The Harbor
BOOK I
CHAPTER XII
When Joe left me in peace at last, just for the sake of the rest and
change I turned my attention to music, or, rather, to a musical friend,
a young Bohemian composer who lived wholly in a world of his own. I
explored this musical world of his, by his side in dark top galleries,
in the Café Rouge on concert nights, in his room at his piano. How
deliciously far away from hay was this chap's feeling for Mozart. With
him I could feel sure of myself, of the way I was living for my art, of
what my mother way back at the start had called the "fine things" in
humanity.
I remember the night we heard "Bohème" from the gallery of the Opéra
Comique. I remember the talk we had late that night, and my walk by the
edge of the Gardens home—and the letter and the cable that I found
waiting on my desk. The letter was from my father and told me that my
mother was dying. The cable told me she was dead.
I remember learning that letter by heart on that long ocean voyage home.
This was no sudden illness, I learned, my mother had known of it while I
was home, known that she had it and that it was fatal. That was the news
she had told my father alone that night on the terrace! That was why she
had been so eager to get me away to Paris; that was why she had kept me
abroad!
"She did not want you to see how she looked," my father wrote. "She
wanted you to remember her always as she was when you saw her last."
I remembered her now. What a young beast I had been to forget her, to
drop her so utterly out of my thoughts in that selfish happy Paris life,
when it was she who had sent me there, when it was she who had set me
free for a time from the harbor which was now dragging me back,[Pg 94] when it
was she from the very start who had fostered this passion for "all that
is fine." I remembered her now—remembered and remembered—until her
dear image filled me.
My father's letter went on to tell how she had fought for her life.
Three operations, all three of them failures, but still she had held
bravely on in hopes of some new discovery which science might make and
so bring her a cure. A thought suddenly gripped me and struck me cold.
It had all depended on science, on men working calmly and coldly along
in laboratories all over the world, while my mother had held to her
thread of life and hoped that these laboratory gods would hurry, hurry
while yet there was time! How many thousands like her every day, every
hour all over the world were watching those gods with that awful
suspense. For they were the only gods that were left, and a comfortless
set of gods they were! They were like J. K., they had hay minds! They
were businesslike, relentless, cold, they belonged to the world of the
harbor! My mother's kind god was a myth and a joke, with no power here
one way or the other. I felt that now, I had thought it before, only
thought it, with that gay freedom of thought we had aired back there in
Paris. But I knew now that deep underneath I had believed all along in
this god of hers, as I had in my beautiful goddess of art and in all the
things that were fine. It had taken this news from the harbor to bring
him tottering, crashing down. For no god like hers would have let her
die! And I felt fear now, the fear of Death, whom I'd never really
noticed before and who now seemed to say to me,
"She is nothing—has gone nowhere—she is only dead!"
And fiercely in a bewildered way I rebelled against this emptiness. I
rebelled against this world of hay that was so abruptly dragging me back
to a sense of its almighty grip on my life. When my ship came up the
Bay, the world looked harsh and gray to me, though there was a bright
and sunny glare on the muddy waves of the harbor.