The Harbor Part 9

In the small apartment we had taken just on the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, on the nights when we were working at home, one of us at his easel, another at his drafting board, myself at my desk, we would knock off at about eleven o'clock and come down for beer and a long smoke in front of the cafe below. A homely little place it was, with two rows of small iron tables in front, and at one of these we would seat ourselves.

Behind us in the window was a long gla.s.s tank of gold fish, into which from time to time a huge cat would reach an omnivorous paw. Often from within the cafe we would hear Russian folk songs played on balalaikas by a group of Russian students there. And between the songs a low hubbub rose, in French and many other tongues, for here were French and Germans, English and Bohemians, Russians and Italians, all gathered here while they were young.

How serene the old city seemed those nights. The street outside was quiet. The motor 'bus, that pest of Paris, had not yet appeared. Only an occasional cab would come tinkling on its way. Our street was absurdly short. At one end was a gay cl.u.s.ter of lights from the crowded cafes of the "Boul' Mich'," at the other were the low lighted arches at the back of the Odeon, from which when the play was over fluffy feminine figures would emerge from the stage entrance; we would hear their low musical voices as they came merrily by us in cabs. Other figures would pa.s.s.

Across the street before us rose the trees and the lofty iron fence of the Gardens, with a rich gloom of shrubs behind, and against this background figures in groups and alone and in couples would come strolling by with their happiness or hurrying eagerly toward it. Or to what else were they hurrying? From what were they coming so slowly away?

These strangers in this setting thrilled me. Comedy, tragedy, character, plot--there seemed nothing in life but the writing of tales--watching, listening, dreaming, finding, then becoming deeply excited, feeling them grow inside of you, planning them out and writing them off, then working them over and over and over, little by little building them up. What a rich absorbing life for a fellow, and for me it still lay all ahead. I had used but twenty-two years of my life, there were fifty left to write in, and what couldn't you write in fifty years!

Often, sitting here at night, I would get an idea and begin to work, and I would keep on until at last the enormous old woman who kept the cafe--we called her "The Blessed Damozel"--would come lumbering out and good humoredly growl,

"Couches-toi donc. Une heure vient de sonner."

There came a brief interruption. Into our street's procession one evening, over its round cobblestones on a bicycle that wearily wobbled, there came a lean dusty figure with something distinctly familiar in the stoop of the big shoulders.

"h.e.l.lo, boys," said a deep gruff voice.

"J. K.!"

It was. Joe Kramer arriving in Paris at midnight on a punctured tire, and cursing the cobblestone pavements over which he had hunted us out.

A hot supper, a bottle of wine, a genial beam on all three of us, and Joe told his story. After leaving college, from New York he had gone to Kansas City, and by the "livest paper" there he had been sent abroad with a bike to do a series of "Sunday specials." He had come over steerage and written an expose of his pa.s.sage. He had two weeks for Paris and then was off to Berlin and Vienna.

"I'm just breaking ground this time, boys," he said. "I want to get the hang of the countries and a start in their infernal languages."

The next day he began to break ground in our city. Early the next morning I found Joe propped up in bed scowling into _Le Matin_ as he tried to b.u.t.t his way through the language into the news events of the day. What I tried to tell him of the Paris I had found made no appeal whatever.

"All right, Kid," he said indulgently. "If I had a dozen lifetimes I might be a poet. But I haven't, so I'll just be a reporter."

And he and his bike plunged into the town. He found its "newspaper row"

that day and a Frenchman to whom he had a letter. With this man Joe went to the Bourse and that night to the Chamber of Deputies. He got "Sunday specials" out of them both, and then went on to the Bourse de Travail.

And in the few spare moments he had, Joe told us of the things he had seen. Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor!

_This_ was not my Paris!

"It is," said J. K. stoutly. "There's no place like a newspaper office to put you right next to the heart of a town."

He would not hear to our seeing him off. I remember him that last night after supper strapping his bag onto his bike and starting off down our quiet old street on his way to the station.

"To-morrow," he said, "I'll stop off in Leipsic. I want to have a look at the college that stirred my young grandfather up for life. I've got his diary with me."

Again, in spite of the gruffness, I felt that wistful quality in him.

J. K. was hunting for something too.

CHAPTER X

But what a relief to see him go, to forget his loud disturbing Paris and again drink deep of mine, the city of great writers.

"I'll never really know them," I thought, "until I can not only talk but think and feel in their language."

So I drudged for hours a day in my room. I inflicted my French on my chums at meals, on defenseless drivers of 'buses who could not rise and go away, and on the Blessed Damozel, who said:

"Va donc, cherches-toi une fille. C'est la seule maniere d'apprendre le Francais."

I was vaguely thrilled by this idea, the more because so far in my life I had had no experience of the kind. On the streets, in cabs, and in cafes I began watching women with different eyes, more eagerly selecting eyes that picked out of the throng the one _her_ of the moment so that for me she was quite alone. She was alone for a thousand reasons, different ones in every case. She was of many ages, rich and poor, now gorgeous and now simply dressed, now a ravishing creature that took your breath and again just funny and very French with a saucy way of wearing her clothes. Her fascinations were always new. I watched her twinkling earrings, her trick of using her lips when she smiled, her hands, her silk clad ankles, her swelling young bust, the small coquettish hat she wore, her shoulders, their expressive shrugs, her quick vivacious movements--and I watched her eyes. Her eyes would meet mine now and then, often with only a challenging smile but again in an intimate dazzling way that gave me a deep swift shock of delight and left me confused and excited.

"In a little while," I thought. I decided to wait till I knew more French. "She'll be strange enough, G.o.d knows," I thought half apprehensively, "even when I can talk her language." And with a feeling almost of relief I would plunge back into my work and forget her. For me she was only an incident in this teeming radiant life.

I must learn French! I strained my ears at lectures, at plays from the top gallery, I hired a tutor to hurry it on. Years later in New York I met a Russian revolutionist come to raise money for his cause. "Three weeks have I been in this country," he said in utter exasperation. "And not yet do I speak fluently the English!" That was how I felt about French. What a delight to begin to feel easy, to catch the fine shadings, the music and color of words and of phrases. How much more pliant and smooth and brilliant than English. How remote from the harbor.

I could study my models now, not only their construction but their small character touches as well. De Maupa.s.sant was still first for me. So simple and sure, with so few strokes but each stroke counting to the full, one suggestive sentence making you imagine the rest, everything else in the world shut out, your mind gripped suddenly and held, focussed on this man and this woman who a moment before had been nothing to you but were now more real than life itself. Especially this woman, what an absorbing creature he made her--and the big human ideas he injected into these pet.i.tes histoires.

I wrote short stories by the score. Each one had a perfectly huge idea but each seemed worse than the one before. I took to myself the advice of Flaubert, and from a table before a cafe I would watch the people around me and jot down the minutest details, I filled whole pages with my strokes. But which to choose to make this person or this scene like no other in the world? There came the rub. How had De Maupa.s.sant done it? The answer came to me one night:

"Not only by watching people. He talked to 'em, lived with 'em, knew their lives!"

The very thing my music teacher had said about Beethoven. How uneasy I had been then, how absurdly young and priggish then in the gingerly way I had gone at the harbor. Thank heaven there was no harbor here. I could enter this life with a wholehearted zest.

I began with one of my roommates. He was to be an architect. A hard-working little chap, his days were filled with sharp suspense. The Beaux Arts entrance examinations were close ahead. If he did not pa.s.s, he told me, his parents in Ohio were too poor to give him another chance.

"If I have to go back to Ohio now," he said in that soft reflective voice of his, "I'll put up cowsheds--later on, barns--and maybe when I'm fifty, a moving picture theater. If I stay here and go back a Beaux Arts man, I can go to New York or Chicago and get right into the center of the big things being done."

With a wet towel bound around his head he used to sit at his work half the night. I watched the lines tighten about his thin lips and between his gray eyes, grew to know the long weariness in them over some problem, the sudden grim joy when the problem worked out. One day he came home early.

"Queer," he said simply. "I can see one side of your face, one side of your body, one leg and one arm. But the other side don't seem to be there." I looked up at him a moment.

"Let's go out for a walk," I suggested. We went for a stroll in the Gardens. And here I was surprised and just a bit ashamed to find that while I had a real sympathy for him I had just as real curiosity. For here was a living ill.u.s.tration of the horror of going blind. I could see his jaws set like a vise, I could hear his low voice talking steadily on as though to keep from thinking. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? We talked of the most commonplace things. But moment by moment, through his voice and his grip on my arm, those sudden waves now of sickening fear, now of keen suspense, now of angry groping around for a foothold, seemed pouring from him right into me, became part of me--while the other part of me stood off and listened.

"By G.o.d, this is life!" said one part of me. "No, it isn't; it's h.e.l.l,"

growled the other part. "This thing has got to be settled!"

I took him to an oculist, and there I had another close view, this time of intense relief.

"Blind? Why, no, you're not going blind," said the oculist kindly. "All you need is"--I heard nothing more. I had never had any idea before of how swift and deep relief could be. On the street outside I heard it not only in his unsteady laugh but in my own as well. We celebrated long that night, and very late he took me to his favorite place down on the lower quay of the river, where with the lights and the sounds of the city far off it felt like some old dungeon. But just over our heads hung the heavy black arch of a stone bridge, and looking up through this arch as a frame we could see close above a gray, luminous ma.s.s rising and rising in great sweeping lines till it filled half the sky--silent, tremendous, Notre Dame. From down here the old edifice seemed alive. And though my friend talked little here, I felt him again coming into me.

And this time it was his religion that came, his curious pa.s.sion for building.

When at last we went home he could see my whole body, and I felt as though I had seen his whole soul.

Then I carefully wrote this down on paper. I put in every touch that I could remember. I rewrote it to make it big, and I made it so big I spoiled it all. I tore this up and began again. For about two weeks I wrote nothing else. But at last I tore up everything. After all, he was a friend of mine.

"But where's the harm," I argued, "so long as I always tear it up? This is real stuff. I'll get somewhere this way if I keep on."

And I did keep on. Shamelessly I wormed my way into friends by the dozen. I found it such an absorbing pursuit I could hardly wait to finish up one before I went on to another. There were such a bewildering lot of them, now that I had pried open my eyes. Would-be painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, rich and poor, tragic ones and comic ones, with the meanest pettiest jealousies, the most b.u.mptious self-conceits, the blindest worship of masters, the most profound humility, ambition so savage it made men inhuman. Many were starving themselves to death.

There was a little Hungarian Jew, an ardent follower of Matisse.