The Harbor
BOOK II
CHAPTER XIX
The next morning, after the rush of relief at the news of Eleanore'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 workroom came Eleanore's
father for a long talk. He too had been up all night, his lean face was
heavily marked from the strain, but their usual 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 to-morrow, and then I hope you'll take a good
rest. But to-day, while you are still way up, I want to talk 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 right on?"
"Yes," I said, watching intently.
"Well," he continued, "you've been using what name[Pg 210] you've already made
and writing short stories of harbor 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 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 remarked.
"My plan won't stop your 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 Eleanore's help (for 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
thirty 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[Pg 211] 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," Dillon 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
last only by getting on a night train which he had taken for Cleveland.
There in his stateroom, 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 placidly.
"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[Pg 212] humanized it all. And not only that, he
trusted me, he gave me the most intimate glimpses into this 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 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, real estate plungers, street traction promoters,
department 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 twenty thousand 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 ten 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[Pg 213] 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 liked these men; I
liked to enthuse over all the big things they were doing. And still true
to my efficiency god, the immense importance of getting things done
loomed so high in my view of life as to overshadow everything else. My
sense of moral values changed.
It was a strange unmoral 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
thirty-five per cent., 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.[Pg 214]
"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 especial 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 vacuous homes," I reflected, "to rest in."
I had 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.[Pg 215]
"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 eleven years.
From such men I would turn to exuberant lives, like that of the Tammany
leader now dead, who gave a ten-thousand-dollar banquet one night, in
the Ten Eyck in Albany, in honor of the newsboy who every morning for
twenty-two 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
naïve pride of the eleven hundred 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 plated, 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 varied 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 graft, 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[Pg 216] from dark
obscure multitudes up into a 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 gaily 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 loved to
look up at these windows at night, at the sheer inscrutability of them.
For behind these twinkling masses I knew were all things tragic,
comic—people laughing, fighting, hating, scheming, dreaming, loving,
living. I thought of that row of cabins de luxe that I had seen on the
Christmas boat. Here was the same thing magnified, a monstrous
caravansary 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 high
lights. 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's 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 Eleanore, or[Pg 217] we would be having friends to dine or
going out to dinner.
For Eleanore 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 our circle widened. We met
all kinds of people, for Eleanore hated "sets" and "cliques." 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 furbished up our French and German, our knowledge of books
and pictures and plays—successful books and pictures and plays.
Through Eleanore'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.