The Harbor Part 39

"Oh Sue," I replied indifferently, "has been enthused so many times."

"Billy."

I turned and saw my wife regarding her husband thoughtfully.

"I wonder," she said, "how long it will be before you can write a love story."

"What?"

"Sue and Joe Kramer, you idiot."

I stared at her dumfounded.

"Did you think all that talk was aimed at you?" my pitiless spouse continued. "Did you think all that change in Joe's point of view was on your account?"

I watched her vigilantly for a while.

"If there's anything in what you say," I remarked carefully at last, "I'll bet at least that Joe doesn't know it. He doesn't even suspect it."

"There are so many things," said Eleanore, "that men don't even suspect in themselves. I'm sorry," she added regretfully. "But that summer vacation we'd planned is off."

"What?"

"Oh, yes, we'll stay right here in town. I see anything but a pleasant summer."

"Suppose," I said excitedly, "you tell me exactly what you _do_ see!"

"I see something," Eleanore answered, "which unless we can stop it may be a very tragic affair. Tragic for Sue because I feel sure that she'd never stand Joe's impossible life. And even worse for your father. He's not only old and excitable, and very weak and feeble, too, but he's so conservative besides that if Sue married Joe Kramer he'd consider her utterly d.a.m.ned."

"But I tell you you're wrong, all wrong!" I broke in. "Joe isn't that kind of an idiot!"

"Joe," said my wife decidedly, "is like every man I've ever met. I found that out when he was sick. He has the old natural longing for a wife and a home of his own. His glimpse of it here may have started it rising.

I'm no more sure than you are that he admits it to himself. But it's there all the same in the back of his mind, and in that same mysterious region he's trying to reconcile marrying Sue to the work which he believes in--even with this strike coming on. It's perfectly pathetic.

"Isn't it funny," she added, "how sometimes everything comes all at once? Do you know what this may mean to us? I don't, I haven't the least idea. I only know that you yourself are horribly unsettled--and that now through this affair of Sue's we'll have to see a good deal of Joe--and not only Joe but his friends on the docks--and not even the quiet ones.

No, we're to see all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this strike--into what Joe calls revolution."

"You may be right," I said doggedly. "But I don't believe it."

CHAPTER VIII

A few days later Joe called me up and asked me to come down to his office. His reason for wanting to see me, he said, he'd rather not give me over the 'phone.

"You're right," I told Eleanore dismally. "He's going to talk to me about Sue."

I dreaded this talk, and I went to see Joe in no easy frame of mind. But it was not about Sue. I saw that in my first glimpse of his face. He sat half around in his office chair listening intensely to a man by his side.

"I want you to meet Jim Marsh," he said.

I felt a little electric shock. So here was the great mob agitator, the notorious leader of strikes. Eleanore's words came into my mind: "We're to meet all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this strike--into what Joe calls revolution." Well, here was the arch-revolutionist, the prime mover of them all. Of middle size, about forty years old, angular and wiry, there was a lithe easy force in his limbs, but he barely moved as he spoke to me now. He just turned his narrow bony face and gave me a glance with his keen gray eyes.

"I've known your work for quite a while," he said in a low drawling voice, "Joe says you're thinking of writing me up."

So this was why Joe had sent for me. I had quite forgotten this idea, but I took to it eagerly now. My work was going badly. Here was something I could do, the life story of a man whose picture would soon be on the front page of every paper in New York. It would interest my magazine, it would give me a chance to get myself clear on this whole ugly business of labor, poverty and strikes. I had evaded it long enough, I would turn and face it squarely now.

"Why yes, I'd like to try," I said.

"He wants to do your picture with the America you know," said Joe. "He says he's ready to be shown."

Marsh glanced out at the harbor.

"If he'll trail around with us for a while we may show him some of it here," he drawled. And then quietly ignoring my presence he continued his talk with Joe, as though taking it for granted that I was an interested friend. I listened there all afternoon.

The thing that struck me most at first was the cool effrontery of the man in undertaking such a struggle. The old type of labor leader had at least stuck to one industry, and had known by close experience what he had to face. But here was a mere outsider, a visitor strolling into a place and saying, "I guess I'll stop all this." Vaguely I knew what he had to contend with. Sitting here in this cheap bare room, the thought of other rooms rose in my mind, s.p.a.cious, handsomely furnished rooms where at one time or another I had interviewed heads of foreign ship companies, railroad presidents, bankers and lawyers, newspaper editors, men representing enormous wealth. All these rooms had been parts of my harbor--a ma.s.sed array of money and brains. He would have all this against him. And to such a struggle I could see no end for him but jail.

For against all this, on his side, was a chaotic army of ignorant men, stokers, dockers, teamsters, scattered all over this immense region, practically unorganized. What possible chance to bring them together?

How could he feel that he had a chance? How much did he already know?

I asked him what he had seen of the harbor. For days, I learned, he had told no one but Joe of his coming, he had wandered about the port by himself. And as a veteran tramp will in some mysterious fashion get the feel of a new town within a few short hours there, so Marsh had got the feel of this place--of a harbor different from mine, for he felt it from the point of view of its hundred thousand laborers. He felt it with its human fringe, he saw its various tenement borders like so many camps and bivouacs on the eve of a battle.

He told a little incident of how the harbor learned he was here. About nine o'clock one morning, as he was waiting his chance to get into one of the North River docks, a teamster recognized him there from a picture of him he had once seen. The news traveled swiftly along the docks, out onto piers and into ships. And at noon, way over in Hoboken, Marsh had overheard a German docker say to the man eating lunch beside him,

"I hear dot tamn fool anarchist Marsh is raising h.e.l.l ofer dere in New York."

"But I wasn't raising h.e.l.l," he drawled. "I was over here studying literature." And he drew out from his pocket a tattered copy of a report, the result of a careful investigation of work on the docks, made recently by a most conservative philanthropic organization.

"'In all the fierce rush of American industry,'" he read, with a quiet smile of derision, "'no work is so long, so irregular or more full of danger. Seven a. m. until midnight is a common work day here, and in the rush season of winter when ships are often delayed by storms and so must make up time in port, the same men often work all day and night and even on into the following day, with only hour and half-hour stops for coffee, food or liquor. This strain makes for accidents. From police reports and other sources we find that six thousand killed and injured every year on the docks is a conservative estimate.'"

Marsh glanced dryly up at me:

"Here's the America I know."

I said nothing. I was appalled. Six thousand killed and injured! I could feel his sharp gray eyes boring down into my soul:

"You wrote up this harbor once."

"Yes," I said.

"Did you write this?"

"No. I would have said it was a lie."

"Do you say so now? These people are a careful crowd." I took the pamphlet from his hands.