Ernest Poole

“ And the strike leader who made that speech was not the girl of two weeks before. Her life had been as utterly changed as though she had jumped to another world.
Through Marsh and Joe, in those tense days, I was fast making striker friends. With some I had long intimate talks, I ate many kitchen suppers and spent many evenings in tenement homes. But though by degrees I felt myself drawn to these men who called me "Bill," when alone with each one I felt little or none of that passion born of the crowd as a whole. With a sharp drop, a sudden reaction, I would feel this new world gone. ”

“ Like an automobile in a crowded street our craft was lurching its way in short dashes in and out of the rush hour traffic. The narrow East River was black with boats. Ferries, tugs and steamers seemed to be coming at us from every side. Now with a leap we would be off, then abruptly churning the water behind us we would hold back drifting, watching our chance for another rush. Eleanore's face was glowing now, her hat was off, her neck was tense—and her blue-gray eyes, wide open, fixed on the chaos ahead, were shining with excitement. ”

“ Joe Kramer came to trial for his life. Before his case went to the jury, Joe rose up and addressed them. And he spoke of war and violence. He spoke of how in times of peace this present system murders men—on ships and docks and railroads, in the mills and down in the mines. And as though these lives were not enough, the powers above in this scramble for theirs for all the profits in the world, all the sweated labor they could wring out of humankind, had now flown at each others' throats. And the blood of the common people was pouring out upon the earth. ”

“ I tried to think of this harbor as being run by this common crowd—of the railroads, mines and factories, of the colleges, hospitals and all institutions of research, and the theaters and concert halls, the picture galleries, all the books—all in the power of the crowd.
"It will be a long time," I thought. "Before it comes the crowd must change. But they will change—and fast or slow, I belong with them while they're changing."
Something Joe had once said came into my mind:
"They're the ones who get shot down in wars and worked like dogs in time of peace." ”

“ For here were we from all over the earth, all speaking one tongue, the language in which half the things that had moved the world had been said by men before us. And what sparkling things there were still to be said, what dazzling things we would see and do, in this prodigious onward march of the armies of peace, out of all dark ages into a glad new world for men, where our great smiling goddess of all the arts would reign supreme, where we would dream mighty visions of life and all these visions would come true. ”

“ And with those men, it seemed to me, went all the great gods I had known—gods of civilization and peace—the kind god in my mother's church and the smiling goddess in Paris, the clear-eyed god of efficiency and the awakening god of the crowd—all plunging into this furnace of war with the men in whose spirits all gods dwell—to shrivel and melt in seething flame and emerge at last in strange new forms. ”

“ I would watch the life of a street full of people, and I myself would be on my way to an interview with some noted man or coming away from one who had given me stuff that I knew would write up big—I knew just how! Or at a corner newsstand I would catch a glimpse of my name on the cover of some magazine. Again I would be hurrying home, or into a neighboring florist's or a theater ticket office, or diving into the jolly whirl of the large Fifth Avenue toy shop in which I took an unflagging delight. ”

“ In older ships, like this one, a "lead stoker" stood at the head of the line and set the pace for the others to follow. He was paid more to keep up the pace. But on the fast new liners this pacer was replaced by a gong.
"And at each stroke of the gong you shovel," said Joe. "You do this till you forget your name. Every time the boat pitches, the floor heaves you forward, the fire spurts at you out of the doors and the gong keeps on like a sledgehammer coming down on top of your mind. And all you think of is your bunk and the time when you're to tumble in." ”

“ Starting in small groups of men, I saw it spread out over the mass with the speed of a prairie fire. I felt it that afternoon on the Farm, changing with a startling speed that sure and mighty giant, the crowd, into a blind disordered throng, a mottled mass of groups of men angrily discussing the news. Threats against "scabs" were shouted out, the word "scab" arose on every side. Bitter things were said against "coons," not only "scabs" but "all of 'em, God damn 'em!" There were hints of violence and open threats of sabotage, things done to dock machinery. ”

“ Make way, all you habits and all you institutions, all you little creeds and gods. For I am the start of the voyage—over the ocean to heathen lands! And I am always starting out and always bearing you along! For I am your molder, I am strong—I am a surprise, I am a shock—I am a dazzling passion of hope—I am a grim executioner! I am reality—I am life! I am the book that has no end. ”

“ Men in the North made millions by sending such rotten meat to the front that we had to live on the people down South, we had to go into their farms and plantations and plunder defenseless women and children of all they had to eat! That's war! And war is filthy stinking camps where men die of fever and scurvy like flies—and war is field hospitals so rotten in their management that you see the wounded in long lines—packed together like bloody sardines—bleeding to death for the lack of care! When they're dead you dig big trenches and you pile 'em in like dogs! ”

“ I had a long talk with a broken old bum who lay on his back in an empty truck looking up at the stars and spun me yarns of his life as a cook on ships all up and down the world. Now and again in the small wee hours I met hurrying groups of men, women and children poorly clad, and following them to one of the piers I heard the sleepy watchman growl, "Steerage passengers over there." I saw the dawn break slowly and everything around me grow bluish and unreal. I watched the teamsters come tramping along leading horses, and harness them to the trucks. ”

“ One evening, I remember, when the talk had waxed hot and loud in favor of labor unions and strikes, Sue left the group and with a friend strolled to the lower end of the garden. There I saw them peer over the edge and listen to the drunken stokers singing in the barrooms deep under all these flower beds and all this adventurous chatter of ours. I thought of the years I had spent with Sam—and Sue, too, seemed to me to be having a spree. Poor kid, what a jolt she would get some day. She called me "our dreamer imported from France." ”

“ Marsh. I've never tormented a woman like that and I never will again in my life—not for Sue or anyone else—she can marry anybody she likes!"
"Well, she won't marry Joe," I said. "Did you see his face—poor devil? You've certainly settled that affair."
"Have I?" she asked sharply. And then her curious feminine mind took a long leap. "And what are you going to be," she asked, "in a year from now?" I smiled at her.
"Not a second Marsh," I said. "But even if I were the man in the moon, you'd make a success of being my wife."
"I think I would," said Eleanore. ”

“ He alone had no strike feeling.
Battered and worn from the day's impressions I wanted to be alone and to think. I made my way in and out among trucks and around a dockshed out to a slip. It was filled with barges, tugs and floats jammed in between the two big vessels that loomed one at either pier. It was a dark jumble of spars and masts, derricks, funnels and cabin roofs, all shadowy and silent. A single light gleamed here and there from the long dark deck of the Morgan coaster close to my right. She was heavily loaded still, for she had come to dock too late. ”

“ If you want to help the people you've got to drop your efficiency gods. You've got to believe in the people first—that all they need is waking up to handle this whole job themselves. You've got to see that they're waking up fast—all over the world—that they're getting tired of gods above 'em slowly planning out their lives—that they don't want to wait till they're dead to be happy—that they feel poverty every day like a million tons of brick on their chests—it's got so they can't even breathe without thinking! ”

“ You needn't go as far as Joe Kramer. He may even learn to go slower himself—now that he has had typhoid——"
"Do you think so?" Eleanore put in.
"Why not?" cried Sue impatiently. "If he keeps on at this pace it will kill him! Has he no right to some joy in life? Why should you two have it all? Just think of it, Billy, you have a name, success and a lot of power! Why not use it here? Suppose it is harder! Oh, I get so out of patience with myself and all of us! Our easy, lazy, soft little lives! Why can't we give ourselves a little?" And she went back over all Joe had said. "It's all so real. ”

“ In the summer's night the city streets were still alive with people. I passed brightly lighted thoroughfares where I saw them in crowds, and I knew that this tide of people flowed endlessly through the hundreds of miles of streets that made up the port of New York. Hurrying, idling, talking and laughing, quarreling, fighting, here stopping to look at displays in shop windows, there pouring into "Movies"—and walking, walking, walking on. Going up into their tenement homes to eat and drink, love, breed and sleep, to wake up and come down to another day. ”

“ 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 passion 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." ”

“ I could see those chaps parading with women. I knew them, I had seen them before, for Sue had often brought them here. I enjoyed myself immensely—till Eleanore shot another bolt.
"Smile on, funny one," she said. "You'll be in line yourself in a year."
"I will not be in line!"
"I wonder." She looked at me in a curious way. The mirth went slowly out of her eyes. "There are so many queer new ideas crowding in all around us," she said. "And I know you, Billy, oh, so well—so much better than you know yourself. I know that when you once feel a thing you're just the kind to go into it hard. ”

“ The old-time sailor lived on deck. He had the winds, the sun and the stars. But you live down between steel walls—with only the glare of electric lights in which you sleep and eat and sweat. You work at all kinds of irregular hours, for you there is no day or night. You don't know whether the millionaire and his last and loveliest wife are drinking champagne before going to bed, in their cabin de luxe above you, or taking their coffee the next day at noon. ”

“ In their offices, clubs and homes, in their motors, on yachts and trains, in Chicago and Pittsburgh and other cities, I followed them, making my time suit theirs. Some had no use for me at all, but I found others delighted to talk—like the great Dakota ranchman who ordered twenty thousand copies of the issue in which his story appeared and scattered them like seeds of fame over the various counties of wheat, corn and alfalfa he owned. And in the main I had little trouble. I met often that curious respect which so many men of affairs seem to have, God knows why, for a successful writer. ”

“ Low in the distance, deep but now rising blast on blast, its waves of sound beat into the city—into millions of ears of sleepers and watchers, the well, the sick and the dying, the dead, the lovers, the schemers, the dreamers, the toilers, the spenders and wasters. I shut my eyes and saw the huge liner on which Joe was sailing moving slowly out of its slip. Down at its bottom men shoveling coal to the clang of its gong. ”

“ These comments, I was well aware, were aimed at my feeling for Eleanore, for whom Sue had no longer any good word but only a smiling derision. Her remarks were straight out of Bernard Shaw's most ribald works, and they left me miserably wondering whether any man had ever loved in any way that wasn't the curse or the joke of his life. Sue dwelt on this glorious age of deep radical changes going on, she spoke of Joe Kramer, with whom she still corresponded, and enlarged on the wonderful freedom he had to go anywhere at any time. ”

“ I thought of what Joe had said that day: "When you see the crowd, in a strike like this, loosen up and show all it could be if it had the chance—that sight is so big it blots you out—you sink—you melt into the crowd." ”

“ I felt my father's world reborn, an ocean world where there was nothing without fighting, and where every nation [Pg 380] fought. Ours had already entered the lists, with a loud clamor for ships of our own in which to seize this sudden chance for our share of the trade of the world. The great canal was open at last, and Europe in her turmoil had had not even a moment to look. The East and South lay open to us—rush in and get our share at last! Make our nation strong at sea! ”

“ He worries you. He gets you to think you've no right to be happy!" There was a bitterness in her voice that I had never heard before. "I believe in helping people—of course—whenever I get a chance," she said. "But I don't believe in this—I hate it! It's simply an insane attempt to pull every good thing down! It's too awful even to think of!"
"We're not going to," I told her. "I'm sorry for Joe and I wish I could help him out of his hole. But I can't—it's too infernally deep. He won't listen to any talk from me—and as long as he won't I'll leave him alone. It's hideous enough—God knows. ”

“ These women and girls were all deeply thrilled by the feeling that for the first time in their lives they were doing something all together—for an idea that each one of them had thought rather big and stirring before, but now, as each felt herself a part of this moving, swinging multitude, she felt the idea suddenly loom so infinitely larger and more compelling than before that she herself was astounded. ”

“ And I took this front-page view of New York. I saw it as a city where big exceptional people were endlessly doing sensational things, both in the making and spending of money. I saw it not only as a cluster of tall buildings far downtown, but uptown as well a towering pile of rich hotels and apartments, a region that sparkled gaily at night, lights flashing from tens of thousands of rooms, in and out of which, I felt delightedly, millions of people had passed through the years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I began my story of the harbor. Every hour that I could spare from the stories and sketches of tenement life by which I made a scant living those days, I spent in gathering memories of my long struggle with this place, arranging and selecting and setting them in order for this record of the great life I had seen.
But this wide world has many such lives, many heaving forces. And ever since I had been born, while I had been building for myself one after the other these gods of civilization and peace—all unheeded by my eyes a black shadow had been silently creeping over the whole ocean world. ”

“ I asked.
"As you did," said Eleanore dryly. "He'll look at it and see nothing at all."
"I've half a mind to tell him!"
"Don't," she said. "If you did he would only get excited, become the old-fashioned father and order Sue to leave Joe alone—which would be all that is needed now to make Sue marry Joe in a week."
"Sue is about as selfish," I said hotly, "about as wrapped up in her own little self——"
"As any girl is who thinks she's in love but isn't sure," said Eleanore. "Sue isn't sure—poor thing—she's frightfully unsettled." ”

“ Eleanore said. "You're always reaching out for things—you jump right into them so hard. And even when they hurt you—and you're hurt quite easily—you hang on and won't let go. Look at the way you've gone at the harbor right from the start. And you're doing it still—you've done it all summer until it has made you look like a ghost. And I guess you'll keep on all your life. There are harbors everywhere, you know—in a way the whole world is a harbor—and unless you change a lot you're going to be hurt a good deal." ”

“ And turning from me to Eleanore, "And you?" he added.
Gradually he got the stories of our lives. I told how all my life I had been raising up gods to worship, and how the harbor had flowed silently in beneath, undermining each one and bringing it down.
"It seems to have such a habit of changing," I ended, "that it won't let a fellow stop."
"Lucky people," he answered, smiling, "to have found that out so soon—to have had all this modern life condensed so cozily into your harbor before your eyes—and to have discovered, while you are still young, that life is growth and growth is change. ”

“ I would do this by comparing it to the harbor of long ago, and the snowy white sails of my father's youth.
His youth was gone. A thick-set and gray-headed old figure, he bent over his desk by my side, putting up a fierce, silent fight for his strength, and now slowly getting enough of it back to keep him at his job as a clerk in what had been his warehouse. Only once, coming suddenly into the room, I found him settled deep down in his chair, heavy, inert, his cigar gone out, staring vacantly out of the window. ”

“ Behind us, at the tip of Manhattan, the tall buildings had all melted together into one tremendous mass, with only a pin point of light here and there, a place of shadowy turrets and walls, like some mediæval fortress. Out of it, in contrast to its dimness, rose a garish tower of lights that seemed to be keeping a vigilant watch over all the dark waters, the ships and the docks. The harbor of big companies. ”

“ And at the slight exclamation I made I saw her color slightly and bite her lip as though she were angry with herself for having let that secret out.
"What do you want to write," she asked, "when you get through with the harbor?"
"Fiction," I said. "I want it so hard sometimes that it seems like a long way ahead. It seems sometimes," I added, "like a girl I'd fallen in love with—but I couldn't even ask her—because I'm so infernally poor."
Over the tea cup at her lips Eleanore looked thoughtfully straight into and through and behind my eyes.
"Fiction is such a broad field," she remarked. ”

“ I must be quite a genius. There [Pg 71] were hours with Hugo in Notre Dame in one of its most shadowy corners; with Zola on top of a 'bus at night as it lumbered up into the Belleville slums; with Balzac in an old garden I found; with Guy de Maupassant everywhere, in the gay hum and lights of those endless cafés, from bridges at sunset over the Seine, or far up the long rich dusk of the Champs Élysées, lights twinkling out, and his women laughing, chattering by.
Nothing left in this rich old world but the harbor? Nothing beautiful, fine or great for an eager, hungry, happy young man? ”

“ It was as though my father had packed all the rich and romantic Far East into common barrels and crates and then nailed down the covers. And he himself became for me as common as his warehouse. For in his case, too, I could see the walls.
"I know you now," I thought to myself. He could sit [Pg 24] through supper night after night and not utter a word in his gloom. But the mystery in him was gone. Business, nothing but business. A man and a place to be let alone.
But it was my mother more than anyone else who drew me away from the harbor. ”

“ Day by day I prolonged my conversion, holding obstinately back—while Eleanore revealed to me the miracles worked by the sunset here, and by the clouds, the winds, the tides, the [Pg 141] very smoke and the ships themselves, all playing weird tricks on each other. Slowly the crude glory of it stole upon me unawares—until to my own intense surprise the harbor now became for me a breathing, heaving, gleaming thing filled deep with the rush and the vigor of life. A thing no longer sinister, crushing down on a man's old age—but strangely deeply stirring. ”

“ One night the watchman on the dump showed me a heavy paper bag with what would have been a baby inside. Where had it come from? He didn't know. Tossed out of some woman's life, in a day it would be far out on the ocean, bobbing, bobbing with the rest. Water from here to Naples, water from here to heathen lands. Just here a patch of light from a lantern. That imp from Italy looking down—into something immense and dark and unknown.
He was having a spree with the harbor, as I had had when as small as he. ”