So at last I went up to the tower.
His office took up an entire floor near the tapering top of the
building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony
outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We
could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon,
and through Dillon's powerful field glass I saw pictures of all I had
seen before in my weary weeks of trudging down there in the haze and
dust. Down there I had felt like a little worm, up here I felt among the
gods. There all had been matter and chaos, here all was mind and a will
to find a way out of confusion. The glass gave me the pictures in swift
succession, in a moment I made a leap of ten miles, and as I listened on
and on to the quiet voice at my elbow, the pictures all came sweeping
together as parts of one colossal whole. The first social vision of my
life I had through Dillon's field glass.
"To see any harbor or city or state as a whole," he said, "is what most
Americans cannot do. And it's what they've got to learn to do."
And while I looked where he told me to, like a surgeon about to operate
he talked of his mighty patient, a giant struggling to breathe, with
swollen veins and arteries. He made me see the Hudson, the East River
and the railroad lines all pouring in their traffic, to be shifted and
reloaded onto the ocean vessels in a perfect fever of confusion and
delay. Far below us you could see long lines of tiny trucks and wagons
waiting hours for a chance to get into the docksheds. New York, he
said, in true Yankee style had developed its waterfront pell mell, each
railroad and each ship line grabbing sites for its own use, until the
port was now so clogged, so tangled and congested that it was able to
grow no more.
"And it's got to grow," he said. The old helter-skelter method had
served well enough in years gone by, for this port had been like this
whole bountiful land, its natural advantages had been so prodigious it
could stand all our blind and hoggish mistakes. But now we were rapidly
nearing the time when every mistake we made would cost us tens of
millions of dollars. For within a few years the Big Ditch would open
across Panama, and the commerce of South America, together with that of
the Orient, would pour into the harbor here to meet the westbound
commerce of Europe. Ships of all nations would steam through the
Narrows, and we must be ready to welcome them all, with an ample
generous harbor worthy of the world's first port.
"To get ready," he said, "what we've got to do is to organize this port
as a whole, like the big industrial plant it is."
He began to show me some of the plans in blue-print maps and sketches. I
saw tens of thousands of freight cars gathered in great central yards at
a few main strategic points connected by long tunnels with all the minor
centers. I saw the port no longer as a mere body of water, but with a
whole region deep beneath of these long winding tunnels through which
flowed the traffic unseen and unheard. I saw along the waterfronts
continuous lines of docksheds where by huge cranes and other devices the
loading and unloading could be done with enormous saving of time. Along
the heavy roofs of steel of these continuous lines of buildings
stretched wide ocean boulevards with trees and shrubs and flowers to
shut out the clamorous life below. Warehouses and factory buildings rose
in solid rows behind. The city was to build them all, and the city as
the landlord was to invite the ships and railroads, and the
manufacturers too, to come in and get together, to stop their fighting
and grabbing and work with each other in one great plan.
"That's what we mean nowadays by a port," he told me at the end of our
talk. "A complicated industrial organ, the heart of a country's
circulation, pumping in and out its millions of tons of traffic as
quickly and cheaply as possible. That's efficiency, scientific
management or just plain engineering, whatever you want to call it. But
it's got to be done for us all in a plan instead of each for himself in
a blind struggling chaos."
* * * * *
I came down from the tower with a dazed, excited feeling which lasted
all the rest of the day. That harbor of confusion had been for months my
entire world, it had baffled and beaten me till I was weak. And now this
man had swept together all its parts and showed me one immense design.
He had promised me the first use of his plans. With this to go on I
drafted a scheme for a series of magazine articles on "The First Port of
the World," and I soon placed it in advance at four hundred dollars an
article. At last I was coming up in life, my first big story had begun!
I went with Dillon each week-end up to the cottage on the Sound. Here he
talked in detail of his dreams, and Eleanore with her old passion and
pride delighted to draw him out for me. And not only her father--for to
help me in my work she invited out here in the evenings many of his
engineer friends.
"It has always been awfully hard for me," she confided, "to understand
big questions by reading about them out of books. But I love to hear
about them from men who are living and working right in them. I love to
feel a little how it must be to be living their lives."
She was a wonderful listener, for she had quietly studied each man until
now she had a kind of an instinct for drawing the very best of him out.
While he talked she would sit with her sewing, now and then putting in a
question to help. Often I would glance at her there and see in her
slightly frowning face how intently she was listening, thinking and
planning to help me. Sometimes she would meet my look. I would grow
tremendously happy.
"In a little while," I thought. But then I would pull myself up with a
jerk: "Stop looking at her, you young fool, keep your mind on this
engineer. You've got the chance of your life right now to make good in
your work and be happy. Don't fall down! Get busy!"
And I did. I threw myself into the lives of these men who were the
living embodiments of all that bigness, boldness, punch that had so
gripped and thrilled me. The harbor had drawn them around it out of the
hum and rush of the country, and here they were in its service, watching
it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I
heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow
across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and
Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way
that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark
opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast
populations, plant millions of people this way and that.
But against these men of the tower, with their wide, deliberate views
ahead, embracing and binding together not only this port but the whole
western world depending upon it, I found in the city jungle innumerable
petty men, who could see only their own narrow interests of to-day, and
who fought blindly any change for a to-morrow--fellows in such mortal
fear of some possible benefit to their rivals that they could see none
for themselves. They were hopelessly used to fighting each other. And I
came to feel that all these men, though many were still young in years,
belonged to a generation gone by, to the age of individual strife that
my father had lived and worked in--and that like him they were all soon
to be swept to one side by the inexorable harbor of to-day, which had no
further use for them.
It needed bigger men. It needed men like Dillon and behind him those
mysterious powers downtown, the men he had called the brains of the
nation, who read the signs of the new times, who saw that the West was
now fast filling up, that the eyes of the nation were once more turning
outward, and that untold resources of wealth were soon to be available
for mighty sea adventures, a vast fleet of Yankee ships that should
drive the surplus output of our teeming industries into all markets of
the world. And the men who saw these things coming were the only ones
who were big enough to prepare the country to meet them. My father's
dream was at last coming true--too late for him to play a part. He had
been but a prophet, a lonely pioneer.
My view of the harbor was different now. I had seen it before as a vast
machine molding the lives of all people around it. But now behind the
machine itself I felt the minds of its molders. I saw its ponderous
masses of freight, its multitudes of people, all pushed and shifted this
way and that by these invisible powers. And by degrees I made for myself
a new god, and its name was Efficiency.
Here at last was a god that I felt could stand! I had made so many in
years gone by, I had been making them all my life--from those first
fearful idols, the condors and the cannibals, to the kind old god of
goodness in my mother's church and the radiant goddess of beauty and art
over there in Paris. One by one I had raised them up, and one by one the
harbor had flowed in and dragged them down. But now in my full manhood
(for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a god
that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was
armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its
head were all the brains of all the strong men at the top.
And all the multitudes below seemed mere pigmies to me now. I remember
one late twilight, coming back from a talk with an engineer, I boarded a
ferry at the rush hour and watched the people herd on like sheep. How
small they seemed, how petty their thoughts compared to mine, how blind
their views of the harbor.
Here was a little Italian bride, just landed, by the looks of her. She
kept her face close to her lover's, smiling dazedly into his eyes. And
she saw no harbor. Here near by was a fat old gentleman with a highly
painted young lady who laughed and swore softly at him as I passed. I
sat down beside them a moment and listened. The old gentleman seemed
quite mad with desire. He was pleading eagerly, whining. And he saw no
harbor. Close by sat two tall serious men. One was deep in a socialist
book, the other in news of the Giants. Both seemed equally absorbed. And
they saw no harbor. I moved on to another spot, and sitting down by a
thin seedy-looking Irish girl I heard her talk to her husband about
having their baby's life insured according to a wonderful plan an agent
had described to her. As she spoke she was frowning anxiously--and she
saw no harbor. Not far away a plump flashy young creature was smiling
down on the bootblack who was busily shining her small patent leather
shoes. Her bright blue petticoat lifted high displayed the most enticing
charms, and as now she turned to look off toward the lights of the city
ahead, she smiled gaily to herself. And she saw no harbor. And alone up
at the windy bow I found a squat husky laborer with his dirty coat and
shirt thrown open wide, the wind on his bare hairy chest, hungrily
watching the dock ahead as though for his supper--seeing no harbor, no
world's first port, no plans for vast fleets or a great canal, none of
the big things shaping his life.
But I saw. Orders had gone out from the tower east and west and south
and north to show me every courtesy. And with a miraculous youthful ease
I understood all that I saw and heard. The details all fitted right into
the whole, or if they didn't I made them fit. Here was a splendid end to
chaos and blind wrestling with life. And feeling stronger and more sure
than ever in my life before, I set out to build my series of glory
stories about it all, laying on the color thick to reach a million pigmy
readers, grip them, pull them out of their holes, make them sit up and
rub their eyes.
For I was now a success in life! The exuberant joy of youth and success
filled the whole immense region for me. In those Fall days there was
nothing too hard to try, no queer hours too exhausting, no deep corner
too remote, in the search for my material. I saw the place from an old
fisherman's boat and from a revenue launch at night, with its
searchlight combing the waters far and wide for smugglers. I saw it from
big pilot boats that put far out to sea to meet the incoming liners. I
ate many good suppers and slept long nights on a stout jolly tug called
_The Happy_, where from my snug bunk at the stern through the open door
I could watch the stars. I went down into tunnels deep beneath the
waters. I went often to the Navy Yard. I dined many nights on
battleships, where the talk of the naval officers recalled my father's
picture of a fighting ocean world. They too talked of the Big Canal, but
in terms of war instead of peace. I went out to the coast defenses, and
with an army major I made a tour of the lights and buoys.
And perhaps more often than anywhere else, I went to a rude log cabin on
the side of a wooded hill high up on Staten Island, where lived a
Norwegian engineer. He had a cozy den up there, with book-shelves set
into the logs, two deep bunks, a few bright rugs on the rough floor,
some soft, ponderous leather chairs and a crackling little stove on
which we cooked delicious suppers. Later out on the narrow porch we
would puff lazy smoke wreaths and watch the vast valley of lights below,
from the distant twinkling arch of the Bridge to the sparkling towers of
old Coney. Down there like swarms of fire-flies were countless darting
skurrying lights, red and blue and green and white. Far off to the south
flashed the light of the Hook, and still other signals gleamed low from
the ocean.
Here I came often with Eleanore, for she had now come back to town. In
her boat we went to many new spots and back to all the old ones. We
found new beauties in them all. At home in the evenings we had long
talks. And all the time I could feel that we two both knew what was
coming, that steadily we were drawing together, that all my work and my
view of the harbor took its joy and its glory from this.
"In a little while," I thought.