 CHAPTER XII. Meanwhile in the late autumn Eleanor had come back to town. I had a note from her one day. Come and tell me what you are writing," she said. I went to see her that afternoon and I was deeply excited. I had often felt her by my side when I was watching the harbour life and as often behind me while I wrote. We had had long talks together, absorbing talks about ourselves. And though now in her easy welcome and through all her cheerful questions there was not a suggestion that we too had been or ever would be anything but genial friends, this did not discourage me in the least. No fellow I thought could be happy as I and have nothing better than friendship ahead. The fates could never be so hard for certainly now they were smiling. Here was her apartment, just the place I had felt it would be, only infinitely more attractive. High up above the Manhattan jungle it was quiet and sunny and charming here. From the low, wide living-room windows you could see miles out over the harbour where my work was going so splendidly and all around the room itself I saw what I was working for. Eleanor's touch was everywhere. An intimate, loveable, feminine home with man-sized views from its windows, just like Eleanor herself from whom I found it difficult to keep my hungry eyes away. To that soft bewildering hair of hers she had done something different. I couldn't tell what, but I loved it. I loved the changing tones of her voice. I hate monotonous voices. I watched the smiling lights in her eyes. She was at her small tea-table now. Her motorboat, thank heaven, was laid up for the winter, and I had her right here in a room with nothing to do with her eyes but pay a decent amount of attention to me. Then by some chance remark I learned that she had been reading what I wrote, almost all of it in fact. And at that slight exclamation I made I saw her colour slightly and bite her lip as though she were angry with herself for having let that secret out. What do you want to write? She asked when you get through with the harbour. Fiction, I said. I want it so hard sometimes that it seems like a long way ahead. It seems sometimes, I added, like a girl I'd fallen in love with, but I couldn't even ask her because I'm so infernally poor. Over the tea-cup at her lips Eleanor looked thoughtfully straight into and through and behind my eyes. Fiction is such a broad field, Cherry-Mart. What kind do you think you're going to try? I don't know, I answered. It still seems so far ahead. You see, I have no name at all, and this harbour at least is a good safe start. I'm afraid I'm rather a cautious sort. When I find what I want and want so hard that it's the deepest part of me, I like to go slow. I'm afraid to risk losing it all, deciding my life one way or the other, by taking a chance. I made a restless movement. I wasn't speaking of my work just then, I added gruffly. I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror back of Eleanor's chair, and I glared at myself for the fool that I was to have said all that. I hadn't meant to, not in the least. What a paltry-looking cuss I was, small, tough and wiry, hair sandy, eyes of no colour at all, snub nose, and a jaw shut tight as in pain. You're a queer person, said a voice. I am, I agreed for longly. I'm the queerest fellow I ever met. I caught a grim twinkle in my eyes. Thank God for a sense of humour. Sometimes, she went on reflectively, you seem to me as old as the hills, and again so young and obvious. I'm so sorry to hear you say that you weren't talking of your work. I like to hear men talk of their work. I know you do, I said hungrily, and that's one of the reasons why you're going to mean so much some day, to somebody's work, and to his whole life. Why couldn't I stop? Had I gone insane? I rose and moved about the room. A low, rippling laugh brought me back to my senses. But how about me and my life, she asked. That ought to be thought of a little, you know. I came close beside her. Let me say this, won't you? I promise never to say it again. Your life is going to be all right. It's going to be quite wonderful, you'll be tremendously happy. I'm sure of that. It's not only the way you always look, it's the way you always think and feel. It's everything about you. She had looked down at her hands for a moment. Now she looked up suddenly. Thank you, she said, smiling in a way that told me to smile too. I obeyed. I did that rather badly, didn't I, I said. No, you did that rather well. Especially the first part. I think I like that best of all. The part where you promise so solemnly that you'd never do it again. I went indignantly back to my chair. Do you know, I said, I feel sometimes when I'm with you as though I were being managed. Absolutely managed. I should think you wouldn't like that, she replied. Her hands were peacefully folded now and she looked at me serenely. I should think you'd rather manage yourself. I took the hint. From that day on, each time I came to see her, I managed myself severely, and this apparently pleased her so much that she seemed no longer the least afraid to let me know her as well as I liked. Her father, too, when I met him now and then in the evenings, was most kindly in his welcome, and as winter wore on my hopes rose high. But one evening, after Dylan had read my story about the Christmas boat, he gave me a bitter disappointment. I like it, he said as he handed it back. It's a fine dramatic piece of work. But it's only a starter here. To get any idea of our problem you'll have to go all over the harbor. When you've done that for a few months more and I get back for my trip abroad, I'll be glad to help you. You're going abroad? I asked abruptly. Next month, he said, with Eleanor. She seems to think I need a rest. That came the old feeling of emptiness, and gloomily at home that night I wondered if it was because she knew she was leaving so soon that she had been so intimate lately, how outrageous women are. CHAPTER XIII 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 that 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 Eleanor 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 revolutors. 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 a 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. 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 stethyly feel for his book, and then presently out of the silence, this is a delish 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 that dad would arise 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 too 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 Eleanor, for whom Sue had no longer any good word but only a smiling derision. Her remarks were straight out of Bernard Shaw's most reballed 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 Cramer, 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. Dylan 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 Eleanor'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 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 wars, 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 Dylan's engineers were striving to bring order. Here I lived for weeks by myself, taking my meals in a bar room below. There were no stately liners here. The North River peers with their rich life had been like a showroom. I had come down into the factory now. I could see them still, those liners, but only in the distance steaming through the narrows. Elinor 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 eerie 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 his wife who quarreled halfway 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 door. 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 having a baby. That's what, he answered fiercely. We wasn't expecting it so soon, and there ain't a single doctor in Miles, but there's a night watchman with a phone down there in the dock shed. 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 the 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 Eleanor'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. When 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 melees were polishing the brasswork. One of them was a boy of ten. His small face was uncouth and primitive, almost as some little apes, 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 Newsy with the pack of evening papers, came loitering along the pier. Unconcernedly up the gang-plank he went, while the melee 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 melee 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 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 dock shed 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 wallpaper. I saw it made into ladies hats, corks, carpets, dynamos, stuff dates. I saw it made into dirt-proof collars and shirt bosom, 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 Nabot, curled hair for Yokohama, movie 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 Dylan's came home. End of Chapter 13, Recording by Tom Weiss. Chapter 14 of the Harbor. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss. The Harbor by Ernest Poole. Chapter 14. They landed toward the end of July and I went to the dock to meet them. He laid it over my finished story, which I had in my pocket, and made absurdly happy by the sight of Eleanor 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 the 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. Eleanor frowned perplexedly. You're such a queer combination, she said. You have such ridiculous ups and downs. Today you're way up, aren't you? I am, I said very honestly. She looked off placently 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, Eleanor 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, Eleanor 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've 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 eager filling in the picture of the life we too 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 by myself. That's one advantage I have as a writer, I continue 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. Take care, 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 careening 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 Eleanor 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 tomorrow at ten. CHAPTER XV 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 Dylan'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 Dylan'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 dock sheds. New York, he said, in true Yankee style, had developed its waterfront hell-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 Helder-Skelder method had served well enough in years gone by. For this port had been like this whole, fountiful 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 blueprint 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 dot sheds, whereby 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. It'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 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 Dylan each weekend up to the cottage on the sound. Here he talked in detail of his dreams, and Eleanor 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 waterbed, and making New York and Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed yanky 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 pettymen, who could see only their own narrow interests of today, and who fought blindly any change for a tomorrow, 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 today, 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 pygmies to me now. I remember one late twilight, coming back from a talk with an engineer. I put at a ferry at the rush hour and watched the people heard 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 lovers, smiling daisily into his eyes, and she saw no harbor. Here nearby 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 gentlemen. 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 ensured, according to a wonderful plan an agent had described to her. And 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 boot-flat who was visibly shining her small, hat-and-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 fit it right into the hole, or if they didn't, I made them fit. Here was a splendid end to chaos and blind wrestling with light, 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 pygmy readers, grip them, pull them out of their holes, make them sit up and rub their eyes. Her eye 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 search light 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. We had a cozy den up there with bookshelves set into the logs, tube 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 smokeries and watch the vast valley of lights below from the distant, twinkling arch of the bridge to the sparkling towers of old Coney. From there like swarms of fireflies were countless darting, scurrying lights, red and blue, and green and white. Far off to the side flashed the light of the hook, and still other signals gleamed low from the ocean. Here I came often with Eleanor, 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 too both knew what was coming. That steadily we were drawing together, that all my work and my view of the harbour took its joy in its glory from this. In a little while I thought. CHAPTER XVI I had been little at home those days, for the house in Brooklyn disturbed me now. Poor old dad. Since I had secured my contract he had tried so hard to help me, to be eager, interested, alive, to talk it all over with me at night. And this I did not like to do. A vague feeling of guilt and disloyalty would creep into my now boundless zest for the harbour that had crowded him out, and I think that he suspected this. One night, when with this feeling I stupidly tried to talk as though I still hated all its ugliness, its clamour, smoke and grime, I caught a twinkle of pain in his eyes. Boy, he broke in roughly, I hope you'll always talk and write what you believe and nothing else. I wouldn't give a pic you for any chap who didn't. I could feel him watching anxiously my affair with Eleanor. In the days when she had come to the house he had grown very fond of her, and now by frequent questions slipped in with a studied indifference, he showed an interest which in time became a deep suspense. Out again this evening, son, he called in one night from the bathroom where he was washing his hands and face before going down to supper. In my room adjoining I was dressing to go out. Yes, dad. What for? Some work. Be out for dinner, too? Yes. Who with? Oh, a pilot, I answered abstractly. I was wondering if she would wear her blue gown. She had asked quite a number of people that night. Then I saw dad in the doorway, briskly rubbing his grey head with a towel he was eyeing my evening clothes. Devolished, polished chaps these days, pilots, he commented, I heard a low snort of glee from his room. My sister, on the other hand, had no more patience than before with this fast, deepening love of mine, which had drawn me away from her radical friends up to the men of the tower who worked for the big companies. By the most vigorous ironies, the most industrious witty remarks, she made me feel how thoroughly she disapproved of anything so deadening as marriage, home, and settling down in this glorious age of new ideas. One morning at breakfast, when I remarked as I commonly did that I would be out for dinner that night, Where are you going? she asked abruptly. To Eleanor Dillon's, I replied. Our eyes met squarely for a moment. Do you know what it means to go there so often, almost every night? she asked. I do, I answered bluntly. I would finish this meddling once and for all. But Sue did not look finished. You better stay home tonight, Billy, she said. Why? Joe Kramer is coming. What? He telephoned me late last night. He's just come from Colorado and he sails tomorrow for England. He's awfully anxious to see you. Of course he was, and I knew what about. I saw at once by the look on her face that Sue had told him all about me, and had begged him to see what he could do. Why couldn't they leave a fellow alone, I said, rathrally to myself? But my ire softened when I met Joe. In the year and a half since I had seen him, the lines in his face had deepened, the stoop of his big shoulders had grown even more pronounced, and again I felt that wisple, frowning, searching quality in him. Beneath his gruffness and his jeers, he was so honestly pushing on for what he could find most real in life. A wave of the old affection came over me suddenly without warning. Vaguely I wondered about it. Why did he always grip me so? My father, too, appeared at first delighted to see him. He had shown a keen relish for J.K. from that first time in college when I had brought him home for Christmas. Since then, whenever Joe had come, he and Dad had always managed to retreat to the study together and smoke and have long, dogged arguments. But tonight it was not the same. For in his growth as a radical, Joe had gone beyond all arguing now. Lines of deep displeasure slowly tightened on Dad's face. All through dinner he kept attempting to turn the talk from Joe's work to mine. But this I would have none of. I wanted to be let alone. So I nervously kept the conversation on what Joe was up to, and Sue seemed more than eager to learn. J.K. was up to a good deal. This muckraking game is played out, he said. We all know how rotten things are. All we want to know now is what's to be done. And he himself had become absorbed in what the working class was doing. As a reporter in the West, he had been to strike after strike, ending with a long, ugly struggle in the Colorado mines. He talked about it intensely, the greed of the mine owners, the brutality of the militia, the bullpens into which strikers were thrown. Vaguely I felt he was giving us a most distorted picture, and glancing now and then at my father I saw that he thought it a pack of lies. Joe made all the strikers the most heroic figures, and he spoke of their struggle as only a part of a great labor war that was soon to sweep the entire land. Sue excitedly drew him out, and I felt it was all for my benefit. Joe said that he was going abroad in order that he might write the truth about the labor world over there. The American papers and magazines would let you write the truth, he said, about labor over in Europe, because it was at a safe distance, but they wouldn't allow it here. And then Sue looked across at me as though to say, it's only stuff like yours they allow. Why don't you two go out for a walk? She suggested sweetly after dinner, and I consented gladly, for there are times when nothing on earth can be worse than your own sister. We went down to the old East River docks and walked for some time with little said. Then Joe turned on me abruptly. Well, Bill, he said, I've read your stuff. It's damn well written. Thanks, I replied. If I've got any knocking to do, he went on with the visible effort. I know you'll give me credit for not knocking out of jealousy. I'm not jealous. I'm honestly tickled to death. I was wrong about you in Paris. You and me were different kinds. What you got over there was just what you needed. It has put you already way out of my class, and it's going to give you a lot of power as a spreader of ideas. That's why I hate so like the devil to see you starting out like this, with what I'm so sure are the wrong ideas. How are they wrong? Think a minute. Why is your magazine pushing you so? The first story of your series is only just out, and they've already boomed you all over the country. Why, Bill, I saw your picture in a trolley car in Denver, and you're only 25 years old. It's damn fine writing. I'll say it again, but that's not reason enough for this. You've got to go down deeper and look into your magazine's policy, which is to strike a balance for all kinds of middle class readers and for their advertisers, too. They've run some radical stuff this year, and they're booming you now to balance off to show how safe and sane they can be in the way they look at life, at big business, and at industry, as you do here in the harbor. You're making gods out of the men at the top. You've seen them as they see themselves, and you've only seen what they see here. You've missed all the millions of people here who depend on the place for their jobs and their lives. They don't count for you. That's not true at all, I interrupted hotly. It's just for them and their children that fellows like Dylan are on the job to make a better harbor for them for the people, said Joe. That's what I'm kicking at in you, Bill. You treat us all like a mass of dubs that need gods above to do everything for us, because we can't do it all by ourselves. I don't believe the people can, I retorted. From what I've seen, I honestly don't believe they count. The fellows that count in a job like this are the fellows with punch and grit enough to fight their way up out of the ranks. I know. And be lieutenants and captains in a regular army of peace with your friend Dylan in command and Wall Street in command of him. Isn't that your view? All right, it is. I don't see any harm in that. It's the only safe way that I can see out of this mess of a harbor we've got. These men are the efficient ones. They're the fellows that have the brains and that know how to work, to use science, money, everything to get a decent world ahead. What's the matter with efficiency? Your latest God sneered JK. Suppose it is. What's wrong with it? What's the matter with Dylan? Is he a crook? No, said Joe. That's just the worst of him. He's so damned honest, he's such a hard worker. I've met men like him all over the country and they're the most dangerous men we've got because they're the real strength of Wall Street. Just as thousands of clean, hardworking priests are the strength of the Catholic Church. They keep their church going and Dylan keeps his. He's a regular priest, a big business. And he takes hold of kids like you and molds your views like his for life. Look at what he has done with you here. Does he say a word to you about graft? Does he talk of the North Atlantic Pool or any one of the other pools and schemes by which they keep up rates? Does he make you think about low wages and long hours and all the fellas hurt or killed on the docks and in the stoke holes? Does he give you any feeling at all of this harbor as a city of four million people, most of them getting a raw deal and getting mad about it? That's more important to you and me than all the efficiency gods on earth. You've got to decide which side you're on and that's what's got me talking now. I see so plain which way you're letting yourself be pulled. I've seen so many pulled the same way. It's so pleasant up there at the top. There's so much money and brains up there and refinement, such women to get married to, such homes to settle down in. Sometimes I wish every promising radical kid in the country could get himself into some scandal that would cut him off for life from any chance of being received by this damned respectable upper class. He stopped for a moment and then with a gruff intensity, we need you Bill, he ended. We need you bad. We don't want you to marry a girl at the top. We don't want you anchored up there for life. We were standing still now and I was looking out on the river. Through the grip of his hand on my arm, I could feel his body taunt and quivering. His whole spirit hot with revolt, the same old Joe, but tensor now strained almost to the breaking point. But I myself was different. In college he had appealed to me because there I was groping and had found nothing. But now I had found something sure. And so, though, to my own surprise, a deep emotional part of me rose up in sudden response to Joe and made me feel guilty to hold back. It was only for a moment. And then my mind told me he was wrong. Who are old JK? What a black distorted view he had. Grown out of a distorted life of traveling continually from one center of trouble to another. How could he be any judge of life? Look here, Joe, I said. I'm a kid, as you say. And someday I may see your side of this. But I don't now. I can't. For since I left Paris, I've been through enough to make me feel what a job living is. I mean really living and growing. And I know what a difference Dylan has made. He has been to my life what he is to this harbor. And I'm not old enough nor strong enough to throw over a man as big as that and as honest and clean in his thinking and throw myself in with your millions of people who seem to me either mighty poor thinkers or fellas who don't think at all. They're not in my life. I believe in men who can think clean, who have trained their minds by years of hard work, who don't try to tear down and bring things to a smash but are always building, building. You talk about this upper class, but they're my people, aren't they? That's where I was born. And I'm going on with them. I believe they're right and I know they're strong. I mean strong enough to handle all this. Make it better. They'll make it worse, Joe answered. And then as he turned to me once more, he added very bitterly, you'll see strength enough in the people some day. A few moments later he left me. I looked at my watch and found it was not yet nine o'clock. I went to Eleanor Dillon and within an hour Joe and his world of crowds at confusion were swept utterly out of my mind. End of chapter 16, recording by Tom Weiss. Chapter 17 of the Harbor. This labor box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss. The Harbor by Ernest Poole, Chapter 17. I had often told Eleanor of Joe. She had asked me about him many times. It's queer, she had said, what a hold he must have had on you. I feel sure he's just the kind of person I wouldn't like and who wouldn't like me. I don't think he's really your kind either and yet he has a hold on you still. Yes, he has, I can feel he has. And tonight when I told her that I had been with him, what did he want of you? She asked. He wants me to drop everything, I answered. And I tried to give her some idea of what he had said. But as I talked, the thought came suddenly into my mind that here at last was the very time to settle my life one way or the other, to ask her if she would be my wife. I grew excited and confused, my voice sounding unnatural to my ears. And as I talked on about Joe, my heart pounding, I could barely keep the thoughts in line. And I don't want what he wants, I entered desperately. That nor anything like it. I just want what I've been getting, just this kind of work and life. And I want you, for life I mean, if you can ever feel like that. Eleanor said nothing. In an instant the world and everything in it had narrowed to the two of us. The intensity was unbearable. I rose abruptly and turned away. I felt suddenly far out of my depth. Confusedly and furiously I felt that I had bungled things that here was something in life so strange I could do nothing with it. What a young fool I was to have thought she could ever care for a fellow like me. I felt she must be smiling. Despairingly I turned to see. And Eleanor was smiling. In a way that steadied me in a flash. For her smile was so plainly a quick strong effort to steady herself. I'm glad you want me like that. She said in a voice that did not sound like hers. I don't believe in hiding things. I'm very happy. She looked down at her hands in her lap and they slowly locked together. But of course it means our whole lives you see. And we mustn't hurry or make a mistake. Now that we know this much we can talk about it quite openly about each other and what we want, what kinds of lives, what we believe in, whether we'd be best for each other. It's what we ought to talk about a good many times. It may be weeks. All right, I agreed. I was utterly changed. At her first words I had felt a deep rush of relief and seeing her tremendous pluck and the effort she was making I pitted, worshipped and loved her all in the same moment. And as we talked on for a few minutes more in that gray and unnaturally sensible way about the pros and cons of it all, these feelings within me mounted so swiftly that all at once I again broke off. I don't believe there's any use in this, I declared. It's perfectly idiotic. Of course it is, she promptly agreed. And then after a rigid instant when each of us looked at the other as though asking, quick, what are we going to do? She burst out laughing excitedly. So did I and that carried her into my arms and I remember nothing. Until after a while she asked me to go because she wanted to be by herself. And I noticed how bright and wet were her eyes. I saw them still in the darkness down along the riverfront where I walked for half the rest of the night, stopping to draw a deep breath of the sea and laugh excitedly and go on. Life changed rapidly after that night. I grew so absorbed in Eleanor and in all that was waiting just ahead that it was hard not to shut out everything else, most of all, impersonal things. It was hard to write and for days I wrote nothing. I remember only intimate talks. Everyone I talked to seemed to be deeply personal. I told my father about it the next evening before supper. I found him in his old chair in the study buried deep in his paper. Say, dad, would you mind coming up to your room? He smote his paper to one side. What the devil he asked do I want to come up to my room for? I've, the fact is I have something you ought to know. I could hear Sue in the other room. All right, my boy, he said nervously, as he followed me he kept clearing his throat. Sue must have guessed and prepared him. In his room he fussed about, grunted hard over getting off his shoes and finding his slippers, then lay back on his sofa with his hands behind his head and uttered an explosive sigh. All right, son, now fire ahead, he said jacosely. I loved him at that moment. You know Eleanor Dillon, I began. She turned you down. No, she took me, the devil you say. He sat bolt upright, staring. Well, my boy, I'm very glad, he said thickly. His eyes were moist. I'm glad, glad. She's a fine girl, strong character, strong. I wish your poor mother were alive. She'd be happy. This girl will make a good wife. You must bring her right here to live with us. And so he talked on, his voice trembling. Then out of his confusion rose the money question and at once his mind grew clear. And to my surprise he urged me to lose no time in looking around for some good steady position in a magazine office, my writing I could do at night. It's so uncertain at best, he said. It's nothing you can count on and you've got to think of a wife and children. Her father has no money saved. I found he'd been looking dillin' up and this jarred on me horribly. But still worse was his lack of faith in my writing. I was making $400 a month and it was a most unpleasant jolt to have it taken so lightly. I went down to Sue. As I came into the living room she met me suddenly at the door. In a moment her arms were about my neck and she was saying softly. I know what it is, dear. And I'm glad, I'm awfully glad. If I've been horrid about it ever, please forgive me. I'm sure now it's just the life you want. And that evening while dad slept in his chair, Sue and I had a long affectionate talk. We drew closer than we had been for months. She was eager to hear everything. She wanted to know all our plans. When I tried at last to turn our talk to herself and our affairs at home, at first she would not hear to it. My dear boy, she said affectionately, you've had these worries long enough. You're to run along now and be happy and leave this house to dad and me. I slipped my arm around her. Look here, sis, let's see this right. You can't run here on what dad earns and if you try to work yourself you'll only hurt him terribly. My idea is to help as before without letting him know that I'm doing it. Make him think you've cut expenses. It took a long time to get her consent. The next night I went to Eleanor's father. He received me quietly and with a deep intensity under that steady smile of his, which reminded me so much of hers. He spoke of all she had meant to him and of her brave search for a big happy light. He told how he had watched her with me slowly making up her mind. It took a long time, but it's made up now, he said. And now that it is, she's the kind that will go through anything for you that can ever come up in your life. He looked at me squarely, still smiling a little, frankly letting his new affection come into his eyes. I wish I knew all that's going to happen, he added almost sadly. I hope you'll get used to telling me things, talking things over, anything, no matter what, where I can be of the slightest help. Then he too spoke of money. He meant to keep up her allowance, he said, and he had ensured his life for her. Again as with my father, I felt that disturbing lack of faith in my work. I spoke of it to Eleanor and she looked at me indignantly. You must never think of it like that, she said. I won't have you writing for money. Dad has never worked that way and you're not to do it on any account, least of all on account of me. Whatever you make, we'll live on and that's all there is to be said. Except that we'll live splendidly, she added very gaily. And we won't spend the finest part of our lives saving up for rainy days. We'll take care of the rain when it rains and we'll have some wonderful times while we can. We decided at once on a trip abroad as soon as I had finished my work and I remember writing hard and reading it aloud to her and rewriting over and over again for Eleanor could be severe. But I remember too more trips in her boat to gather the last odds and ends. I remember how the big harbor took on a new glory to our eyes, mingled with all the deep personal joys and small troubles and crises we went through, the puzzles and the questionings and the glad discoveries that made up the swift growth of our love. And though I never once thought of Joe Kramer, he had prophesied all right. I belonged wholly now to Dylan's world, a world of clean vigorous order that seemed to welcome me the more as I wrote in praise of its power and happy over my success and in love and starting life anew with all the signs so bright, how could I have any doubts of my harbor? We were married very quietly late, one April afternoon. It rained, I remember, all that day but the next was bright and clear for our sailing. In our small state room on the ship we found a note from the company, a large engraved impressive affair presenting their best wishes and asking us to accept for the voyage one of their most luxurious cabins. This is what comes, said Eleanor Daley, a being the wife of a writer or the daughter, I said softly, of a very wonderful engineer. You darling boy. We moved up to a large sunny cabin. I remember her swiftly reading the telegrams and letters there as though to get them all out of the way. I remember her unpacking and taking possession of our first home. We're married, aren't we? said a voice. There was only one more goodbye to be said. On the deck as we went out of the harbor, Eleanor stood by the rail. I felt her hand close tight on mine and I saw her eyes glisten a little with tears. What a splendid place it has been, she said. End of Chapter 17 Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 18 of the Harbor This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss The Harbor by Ernest Poole Chapter 18 We found every place splendid in those weeks as we let the wanderlust carry us on and as though emerging from some vivid dream, various places and faces of people stand out in my memory now as then they loomed in upon our absorption. I remember the little old harbor of Cherbourg gleaming in the moonlight where when we landed Eleanor said, let's stay here awhile. So of course we did and then went on to Paris. We took an apartment very French and absurdly small from a former beau-art's friend of mine. I remember the kindly face of the maid who took such beaming care of us, the café in front of which late at night we sat and watched the huge shadowy carts go by on their way to the market halls, the sunrise flower market where we filled our cab with moth roses and plants, holding songs in embassadours, delicious pitié allee in the boys, our favorite rides on the tops of the buses that old religious place of mine down under the bridge by Notre Dame. All these and more we saw in fragments, now and then looking out with vivid interest on all the life around us, only to return to each other, into each other I should say, for the exploring was quite different now. There had been such hours between us that nothing intimate could be held back. Nothing? Well, nothing that I thought of then. For somehow or other in those glad, eager afternoons and evenings, in those nights nothing disturbingly ugly in me so much as a thought of showing its head. Three years before in this stirring town, I had felt guilty at being a monk, but now I felt no guilt at all. For down the Champs-Élys, our cab rolled serenely now and even our driver's white hat wore an air as though it had a place in life. From Paris we started from Munich, but we did not stop there. We happened to feel like going on. So we went through to Constantinople once we took a boat to Batum and went up into the Caucasus which Eleanor had heard about once from an engineer friend of her father's. I remember Coutice, a little town by a mountain torrent with gray vine covered walls around it. Shops opened into the walls like stalls. There we would buy things for our supper and then in a crazy vehicle we would drive miles out on the broad mountainside to an orchard pink with blossoms where we would build a fire and cook and an old man in a long yellow robe and with a turban on his head would come out of his cabin and bring us wine and the stars would appear and the frogs tune up in the marshes far down in the valley below and the filming mists would rise and the mountains would tower overhead and the effect of this place upon us was to make us feel it was only one of innumerable such vacation places that lay ahead, festival spots in long radiant lives. We felt this vaguely silently. So often we talked silently. Then there would come the most serious times when with the deepest thoughtfulness we would survey the years ahead and very solemnly place ourselves our views and beliefs. Miraculous how agreed we were. We believed we found in good workmanship in honest building, in getting things done. We believed in Eleanor's father and all those around and above him that could help his kind of work. We were impatient of softheadedness in rich people who had nothing to do and of heavy muddleheadedness in the millions who had too much to do and of muckragging of every kind which only got in the way of the builders. For the building of a new clean vigorous world was our religion and it did not seem cold to us because our lives were in it and because we were in love. There was no end to the plans for ourselves for my writing, our home, the friends we wanted, the trips, the books and the music and through it all and from under it all there kept bursting up that feeling which we knew was the most important of all, the exultant realization that we too were just starting out. When at last we came back home this feeling took a deeper turn. I noticed a change in Eleanor. She had far less thought and time for me now. She seemed to be strangely absorbed in herself. Nearly all her time and strength were given to our small apartment in the same building as that of her father. By countless feminine touches she was making it look like the home she had planned. She was getting all in order and then one night she told me why. Her arms were close around me and her voice was so low I could barely hear. There's going to be another soon, another one of us. Do you hear? A very tiny, blessed one. I held her slowly tighter. Oh, my darling girl, I whispered. Suddenly I relaxed my hold for I was afraid of hurting her now. In a moment all was so utterly changed and as in that brave, quiet way of hers she looked smiling steadily into my eyes my throat contracted sharply. Her into my mind leaped the memory of what the harbor had shown to me on that sultry, hideous summer night in the tenement over in Brooklyn and that must happen to my wife. Oh, my dear, she whispered, if you only knew how much strength I stored up way over there in the mountains. So she had been thinking of this even then and yet had told me nothing. Here was the beginning of a long anxious period. Month after month I watched her quietly preparing. Slowly we drew into ourselves while her father and mine and Sue and our friends came and went, but mattered little. I wondered if Dylan ever felt this. As he came down to us in the evenings from the apartment upstairs where he and Eleanor had meant so much to each other only a year before he gave no sign that he saw any change. But one night after he had gone, Eleanor happened to pick up the evening paper which had dropped from his bulging overcoat pocket. Billy, come here, she said presently, what is it? Look at this. The president of the United States had gone with Eleanor's father that day in a revenue cutter over the harbor and had spoken of Dylan's great dream in vigorous terms of approval and father was here this evening, said Eleanor very slowly. And yet he never told me a word. He saw that I'd heard nothing and he thought I didn't care. Oh, Billy, I feel so ashamed. But she soon forgot the incident. My suspense grew sharp as the time grew nearer. I had a good doctor, I was sure of that. And he told me he had an excellent nurse. But what good were all these puny precautions? The tenement room in Brooklyn kept rising in my mind. She sat by the window that last night and looking down on the faraway lights of the river, we planned another trip abroad. A few hours later I stood over her holding her hand and with her white lips pressed close together and her eyes shut, she went through one of those terrible spasms. Then she looked up in the moment's relief and suddenly here was that smile of hers. And she said, low between clenched teeth. Well, dairy, another starting out. End of chapter 18, recording by Tom Weiss. Chapter 19 of the Harbor. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss. The Harbor by Ernest Huell. Chapter 19. The next morning, after the rush of relief at the news of Eleanor's safety and the strange sight of our tiny son, I felt keyed gloriously high, ready for anything under the sun. But there seemed to be nothing whatever to do. I felt in the way each time that I moved so I took to my old refuge, work. And then into my small work room came Eleanor's father for a long talk. He too had been up all night. His lean face was heavily marked from the strain, but their unusual deep serenity had come back into his quiet eyes. Let's take a day off, he said, smiling. We're both so tired we don't know it. Tired, I demanded. Yes, he said. You're tired more than you've ever been in your life. You'll feel like a rag by tomorrow. And then I'll hope you'll take a good rest. But today, while you are still way up, I want to talk to you about your work. Do you mind? Mind? No, I replied a bit anxiously. It's just what I'm trying to figure out. I know you are. You've figured for months and you've worked yourself thin. I don't mind that. I like it because I know the reason. But I don't think the result has been good. It seems to me you've been so anxious to get on because of this large family of yours that you've shut yourself up and written too fast. You've gotten rather away from life. Shall I go write on? Yes, I said, watching intently. Well, he continued, you've been using what name you've already made and writing short stories of harbour life. That's what the editors want, I said. When a man makes a hit in one vein of writing, they want that and nothing else. At this rate, you'll soon work out of the vein, he said. I'd like to see you stop writing now. Take time to find new ground and dig. There's not an awful lot of time, I remark. My plan won't stop you're making money, he replied. I want you to write less, but get more pay. That sounds attractive. How shall I do it? By writing about big men, he said, I suggest that you try a series of portraits of some of the big Americans and the America they know. I jumped up so suddenly he started. What's the matter, he asked with a glance at the door? Did you hear anything? Yes, I said excitedly. I heard a stunning title, the America they know. We discussed it all that morning and it appealed to me more and more. Later on with Eleanor's help, who she grew stronger fast those days, I prevailed upon her father to let me practice upon himself as my first subject. I worked fast, my material right at hand and within a few weeks I had written the story of those significant incidents out of 30 years of work and wanderings east and west that showed the America he had known, his widening view. I did his portrait, so to speak, with his back to the reader, letting the reader see what he saw. This story I sold promptly and under the tonic of that success I went into the work with zest and vim. It filled the next four years of my life. It took the view I had had of the harbor and widened it to embrace the whole land which I now saw altogether through the eyes of the men at the top. The most central figure of them all and by far the most difficult to attack was a powerful New York banker, one of those invisible gods whose hand I had felt on the harbor. The value of him to you, Dylan said, is that if you can only make him talk you'll find him a born storyteller. The secret scandal of his life is that once in a short vacation he tried to write a play. It was weeks before he would see me and I had my first interview at the last only by getting on a night train which he had taken for Cleveland. There in his state room cornered he received me with a grim reluctance and with a humorous glint in his eyes. How much do you know about banking? He asked. Nothing, I said frankly. And then I took a sudden chance. What do you know about writing? I asked. Nothing, he said placently. Is that true? I thought you once wrote a play. He sat up very quickly. If you did, I went on, you've probably read some of Shakespeare's stuff. It was strong stuff about strong men. If he were alive he'd write about you but I'm sure that he wouldn't know about banking. That's only your job. What do you want of me young man? He inquired. Is it my soul? Not at all, I answered. It's the America you know expressed in such simple human terms that even a young ignoramus like me will be able to understand it. Out of this big country, a good many thousands of men I suppose have come to you for money which are the most significant ones. And I went on to explain my idea. Soon it began to take hold of him. We talked until after midnight and later we had other talks. It was hard at first in the questioning to dodge the technical side of it all. The widely intricate workings of that machine of credit of which he was chief engineer. But as he saw how eager I was to feel his view and become enthused, by degrees he humanized it all. And not only that, he trusted me. He gave me the most intimate glimpses into his life of big money. Although when I dared to include such bits in the story that I showed him, he calmly scratched them out and said, you're a mistaken young man. I didn't say that. As he talked, I saw again that vision I had had on the North River Docks. For into this man's office had come the men of the mines, the factories and the mills, the promoters of vast irrigations on prairies, builders of railroads, store owners, newspaper proprietors, politicians, the builders and boomers, the strong energetic men of the land. He showed me their power and made me feel it was still, but in its infancy. He made me feel a dazzling future rushing upon us, a future of plenty still more controlled by the keen minds and wide visions of the powerful men at the top. Of all these men and the rushing world of power they lived in, I have only a jumble of memories now. For my own life was a jumble, irregular, crowded and intense. In their offices, clubs and homes, in their motors on yachts and trains, in Chicago and Pittsburgh and other cities, I followed them, making my time suit theirs. Some had no use for me at all, but I found others delighted to talk. Like the great Dakota Ranchman who ordered 20,000 copies of the issue in which his story appeared and scattered them like seeds of fame over the various counties of wheat, corn and alfalfa he owned. And in the main, I had little trouble. I met often that curious respect which so many men of affairs seem to have, God knows why, for a successful writer. I got in where men with 10 times my knowledge were barred. I remember with a touch of shame the Institute of Scientific Research where the chief of the place took a whole afternoon to show me around. And while I looked wise and tried to feel thrilled over glass tubes and jars and microscopes through which I peered at microbes, a simple old country doctor, one of the thousands of common visitors by my invitation followed humbly in my wake, murmuring from time to time. Miraculous by George astounding. And gratefully pressing my hand at the end. This has been the chance of a lifetime, he said. Perhaps the principal reason why I got so warm a welcome was the name I had already made as a writer of glory stories. I like these men. I like to enthuse over all the big things they were doing. And still true to my efficiency, God, the immense importance of getting things done looms so high in my view of life as to overshadow everything else. My sense of moral values changed. It was a strange, un-moral world. In the Institute of Science, these keen laboratory gods who had seemed so cold and comfortless to me but a few short years ago were perfecting a cure for syphilis. Strong men were removing the wages of sin. In Chicago I met the president of a huge industrial company who had found it necessary at times to use money on politicians. For this he had been sent to jail. But later his influence got him out. Promptly he was made treasurer of another company. In one year through his energy, now more intense than ever, the business of that company increased some 35%. Whereupon the directors of the original corporation after a stormy meeting in which two church deacon directors fussed and fumed considerably, unanimously decided to ask him to come back. He did. He told me the story quite frankly himself. I admired him tremendously. The head of a mining company sat in his office one afternoon and talked of the labor problem. There was no right or wrong involved, he said. It was simply a matter of force. Once when a strike threatened he had called in a labor expert who had used money wholesale and there had been no strike. Well, he asked smiling, what do you think of it? I think I can't print it. He still smiled. Naturally not. But what do you think? If you yourself were responsible to several hundred stockholders, what would you do? Risk a strike that might wipe out their dividends or would you resort to bribery? His smile slowly deepened, which is a penal offense in this state. I found such questions cropping up almost everywhere I went. In their dealings with the public and still more with their rivals, there was a ruthless vigor that swept old fashioned maxims aside. And I liked this, for it got things done. I was bored to find, as I often did, these men in their homes quite old fashioned again to suit sober old wives who still went to church. I remember one such elderly lady and the shock I unwittingly gave her. She had deplored the decline of churches. Her own, she said, was barely half full. And I then tried to cheer her by an account of my last story, which was of an advertising man, a genius who in the last two years had made churches his a special line and by his up to date methods had packed church after church on a commission basis. Her burst of disapproval almost drove me from the house. And there were so many homes like that. Men who were perfect giants by day would become the gentlest babies at night, allowing their wives to read to them such sentimental drivel as would have been kicked from the office by day. But God knows they need such walk as homes I reflected to rest in. I never dreamed before how strenuous men's lives could be. One day in the New York office of a big plunger in real estate, I pointed to a map on the wall. What are all those lots marked vacant for, I asked him. I never saw many vacant lots in that part of town. He grinned cheerfully. Anything under four stories is vacant to us, he answered, because it pays to buy it, tear it down and build something higher. That was the way they crowded their cities. And as with their cities, so with their lives. One story that interested me most was of the weird America which a renowned nerve specialist knew. To him came these men broken down, some on the verge of insanity. He gave me stories of their lives, of his glimpses into their straining minds. He described their pathetic efforts to rest, their strenuous attempts to relax. He himself had some mysterious ailment. His hands kept trembling while he talked. His wife said he hadn't had a vacation of over a week in 11 years. From such men I would turn to exuberant lies, like that of the Tammany leader now dead, who gave a $10,000 banquet one night in the Tenech in Albany in honor of the newsboy who every morning for 22 winters had brought morning papers to him in bed in his hotel room. Or like that of the millionaire merchant who told me with the most naive pride of the 1,100 electric lights in his new home on Fifth Avenue and of how the bathrooms of both his large daughters were fitted in solid silver throughout. Not played it, understand, he said. I told the architect while he was at it to put in the real solid stuff and plenty of it. Through this married throng of successes, this rich abundance of types, I ranged with an ever deepening zest. As a hunter of game I watched that endless human procession on and off the front pages of papers, the men who were for the moment news. Often small people too would be there, like the telephone girl from a suburb who for one day as the most important witness in a sensational case of graph was suddenly before the whole country. And then as suddenly dropped out of sight. In fact, that was now my view of the land. Figures emerging from dark obscure multitudes up into the bright circle of light. And I took this front page view of New York. I saw it as a city where big exceptional people were endlessly doing sensational things both in the making and spending of money. I saw it not only as a cluster of tall buildings far downtown, but uptown as well a towering pile of rich hotels and apartments. A region that sparkled galey at night, lights flashing from tens of thousands of rooms in and out of which I felt delightedly millions of people had passed through the years. I love to look up at these windows at night at the sheer inscrutability of them. For behind these twinkling masses I knew where all things tragic, comic, people laughing, fighting, hating, scheming, dreaming, loving, living. I thought of that row of cabin's deluxe that I had seen on the Christmas boat. Here was the same thing magnified a monstrous caravancery with but one question over its doors. Have you got the price? Once I had seen a harbor then it had grown into a port and now I saw a metropolis, the hub of a successful land. And through this gay city of triumph I moved myself a success and my view of the whole was colored by that. My life as an observer was sprinkled with personal moments that made me see everything in highlights. I would watch the life of a street full of people and I myself would be on my way to an interview with some noted man or coming away from one who had given me stuff that I knew would write up big. I knew just how. Or at a corner newsstand I would catch a glimpse of my name on the cover of some magazine. Again I would be hurrying home or into a neighboring florist or a theater ticket office or diving into the jolly whirl of the large Fifth Avenue toy shop in which I took an unflagging delight. In my mind would be thoughts of a pillow fight or a long evening with Eleanor or we would be having friends to dine or going out to dinner. Her Eleanor had been swift to use my success to broaden both our lives. Young and adorably happy, eagerly alive she did for me what she had done for her father filling my life with other lives. She was an artist in living. It was a joy to see her make out a list of people to be asked to dine. Her father once watching the process remarked to me in low solemn tones. She's a regular social chemist who has never had an explosion. He was often on the list and through him and his many friends and the ones I made through my writing by degrees are circle widened. We met all kinds of people. Her Eleanor hated sets or clicks. We met not only successful men but God help us sometimes. We also met their wives. We met successful writers, artists and musicians and a few people of the stage. We met visitors from the West and from half the big cities of Europe. We furnished up our French and German our knowledge of books and pictures and plays. Successful books and pictures and plays. Through Eleanor's father and his work our minds were still held to the past to the harbor which had taken me bruised and blind and petty and lifted me up and taught me to live had given me my work, my home and my new God. I was grateful. I was proud. I was in love and I felt strong. And my view of the harbor in those days was of a glorious symbol of the power of mind over matter and of the mighty speeding up of a world of civilization and peace. A successful world, strong, broad, tolerant sweeping on and bearing us with it. So we adventured gaily, not deeper down but higher and higher up into life. End of chapter 19, recording by Tom Weiss. Chapter one, a book three of the harbor. This lever box recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss. The Harbor by Ernest Hull. Chapter one, a book three. We had been married four years. At the end of a crisp November day I was just about starting home. I remember how keenly alive I felt how tingling with bodily health and above all how successful. I had had such a successful day. I had written hard all morning and my work had been going splendidly. I had lunched downtown with the man whose life I was writing that month. A man of astounding fertility who had started 15 years ago with a small hotel in a Western town, had made money, had built a larger hotel, had made money, had moved to a larger town and bought a still larger hotel, had made money, had moved to Chicago, New York, had made money. And the America he knew was made up of people who themselves had made their money so suddenly they had to come to hotels to spend it. The stories that he told me both scandalous and otherwise of these men and women who shot up rich and diamondy out of this booming country of ours had a range and a richness of color that had held me delighted through many long talks. During luncheon he had told me some of his best and had given me permission to print with a discrete twist or so to disguise them certain intimate episodes in the first fat years of men whose names were by words now all over the land. I could already see that story selling on the newsstands. From this man I had come uptown to a branch of the YMCA where after an hour of handball and a plunge in the swimming tank I had gone to a room downstairs to which ambitious youngsters came for free advice from an expert who told them how to get on in life. His room was a confessional. He would cross-examine each suppliant hard, make a diagnosis of each one and then give him advice as to what to do, whether or not to throw over his job, what kind of work he was suited for best. The America he knew was made up of these small human units some pitiably or absurdly small but all anxiously straining upward and they too appealed to me. For I was so successful now that I was growing mellow. From certain big men I had written about I had taken a spacious breadth of view that included a deep indulgence for all these scurrying pigbees. Poor little devils give them a chance, especially those among them who had been enough to want a chance and to wonder why they were not getting on and want to do something about it. And so I had formed the habit of dropping in often at this room hearing its confessions and now and then helping get someone a job. As the swimming tank made my body tingle so this place affected my soul. It warned me to do all I could for some fellow, some decent kid who was down on his luck. Besides, some confessions were gems of their kind glimpses into human lies, hard struggles, wild ambitions. I meant to write them up some day. In fact, I meant to write everything up. I felt everything waiting for my pen. And as I went down to the coat room the thought I had had so often lately came again into my mind. I too would soon throw over my job, leave articles and write fiction, my old Paris dream. But what a wide and varied experience of life I had gathered since those ingenuous Paris days. Yes, I would do it real and big out of the big life I had known. And my heroes would no longer be watching at my elbow to point to the choices bits and say, you're mistaken young man, I never said that. No, all those lifelike human touches would stay in. Stories kept coming up in my mind, one especially of late. As I stood in line for my hat and coat, I thought of it now and grew so absorbed I forgot that I was standing in a line of insignificant clerks. Until the one ahead of me who had just come in from the street asked the chap in front of him, say Gus, did you see the suffragettes? There are parades just going by. This brought me down from the clouds with a jerk for I had meant to see that parade. Sue was in it, in it hard. Suffrage was her latest fad. Nah, growl, Gus. If I was the mayor and they came to me for a permit to march, I'd tell them to go and buy courses. That's their complaint. They can't get kissed so they want to vote. The other one chuckled. I saw one who can have my vote and all I'll ask is a better look. Believe me, some silk stockings. As they went away, I glared after them. Damn little mutts, I thought. I was rather in favor of suffrage. At least I felt indulgent about it. Why shouldn't I be? The great thing was to keep your mind open and kindly to feel contempt for nothing whatever. And because I felt contempt for no thing or person in all the world, I now glared with the most utter contempt on these narrow-minded little clerks. Then I hurried out and over to Fifth Avenue where the throb of the drums was still to be heard. And there I found to my surprise that in a very real sense, this parade was different from anything that I had ever seen before. I was more than indulgent. I was excited. And by what? Not by the marching lines of figures, fluttering banners, booming bands, nor just by the fact that these marchers were women, and women quite frankly dressed for effect so that the whole rhythmic mass had a feminine color and dash that made it all yay and delightful. No, there was something deeper. And that something I finally made out was this. These women and girls were all deeply thrilled by the feeling that for the first time in their lives, they were doing something all together for an idea that each one of them had thought rather big and stirring before. But now, as each felt herself a part of this moving, swinging multitude, she felt the idea suddenly loomed so infinitely larger and more compelling than before that she herself was astounded. Here, for the first time in my life, I felt the power of mass action. And as presently I started home and the intensity of it was gone, there was an added pleasure in me in remembering how I had felt it, another proof of my breadth of mind. I hurried home to dinner. As I entered our apartment, I gave a long, low, mysterious whistle. And after a moment, another whistle, which tried hard to be mysterious, answered mine from another room. Then there were stealthy footsteps, which ended in a sudden charge. And my wee son, the Indian, hurled me onto a sofa, where to use his expression, we rush house each other. We did this almost every night. When the big time was about over, Eleanor appeared. Come Indian, it's time for bed. She let him off protesting and blew me back a kiss from the door. She had developed wonderfully this bewitching wife of mine, this quiet able one in her work, this smiling, humorous one in her life, this watchful, joyous, intimate one in the hours that shut everything out. Sue said I idolized my wife, that I saw her all perfection without one redeeming vice. Not at all. I knew her vices well enough. I knew she could get distinctly crossed when a new gown came home all wrong. I knew that she could lie to me. I had caught her at it several times when she said she was feeling finally and then confessed to me the next day. I had a splitting headache last night. In fact, she had any number of vices, queer, mysterious, feminine moods when she quite shamelessly shut me out. She didn't have to take care of herself. She went places when she should have stayed home. And finally she was slow at dressing. Placidly seated in front of her mirror, she could spend an entire hour in doing her soft, luxuriant hair. I went over all these vices now as I lay back on the sofa. I idolized her. Not at all. I knew her. We were married, thank God. Then she came back into the room. She was smiling in rather a curious way an expectant way and I noticed that her color was unusually high. Eleanor always dressed so well but tonight she had outdone herself. From her trim blue satin slippers to the demure little band of blue at her throat she was more enchantingly fresh than ever. Suffragettes and that sort of thing were all very well on the avenue. Give me Eleanor at home. Did you see the parade? She inquired. Yes. Did you see me? I fairly jumped. You, I demanded. Were you in that march? I most certainly was, she said quietly. Having shot her bowl she was regarding me gravely now with the merest glint of a muse delight somewhere in her gray blue eyes. Why not? she asked. I believe in it. I want the vote. Why shouldn't I march? I parade it, she added serenely in the college section right up near the head of the line. That's why I'm home so early. I'm afraid I was quite conspicuous for you see I'm rather small and I had to take long swinging strides to keep in step. But I soon got used to it and I thoroughly enjoyed the cheers. We waved back at them with our flags. But I cried, my darling wife why didn't you tell me about it ahead? Because she came close up to me and said quite confidentially we do these things all by ourselves. You don't mean to say that you mind it, dear? I lost about five seconds and then I did exactly right. I took her in my arms and laughed and called my wife by many names and said she couldn't worry me that I didn't mind it in the least was proud of her and so on. In short, to use a slang expression I distinctly got away with it. Moreover, I soon felt what I said. I was honestly rather proud of my wife for having had the nerve to march. It must have been quite a struggle for she was no born marcher and I was glad that I was proud. Another proof of my tolerance which was the more grateful to me just now because a magazine man I admired had genially hinted the other day that I was rather narrow. Did you see Sue? I inquired. Only for a moment she said Sue was one of the marshals and she was all up and down the lines. She's coming to suffer with many paraders. A crowd of women here, I'm off. No, you're not. She's bringing some men paraders too. Men paraders, now I could smile. I had earned the right, I had been brought but after all there are limits. I could see those chaps parading with women. I knew them, I had seen them before. Sue had often brought them here. I enjoyed myself immensely until Eleanor shot another bolt. Smile on, funny one. She said, you'll be in line yourself in a year. I will not be in line. I wonder, she looked at me in a curious way. The mirth went slowly out of her eyes. There are so many queer new ideas crowding in all around us, she said. And I know you Billy, oh so well. So much better than you know yourself. I know that when you once feel a thing you're just the kind to go into it hard. I'm not speaking of suffrage now. That's only one nice little part. I mean this whole big radical movement. All the kind of thing your friend Joe Kramer stood for. She put her arms around my neck. Don't get too radical husband mind. You're so nice and funny now my love. I regarded her anxiously. Has this parade gone to your head or has Sue been talking to you again? I lunched with Sue. I knew it and now she's coming here to suffer bringing men for raiders. And they'll all be rabidly hungry, said Eleanor with a sudden change. She went quickly in to see the cook and left me to grim meditation. I a radical, I smiled. And my slight uneasiness passed away as I thought about my sister. End of chapter one, recording by Tom Weiss.