Harbor (9781101565681) (29 page)

“We're married, aren't we,” said a voice.

There was only one more good-by to be said. On the deck, as we went out of the harbor, Eleanore stood by the rail. I felt her hand close tight on mine and I saw her eyes glisten a little with tears.

“What a splendid place it has been,” she said.

We found every place splendid in those weeks as we let the wanderlust carry us on. And as though emerging from some vivid dream, various places and faces of people stand out in my memory now, as then they loomed in upon our absorption.

I remember the little old harbor of Cherbourg, gleaming in the moonlight, where when we landed Eleanore said, “Let's stay here awhile.” So of course we did, and then went on to Paris. We took an apartment, very French and absurdly small, from a former Beaux Arts friend of mine. I remember the kindly face of the maid who took such beaming care of us, the café in front of which late at night we sat and watched the huge shadowy carts go by on their way to the market halls, the sunrise flower market, where we filled our cab with moss roses and plants, Polin's songs in the “Ambassadeurs,” delicious petites allées in the Bois, our favorite rides on the tops of the 'buses, that old religious place of mine down under the bridge by Notre Dame.

All these and more we saw in fragments, now and then, looking out with vivid interest on all the life around us, only to return to each other,
into
each other I should say, for the exploring was quite different now, there had been such hours between us that nothing intimate could be held back. Nothing? Well, nothing that I thought of then. For somehow or other, in those glad, eager afternoons and evenings, in those nights, nothing disturbingly ugly in me so much as thought of showing its head. Three years before in this stirring town I had felt guilty at being a monk. But now I felt no guilt at all. For down the Champs Élysées our cab rolled serenely now, and even our driver's white hat wore an air as though it had a place in life.

From Paris we started for Munich, but we did not stop there, we happened to feel like going on. So we went through to Constantinople, whence we took a boat to Batoum and went up into the Caucasus, which Eleanore had heard about once from an engineer friend of her father's. I remember Koutais, a little town by a mountain torrent with gray vine-covered walls around it. Shops opened into the walls like stalls. There we would buy things for our supper and then in a crazy vehicle we would drive miles out on the broad mountainside to an orchard pink with blossoms, where we would build a fire and cook, and an old man in a long yellow robe and with a turban on his head would come out of his cabin and bring us wine. And the stars would appear and the frogs tune up in the marshes far down in the valley below, and the filmy mists would rise and the mountains would tower overhead. And the effect of this place upon us was to make us feel it was only one of innumerable such vacation places that lay ahead, festival spots in long, radiant lives. We felt this vaguely, silently. So often we talked silently.

Then there would come the most serious times, when with the deepest thoughtfulness we would survey the years ahead and very solemnly place ourselves, our views and beliefs. Miraculous how agreed we were! We believed, we found, in good workmanship, in honest building, in getting things done. We believed in Eleanore's father and all those around and above him that could help his kind of work. We were impatient of soft-headedness in rich people who had nothing to do, and of heavy muddle-headedness in the millions who had too much to do, and of muckraking of every kind which only got in the way of the builders. For the building of a new, clean vigorous world was our religion. And it did not seem cold to us, because our lives were in it and because we were in love.

There was no end to the plans for ourselves, for my writing, our home, the friends we wanted, the trips, the books and the music. And through it all and from under it all there kept bursting up that feeling which we knew was the most important of all, the exultant realization that we two were just starting out.

 

When at last we came back home this feeling took a deeper turn. I noticed a change in Eleanore. She had far less thought and time for me now, she seemed to be strangely absorbed in herself. Nearly all her time and strength were given to our small apartment, in the same building as that of her father. By countless feminine touches she was making it look like the home she had planned. She was getting all in order. And then one night she told me why. Her arms were close around me and her voice was so low I could barely hear:

“There's going to be another soon—another one
of us
—do you hear?—a very tiny blessed one.”

I held her slowly tighter.

“Oh, my darling girl,” I whispered.

Suddenly I relaxed my hold, for I was afraid of hurting her now. In a moment all was so utterly changed. And as in that brave, quiet way of hers she looked smiling steadily into my eyes, my throat contracted sharply. For into my mind leaped the memory of what the harbor had shown to me on that sultry hideous summer night in the tenement over in Brooklyn. And
that
must happen to
my wife!

“Oh, my dear,” she whispered, “if you only knew how much strength I stored up way over there in the mountains.”

So she had been thinking of this even then, and yet had told me nothing!

Here was the beginning of a long anxious period. Month after month I watched her quietly preparing. Slowly we drew into ourselves, while her father and mine and Sue and our friends came and went, but mattered little. I wondered if Dillon ever felt this. As he came down to us in the evenings from the apartment upstairs, where he and Eleanore had meant so much to each other only a year before, he gave no sign that he saw any change. But one night after he had gone, Eleanore happened to pick up the evening paper which had dropped from his bulging overcoat pocket.

“Billy, come here,” she said presently.

“What is it?”

“Look at this.”

The President of the United States had gone with Eleanore's father that day in a revenue cutter over the harbor and had spoken of Dillon's great dream in vigorous terms of approval.

“And father was here this evening,” said Eleanore very slowly, “and yet he never told me a word. He saw that I'd heard nothing and he thought I didn't care. Oh, Billy, I feel so ashamed.”

But she soon forgot the incident.

My suspense grew sharp as the time drew near. I had a good doctor, I was sure of that, and he told me he had an excellent nurse. But what good were all these puny precautions? The tenement room in Brooklyn kept rising in my mind.

She sat by the window that last night, and looking down on the far-away lights of the river we planned another trip abroad.

A few hours later I stood over her, holding her hand, and with her white lips pressed close together and her eyes shut, she went through one of those terrible spasms. Then she looked up in the moment's relief. And suddenly here was that smile of hers. And she said low, between clenched teeth,

“Well, dearie, another starting out—”

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 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 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 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.