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. Thank a merciful heaven he wasn't tied down! And if Joe would only keep his head and not marry, not get a huge family on his hands——
Sue made me perfectly wretched.
In this frame of mind I again tackled the harbor. Dillon had told me to cover it all, and this I now set out to do. On warm muggy April days I tramped what appeared to me hundreds of miles. But the regions that from Eleanore's boat had somehow had a feeling of being one great living thing, now on these dreary trudging days fell apart into remote bays and slips and rivers, hours of weary travel apart and each without any connection with any other that I could see. Railroad tracks wound in and out with no apparent purpose, dirty freight boats crawled helter-skelter this way and that. All seemed a meaningless chaos and jam.
And still worse, as I wrestled with this confusion I found it was growing stale to me. In those Spring days I was fagged and dull, my imagination would not work. And this gave me a scare. I must not grow stale, I must keep right on making money to meet the bills that were still piling up at home. And so for a Sunday paper I undertook a series on "The Harbor from a Police Boat." This sounded rather exciting and I hoped that it might restore the lost thrill. The harbor that it showed me made fine Sunday reading. Out of its grim waters dead bodies bobbed, dead faces leered, the sodden ends of mysteries. I wrote them and got paid for them. And I felt no thrill but only disgust. I made some more money out of rats—rats in countless ravenous hordes that had a harbor world of their own. This world extended for hundreds of miles in the dark chill places under the wharves. And the rats kept gnawing, gnawing, and slowly with the help of the waves they wore away to splinters and pulp the millions of beams and planks and piles. I found that entire mountains were denuded each year of their forests to supply food for the rats and the ocean here. I was almost a muckraker now.
Meanwhile I had gone in June to the South Brooklyn waterfront and had taken a room in a tenement near the end of a dock peninsula which jutted out into the bay. For I wanted to live in the very heart of the big port's confusion, to grapple alone with the chaos out of which Dillon's engineers were striving to bring order. Here I lived for weeks by myself, taking my meals in a barroom below.
There were no stately liners here. The North River piers with their rich life had been like a show room. I had come down into the factory now. I could see them still, those liners, but only in the distance steaming through the Narrows. Eleanore had gone that way. Here close around me were grimy yards with heaps of coal, enormous sheds, and inland one of the two narrow mouths of the crowded Erie Basin, out of which slid ugly freighters through the dirty water.
Like the Ancient Mariner I sat there dully on the pier watching the life of the ocean go past, and I would try to jot it down. But soon I would stop. "All right—who cares?" The punch was gone. It grew hot and the water smelt. And I was as blue a reporter of life as ever chewed his pencil.
But life has a way of punching up even a stale young writer. In the rooms above mine lived a man and wife who quarreled half way through the night. Night after night they railed at each other, until one horrible night of screams, in the middle of which I heard the man come running downstairs. He banged at my door.
"Come in," I cried morosely. A big figure entered the dark room.