The Harbor Part 26

His office took up an entire floor near the tapering top of the building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon, and through Dillon's powerful field gla.s.s I saw pictures of all I had seen before in my weary weeks of trudging down there in the haze and dust. Down there I had felt like a little worm, up here I felt among the G.o.ds. There all had been matter and chaos, here all was mind and a will to find a way out of confusion. The gla.s.s gave me the pictures in swift succession, in a moment I made a leap of ten miles, and as I listened on and on to the quiet voice at my elbow, the pictures all came sweeping together as parts of one colossal whole. The first social vision of my life I had through Dillon's field gla.s.s.

"To see any harbor or city or state as a whole," he said, "is what most Americans cannot do. And it's what they've got to learn to do."

And while I looked where he told me to, like a surgeon about to operate he talked of his mighty patient, a giant struggling to breathe, with swollen veins and arteries. He made me see the Hudson, the East River and the railroad lines all pouring in their traffic, to be shifted and reloaded onto the ocean vessels in a perfect fever of confusion and delay. Far below us you could see long lines of tiny trucks and wagons waiting hours for a chance to get into the docksheds. New York, he said, in true Yankee style had developed its waterfront pell mell, each railroad and each ship line grabbing sites for its own use, until the port was now so clogged, so tangled and congested that it was able to grow no more.

"And it's got to grow," he said. The old helter-skelter method had served well enough in years gone by, for this port had been like this whole bountiful land, its natural advantages had been so prodigious it could stand all our blind and hoggish mistakes. But now we were rapidly nearing the time when every mistake we made would cost us tens of millions of dollars. For within a few years the Big Ditch would open across Panama, and the commerce of South America, together with that of the Orient, would pour into the harbor here to meet the westbound commerce of Europe. Ships of all nations would steam through the Narrows, and we must be ready to welcome them all, with an ample generous harbor worthy of the world's first port.

"To get ready," he said, "what we've got to do is to organize this port as a whole, like the big industrial plant it is."

He began to show me some of the plans in blue-print maps and sketches. I saw tens of thousands of freight cars gathered in great central yards at a few main strategic points connected by long tunnels with all the minor centers. I saw the port no longer as a mere body of water, but with a whole region deep beneath of these long winding tunnels through which flowed the traffic unseen and unheard. I saw along the waterfronts continuous lines of docksheds where by huge cranes and other devices the loading and unloading could be done with enormous saving of time. Along the heavy roofs of steel of these continuous lines of buildings stretched wide ocean boulevards with trees and shrubs and flowers to shut out the clamorous life below. Warehouses and factory buildings rose in solid rows behind. The city was to build them all, and the city as the landlord was to invite the ships and railroads, and the manufacturers too, to come in and get together, to stop their fighting and grabbing and work with each other in one great plan.

"That's what we mean nowadays by a port," he told me at the end of our talk. "A complicated industrial organ, the heart of a country's circulation, pumping in and out its millions of tons of traffic as quickly and cheaply as possible. That's efficiency, scientific management or just plain engineering, whatever you want to call it. But it's got to be done for us all in a plan instead of each for himself in a blind struggling chaos."

I came down from the tower with a dazed, excited feeling which lasted all the rest of the day. That harbor of confusion had been for months my entire world, it had baffled and beaten me till I was weak. And now this man had swept together all its parts and showed me one immense design.

He had promised me the first use of his plans. With this to go on I drafted a scheme for a series of magazine articles on "The First Port of the World," and I soon placed it in advance at four hundred dollars an article. At last I was coming up in life, my first big story had begun!

I went with Dillon each week-end up to the cottage on the Sound. Here he talked in detail of his dreams, and Eleanore with her old pa.s.sion and pride delighted to draw him out for me. And not only her father--for to help me in my work she invited out here in the evenings many of his engineer friends.

"It has always been awfully hard for me," she confided, "to understand big questions by reading about them out of books. But I love to hear about them from men who are living and working right in them. I love to feel a little how it must be to be living their lives."

She was a wonderful listener, for she had quietly studied each man until now she had a kind of an instinct for drawing the very best of him out.

While he talked she would sit with her sewing, now and then putting in a question to help. Often I would glance at her there and see in her slightly frowning face how intently she was listening, thinking and planning to help me. Sometimes she would meet my look. I would grow tremendously happy.

"In a little while," I thought. But then I would pull myself up with a jerk: "Stop looking at her, you young fool, keep your mind on this engineer. You've got the chance of your life right now to make good in your work and be happy. Don't fall down! Get busy!"

And I did. I threw myself into the lives of these men who were the living embodiments of all that bigness, boldness, punch that had so gripped and thrilled me. The harbor had drawn them around it out of the hum and rush of the country, and here they were in its service, watching it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast populations, plant millions of people this way and that.

But against these men of the tower, with their wide, deliberate views ahead, embracing and binding together not only this port but the whole western world depending upon it, I found in the city jungle innumerable petty men, who could see only their own narrow interests of to-day, and who fought blindly any change for a to-morrow--fellows in such mortal fear of some possible benefit to their rivals that they could see none for themselves. They were hopelessly used to fighting each other. And I came to feel that all these men, though many were still young in years, belonged to a generation gone by, to the age of individual strife that my father had lived and worked in--and that like him they were all soon to be swept to one side by the inexorable harbor of to-day, which had no further use for them.

It needed bigger men. It needed men like Dillon and behind him those mysterious powers downtown, the men he had called the brains of the nation, who read the signs of the new times, who saw that the West was now fast filling up, that the eyes of the nation were once more turning outward, and that untold resources of wealth were soon to be available for mighty sea adventures, a vast fleet of Yankee ships that should drive the surplus output of our teeming industries into all markets of the world. And the men who saw these things coming were the only ones who were big enough to prepare the country to meet them. My father's dream was at last coming true--too late for him to play a part. He had been but a prophet, a lonely pioneer.

My view of the harbor was different now. I had seen it before as a vast machine molding the lives of all people around it. But now behind the machine itself I felt the minds of its molders. I saw its ponderous ma.s.ses of freight, its mult.i.tudes of people, all pushed and shifted this way and that by these invisible powers. And by degrees I made for myself a new G.o.d, and its name was Efficiency.

Here at last was a G.o.d that I felt could stand! I had made so many in years gone by, I had been making them all my life--from those first fearful idols, the condors and the cannibals, to the kind old G.o.d of goodness in my mother's church and the radiant G.o.ddess of beauty and art over there in Paris. One by one I had raised them up, and one by one the harbor had flowed in and dragged them down. But now in my full manhood (for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a G.o.d that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its head were all the brains of all the strong men at the top.

And all the mult.i.tudes below seemed mere pigmies to me now. I remember one late twilight, coming back from a talk with an engineer, I boarded a ferry at the rush hour and watched the people herd on like sheep. How small they seemed, how petty their thoughts compared to mine, how blind their views of the harbor.

Here was a little Italian bride, just landed, by the looks of her. She kept her face close to her lover's, smiling dazedly into his eyes. And she saw no harbor. Here near by was a fat old gentleman with a highly painted young lady who laughed and swore softly at him as I pa.s.sed. I sat down beside them a moment and listened. The old gentleman seemed quite mad with desire. He was pleading eagerly, whining. And he saw no harbor. Close by sat two tall serious men. One was deep in a socialist book, the other in news of the Giants. Both seemed equally absorbed. And they saw no harbor. I moved on to another spot, and sitting down by a thin seedy-looking Irish girl I heard her talk to her husband about having their baby's life insured according to a wonderful plan an agent had described to her. As she spoke she was frowning anxiously--and she saw no harbor. Not far away a plump flashy young creature was smiling down on the bootblack who was busily shining her small patent leather shoes. Her bright blue petticoat lifted high displayed the most enticing charms, and as now she turned to look off toward the lights of the city ahead, she smiled gaily to herself. And she saw no harbor. And alone up at the windy bow I found a squat husky laborer with his dirty coat and shirt thrown open wide, the wind on his bare hairy chest, hungrily watching the dock ahead as though for his supper--seeing no harbor, no world's first port, no plans for vast fleets or a great ca.n.a.l, none of the big things shaping his life.

But I saw. Orders had gone out from the tower east and west and south and north to show me every courtesy. And with a miraculous youthful ease I understood all that I saw and heard. The details all fitted right into the whole, or if they didn't I made them fit. Here was a splendid end to chaos and blind wrestling with life. And feeling stronger and more sure than ever in my life before, I set out to build my series of glory stories about it all, laying on the color thick to reach a million pigmy readers, grip them, pull them out of their holes, make them sit up and rub their eyes.

For I was now a success in life! The exuberant joy of youth and success filled the whole immense region for me. In those Fall days there was nothing too hard to try, no queer hours too exhausting, no deep corner too remote, in the search for my material. I saw the place from an old fisherman's boat and from a revenue launch at night, with its searchlight combing the waters far and wide for smugglers. I saw it from big pilot boats that put far out to sea to meet the incoming liners. I ate many good suppers and slept long nights on a stout jolly tug called _The Happy_, where from my snug bunk at the stern through the open door I could watch the stars. I went down into tunnels deep beneath the waters. I went often to the Navy Yard. I dined many nights on battleships, where the talk of the naval officers recalled my father's picture of a fighting ocean world. They too talked of the Big Ca.n.a.l, but in terms of war instead of peace. I went out to the coast defenses, and with an army major I made a tour of the lights and buoys.

And perhaps more often than anywhere else, I went to a rude log cabin on the side of a wooded hill high up on Staten Island, where lived a Norwegian engineer. He had a cozy den up there, with book-shelves set into the logs, two deep bunks, a few bright rugs on the rough floor, some soft, ponderous leather chairs and a crackling little stove on which we cooked delicious suppers. Later out on the narrow porch we would puff lazy smoke wreaths and watch the vast valley of lights below, from the distant twinkling arch of the Bridge to the sparkling towers of old Coney. Down there like swarms of fire-flies were countless darting skurrying lights, red and blue and green and white. Far off to the south flashed the light of the Hook, and still other signals gleamed low from the ocean.

Here I came often with Eleanore, for she had now come back to town. In her boat we went to many new spots and back to all the old ones. We found new beauties in them all. At home in the evenings we had long talks. And all the time I could feel that we two both knew what was coming, that steadily we were drawing together, that all my work and my view of the harbor took its joy and its glory from this.

"In a little while," I thought.

CHAPTER XVI

I had been little at home those days, for the house in Brooklyn disturbed me now. Poor old Dad. Since I had secured my contract he had tried so hard to help me, to be eager, interested, alive, to talk it all over with me at night. And this I did not like to do. A vague feeling of guilt and disloyalty would creep into my now boundless zest for the harbor that had crowded him out. And I think that he suspected this. One night, when with this feeling I stupidly tried to talk as though I still hated all its ugliness, its clamor, smoke and grime, I caught a twinkle of pain in his eyes.

"Boy," he broke in roughly, "I hope you'll always talk and write what you believe and nothing else! I wouldn't give a picayune for any chap who didn't!"

I could feel him watching anxiously my affair with Eleanore. In the days when she had come to the house he had grown very fond of her, and now by frequent questions, slipped in with a studied indifference, he showed an interest which in time became a deep suspense.

"Out again this evening, son?" he called in one night from the bathroom where he was washing his hands and face before going down to supper. In my room adjoining I was dressing to go out.

"Yes, Dad."

"What for?"

"Some work."

"Be out for dinner too?"

"Yes."

"Who with?"

"Oh, a pilot," I answered abstractedly. I was wondering if she would wear her blue gown. She had asked quite a number of people that night.

Then I saw Dad in the doorway. Briskly rubbing his gray head with a towel, he was eyeing my evening clothes.

"Devilish polished chaps these days--pilots," he commented. I heard a low snort of glee from his room.

My sister, on the other hand, had no more patience than before with this fast deepening love of mine, which had drawn me away from her radical friends up to the men of the tower who worked for the big companies. By the most vigorous ironies, the most industrious witty remarks, she made me feel how thoroughly she disapproved of anything so deadening as marriage, home and settling down, in this glorious age of new ideas.

One morning at breakfast, when I remarked as I commonly did that I would be out for dinner that night,

"Where are you going?" she asked abruptly.

"To Eleanore Dillon's," I replied. Our eyes met squarely for a moment.

"Do you know what it means to go there so often, almost every night?"

she asked.

"I do," I answered bluntly. I would finish this meddling once and for all. But Sue did not look finished.

"You'd better stay home to-night, Billy," she said.

"Why?"