"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."
She was a wonderful listener, for she had quietly studied each man until now she had a kind of an instinct for drawing the very best of him out. While he talked she would sit with her sewing, now and then putting in a question to help. Often I would glance at her there and see in her slightly frowning face how intently she was listening, thinking and planning to help me. Sometimes she would meet my look. I would grow tremendously happy.
"In a little while," I thought. But then I would pull myself up with a jerk: "Stop looking at her, you young fool, keep your mind on this engineer. You've got the chance of your life right now to make good in your work and be happy. Don't fall down! Get busy!"
And I did. I threw myself into the lives of these men who were the living embodiments of all that bigness, boldness, punch that had so gripped and thrilled me. The harbor had drawn them around it out of the hum and rush of the country, and here they were in its service, watching it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast populations, plant millions of people this way and that.
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. They were hopelessly used to fighting each other. And I came to feel that all these men, though many were still young in years, belonged to a generation gone by, to the age of individual strife that my father had lived and worked in—and that like him they were all soon to be swept to one side by the inexorable harbor of to-day, which had no further use for them.
It needed bigger men. It needed men like Dillon and behind him those mysterious powers downtown, the men he had called the brains of the nation, who read the signs of the new times, who saw that the West was now fast filling up, that the eyes of the nation were once more turning outward, and that untold resources of wealth were soon to be available for mighty sea adventures, a vast fleet of Yankee ships that should drive the surplus output of our teeming industries into all markets of the world. And the men who saw these things coming were the only ones who were big enough to prepare the country to meet them. My father's dream was at last coming true—too late for him to play a part. He had been but a prophet, a lonely pioneer.
My view of the harbor was different now. I had seen it before as a vast machine molding the lives of all people around it. But now behind the machine itself I felt the minds of its molders. I saw its ponderous masses of freight, its multitudes of people, all pushed and shifted this way and that by these invisible powers. And by degrees I made for myself a new god, and its name was Efficiency.
Here at last was a god that I felt could stand! I had made so many in years gone by, I had been making them all my life—from those first fearful idols, the condors and the cannibals, to the kind old god of goodness in my mother's church and the radiant goddess of beauty and art over there in Paris. One by one I had raised them up, and one by one the harbor had flowed in and dragged them down. But now in my full manhood (for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a god that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its head were all the brains of all the strong men at the top.
And all the multitudes below seemed mere pigmies to me now. I remember one late twilight, coming back from a talk with an engineer, I boarded a ferry at the rush hour and watched the people herd on like sheep. How small they seemed, how petty their thoughts compared to mine, how blind their views of the harbor.
Here was a little Italian bride, just landed, by the looks of her. She kept her face close to her lover's, smiling dazedly into his eyes. And she saw no harbor. Here near by was a fat old gentleman with a highly painted young lady who laughed and swore softly at him as I passed. I sat down beside them a moment and listened. The old gentleman seemed quite mad with desire. He was pleading eagerly, whining. And he saw no harbor. Close by sat two tall serious men. One was deep in a socialist book, the other in news of the Giants. Both seemed equally absorbed. And they saw no harbor. I moved on to another spot, and sitting down by a thin seedy-looking Irish girl I heard her talk to her husband about having their baby's life insured according to a wonderful plan an agent had described to her. As she spoke she was frowning anxiously—and she saw no harbor. Not far away a plump flashy young creature was smiling down on the bootblack who was busily shining her small patent leather shoes. Her bright blue petticoat lifted high displayed the most enticing charms, and as now she turned to look off toward the lights of the city ahead, she smiled gaily to herself. And she saw no harbor. And alone up at the windy bow I found a squat husky laborer with his dirty coat and shirt thrown open wide, the wind on his bare hairy chest, hungrily watching the dock ahead as though for his supper—seeing no harbor, no world's first port, no plans for vast fleets or a great canal, none of the big things shaping his life.