Harbor (9781101565681) (30 page)

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 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.

“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.

“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 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 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.

We had been married four years.

At the end of a crisp November day I was just about starting home. I remember how keenly alive I felt, how tingling with bodily health, and above all how successful.

I had had such a successful day. I had written hard all morning and my work had been going splendidly. I had lunched downtown with the man whose life I was writing that month, a man of astounding fertility, who had started fifteen years ago with a small hotel in a western town, had made money, had built a larger hotel, had made money, had moved to a larger town and bought a still larger hotel, had made money, had moved to Chicago, New York, had made money. And the America he knew was made up of people who themselves had made their money so suddenly they had to come to hotels to spend it. The stories that he told me, both scandalous and otherwise, of these men and women who shot up rich and diamondy out of this booming country of ours, had a range and a richness of color that had held me delighted through many long talks. During luncheon he had told some of his best, and had given me permission to print, with a discreet twist or so to disguise them, certain intimate episodes in the first fat years of men whose names were by-words now all over the land. I could already see that story selling on the newsstands.

From this man I had come uptown to a branch of the Y. M. C. A., where after an hour of hand-ball and a plunge in the swimming tank I had gone to a room downstairs, to which ambitious youngsters came for free advice from an expert who told them how to get on in life. His room was a confessional. He would cross-examine each suppliant hard, make a diagnosis of each one and then give him advice as to what to do—whether or not to throw over his job, what kind of work he was suited for best. The America he knew was made up of these small human units, some pitiably or absurdly small, but all anxiously straining upward. And they too appealed to me.

For I was so successful now that I was growing mellow. From certain big men I had written about I had taken a spacious breadth of view that included a deep indulgence for all these skurrying pigmies. Poor little devils, give 'em a chance, especially those among them who had “bim” enough to want a chance, to wonder why they were not getting on and want to do something about it. And so I had formed the habit of dropping in often at this room, hearing its confessions and now and then helping get someone a job. As the swimming tank made my body tingle, so this place affected my soul. It warmed me to do all I could for some fellow, some decent kid who was down on his luck. Besides, some confessions were gems of their kind, glimpses into human lives, hard struggles, wild ambitions. I meant to write them up some day. In fact, I meant to write everything up, I felt everything waiting for my pen.

And as I went down to the coat-room, the thought I had had so often lately came again into my mind. I too would soon throw over my job, leave articles and write fiction—my old Paris dream. But what a wide and varied experience of life I had gathered since those ingenuous Paris days. Yes, I would do it real and big, out of the big life I had known. And my heroes would no longer be watching at my elbow to point to the choicest bits and say, “You're mistaken, young man, I never said that.” No, all those lifelike human touches would stay in. Stories kept coming up in my mind, one especially of late. As I stood in line for my hat and coat I thought of it now and grew so absorbed I forgot that I was standing in a line of insignificant clerks—until the one ahead of me, who had just come in from the street, asked the chap in front of him:

“Say, Gus, did you see the suffragettes? Their parade's just going by.”

This brought me down from the clouds with a jerk. For I had meant to see that parade. Sue was in it, in it hard. Suffrage was her latest fad.

“Naw,” growled Gus. “If I was the mayor and they came to me for a permit to march I'd tell 'em to go and buy corsets. That's their complaint. They can't get kissed so they want to vote.” The other one chuckled:

“I saw one who can have my vote—and all I'll ask is a better look. Believe me, some silk stockings!”

As they went away I glared after them. “Damn little muts,” I thought. I was rather in favor of suffrage, at least I felt indulgent about it. Why shouldn't I be? The great thing was to keep your mind open and kindly; to feel contempt for nothing whatever. And because I felt contempt for no thing or person in all the world, I now glared with the most utter contempt on these narrow-minded little clerks.

Then I hurried out and over to Fifth Avenue, where the throb of the drums was still to be heard. And there I found to my surprise that in a very real sense this parade was different from anything that I had ever seen before. I was more than indulgent, I was excited. And by what? Not by the marching lines of figures, fluttering banners, booming bands, nor just by the fact that these marchers were women, and women quite frankly dressed for effect, so that the whole rhythmic mass had a feminine color and dash that made it all gay and delightful. No, there was something deeper. And that something, I finally made out, was this. These women and girls were all deeply thrilled by the feeling that for the first time in their lives they were doing something all together—for an idea that each one of them had thought rather big and stirring before, but now, as each felt herself a part of this moving, swinging multitude, she felt the idea suddenly loom so infinitely larger and more compelling than before that she herself was astounded. Here for the first time in my life I felt the power of mass action.