Harbor (9781101565681) (12 page)

“Do you know who's to blame for this stuff?” he said. “It's not the profs, I've nothing against them, all they need is to be kicked out. No, it's us, because we stand for their line of drule. If we got right up on our honkeys and howled, all of us, for a real education, we'd get it by next Saturday night. But we don't care a damn. Why don't we? Are we all of us dubs? No we're not. Go down to the football field and see. There's as much brains in figuring out those plays as there is in mathematics. Would we stand for coaches like our profs? But that's just it. It's the thing to be alive in athletics and a dub in everything else. And because it's the thing, every fellow fits in. On the whole,” he added reflectively, “I think it's this ‘dear old college' feeling that's to blame for it all.”

“My God, Joe!” This was high treason!

“Sure it is,” he retorted. “It
is
your god and the god of us all. This dear old college feeling. It's got us all stuck together so close that nobody dares to be himself and buck against its standards.”

This from Joe Kramer! How often, in a football game, have I seen him on the reporter's bench, his sallow face now all a-scowl, now beaming satisfaction as he pounded his neighbor on the back.

In pursuit of “a real education” we got into the habit of spending almost every evening in the college library, where except at examination times there was nobody but a few silent “polers.”

I grew to love this place. It was so huge and shadowy, with only shaded lights here and there. It had such tempting crannies. I loved its deep quiet, so pleasantly broken now and then by a step, a whisper, the sound of a book being moved from its shelf where perhaps it had stood unread for years, or occasional voices passing outside or snatches of song from the campus. And here I thought I was finding myself. That French prof had introduced me to Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant and others who were becoming my new idols. This was art, this was beauty and truth, this was getting at life in a way that thrilled.

But now and then looking up from my book I would see Joe prowling about the place, taking down a book, then shoving it back and scowling as he ran his eyes along whole rows of titles.

“This darned library shut its doors,” he would growl to himself, “just as the real dope was coming along. But there's been such a flood of it ever since that some leaked in in spite of 'em.”

Joe would search and search until he found “it” on back shelves or stuck away in corners. Angrily he would blow off the dust and then settle himself with a sigh to read. There was always something wistful to me in the way Joe opened each new book. But what a joy when he found “it”—Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Walt Whitman, Zola, Samuel Butler. What a sudden sort of glee the night he discovered Bernard Shaw!

When the library closed we adjourned for beer and a smoke, and often we would argue long about what we had been reading. Joe had little use for the stuff I liked. Beauty and form were nothing to him, it was “the meat” he was after. My mother's idols he laid low.

“The first part was big,” he said one night of a recent English novel. “But the last part was the kind of thing that poor old Thackeray might have done.”

In an instant I was up in arms, for to my mother and me the author of “Pendennis” had been like a great lovable patron saint, a refuge from all we abhorred in the harbor. To slight him was a sacrilege. But reverence to Joe Kramer was a thing unknown. “Show me,” he said, in reply to my outburst, “a single thing he ever wrote that wasn't sentimental bosh!” And we went at it hammer and tongs.

It was so in all our talks. Nothing was too sacred. Joe always insisted on “being shown.”

He had a keen liking but little respect for the nation built by our fathers. From his own father's tragedy, caused by graft, his own hard struggles in the West and the Populist doctrines he had imbibed, he had come East with a deep conviction that “things in this country are one big mess with the Constitution sitting on top.” And when the term “muckraker” came into use, I remember his deep satisfaction. “Now I know my name,” he said.

He was equally hard on the church. How he kicked against our compulsory chapel. “Broad, isn't it, scientific,” he growled, “to yank a man out of bed every morning, throw him into his seat in chapel and tell him, ‘Here. This is what you believe. Be good now, take your little dose and then you can go to breakfast.' ”

“I'm no atheist,” he remarked. “I'm only a poor young fellah who asks, ‘Say, Mister, if you
are
up there why is it that no big scientist has brains enough to see you?' ”

“Look here, J. K., that isn't so!”

“Isn't it? Show me!” And we would start in. I had a deep repugnance for his whole materialistic view. But I liked the way he jarred me.

“What I want to do,” he said, “is to bust every hold that any creed ever had on me. I don't mean only creeds in churches, I mean creeds in politics, business and everywhere else. I want to get 'em all out of my eyes so I can see what's really here—because I'm so sure there's an awful lot here and an awful lot more that's coming. If I make a noise like a knocker at times you don't want to put me down as any Schopenhauer fan. None of that pessimistic dope for little Joey Kramer. I never open a new book without hoping I'll find the real stuff I want, and I never open a paper without hoping that some more of it will be right here in the news of the day. Kid,” he ended intensely, “you can take it from me there are going to be big doings soon in this little old world, big doings and great big ideas, as big as what caused the Civil War and a damn sight more scientific. And the thing for you and me to do is to get ourselves in some kind of shape so we can shake hands with 'em when they arrive, and say, ‘Hello, fellahs, come right in. You're just what we've been waiting for.' ”

When Joe gave up college at the end of the junior year, he left a small group of us behind. “The Ishmaelites,” we called ourselves. For though most of us “couldn't quite go Joe,” we had all “queered” ourselves in college through the influence on us he had had.

There are thousands of Joe Kramers now in colleges scattered all over the land. Each year their numbers grow, each year more deep their vague conviction that somehow they've been cheated, more harsh and insistent every year their questioning of all “news from the graveyard,” whether it comes from old fogey professors or from parents or preachers, eminent lawyers or business men, great politicians or writers of books. Arrogant and sweeping, sparing nothing sacred—young. Ignorant, confused and groping, almost wistful—new. They are becoming no insignificant part in this swiftly changing national life.

Joe Kramer was one of the pioneers.

It was with an unpleasant shock of surprise that I found Joe liked the harbor.

When I took him home for Christmas he spent half his time down there on the docks. He explored the whole region for miles around, in a week he spoke in familiar terms of slips and bays and rivers that to me were still nothing but names. Moreover, he liked my father. And my father, opening up by degrees, showed an unmistakable relish for Joe.

They had long talks in the study at night, where I could hear them arguing about the decline of our shipping, the growth of our trusts and railroads, graft and high finance and strikes, the swift piling up of our troubles at home—and about the great chance we were losing abroad, the blind weak part we were playing in this eager ocean world where every nation that was alive was rushing in to get a place. As their voices rose loud and excited, even my young sister Sue, who was just out of high school now and doing some groping about of her own, would go into the study to listen at times. But I kept out. For already I was tired again of all these harbor problems, I wanted to get at life through Art! And I felt besides that if I entered into long talks with my father, sooner or later he would be sure to bring up the dreaded question of my going into his business. And this I was firmly resolved not to do. For my dislike of all his work, his deepening worries, his dogged absorption in his tiresome hobby of ships, was even sharper than before.

“That dad of yours,” Joe told me, “is a mighty interesting old boy. He has had a big life with a big idea.”

“Has he?” said I. “Then he's lost it.”

“He hasn't! That's just the trouble. He thinks he's a comer when he's a goer—he can't see his idea is out of date. It's a pity,” he added sadly. “When a man can spend his days and nights hating the trusts and the railroads as he does, it's a pity he's so darned old in his views of what ought to be done about it. Your father believes that if only we'd get a strong navy and a large mercantile marine——”

“Oh, cut it, J. K.,” I said pettishly. “I tell you I don't care what he believes! The next thing you'll be telling me is that I ought to take a job in his warehouse!”

“You might do worse,” said Joe.

“What?” I demanded indignantly.

“That's just what I said. If you'd go on a paper and learn to write like a regular man I'd be tickled to death. But if all you want to be in life is a young Guy de Maupassant and turn out little gems for the girls, then I say you'd be a lot better off if you went into your father's warehouse and began telling Wall Street to get off the roof!”

“Thank you,” I said stiffly.

From that talk Joe and I began drifting apart. I never brought him home again, I saw less of him at college. And at the end of the college year he went to New York, where he found a job on a paper.

And so all through my senior year I was left undisturbed to “queer” myself in my own sweet way, which was to slave for hours over Guy de Maupassant and other foreign authors, write stories and sketches by the score, and with two other “Ishmaelites” plan for a year's work in Paris. The French prof was delighted and spurred us on with glowing accounts of life in “the Quarter.” One of us wanted to be a painter. No place for that like Paris! Another an architect—Paris! Myself a writer—Paris! For what could American writers to-day, with their sentimental little yarns covering with a laugh or a tear all the big deep facts of life, show to compare to the unflinching powerful work of the best writers over in France? In Paris they were training men to write of life as it really is! How that prof did drum it in. Better still, how he talked it up to my mother—the last time she came to college.

I soon found she was on my side. If only she could bring father around.

I still remember vividly that exciting night in June when the three of us, back there at home, sat on the terrace and fought it out. I remember the beauty of the night, I mean of the night up there in the garden under the stars, my mother's garden and her stars, and of the hideous showing put up by my father's harbor below.

Of course he opposed my going abroad. His old indifference to me had vanished, I saw he regarded me now as worth while, grown up, a business asset worth fighting for. And my father fought. He spoke abruptly, passionately of the great chance on the docks down there. I remember being surprised at his talk, at the bigness and the intensity of this hunger of his for ships. But of what he said I remembered nothing, I did not hear, for I was eyeing my mother.

I saw she was watching him pityingly. Why? What argument had she still to use? I waited in increasing suspense.

“So that's all there is to it,” I heard him end. “You might as well get it right out of your head. You're not going over to Europe to fool away any more of your time. You're going to buckle down right here.”

“Billy, leave us alone,” said my mother.

What in the name of all the miracles did she do to him that night—my mother so frail (she had grown so of late), my father so strong? The next day she told me he had consented.

I saw little of him in the next two weeks. He left me alone with her every evening. But when I watched him he looked changed—beaten and broken, older. In spite of myself I pitied him now, and a confused uneasiness, almost remorse, came over me at the way I had opposed him. “What's come over Dad?” I wondered. Once I saw him look at my mother, and his look was frightened, crushed. What was it she had told him?

Those evenings I read “Pendennis” aloud for the third time to my mother. It had been our favorite book, and I took anxious pains to show her how I loved it still. But once chancing to look quickly up, I caught my mother watching me with a hungriness and an utter despair such as I'd never seen before. It struck me cold, I looked away—and suddenly I realized what a selfish little beast I was, beside this woman who loved me so and whom I was now leaving. My throat contracted sharply. But when I looked back the look was gone, and in its place was a quiet smile.

“Oh, my boy, you must do fine work,” she said. “I want it so much more than anything else in my whole life. In my whole life,” she repeated. I came over to her chair, bent over her and kissed her hard.

“I'm sorry I'm going! I'm sorry!” I whispered. “But mammy! It's only for a year!”

Why did that make her cling to me so? If only she had told me.

But what young egotists we sons are. It was only a few days later that with my two college chums, from the deck of an ocean liner, I said good-by to the harbor.

“Thank God I'm through with you at last.”

I was in Paris for two years.

In those first weeks of deep delight I called it, “The Beautiful City of Grays.” For this town was certainly mellowed down. No jar of an ugly present here, no loud disturbing harbor. But on the other hand, no dullness of a fossilized past. What college had been supposed to do this city did, it took the past and made it alive, richly, thrillingly alive, and wove it in with the present. In the first Sorbonne lectures, even with my meager French, I felt this at once, I wanted to feel it. These profs were brilliant, sparkling, gay. They talked as though Rousseau and Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert, Maupassant and all the rest were still vital dazzling news to the world, because these men were still molding the world. And from here exploring out over the town, I was smilingly greeted everywhere by such affable gracious old places, that seemed to say: