The Harbor Part 29

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----"

CHAPTER XIX

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 t.i.tle! 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 G.o.ds 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.