The Harbor Part 16

"Let's stick to the harbor."

"All right, let's. I know enough about it to like it. Sue says you know enough to hate it. I wonder which of us knows more."

"I do."

"How do you know you do?"

"Because I've been here longer," I said. "I've hated it for twenty odd years."

She looked at me with interest. Her eyes were not at all like Sue's.

Sue's eyes were always wrapped up in herself; Eleanore's in somebody else. They were as intimate as her voice.

"Don't you remember the evening when you took me down to the docks?" she asked.

"I do--very well," I said.

"And do you mean to tell me you didn't like the harbor then?"

"I do--I hated the harbor then. I was scared to death that Sam and his gang would appear around the end of a car."

"Who was Sam?" she asked me. "He sounds like a very dreadful small boy."

Soon she had me telling her of Sam and his gang and the harbor of thrills, from the time of old Belle and the Condor.

"I was a toy piano," I said. "And the harbor was a giant who played on me till I rattled inside. We had a big spree together."

"Not a very healthy spree, was it?" she said quietly, turning her gray-blue eyes on mine. For some reason we suddenly smiled at each other. "You're a good deal like your father--aren't you?" she said. "The same nice twinkle in your eyes. Please go on. What did the harbor do to you next?"

I thought all at once of the August day when she had lain, a girl of twelve, in the fragrant meadow beside me. And as then, so now, the drunken woman's image rose for an instant in my mind.

"It wiped the thrills all out," I said abruptly. I told how the place grew harsh and bare, how I could always feel it there stripping everything naked like itself, and how finally when later in Paris I felt I had shaken it off for life, it had now suddenly jerked me back, let me see what my father had really been, and had then repeated its same old trick, closing in on his great idea and making it look like an old man's hobby, crowding him out and handing us grimly two dull little jobs--one to live on and one to die on.

"It's getting monotonous," I ended.

While I talked she had been watching it, now a bustling ferry crossing, now a tug with a string of barges working up against the tide.

"How do you know it's so bad for you to be brought back from Paris?" she asked me, without looking around.

"Have you ever been in Paris?"

"Yes--and I want to go again. But I don't believe it will ever feel as real to me as this place does. And I shouldn't think it would to you.

Because you were born here, weren't you--and you've been so close to it most of the time that you're all mixed into it, aren't you? I mean you've got your roots here. Why don't you write about _them_ for a while?"

"What?"

"Your roots."

She turned and again her eyes met mine, and again for some reason or other we smiled.

"All right," I a.s.sented gravely, "I'll buy a hoe and start right in."

"That's it, hoe yourself all up. Get as far down as you can remember.

Dig up Belle and Sam, and Sue and your mother and father. Then take a hoe to Paris and find out why you loved it so, and why you hate the harbor. Be sure you get all the hate there is, it makes such interesting reading. Besides, it may be just what you need--it may take the hate all out of your system."

"Who'll print it?" I demanded.

"Oh, some magazine," she said.

"Do you think this kind of thing would interest their readers?"

"It would interest _me_----"

"Thank you. I'll tell the editors that."

"You'll do no such thing," she said severely. "You'll tell the magazine editors, please, that I'm only one of thousands of girls who are getting sick and tired of the happy, cheery little tales they print for our special benefit. It's just about time they got over the habit of thinking of us as sweet, young things and gave us some roots we can grow on."

Another modern girl, I thought.

"Do you, too, want to vote?" I asked her, with a fine, indulgent irony.

"Some day I do," she answered. And then she added with placid scorn, "When I've learned all the political wisdom that _you_ have to teach me." And as if that were a good place to stop, she rose from her seat.

"The others seem to have left us," she said. "I think I'd better be going home."

"Wait a minute, please," I cried. "When am I going to hear about you--and your side of this dismal body of water?"

She looked back at me serenely.

"Wait till you've got yours all written down," she replied. "You see mine might only mix you up. Mine is so much pleasanter. Good night," she added softly.

CHAPTER VI

Until late that night, and again the next day at my desk down in the warehouse, my thoughts kept drifting back to our talk. With a glow of surprise I found I remembered not only every word she had said, but the tones of her voice as she said it, the changing expressions on her face and in her smiling gray-blue eyes. Her picture rose so vividly at times it was uncanny.

"What do you think of her?" asked Sue.

"Mighty little," I replied. I did not care to discuss her with Sue, for I had not liked Sue's tone at all.

But how little I'd learned about Eleanor's life. Where did she live? I didn't know. When I had hinted at coming to see her she had smilingly put me off. What was this pleasant harbor of hers? "Wait till you've got yours all written down," she had said, and had told me nothing whatever.

Yes, I thought disgustedly, I was quite a smart young man. Here I had spent two years in Paris learning how to draw people out. What had she let me draw out of her? What hadn't I let her draw out of me? I wondered how much I had told that girl.

For some reason, in the next few days, my thoughts drifted about with astonis.h.i.+ng ease and made prodigious journeys. I roved far back to my childhood, and there the most tempting incidents rose, and solemn little thoughts and terrors, hopes and plans, some I was proud of, some mighty ashamed of. Roots, roots, up they came, as though they'd just been waiting, down there deep inside of me, for that girl and her hoeing.

Presently, just to get rid of them all, I began writing some of them down. And again I was surprised to find that I was in fine writing trim. The words seemed to come of themselves from my pen and line themselves up triumphantly into scenes of amazing vividness. At least so they looked to me. How good it felt to be at it again. Often up in my room at night I kept on working till nearly dawn. I was getting on famously now.