The Harbor Part 47

"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----"

CHAPTER XII

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 mult.i.tudes 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 unbia.s.sed 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 ma.s.ses 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.

These tragic people gripped me hard. The stokers down in their foul hole in the bottom of the ship had only disturbed and repelled me. But these crippled dockers in their homes, with their women and their children, their shattered lives, their agony, starvation looming up ahead--they brought a tightening at my throat--nor was it all of pity. For these labor victims were not dumb, I heard the word "strike!" spoken bitterly here, and now I felt that they had a right to this bitter pa.s.sion of revolt.

But still I felt their way was wrong. How could any real good, any sure intelligent remedies for all this fearful misery, come out of the minds of such people as these, who were rushing so blindly into revolt? I went into saloons full of dockers and stokers, and out of the low harsh hubbub there the word "strike!" came repeatedly to my ears, recklessly from drunken tongues. Wherever I went I heard that word. I heard it spoken in many languages, in many tones. Anxious old women said "strike!" with fear. Little street urchins shouted it joyously. Even the greenest foreigner understood its meaning. A little Greek, who had broken his arm and was one of the cases I traced home, understood none of my questions. "You speak no English?" He shook his head. "Strike!" I ventured. Up he leaped. "Yo' bet!" he cried emphatically.

What was it deep within me that leaped up then as though to meet that burning pa.s.sion in his eyes?

"Keep your head," I warned myself. "To change all this means years of work--thinking of the clearest kind. And what clear thinking can these men do? The ships have got them down so low they've no minds left to get out of their holes!"

And yet--as now on every dock, that "strike feeling" in the air kept growing tenser, tenser--its tensity crept into me. What was it that lay just ahead? I felt like a man starting out on a journey--a journey from which when he comes back he will find nothing quite the same.

I had a talk about the strike one day with Eleanore's father. I can still see the affectionate smile on his face, he looked as though he were seeing me off.

"My dear boy," he said, in his kind quiet voice, "don't forget for even a minute that the men who stand behind my work are going to stamp out this strike. This modern world is too complex to allow brute force and violence to wreck all that civilization has done. I'm sorry you've gone into this--but so long as you have, as Eleanore's father, I want you now to promise you won't write a line until the strike is over and you have had plenty of time to get clear. Don't let yourself get swamped in this--remember that you have a wife and a small son to think of."

My father had put it more sharply. He was out of bed now and he seemed to take strength from the news reports that he eagerly read of the struggle so fast approaching.

"At sea," he said, "when stokers try to quit their jobs and force their way on deck, they're either put in irons or shot down as mutineers.

You'll see your friend Kramer dead or in jail. No danger to your sister now. Only see that _you_ keep out of it!"

I did not tell him of my work, for I knew it would only excite him again, and excitement would be dangerous.

"Now you and Eleanore must go home," said Sue that night. "You'll have enough to think of. I'll be all right with father--he knows there's nothing to do but wait, and he's so kind to me now that it hurts. Poor old Dad--how well he means. But he's the old and we're the new--and that's the whole trouble between us." A sudden light came in her eyes.

"The new are bound to win!" she said.

But I was not so sure of the new. To me it was still very vague and chaotic. After we had moved back to New York, at the times when I came home to sleep, Eleanore was silent or quietly casual in her remarks, but I felt her always watching me. One night when I came in very late and thought her asleep, being too tired to sleep myself, I went to our bedroom window and stood looking off down, into the distant expanse of the harbor. How quiet and cool it seemed down there. But presently out of the darkness behind, Eleanore's arm came around me.

"I wonder whether the harbor will ever let us alone," she said. "It was so good to us at first--we were getting on so splendidly. But it's taking hold of us now again--as though we had wandered too far away and were living too smoothly and needed a jolt. Never mind, we're not afraid. Only let's be very sure we know what we are doing."