They landed toward the end of July and I went to the dock to meet them.
Elated over my finished story, which I had in my pocket, and made
absurdly happy by the sight of Eleanore smiling down at me over the
rail, I was surprised at the greeting she gave me.
"Why, you poor boy. How terribly hard you've been working," she said.
And she looked at me as though I were sick and worn to the bone. The end
of it was that I accepted delightedly an invitation to spend a week up
at their cottage on the Sound.
Those were seven vivid glowing days. I could not relax, I was too
intensely happy, I had too much to tell her, not only about my work but
about a host of other things that without rhyme or reason popped into my
mind and had to be said. The range of our talk was tremendous, and the
wider we ranged the closer we drew. For she too was telling things, and
her things were as unexpected as mine and infinitely more absorbing. Her
manner toward me had quite changed. It was that of a nurse with an
invalid, she frankly ordered me about.
"Why can't you lie back on those cushions?" she asked one morning when
we were out in her boat. "You ought to be dozing half the day--and
instead you're as wide awake as an owl."
"I am," I admitted happily. "I'm trying to see everything." The chic
little hat and the blouse she wore were adorably fresh from Paris, and
as I watched her run her boat I could feel flowing into my body and soul
a perfectly boundless store of new life.
"I've been thinking you over," she said.
"Have you?" I asked delightedly. I had often wondered if she had. "What
do you think?" I inquired.
Eleanore frowned perplexedly.
"You're such a queer combination," she said. "You have such ridiculous
ups and downs. To-day you're way up, aren't you."
"I am," I said very earnestly. She looked off placidly over the Sound.
"You're so very sensitive," she went on. "You let things take hold of
you so hard. And yet on the other hand you seem to be so very----" she
hesitated for a word.
"Tough," I suggested cheerfully.
"No--hungry," Eleanore said. "You're always reaching out for things--you
jump right into them so hard. And even when they hurt you--and you're
hurt quite easily--you hang on and won't let go. Look at the way you've
gone at the harbor right from the start. And you're doing it
still--you've done it all summer until it has made you look like a
ghost. And I guess you'll keep on all your life. There are harbors
everywhere, you know--in a way the whole world is a harbor--and unless
you change a lot you're going to be hurt a good deal."
"My mother agreed with you," I said. "She wanted me to be a professor in
a quiet college town."
"Please stop twinkling your eyes," Eleanore commanded. "Your mother knew
you very well. You might have done that--and settled down--with some
nice quiet college girl--if you had done it years ago. As it is, of
course you're hopeless."
"I am not hopeless," I declared indignantly. "If I can only get what I
want I'll be the happiest fellow alive!"
"I know," she answered thoughtfully. "You told me that before. You want
fiction, don't you."
"Yes, fiction," I said wrathfully. "I want that more than anything
else. But I don't want any quiet kind, and I don't want any quiet town,"
I went on, leaning forward intensely. "I want the harbor and the city--I
want it thick and heavy, and just as fast as it will come. I want all
the life there is in the world--all the beauty--all the happiness! And I
can't wait--I want it soon!"
From under the brim of her soft white hat her blue-gray eyes were fixed
intently on the shore, which was miles away. But watching her I saw she
knew that all the time I was saying desperately, "I want you."
I knew she did not want me to say anything like that out loud, and I
felt myself that I had no right--not until I had done so much more in my
writing. But I kept circling around it. Half the time on purpose and as
often quite unconsciously, in all we talked about those days I kept
eagerly filling in the picture of the life we two might lead. When in
one of her cool hostile moods--moods which came over her suddenly--she
told me almost jealously how happy she'd been with her father abroad and
how together they had planned to go to India, China, Japan in the years
to come, I brought her back to my subject by saying: "I mean to travel a
lot myself."
"That's one advantage I have as a writer," I continued earnestly. "I'll
never be tied down to one place. All my life--whenever I choose--I can
pick up my work and go anywhere."
She looked straight back into my eyes.
"I wish my father could," she said.
"Look here," I said indignantly. "Your father has been four months
abroad while I have been in Brooklyn! Isn't it only fair and square to
let _me_ travel this afternoon?" She looked at me reluctantly.
"Yes," she agreed. "I suppose it is."
"Come along," I urged, and off we went. While our boat drifted idly that
long, lazy afternoon, we went careering all over the world and I kept
doggedly by her side. Every now and then I would make her stop while we
had a good look at each other, exploring deep into the old questions,
"What are you and what do you want?"
"You can't run a motorboat all your life," I reminded her. "What are you
going to tackle next?"
"Our living-room," she answered. "I'm going to have it done over next
month."
That took us into house furnishings, and I gave her ideas by the score.
I had never thought about this before, but now I thought hard and
eagerly--until she brought me up with a jerk, by pityingly murmuring:
"What perfectly frightful taste you have. It's funny--because you're an
artist--you really write quite beautiful things."
"I don't care," I answered grimly. "I can see that living-room----"
"So can I," she said cheerfully. "But so long as you like it, that's all
there is to be said. You're the one who has to live in it, you know. Now
my father likes a room----"
And while I looked gloomily over the water she told me what her father
liked.
* * * * *
He came out from the city each evening by train. He refused to use the
boat these days, he said he was so infernally busy that he could not
spare the time. He brought out stacks of papers and plans which had
piled up while he was abroad, and with these he busied himself at night.
And though Eleanore from the veranda glanced in at him frequently, she
never again caught him looking old. And when she went in to make him
stop working he smilingly told her to leave him alone. He smoked many
cigars with apparent enjoyment, his lean face wrinkling over the smoke
as he turned over plan after plan for the harbor. His manner to me was
if anything even kindlier than before. He began calling me "Billy" now.
On the last night of my stay he said:
"I think you're the man I've been looking for. I've just read your story
and you've done exactly what I hoped. You've pictured one spot of
efficiency in a whole dreary desert of waste. Come up to my office
to-morrow at ten."