The Harbor Part 37

She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse, and through the last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely felt pulling him back into comfort and strength.

"No, don't talk," I heard her say to him one evening. "I don't want to hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I have to talk of."

But having so thrown him off his guard, as his mind grew clearer she began cautiously drawing him out, despite his awakening hostility to this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard s.n.a.t.c.hes of their talk. She surprised J. K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings.

She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his staring grimly up at my face and saying:

"Bill, that wife of yours is such a born success she scares me.

Everything she touches, everything she brings me to drink, everything she does to this bed, is one thundering success. And she won't listen to anything _but_ success. Your case is absolutely hopeless."

They became grim enemies, and both of them enjoyed it. She let our small son come and sit by the bed. The Indian promptly wors.h.i.+ped Joe as the "longest" man he had ever seen, and they became boon companions.

"It's pathetic," Eleanore told me, "the little things that appeal to him here. Poor boy, he has forgotten what a decent home is like."

As he grew stronger she read the paper to him each morning, and they quarreled with keen relish over the news events of the day. And as at the start, so now, she kept giving him little shocks of surprise by her intimate glimpses into his views. On one of these occasions, after she had come out from his room and was sitting by me reading,

"You're a wonder, Eleanore," I said. "I don't see how you've done it."

"Done what, my love?" asked Eleanore.

"Wormed all his views out of poor old Joe."

"I haven't done anything of the sort. I've learned over half of it from Sue. She comes here often nowadays and we have long talks about him. Sue seems to know him rather well."

This did not interest me much, so I switched our talk to something that did.

"What bothers me," I said with a scowl, "is this infernal work of mine.

What are you smiling at?" I asked.

"Nothing," she murmured, beginning to read. "But if I were you I'd stick at my work. You're good at that."

"Not now I'm not," I retorted. "This story about the opera man isn't coming on at all! The more I work the worse it gets!"

"It will get better soon," she said.

"I'm not so sure. Do you know what I think is the matter with me? I was in to-day looking at Joe asleep, and watching the lines in that face of his it came over me all of a sudden what a wretched coward I've been."

Eleanore looked up suddenly. "I know there's something in all his talk, I've known it every time we've met. His view's so distorted it makes me mad, but there's something in it you can't get away from. Poverty, that's what it is, and I've always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I've taken your father's point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But that hour with J. K. and his stokers gave me a jolt. I can feel it still. I can't seem to shake it off. And I'm beginning to wonder now why I shouldn't get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all--and write about it for a while."

"Don't!" said Eleanore. "Leave it alone!" Her voice was so sharp it startled me.

"Why?" I rejoined. "You've tackled poverty often enough. I guess I can stand it if you can."

"You're different," she answered. "You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You've made a very wonderful start.

You'll be ready to take up fiction soon. When you have, and when you have gone so far that you can feel sure of your name and yourself, then you can look at whatever you like."

"I wonder what Joe would say to that."

"I know what he'll say--he'll agree with me. Why don't you ask him and see for yourself? I'm beginning to like Joe Kramer," she added with a quiet smile, "because now that I understand him I know that his life and yours are so far apart you've hardly a point in common."

And in the talks I had with Joe this soon proved to be the case.

Eleanore brought us together now and listened with deep satisfaction as we clashed and jarred each other apart.

His old indifferent manner was gone, he was softened, grateful for what we had done--but he held to that view of his like a rock, and the view entirely shut me out. Joe saw society wholly as "War Sure" between two cla.s.ses, and I was hopelessly on the wrong side. My work, my home and my whole life were bound in with the upper cla.s.s. And there could be no middle ground. My boasted tolerance, breadth of mind, my readiness to see both sides, my pa.s.sion for showing up all men as human--this to Joe was utter piffle. He had no use for such writing, or in fact for art of any kind. "Propaganda" was all that he wanted, and that could be as cheap as Nick Carter, as sentimental as Uncle Tom's Cabin, if only it had the kind of "punch" that would reach to the ma.s.s of ignorant workers and stir their minds and their pa.s.sions into swift and bitter revolt.

Revolution! That was the thing. The world had come to a time, he said, when talking and writing weren't going to count. We were entering into an age of force--of "direct action"--strikes and the like--by prodigious ma.s.ses of men. All I could do was worthless.

These talks made me so indignant and sore, so sure that Joe and all his work were utterly wild and that only in Dillon and his kind lay any hope of solving the dreary problems of the slums--that within a few days more I was delving into my opera man with a most determined approval. He at least was a builder, he didn't want to tear everything down! In his every scheme for a huge success I took now an aggravated delight. All my recent tolerance gone, I threw into my work an intensity that I had not felt in months.

And Eleanore smiled contentedly, as though she knew what she was about.

When at last the time came for Joe to leave, she was twice as friendly to him as I.

CHAPTER VII

But on coming home one evening two or three weeks later, I found Eleanore reading aloud to our son with a most preoccupied look on her face.

"Joe Kramer is coming to dinner," she said. "He called up this morning and said he'd like to see us again. Sue is coming, too, as it happens.

She dropped in this afternoon."

Sue arrived a few minutes later, and at once I thought to myself I had never seen her look so well. For once she had taken time to dress. She had done her dark hair in a different way. Her color, which had been poor of late, to-night was most becomingly high, and those fascinating eyes of hers were bright with a new animation.

"She has found a fine new hobby," I thought.

Her whole att.i.tude to us was one of eager friendliness. She made much of what we had done for Joe.

"You've no idea," she told me, "how he feels about you both." She was speaking of this when Joe came in.

He, too, appeared to me different. Into his blunt manner had crept a certain awkwardness, his gruff voice had an anxious note at times and his eyes a hungry gleam. Poor old Joe, I thought. It must be hard, despite all his talk, to see what he had missed in life, to feel what a sacrifice he had made. He had thrown everything aside, love, marriage, home, all personal ties--to tackle this bleak business of slums. The more pity he had such a twisted view. And as presently, in reply to Sue's questions, he talked about the approaching strike, my irritation at his talk grew even sharper than before.

"Your stokers and dock laborers," I interrupted hotly, "are about as fit to build up a mew world as they are to build a Brooklyn Bridge! When I compare them to Eleanore's father and his way of going to work"--I broke off in exasperation. "Can't you see you're all just floundering in a perfect swamp of ignorance?"

"No," said Joe. "I don't see that----"

"I'm mighty glad you don't," said Sue. Eleanore turned on her abruptly.

"Why are _you_ glad, Sue?" she asked.

"Because," Sue answered warmly, "he's where every one of us ought to be!

He's doing the work we all ought to be doing!"

"Then why don't you do it?" said Joe. His voice was low but sharp as in pain. The next instant he turned from Sue to me. "I mean all of you," he added. I looked at him in astonishment. What had worked this change in Joe? In our last talk he had shut me out so completely. He seemed to feel this at once himself, for he hastened to explain his remark. He had turned his back on Sue and was talking hard at me:

"Of course I don't mean you can do it, Bill, unless you change your whole view of life. But why shouldn't you change? You're young enough.

That look at a stokehole got hold of you hard. And if you're able to feel like that why not do some thinking, too?"

"I'm thinking," I said grimly. "I told you before that I wanted to help.

But you said----"