept gnawing, gnawing,
and slowly with the help of the waves they wore away to splinters and
pulp the millions of beams and planks and piles. I found that entire
mountains were denuded each year of their forests to supply food for the
rats and the ocean here. I was almost a muckraker now.
Meanwhile I had gone in June to the South Brooklyn waterfront and had
taken a room in a tenement near the end of a dock peninsula which jutted
out into the bay. For I wanted to live in the very heart of the big
port's confusion, to grapple alone with the chaos out of which Dillon's
engineers were striving to bring order. Here I lived for weeks by
myself, taking my meals in a barroom below.
There were no stately liners here. The North River piers with their rich
life had been like a show room. I had come down into the factory now. I
could see them still, those liners, but only in the distance steaming
through the Narrows. Eleanore had gone that way. Here close around me
were grimy yards with heaps of coal, enormous sheds, and inland one of
the two narrow mouths of the crowded Erie Basin, out of which slid ugly
freighters through the dirty water.
Like the Ancient Mariner I sat there dully on the pier watching the life
of the ocean go past, and I would try to jot it down. But soon I would
stop. "All right--who cares?" The punch was gone. It grew hot and the
water smelt. And I was as blue a reporter of life as ever chewed his
pencil.
But life has a way of punching up even a stale young writer. In the
rooms above mine lived a man and wife who quarreled half way through the
night. Night after night they railed at each other, until one horrible
night of screams, in the middle of which I heard the man come running
downstairs. He banged at my door.
"Come in," I cried morosely. A big figure entered the dark room.
"Look here," said a rough frightened voice. "Get up and get dressed and
run for a doctor. Will you, son? I'm in a hell of a hole!"
"What's the matter!"
"My woman is havin' a baby, that's what," he answered fiercely. "We
wasn't expectin' it so soon! An' there ain't a single doctor in miles!
But there's a night watchman with a 'phone down there in the dockshed!"
"All right, old man, I'll do my best."
"Say!" he shouted after me, as I hurried down the stairs. "If you know a
damn thing about this business come back here the minute you've
'phoned! I'm in a hole, brother, a hell of a hole!"
I came back soon, and within a few minutes after I came I saw a baby
born.
I did not sleep that night. My mind was curiously clear. I had had the
jolt that I needed from life--its agony and bloody sweat, its mystery.
It was not dull, it was not stale. The only trouble lay in me. I must
find a new angle from which to write.
Why not try becoming one of the workers? The man upstairs was a tug
captain, and grateful to me for what help I had given; he now agreed to
take me on his tug, where there was plenty of simple work which I did
for a dollar a day and my board. And at once I felt a difference. The
light work steadied my overwrought nerves and unlocked my mind which had
set tight. And now at last I began to see my way out of the jungle.
For the tug belonged to a row of piers about a mile to the southward.
Brand new gigantic piers they were, with solid rows of factory buildings
on the shore behind them, all owned by one great company, which rented
floors or parts of floors to hundreds of manufacturers here. The raw
materials they required were landed from barges or ships at the piers
and delivered to their doors at once, and their finished products were
conveyed in the same way to all parts of the world. Here was a key to
the future port of ordered combination that Eleanore's father was
working toward. Here was the place I must write up before he came back
from abroad, to show him that I had found it.
And the very certainty of this increased my exasperation. For even still
I could not write. Doggedly I worked at night up there in my room in the
tenement, but I wrote the most tedious dismal stuff which I would tear
up savagely. Inanely I would pound my head as though to put punch into
it.
But another miracle happened to me.
On one of those enormous piers, roofed over, dim and cool inside, I
stood one day looking out on the deck of an East Indian freighter, where
two half-naked Malays were polishing the brasswork. One of them was a
boy of ten. His small face was uncouth and primitive almost as some
little ape's, but I saw him look up again and again with a sudden
gleaming expectancy. I grew curious and waited. Now the looks came
oftener, his every move was restless. And after a time another boy, a
little New York "newsie," with a pack of evening papers, came loitering
along the pier. Unconcernedly up the gang-plank he went, while the Malay
crouched in his corner, rigid and tense, his black eyes fixed. The white
boy took no notice. Climbing up a ladder he sold a couple of papers to
some officers on a deck above, and then he went down again to the dock.
Presently one of the officers yawned and threw his paper over the rail,
and as it fell to the lower deck in an instant the Malay boy was upon
it, devouring its headlines and its pictures with his animal eyes, with
one of his small bare brown feet upon the jeweled bosom of the latest
Fifth Avenue divorcee.
"Where does that kid sleep?" I asked an officer. I was shown his bunk
below, and there I found I had guessed right. For the side and the top
and both ends of his bunk were lined with red headlines and newspaper
pictures all carefully cut and pasted on. Five of the New York "Giants"
were there.
And as though the fresh fierce hungriness had passed from that small
heathen's soul into my own, that day I again became a reporter of things
to be seen in the port of New York.
Back into the dockshed I went, and all up and down and in and out among
piles of strange and odorous stuffs. And once more I felt the wonder of
this modern ocean world. I followed this raw produce of Mother Earth's
four corners back into those factory buildings ashore. I saw it made
into chewing-gum, toys, sofas, glue, curled hair and wall-paper. I saw
it made into ladles' hats, corks, carpets, dynamos, stuffed dates. I saw
it made into dirt-proof collars and shirt bosoms, salad dressing,
blackboards, corsets and the like. Again I fairly reveled in lists of
things and the places they came from and the places to which they were
going. I saw chewing-gum start for Rio and Quaker Oats for Shanghai,
patent medicine for Nabat, curled hair for Yokohama, "movy" theater
seats for Sydney, tomato soup for Cape Town and corsets for Rangoon.
"From Everywhere to Anywhere" was the title of my article. It took only
a week to write, and was ready when the Dillons came home.