Harbor (9781101565681) (40 page)

“Well, young man, what have you to say to me?”

“Nothing.”

Sue came into the room. Briefly I explained to her what our father had agreed upon, that she was to do the deciding and that he would abide by her decision. Then I began my questions to Joe. I felt awkward, painfully the intruder into two other people's lives. And I felt as though I were operating upon the silent old man close by. “The uglier the better,” I kept repeating to myself.

“Let's take up first the money side, Joe. Have you any regular salary?”

“No.”

“Such as it is, where does it come from?”

“Out of the stokers.”

“How much do you get?”

“One week twenty dollars and another ten or five,” he said. “One week I got three dollars and eighty-seven cents.”

“Is that likely to grow steadier?”

“Possibly—more likely worse.”

“But can two of you live on pay like that—say an average of ten dollars a week?”

“I know several millions of people that have to. And most of them have children too.”

“And you'd expect to live like that?”

“No better,” was his answer. My father turned to him slowly as though he had not heard just right.

“But as a matter of fact,” I went on, “you wouldn't have to, would you? You'd expect Sue to earn money as well as yourself.”

“I hope so—if she wants to—it's my idea of a woman's life.”

“And the work you hope she'll enter will be the kind you believe in—organizing labor and taking an active part in strikes?”

“Yes. She's a good speaker——”

“I see. And if you were out of a job at times you'd be willing to let her support you?”

Sue angrily half rose from her chair, but Joe with a grim move of his hand said softly, “Sit down and try to stand this. Let's get it over and done with.” Then he turned quietly back to me.

“Why yes—I'd let her support me,” he said.

“You mean you don't care one way or the other. You'd both be working for what you believe in, and how you lived wouldn't especially count?”

“That's about it.”

“What do you believe in, Joe? Just briefly, what's your main idea in stirring up millions of ignorant men?”

“Mainly to pull down what's on top.”

“As for instance?”

“All of it. Business, industry and finance as it's being run at present.”

“A clean sweep. And in place of that?”

“Everything run by the workers themselves.”

“For example?” I asked. “The ships by the stokers?”

“Yes, the ships by the stokers,” he said. And I felt Dad stiffen in his chair. “As they will be when the time comes,” Joe added.

“How soon will that be?”

“I'll see it,” he said.

“The working people in full control. No restraints whatever from above.”

“There won't be anyone left above. No more gods,” he answered.

“Not even one?”

“Is there one?” he asked.

“You're an atheist, aren't you,” I said.

“Yes, when I happen to think of it.”

“And Sue would likely be the same.”

“Isn't she now?” he inquired. I dropped the point and hurried on.

“How about Sue's friends, Joe? In a life like that—always in strikes—she'd have to give them up, wouldn't she?”

“Probably. Some of 'em think they're radicals, but I doubt if they'd come far out of the parlor.”

“So her new friends would be either strikers or the people who lead in strikes. Her life would be practically sunk in the mass.”

“I hope so.”

“You may be in jail at times.”

“Quite probably.”

“Sue too?”

“Possibly.”

I caught the look in my father's face and knew that I had but a few moments more.

“Do you want to marry her, Joe?” I asked.

“Yes, I'll go down to City Hall—if a large fat Tammany alderman can make our love any cleaner.”

“You mean you don't believe in marriage.”

“Not especially,” he said.

“And so if either gets sick of the other he just leaves without any fuss.”

“Naturally.”

There was a pause. And then Joe spoke again.

“You're a better interviewer than I thought you were,” he said. “You've made the picture quite complete—as far as you can see it. Of course you've left all the real stuff out——”

“What is the real stuff, as you call it, young man?” My father's voice had a deadly ring. Joe turned and looked at him as before.

“You couldn't understand,” he said.

“I think I understand enough.” Dad rose abruptly and turned to Sue. “Sue,” he said. “Shall I ask your anarchist friend to go?”

I could feel Sue gather herself. She was white.

“I'll have to go with him,” she managed to say. A slight spasm shot over our father's face. For a moment there was silence.

“You've heard all he said of this life of his?”

“Yes.”

“And what he wants and expects you to do?”

“I heard it.”

“And just how he wants you to live—with nothing you've been used to—nothing? No money but what a few drunken stokers throw your way, no decent ideals, no religion, no home?”

Again a pause.

“I want to go with him,” she brought out at last.

Dad turned sharply and left the room.

 

I heard a deep breath behind me. It came from Joe Kramer, whose face was set in a frown of pain.

“He's so damn old,” Joe muttered. “You operated on him hard.”

Suddenly Sue threw herself on the lounge. She huddled there shaking and motioned us off.

“Leave me alone, can't you, go away!” we heard between her sobs. “It's all right—I'm ready—I'll come to you, Joe—but not now—not just now! Go away, both of you—leave me alone!”

Joe left the house. Soon after that Eleanore arrived and I told her what had happened. She went in to Sue, I left them together and went up to my father's room. He lay on the bed breathing quickly.

“You did splendidly, son,” he said. “You slashed into her hard. It hurt me to listen—but it's all right. Let her suffer—she had to. It hit her, I tell you—she'll break down! If we can only keep her here! Get Eleanore!”

He stopped with a jerk, his hand went to his heart, and he panted and scowled with pain.

“I sent for her,” I told him. “She's come and she's in Sue's room now. Let's leave them alone. It's going to be all right, Dad.”

I sent for a doctor who was an old friend of my father's. He came and spent a long time in the room, and I could hear them talking. At last he came out.

“It won't do,” he said. “We can't have any more of this. We must keep your sister out of his sight. She can't stay alone with him in this house, and she can't go now to your anarchist friend. If she does it may be the end of your father. Suppose you persuade her to come to you.”

But here Eleanore joined us.

“I have a better plan,” she said. “I've been talking to Sue and she has agreed. She's to stay—and we'll move over here and try to keep Sue and her father apart.”

“What about Joe?” I asked her.

“Sue has promised me not to see Joe until the strike is over. It will only be a matter of weeks—perhaps even days—it may break out to-morrow. It's not much of a time for Joe to get married—besides, it's the least she can do for her father—to wait that long. And she has agreed. So that much is settled.”

She went home to pack up a few things for the night. When she came back it was evening. She spent some time with Sue in her room, while I stayed in with father. I gave him a powder the doctor had left and he was soon sleeping heavily.

At last in my old bedroom Eleanore and I were alone. It was a long time before we could sleep.

“Funny,” said Eleanore presently, “how thoroughly selfish people can be. Here's Sue and your father going through a perfectly ghastly crisis. But I haven't been thinking of them—not at all. I've been thinking of us—of you, I mean—of what this strike will do to you. You're getting so terribly tense these days.”

I reached over and took her hand:

“You don't want me to run away from it now?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I don't want that. I've told you that I'm not afraid——”

“Then we'll have to wait and see, won't we, dear? We can't help ourselves now. I've got to keep on writing, you know—we depend on that for our living. And I can't write what I did before—I don't seem to have it in me. So I'm going into this strike as hard as I can—I'm going to watch it as hard as I can and think it out as clearly. I know I'll never be like Joe—but I do feel now I'm going to change. I've got to—after what I've been shown. The harbor is so different now. Don't you understand?”

I felt her hand slowly tighten on mine.

“Yes, dear,” she said, “I understand——”

The events of that day dropped out of my mind in the turbulent weeks that followed. For day by day I felt myself sink deeper and deeper into the crowd, into surging multitudes of men—till something that I found down there lifted me up and swept me on—into a strange new harbor.

Of the strike I can give only one man's view, what I could see with my one pair of eyes in that swiftly spreading confusion that soon embraced the whole port of New York and other ports both here and abroad. War correspondents, I suppose, must feel the same chaos around them, but in my case it rose from within me as well. I was like a war correspondent who is trying to make up his mind about war. What was good in this labor rebellion? What was bad? Where was it taking me?

From the beginning I could feel that it meant for me a breaking of ties with the safe strong world that had been my life. I felt this first before the strike, when I went to my magazine editor. He had taken my story about Jim Marsh, but when I came to him now and told him that I wanted to cover the strike,

“Go ahead if you like,” he answered, a weary indulgence in his tone, “I don't want to interfere in your work. But I can't promise you now that we'll buy it. If you feel you must write up this strike you'll have to do it at your own risk.”

“Why?” I asked. For years my work had been ordered ahead. I thought of that small apartment of ours, of my father sick at home—and I felt myself suddenly insecure.

“Because,” he answered coolly, “I'm not quite sure that what you write will be a fair unbiassed presentation of the facts. I've seen so many good reporters utterly spoiled in strikes like this. They lose their whole sense of proportion and never seem to get it quite back.”

This little talk left me deeply disturbed. But I was unwilling to give up my plan, and so, after some anxious thinking, I decided to free-lance it. After all, if this one story didn't sell I could borrow until I wrote something that did. And I set to work with an angry vim. The very thought that my old world was closing up behind me made my mind the more ready now for the new world opening ahead.

From the old house in Brooklyn I once more explored my harbor. All day and the greater part of each night I went back over my old ground. Old memories rose in sharp contrast to new views I was getting. From the top I had come to the bottom. Crowds of sweating laborers rose everywhere between me and my past. And as between me and my past, and between these masses and their rulers, I felt the struggle drawing near, the whole immense region took on for me the aspect of a battlefield, with puffs and clouds and darting lines of smoke and steam from its ships and trains and factories. Through it I moved confusedly, troubled and absorbed.

I saw the work of the harbor go now with an even mightier rush, because of the impending strike. The rumor of its coming had spread far over the country, and shippers were hurrying cargoes in. I saw boxes and barrels by thousands marked “Rush.” And they were rushed! On one dock I saw the dockers begin at seven in the morning and when I came back late in the evening the same men were there. At midnight I went home to sleep. When I came back at daybreak the same men were there, and I watched them straining through the last rush until the ship sailed that day at noon. They had worked for twenty-nine hours. In that last hour I drew close—so close that I could feel them heaving, sweating, panting, feel their laboring hearts and lungs. Long ago I had watched them thus, but then I had seen from a different world. I had felt the pulse of a nation beating and I had gloried in its speed. But now I felt the pulse-beats of exhausted straining men, I saw that undertaker's sign staring fixedly from across the way. “
Certainly
I'm talking to you!” Six thousand killed and injured!

I saw accidents that week. I saw a Polish docker knocked on the head by the end of a heavy chain that broke. I saw a little Italian caught by the foot in a rope net, swung yelling with terror into the air, then dropped—his leg was broken. And toward the end of a long night's work I saw a tired man slip and fall with a huge bag on his shoulders. The bag came down on top of him, and he lay there white and still. Later I learned that his spine had been broken, that he would be paralyzed for life.

But what I saw was only a part. From the policemen's books alone I found a record for that week of six dockers killed and eighty-seven injured. I traced about a score of these cases back into their tenement homes, and there I found haggard, crippled men and silent, anxious women, the mothers of small children. Curious and deeply thrilled, these children looked at the man on the bed, between his groans of pain I heard their eager questions, they kept getting in their mother's way. One thin Italian mother, whose nerves were plainly all on edge suddenly slapped the child at her skirts, and then when it began to cry she herself burst into tears.