Harbor (9781101565681) (22 page)

“I liked it too,” said Eleanore.

“Did you?” I asked delightedly. Far from retiring into my shell, I wanted at once to open up and make her feel how much I had missed in that crude effort. Soon she had me talking about it. And while I talked on eagerly, I tried to guess from her questions whether she'd read it more than once. Finally I guessed she had. And, glancing at her now and then, I wondered how much she could ever know about me or I about her—really know. And the intimacy I saw ahead loomed radiant and boundless. I strained every nerve to show her myself, to show her the very best of myself.

But then I heard her ask me,

“Wouldn't you like to talk to my father?”

Here was a fine end to it all.

“I don't know,” I answered gloomily. I could see already those engineer eyes moving amusedly down my pages. I could see her watching his face and getting to feel as he did about me. “What good would it do?” I added.

“What good would it do?” Her sharply offended tone brought me back with a jerk to try to explain.

“Don't you see what I mean?” I asked eagerly. “Why should a man as busy as he is waste his time on a kid like me? After all that you've told me about him, I feel sometimes as though all the writers on earth don't count any more, because all the really big things are being done by men like your father.”

“That's much better,” said Eleanore. “Only of course it isn't true. If you poor little writers want to get big and really count,” she went on serenely, “all you have to do is to write about my father.”

“I'll begin the minute you say so,” I told her.

“Then it's arranged,” said my companion, with an exceedingly comfortable sigh. “We've taken a cottage up on the Sound for the summer,” she continued. “And we're moving up to-morrow. Suppose you come up over Sunday.”

“Thanks. I'd love to,” I replied.

“So she's to be away for months,” I added dismally to myself. “No more of these long afternoons.”

On the following Saturday, when I met her boat at an East River dock, at once I felt a difference. We were waiting for her father. The moments dragged and I grew glum, try as I would to be pleasant.

“Here he is,” she said at last.

Tall, rather lank and loosely clothed, Dillon was coming down the pier in easy leisurely fashion, talking to a man by his side. His face lighted up when he saw us.

“Just a minute,” he said.

His voice was low but it had a peculiar carrying quality. His rugged face was deeply lined, and I noticed a little gray in his hair. He was smiling straight down into the eyes of his companion, a much younger man, thin and poorly dressed, whose face looked drawn and tired.

“When I was your age,” I heard Dillon remark, “I got into just the same kind of a snarl.” And he began telling about it. A frightfully technical story it was, full of engineer slang that was Greek to me, but I saw the younger man listen absorbed, his thin lips parting in a smile. I saw him come out from under his worries, I saw his chief watching him, pulling him out.

“All right, Jim,” he ended. “See what you can do.”

“Say, Chief, just you forget this, will you?” the other said intensely. “Don't give it a thought. It's go'n' to be done!”

“It's forgotten.”

Another easy smile at his man, and then Eleanore's father turned to us. I could feel him casually take me in.

“The thing I liked most in that sketch of yours,” he was saying a few minutes later, when our boat was on her course, “was the way you listed that Dutchman's cargo. ‘One baby carriage—to Lahore.' A very large picture in five little words. I can see that Hindu baby now—being wheeled in its carriage to Crocodile Park and wondering where the devil this queer new wagon came from. I've been nosing around these docks for years, but I missed that part of 'em right along—that human part—till you came along with your neat writer's trick. ‘One baby carriage—to Lahore.' You ought to be proud, young man, at your age to have written one sentence so long that it goes half way around the world.”

As he talked in that half bantering tone I tried to feel cross, but it wouldn't do. That low voice and those gray eyes were not making fun of me, they were making friends with me, they were so kindly, curious, so open and sincere. Soon he had lighted a cigar and was telling Eleanore gravely just how she ought to run her boat.

“Why be so busy about it?” he asked.

“Oh, you be quiet!” she replied, as she sharply spun her wheel. Like an automobile in a crowded street our craft was lurching its way in short dashes in and out of the rush hour traffic. The narrow East River was black with boats. Ferries, tugs and steamers seemed to be coming at us from every side. Now with a leap we would be off, then abruptly churning the water behind us we would hold back drifting, watching out chance for another rush. Eleanore's face was glowing now, her hat was off, her neck was tense—and her blue-gray eyes, wide open, fixed on the chaos ahead, were shining with excitement. Now and then a long curling wisp of her hair would get in her eyes and savagely she would blow it back. And her lank quiet father puffed his cigar, with his gray eyes restfully on her. “The serenity of her,” he murmured to me.

“Oh, now, my dear,” he said gently, as we careened to starboard, “
that
was a slip. I can't say I would have done it like that.”

“Have you ever run a boat in your life?” came back the fierce rejoinder.

“No,” said Dillon calmly, “I can't exactly say I have. Still”—he relapsed and enjoyed his cigar.

Just a short time after this, we had the only ugly moment that I had been through in all our rides. A huge Sound steamer was ahead. Dashing close along under her port, we came suddenly out before her and met a tug whose fool of a captain had made a rush to cross her bow. It was one of those sickening instants when you see nothing at all to do. But Eleanore saw. A quick jerk on her lever, a swift spinning of her wheel, and with a leap we were right under the steamer's bow. It missed our stern by a foot as it passed and then we were safe on the other side. She made a low sound, in a moment her face went deathly white, her eyes shut and she nearly let go the wheel. But then, her slight form tightening, slowly opening her eyes she turned toward her father.

“Now?” he asked very softly. And there passed a look between them.

“All right,” she breathed, and turned back to her wheel. And for some time very little was said.

But I understood her love for him now. These two were such companions as I had never seen before. And though I myself felt quite out of it all, this did not bother me in the least. For watching her father and feeling the abounding reserve of force deep under his quiet, I told myself that here was a big man, the first really big one I'd ever come close to. And I was so eager to know him and see just what he was like inside, that I had no room for myself or his daughter—because I wanted to write him up. What a weird, curious feeling it is, this passion for writing up people you meet.

On the remainder of the ride, and at supper that night on the porch of their cottage, a little house perched on a rocky point directly overlooking the water, I did my best to draw him out, and Eleanore seemed quite ready to help me. And later, when he went inside to do some work, I went on with the same eagerness, obliterating my own small self, exploring this feeling of hers for him and his dream of a future harbor.

Soon she was doing all the talking, her voice growing lower and more intense as she tried to make me feel all he meant when he said, “It's going to be the first port in the world.” She told how up in his tower he made you see the commerce of this whole mighty world of peace converging slowly on this port. She told of the night two years before when he had come home “all shaken and queer” and had said to her huskily, “Eleanore, child, at last it's sure. There's to be a Panama Canal.” Of other nights when he didn't come home and at last she went down to his office to fetch him and found him at midnight there with his men, “all working like mad and gay as larks!”

“When it comes to millions of dollars for his work,” she said, “he's so very keen that he makes you feel like a little child. But when it's merely a question of dollars for himself to live on, he's a perfect baby. He won't look at a bill, he always turns them over to me. He won't enter a shop, he won't go to a tailor. One ready-made clothing store has his measure and twice a year I order his clothes and then have a fight to get him to wear them. He never knows what he eats except steak. One night when we had been having steak six evenings in succession I tried chicken for a change. At first he didn't know what was wrong. Every now and then he would seem to notice something. ‘What's the matter with me?' I could see he was asking. Then all at once he had it. ‘My dear,' he said, very coaxingly, ‘could we have a nice juicy porterhouse steak for supper to-morrow evening?' ”

From these and many other details slowly I got the feel of my man. Closer, more intimate he grew. All the work I had done in Paris, questioning, drawing out my friends until I could feel their inner selves coming out of them into me, was counting now. I had never done so well before, I was sliding my questions in just right, very cautiously turning her memory this way and that on her father's life, watching her grow more and more unaware of my presence beside her, although now I had her bending toward me, eagerly, close.

“And she thinks she's doing it all by herself,” I thought exultingly.

But as there came a pause in our talk, she turned slightly in her seat and glanced in through the window into the lighted room behind. And instantly her expression changed. A swift look of surprise, a puzzled frown and a moment of hard thinking—and then with a murmured excuse she rose and went away quickly into the house. In the meantime I had followed her look. Sitting close by the lamp, in the room inside, Dillon was staring straight at this spot where I was invisible in the dark. And he looked old—and rigid, as though he'd been staring like that for some time. I caught just a glimpse. Then he heard her step and turned hastily back to his work. I looked at my watch. It was after twelve.

“And he never knew it was all about him,” I said to myself disgustedly. “I hope this doesn't spoil it all.”

 

But that is precisely what it did. The next morning she was coolly polite and Dillon determinedly genial. I could feel a silent struggle between them as to what should be done with me. She wanted to get rid of me, he wanted to keep us together. Gone was all his quiet strength, in its place was an anxious friendliness. He made me tell him what I was writing. He said he was glad that his press agent daughter had taken me 'round and opened my eyes. And as soon as she got through with me he himself would do all he could.

“I'm through with him,” said Eleanore cheerfully. “I've shown him all I possibly can. What you need now,” she added, turning to me in her old easy manner, “is to watch the harbor all by yourself and get your own feelings about it. You might begin at the North River docks.”

I spent a wretched afternoon. All my plans for my work and my life assumed the most gray and desolate hues. Eleanore was taking a nap. At last she came down and gave me some tea.

“May I come out and see you now and then?” I asked her very humbly. “It would help me so much to talk over my work.”

“No,” she answered kindly, “I think you'd better not.”

“Why not?” I blurted. “What have I done?”

She hesitated, then looked at me squarely.

“You've made my absurd young father,” she said, “think that he is no longer young.”

I lost just a moment in admiration. There wasn't one girl in a hundred who would have come out with it like that. Then I seized my chance.

“Why, it's perfectly idiotic,” I cried. “Here's a man so big he's a giant beside me, so full of some queer magnetic force that on the way up here in the boat he made me forget that I was there. I forgot that
you
were there,” I threw in, and I caught just the sign of a gleam in her eyes. “No longer young?” I continued. “That man will be young when you and I are blinking in our dull old age! He's the biggest man I ever met! And I want to know him, I want to know how he thinks and feels, I want that more than anything else! And now you come between us!”

“Are you real?” asked Eleanore. I looked back unflinchingly.

“Just you try me,” I retorted.

“No,” she replied with a quiet smile.

She said good-by to me that night.

 

The next morning at seven o'clock I met her father down at the boat. We had a quick swim together and then climbed on board. And the next minute, with a sober old seaman called “Captain Arty” at the wheel, the boat was speeding for New York while we dressed and cooked and breakfasted.

“This was Eleanore's idea,” Dillon said. “It gets me to town by nine o'clock and takes me back each day at five. So I hardly miss a night at home. . . . Did she ever tell you,” he went on, “about the first week she spent in this boat?”

“She said it was a wonderful time.”

“It was a nightmare,” Dillon said. I looked at him quickly:

“What do you mean?”

“Her fight for her strength. She looked like a ghost—with a stiff upper lip. She fainted twice. But she wouldn't give up. She said she knew she could do it if I'd only let her stick it out. She has quite a will, that daughter of mine,” he added quietly.

“You know,” he went on, “that idea of hers that you tackle the North River piers isn't bad. Why don't you put in the whole Summer there, watching the big liners? I won't ask you to come to my office now, for our work is still in that early stage where we don't want any publicity.” I could feel his casual glance, and I wondered whether he noticed my sharp disappointment. “When we are ready,” he resumed, “we're sure to be flooded with writers. I hope there'll be one man in the lot who'll stick to the work for a year or more, a man with a kind of a passion in him for the thing we're trying to do. There's nothing we wouldn't do for that man. I hope he's going to be you.”