The Harbor Part 14

"Well, son, I guess that ends our work."

"Yes, sir."

He went out of the office.

I sat there dully for some time. Then I remember there came a harsh scream from a freight engine close outside. And I looked out of the window.

The harbor of big companies, uglier than I had ever seen it, no longer dotted with white sails, but clouded with the smoke and soot of an age of steam, and iron, lay sprawled out there like a thing alive. Always changing, always growing, it had crushed the life out of my father and mother, and now it was ready for Sue and me.

"I've got to stay here and make money."

Good-by to the Beautiful City of Grays. A clock in an outer room struck five. In Paris it was ten o'clock, and those friends of mine from all countries were crowding into "The Dirty Spoon." I could see them sauntering one by one on that summer's night down the gay old Boulevard Saint Michel and dropping into their seats at the table in the corner.

"How am I to make money? By writing?"

I thought of De Maupa.s.sant and the rest, and the two years I had spent in trying to make vivid and real the life I had seen. In these last anxious weeks I had sent some of my Paris sketches to magazine offices in New York. They had all been returned with printed slips of rejection, except in one case where the editor wrote, "This is a good piece of writing, but the subject is too remote. Why not try something nearer home?"

"All right," I thought, "what's near me here? Let's see. There's a cloud of yellow smoke I can do, with a brand-new tug below it dragging a string of good big barges. What are they loaded with? Standard Oil. Wait till they get closer and I can even describe the smell! No," I concluded savagely. "Let's keep my writing clean out of this hole and get the money some other way!"

Then suddenly I forgot myself and thought of my stern brave old dad.

What under the sun was he going to do?

That week he mortgaged our house on the Heights for five thousand dollars. With this he paid off all his debts and put the balance in the bank. Then from the big dock company he got a job in his own warehouse at a hundred dollars a month.

"Kind of 'em," he said gruffly. He was sixty-five years old. They were even kind enough to add to that a job for me. I sat at the desk next to his and I was paid ten dollars a week.

Sue let the servants go, hired one green German girl and said she knew she could run the house on a hundred and twenty dollars a month. But the August bills went over that, so we drew money out of the bank. My father had bronchitis that week. We managed to keep him in bed for three days, but then he struggled up and dressed and went back to his desk in the warehouse.

"Keep your eye on him down there," said Sue. "He's so terribly feeble."

"This can't go on," I told her.

I must make more than ten dollars a week. Again I sent out some of my sketches, again the magazines sent them back. I went to a newspaper office, but there an ironical office boy, with the aid of the city editor, made me feel that reporting was not in my line. What other work could I find to do? How much time did I have? How long was my father going to last? I watched his face and our bank account. I studied the "want ads" in the press. But the more I studied the smaller I felt, for this was one of the years of depression. "Two Hundred Thousand In New York Idle," I read in a headline. Here was literature that gripped!

"I guess I'll stay right where I am. It's safer," I thought anxiously.

"Perhaps if I work hard enough they'll give me a raise at Christmas.

When Dad was my age he kept two sets of books, one by day and the other at night. How can I make my evenings pay?"

I took long walks in Brooklyn and picked up night work here and there.

It was monotonous clerical work, and being slow at figures I was often at it till midnight. Very late one evening, while making out bills in a hardware store, I suddenly came to a customer whose initials were J. K.

It started me thinking of Joe Kramer and our last long talk--about hay.

"So this is hay," I told myself. "How long will it take me to get a hay mind, back here by this d.a.m.ned harbor?"

CHAPTER IV

Then Sue began to take me in hand. From the subdued and weary girl that I had found when I came home, in the last few weeks she had blossomed out. The color had come into her cheeks, a new animation into her voice, a resolute brightness into her eyes.

"This thing has got to stop, Billy," she said determinedly. "This house has been like a tomb for months, you and Dad are so gloomy and tired you're sights. He needs a change, and so do you. You're getting into a little rut and throwing away your chance to write. You need friends who are writers, you need a lot of fresh ideas to tone you up. There's plenty of money in writing. And I need a change myself. I can't stand this house any longer. After all, I've got my own life to live. I'm going to get a job before long. In the meantime I'm going to see my friends. And what's more, I'm going to have them here to the house--- just as often as they'll come! Let's brighten things up a little!"

I looked at her with interest. Here was _another_ sister of mine--risen out of her sorrow and eager to live, and talking of running our lives as well, of curing us both by large, firm doses of "fresh ideas," while she herself looked around for a job that would help her to "live her own life."

"Look here, Sue," I argued vaguely. "You don't want to take a job----"

"I certainly do----"

"But you can't! Dad wouldn't hear to it!"

"He'll have to--when I've found it. No poor feeble old man supporting me, thank you--quite probably no man at all--ever! But you needn't worry. I won't take any old job that comes along. And I won't bother Dad till I've found just what I really want--something I can grow in."

"That's right, take it easy," I said.

"Where have you been!" I thought as I watched her. It came over me as a distinct surprise that Sue had been in all sorts of places and had been making all sorts of friends, had been having ambitions and dreams of her own--all the time I had been having mine. Most older brothers, I suppose, at some time or another have felt this same bewilderment. "Look here, Sis," they wonder gravely, "where in thunder have you been?"

I took a keen interest in her now. In the evenings when I wasn't out working we had long talks about our lives, which to my satisfaction became almost entirely talks about _her_ life, her needs, her growth.

Her delight in herself, her intensity over plans for herself, her enthusiasm for all the new "movements," reforms and ideas that she had heard of G.o.d-knows-where and felt she must gather into herself to expand herself--it was wonderful! She was like that chap from Detroit, that would-be perfect all-round man. But Sue was so much less solemn about it, one minute in art and the next in social settlements, so little hampered by ever putting through what she planned.

"In short, a woman," I thought sagely.

I felt I knew a lot about women, although I had had no more intimate talks since that affair in Paris. I had felt that would last me for quite a while. But here was something perfectly safe. A sister, decent but far from dull, well stocked with all the feminine points and only too glad to be confidential. She wanted to study for the stage! Of course that was the kind of thing that Dad and I would stop darned quick. Still--I could see Sue on the stage. She was not at all like me.

I was middling small, with a square jaw, snub nose and sandy hair. Sue was tall and easy moving, with an abundance of soft brown hair worn low over large and irregular features. She had fascinating eyes. She could sprawl on a rug or a sofa as lazy and indolent as you please--all but her eyes, they were always doing something or other, letting this out or keeping that back, practicing on me!

"Oh, yes, she'll marry soon enough," I thought. "This talk of a job for life is a joke."

Some nights I would listen to her for hours. It was so good to come back to life, to feel younger than my worries, to forget for a little while that stark heavy certainty that poor old Dad would soon be a burden in spite of himself, and that with a family on my hands I'd have to spend the best years of my life slaving for a little hay.

I took the same delight in her friends.

Starting with her cla.s.smates in a Brooklyn high school, most of whom were working over in New York, Sue had followed in their trail, and at settlements, in studios and in girl bachelor flats she had picked up an amazing a.s.sortment of friends. "Radicals," they called themselves.

Nothing was too wild or new for these friends of Sue's to jump into--and what was more, to tie themselves to by a regular job in some queer irregular office. "Votes for Women" was just starting up, and one of this group, a stenographer in a suffragette office, had been in the first small parade. Another, a stout florid youth who wrote poems for magazines, had paraded bravely in her wake. Here were two girls who lived in a tenement, did their own cooking and pushed East Side investigations that they said would soon "shake up the town." There were several rising muckrakers, too, some of whom did free work on the side for socialist papers. There was one real socialist, a painter, who had a red members.h.i.+p card in his pocket to prove that he belonged to "the Party." Others were spreading music and art and dramatics through the tenements--new music, new art and new dramatics. One young husband and wife, intensely in love with one another, were working together night and day for easier divorces which would put an end to the old-fas.h.i.+oned home.

These people seemed to me to be laughing at a different old thing every time. But when they weren't laughing they were scowling, over some new attack upon life--and when they did that they were laughable. At least so they were to me. Not that I minded attacking things, I had done plenty of that myself in Paris. But how different we had been back there. We, too, had thrown old creeds to the winds, but with how much more finesse and art. And there had been a large remoteness about it.

Each one had tossed his far-away country into the cosmopolitan pot, our talk had been on a world-wide scale. But this crude crowd, except for occasional mental flights, kept all its attention, its laughs and its jeers, its attacks and exposures centered on this one mammoth town, against which as a background they seemed the merest pigmies. Three little muckrakers loomed against Wall Street, one small, scoffing suffragette against a hundred and eighty thousand solid stolid Brooklyn wives. They had posed themselves so absurdly close to the world of things as they are.

And they were in such a rush about their work. Over there in Paris, with all our smas.h.i.+ng of idols, we had at least held fast to our one great G.o.ddess of art, we had slaved like dogs at the hard daily labor of honestly learning our various crafts. But here they stopped for nothing at all. The magazine writers were "tearing off copy," the painters were simply "slapping it down." One of them told me he "painted the real stuff right out of life"--dashed it off with one hand, so to speak, while he shook his fist at the town with the other. Everyone wanted to see something done--and done d.a.m.n quick--about this, that or the other.

My artist's eyes surveyed this group and twinkled with amused surprise.

But I could sit by the hour and listen to their talk. I found it mighty refres.h.i.+ng, after those bills in the hardware shop, that monotonous martyr feeling of mine and those worries down by the harbor.

But I felt the harbor always there, slowly closing in on my father, who looked older day by day, slowly bringing things to a crisis. In the garden behind our house on warm September evenings when these pigmies gathered to chatter reforms, the harbor hooted at their little plans as it had hooted at my own. One evening, I remember, when the talk had waxed hot and loud in favor of labor unions and strikes, Sue left the group and with a friend strolled to the lower end of the garden. There I saw them peer over the edge and listen to the drunken stokers singing in the barrooms deep under all these flower beds and all this adventurous chatter of ours. I thought of the years I had spent with Sam--and Sue, too, seemed to me to be having a spree. Poor kid, what a jolt she would get some day. She called me "our dreamer imported from France." But I was far from dreaming.

Presently the harbor just opened one of its big eyes and sent up by a messenger a little grim reality.

A Russian revolutionist had appeared among us with a letter to Sue from Joe Kramer. Joe, I found to my surprise, had seen quite a little of Sue over here while I had been in Paris--and from the various s.h.i.+ps and hotels that had been his "home" of late, he had written her now and then. Through him Sue had joined a society known as "The Friends of Russian Freedom," and Joe wrote now from Moscow urging her to "stir up the crowd and lick this fellow into shape to talk at big meetings and raise some cash. He has the real goods," Joe added. "All he needs is the English language and a few points about making it yellow. If handled right he'll be a scream."