In short, I considered myself mighty clever. 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 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.
"Look out, my friend," I warned myself. "This is no harbor you're falling in love with."
CHAPTER IX
Although at such lucid moments I would sometimes go a-soaring up into the most dazzling dreams, more often I would plunge in gloom. For Eleanore's dreams and all her thoughts seemed centered on her father. From each corner of that watery world, no matter how far we wandered, the high tower from which he looked down on it all would suddenly loom above the horizon. Over the dreariest marshes it peeped and into all our talk he came. A marsh was a place that he was to transform, oily odors were things he would sweep away. For every abuse that I could discover her father was working out some cure. With a whole corps of engineers drafting his dreams into practicable plans, there was no end to the things he could do.
"Here is a girl," I told myself, "so selfishly wrapped up in her father she hasn't a thought for anyone else. She's using me to boom his work, as she has doubtless used writers before me and will use dozens more when I'm gone. No doubt she would like to have dozens of me sitting right here beside her now! It's not at all a romantic thought, but think how she could use me then!" And I would glower at her.
But it is a lonely desolate job to sit and glower at a girl who appears so placidly unaware of the fact that you are glowering. And slowly emerging from my gloom I would wonder about this love that was in her. At times when she talked she made me feel small. My own love for my mother, how utterly selfish it had been. Here was a passion so deep and real it made her almost forget I was there, asking questions, hungrily watching her, trying to learn about her life.
"While I was in school," she said, in that low deliberate voice of hers, "my father and I went abroad every summer. We tramped in the Alps for weeks at a time, keeping way off the beaten paths to watch the work of the Swiss engineers. One of them was a woman. We saw the bridge she'd built over a gorge, and I became deeply excited. Until then I had never had any idea that I could go into my father's work. But now I wondered if I could. That winter in school I really worked. I was dreadfully dull at mathematics, but I wouldn't see it. I made up my mind to go to Cornell for the course on engineering. I worked like a slave for two years to get ready and just succeeded in getting in.
"Then toward the middle of Freshman year I realized that I was becoming a quite absurdly solemn young grind. There were over a hundred girls in college but I had made barely any friends. And so I firmly resolved to be gay. I made a regular business of it and worked my way into clubs and dances, hunting for the girls I liked and scheming to make them like me too. By May I was way behind in my work. I tried to make up, I began cramming every night until one or two in the morning. And I passed my examinations—but that summer I broke down. My father had to drop his work and take me abroad for an operation, and by the time we got back he had lost nearly six months of his time. I decided that as an engineer I was a dismal failure. I'd much better give my father a chance.
"So when he took up this work in New York I spent all my time on our new apartment. I loved fussing with it, I shopped like a bee, and this kept me busy all Autumn. Besides I was going about with Sue. She had managed me long ago at school and I was glad to let her now, for I was hunting for new ideas. But Sue put me on so many committees that by Spring my nerves were in shreds, and again for weeks I was flat on my back.