The Harbor
BOOK III
CHAPTER VI
That same day I had an appointment to lunch with the owner of rich
hotels whose story I was writing. And the interview dragged. For the
America he knew was like what I'd seen on the upper decks of the ship
that had sailed a few hours before. And I could not get back my old zest
for it all, I kept thinking of what I had seen underneath. The faces of
individual stokers, some fiery red, some sodden gray, kept bobbing up in
my memory. Angrily trying to keep them down, I went on with my
questions. But I caught the hotel millionaire throwing curious looks at
me now and then.
I went home worried and depressed and shut myself up in my workroom.
This business had to be thought out. It wasn't only stokers; it was
something deep, world-wide. I had come up against the slums. What had I
to do with it all?
I was in my room all afternoon. I heard "the Indian" at my door, but I
sat still and silent, and presently he went away.
Late in the twilight Eleanore came. How beautiful she was to-night. She
was wearing a soft gown of silk, blue with something white at her throat
and a brooch that I had given her. As she bent over my shoulder I felt
her clean, fresh loveliness.
"Don't you want to tell me, love, just what it was he showed you?"
"I'd rather not, my dear one, it was something so terribly ugly," I
said.
"I don't like being so far away from you, dear. Please tell me. Suppose
you begin at the start."[Pg 253]
It took a long time, for she would let me keep nothing back.
"I wouldn't have thought it could hit me so hard," I said at the end.
"I'm not surprised," said Eleanore.
"I can't be simply angry at Joe," I went on. "He's so intensely and
gauntly sincere. It isn't just talk with him, you see, as it is with
Sue's parlor radical friends. Think of the life he's been leading, think
of it compared to mine. Joe and I were mighty close once"—I broke off
and got up restlessly. "I hate to think of him," I said.
"It's funny," said Eleanore quietly. "I knew this was coming sooner or
later. Ever since we've been married I've known that Joe Kramer still
means more to you than any man you've ever met."
"He doesn't," I said sharply. "Where on earth did you get that idea?"
"From you, my love," she answered. "You can't dream how often you've
spoken about him."
"I didn't know I had!" It is most disquieting at times, the things
Eleanore tells me about myself.
"I know you don't," she continued, "you do it so unconsciously. That's
why I'm so sure he has a real place in the deep unconscious part of you.
He worries you. He gets you to think you've no right to be happy!" There
was a bitterness in her voice that I had never heard before. "I believe
in helping people—of course—whenever I get a chance," she said. "But I
don't believe in this—I hate it! It's simply an insane attempt to pull
every good thing down! It's too awful even to think of!"
"We're not going to," I told her. "I'm sorry for Joe and I wish I could
help him out of his hole. But I can't—it's too infernally deep. He
won't listen to any talk from me—and as long as he won't I'll leave him
alone. It's hideous enough—God knows. But if I ever tackle poverty and
labor and that sort of thing it'll be along quite different lines."[Pg 254]
The door-bell rang.
"Oh Billy," she said, "I forgot to tell you. Father's coming to dinner
to-night." I looked at her a moment:
"Did you ask him here on my account?" Eleanore smiled frankly.
"Yes—I thought I might need him," she said.
I did not talk to her father of Joe—his plans for a strike were his
secret, not mine. But with Eleanore pushing me on, I described the hell
I had seen in the stokehole.
"You're right, it's hell," her father agreed. "But in time we'll do away
with it."
"I knew it," Eleanore put in.
"How?" I asked.
"By using oil instead of coal. Or if we can't get oil cheap enough by
automatic stokers—machines to do the work of men."
I thought hard and fast for a moment, and suddenly I realized that I had
never given any real thought to matters of this kind before.
"Then what will become of the stokers?" I asked him.
"One thing at a time." I caught Dillon keenly watching me over his
cigar. "Don't give up your faith in efficiency, Bill. If they'll only
give us time enough we'll be able to do so much for men."
There was something so big and sincere in his voice and in his clear and
kindly eyes.
"I'm sure you will," I answered. "If you don't, there's nobody else who
can."
In a week or two, by grinding steadily on at my work and by a few more
quiet talks with Eleanore and her father, I could feel myself safely
back on my ground.
But one morning Sue broke in on me.
"I've just heard from a friend of Joe Kramer's," she said, "that he is
dangerously ill. And there's no one to look after him. Hadn't you better
go yourself?"
"Of course," I assented gruffly. "I'll go down at once."[Pg 255]
It seemed as though the Fates and Sue were in league to keep Joe in my
life.
I went to Joe's office and found the address of the room where he slept.
It was over a German saloon close by. It was a large, low-ceilinged
room, bare and cheaply furnished, with dirty curtains at the windows,
dirty collars and shirts on the floor. It was cold. In the high
old-fashioned fireplace the coal fire had gone out. Joe was lying
dressed on the bed. He jumped up as I entered and came to me with his
face flushed and his eyes dilated. He gripped my hand.
"Why, hello, Kid," he cried. "Glad to see you!" And then with a quick
drop of his voice: "Hold on, we mustn't talk so loud, we've got to be
quiet here, you know." He turned away from me restlessly. "I've been
hunting for hours for that damn book. Their cataloguing system here is
rotten, Kid, it's rotten!" As he spoke he was slowly feeling his way
along the dirty white wall of his room. "They've cheated us, Bill, I'm
on to 'em now! That's what college is really for these days, to hide the
books we ought to read!"
It came over me suddenly that Joe was back in college, on one of those
library evenings of ours. I felt a tightening at my throat.
"Say, Joe." I drew him toward the bed. "The chapel bell has just struck
ten. Time for beer and pretzels."
"Fine business! Gee, but I've got a thirst! But where's the door? God
damn it all—I can't find anything to-night!" He laughed unsteadily.
"Right over here," I answered. "Steady, old man——"
And so I got him to his bed. He fell down on it breathing hard and I
brought him a drink of water. He began to shiver violently. I covered
him up with dirty blankets, went down to the barroom and telephoned to
Eleanore. Too deeply disturbed to think very clearly, acting on an
impulse, I told her of Joe's condition and asked if I might bring him
home.[Pg 256]
"Why of course," came the answer, a little sharp. "Wait a moment. Let me
think." There was a pause, and then she added quietly, "Go back to his
room and keep him in bed. I'll see that an ambulance comes right down."
Within an hour after that Joe was installed in our guest room with a
trained nurse to attend to him. The doctor pronounced it typhoid and he
was with us for nine weeks.
The effect upon our lives was sharp. In our small crowded apartment all
entertaining was suddenly stopped, and with the sole exception of Sue no
one came to see us. Even our little Indian learned to be quiet as a
mouse. Our whole home became intense.
Through the thin wall of my workroom I could hear Joe in his delirium.
Now he was busily writing letters, now in a harsh excited voice he was
talking to a crowd of men, again he was furiously shoveling coal. All
this was incoherent, only mutterings most of the time. But when the
voice rose suddenly it was so full of a stern pain, so quivering with
revolt against life, and it poured out such a torrent of commonplace
minute details that showed this was Joe's daily life and the deepest
part of his being—that as I listened at my desk the ghost I thought I
had buried deep, that vague guilty feeling over my own happiness, came
stealing up in me again. And it was so poignant now, that struggle
angrily as I would to plunge again into my work, I found it impossible
to describe the life in those rich gay hotels with the zest and the dash
I needed to make my story a success.
But it had to be a success, for we needed money badly, the expenses of
Joe's sickness were already rolling in. So I did finish it at last and
took it to my successful man, who read it with evident disappointment.
It was not the glory story that I had led him to expect. My magazine
editor said he would use it, but he, too, appeared surprised.[Pg 257]
"You weren't up to your usual form," was his comment. "What's the
matter?"
"A sick friend."
I started another story at once, one I had already planned, about a man
who was to build a string of gorgeous opera houses in the leading
American cities. This story, too, went slowly. Joe Kramer's voice kept
breaking in. From time to time as I struggled on I could feel Eleanore
watching me.
"Don't try to hurry it," she said. "We can always borrow from father,
you know—and besides, I'm going to cut our expenses."
She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse, and through the
last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she
placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely
felt pulling him back into comfort and strength.
"No, don't talk," I heard her say to him one evening. "I don't want to
hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I
have to talk of."
But having so thrown him off his guard, as his mind grew clearer she
began cautiously drawing him out, despite his awakening hostility to
this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard snatches of
their talk. She surprised J. K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about
him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings.
She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his
indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to
understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his
staring grimly up at my face and saying:
"Bill, that wife of yours is such a born success she scares me.
Everything she touches, everything she brings me to drink, everything
she does to this bed, is one thundering success. And she won't listen to
anything but success. Your case is absolutely hopeless."
They became grim enemies, and both of them enjoyed[Pg 258] it. She let our
small son come and sit by the bed. The Indian promptly worshiped Joe as
the "longest" man he had ever seen, and they became boon companions.
"It's pathetic," Eleanore told me, "the little things that appeal to him
here. Poor boy, he has forgotten what a decent home is like."
As he grew stronger she read the paper to him each morning, and they
quarreled with keen relish over the news events of the day. And as at
the start, so now, she kept giving him little shocks of surprise by her
intimate glimpses into his views. On one of these occasions, after she
had come out from his room and was sitting by me reading,
"You're a wonder, Eleanore," I said. "I don't see how you've done it."
"Done what, my love?" asked Eleanore.
"Wormed all his views out of poor old Joe."
"I haven't done anything of the sort. I've learned over half of it from
Sue. She comes here often nowadays and we have long talks about him. Sue
seems to know him rather well."
This did not interest me much, so I switched our talk to something that
did.
"What bothers me," I said with a scowl, "is this infernal work of mine.
What are you smiling at?" I asked.
"Nothing," she murmured, beginning to read. "But if I were you I'd stick
at my work. You're good at that."
"Not now I'm not," I retorted. "This story about the opera man isn't
coming on at all! The more I work the worse it gets!"
"It will get better soon," she said.
"I'm not so sure. Do you know what I think is the matter with me? I was
in to-day looking at Joe asleep, and watching the lines in that face of
his it came over me all of a sudden what a wretched coward I've been."
Eleanore looked up suddenly. "I know there's something in all his talk,
I've known it every time we've met. His view's[Pg 259] so distorted it makes me
mad, but there's something in it you can't get away from. Poverty,
that's what it is, and I've always steered way clear of it as though I
were afraid to look. I've taken your father's point of view and left the
slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was
only too glad to be left out. But that hour with J. K. and his stokers
gave me a jolt. I can feel it still. I can't seem to shake it off. And
I'm beginning to wonder now why I shouldn't get up the nerve to see for
myself, to have a good big look at it all—and write about it for a
while."
"Don't!" said Eleanore. "Leave it alone!" Her voice was so sharp it
startled me.
"Why?" I rejoined. "You've tackled poverty often enough. I guess I can
stand it if you can."
"You're different," she answered. "You leave poverty alone and force
yourself to go on with your work. You've made a very wonderful start.
You'll be ready to take up fiction soon. When you have, and when you
have gone so far that you can feel sure of your name and yourself, then
you can look at whatever you like."
"I wonder what Joe would say to that."
"I know what he'll say—he'll agree with me. Why don't you ask him and
see for yourself? I'm beginning to like Joe Kramer," she added with a
quiet smile, "because now that I understand him I know that his life and
yours are so far apart you've hardly a point in common."
And in the talks I had with Joe this soon proved to be the case.
Eleanore brought us together now and listened with deep satisfaction as
we clashed and jarred each other apart.
His old indifferent manner was gone, he was softened, grateful for what
we had done—but he held to that view of his like a rock, and the view
entirely shut me out. Joe saw society wholly as "War Sure" between two
classes, and I was hopelessly on the wrong side. My work, my home and my
whole life were bound in with the upper class.[Pg 260] And there could be no
middle ground. My boasted tolerance, breadth of mind, my readiness to
see both sides, my passion for showing up all men as human—this to Joe
was utter piffle. He had no use for such writing, or in fact for art of
any kind. "Propaganda" was all that he wanted, and that could be as
cheap as Nick Carter, as sentimental as Uncle Tom's Cabin, if only it
had the kind of "punch" that would reach to the mass of ignorant workers
and stir their minds and their passions into swift and bitter revolt.
Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said,
when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into
an age of force—of "direct action"—strikes and the like—by prodigious
masses of men. All I could do was worthless.
These talks made me so indignant and sore, so sure that Joe and all his
work were utterly wild and that only in Dillon and his kind lay any hope
of solving the dreary problems of the slums—that within a few days more
I was delving into my opera man with a most determined approval. He at
least was a builder, he didn't want to tear everything down! In his
every scheme for a huge success I took now an aggravated delight. All my
recent tolerance gone, I threw into my work an intensity that I had not
felt in months.
And Eleanore smiled contentedly, as though she knew what she was about.
When at last the time came for Joe to leave, she was twice as friendly
to him as I.[Pg 261]