Part 13 (1/2)

”Stories?”

”Not exactly----”

”Poems?” My father's look was tragic.

”No.”

And I tried to explain what I had been doing. But my attempts to tell him of my work in Paris were as forced and as pathetic as his efforts to attend. More and more halting grew our talk, and it ended in a silence that seemed to have no end. Then I went to the fireplace, knocked the ashes out of my pipe, refilled it and relit it. When I returned he was reading his book, and with deep relief I took up mine. That much of it was over.

But again I found myself watching him. What was in my father's mind? Why this anxious almost humble tone? It made me wince, it made me ashamed. I sat there all evening pretending to read and feeling that he was doing the same.

”Good night, dad--I think I'll go to bed.” Even this little came clumsily. I had never called him ”dad” before.

”Good night, my boy. See you at breakfast.”

”Yes, sir.”

I glanced back as I turned down the hall and saw him staring after me.

What was it he was thinking?

CHAPTER II

”I'm closing out my business, son,” he told me the next morning. Here was another sharp surprise. I did not look at him as I asked:

”Why are you doing that, sir?”

”It's a long story. Times have changed and I'm getting old.”

Again I felt suddenly drawn to him. He was old and no mistake. Why had I never known him till now?

”Look here--Dad.” The last word still came awkwardly. ”Can't I possibly be any help down there?” He shot an anxious look at me:

”Why, yes. Glad to have you. I still have a young clerk, but I'd rather have you.”

Only one clerk! What had gone wrong with his business?

But that day in his warehouse, which was empty now and silent, the mere ghost of what it had been, he seemed in no hurry to show me. On the contrary, he went back to the ledgers of his earliest years in business, on the flimsy pretext of looking up certain figures and dates. He did not need me here, the work he gave me was absurd, I was simply taking the musty books from their piles in the closet and arranging them by years on the floor. ”To save time,” he said. But he himself was still on that first ledger, stopping to talk, to ramble off from the pages before him. What did it mean? As the days wore on and he still delayed and at night that strange humility crept again into his eyes, with a slowly deepening suspense I came to feel that instead of saving time my father was trying to make it, to go far back into his vigorous past for strength to meet his present--because he dreaded what we would find at the end of our work on these dusty books, the last grim figure in dollars and cents that would stand there as the result of his life, as the stepping-stone for Sue's and mine. And that was why he wanted me here, this was his way of telling me the story of his business life--before I saw what lay at the end. And as in our work that story unfolded, though at times it cast its spell on me hard, revealing what a man he had been, there were other times when from somewhere deep inside of me a small selfish voice would ask:

”What is left? How much has he saved from the wreck? What is this going to mean to my life?”

In the ledgers his story was still alive. Yellow and dusty as they were, for me day by day they revivified that still odorous old warehouse until I saw it as it had been, a huge dim caravansary for the curious products of all the earth. And that trick of feeling a man, which I had learned in Paris, made me keenly sensitive now to this lonely old stranger by my side with whom I was becoming acquainted. I could feel the pull of these books upon him, pulling him out of his cramped old age back to his glad boundless youth. How suddenly s.p.a.cious they became as he slowly turned the pages. Palm oil from Africa, cotton from Bombay, coffee from Arabia, pepper from Sumatra. Turn the page. Ivory from Zanzibar, salt from Cadiz and wines from Bordeaux. Turn the page. Whale oil from the Arctic, iron from the Baltic, tortoise sh.e.l.l from the Fiji Islands. Turn the page!

India silks and rugs and shawls, indigo, spices! Turn the page!

I began to see the sails speed out along those starlit ocean roads. I began to feel the forces that had shaped my father's life. And little by little I saw in those days what not even my mother had understood, that in my father's business life there had been more than dollars, that what to us had seemed only a hobby, a dull obstinate fixed idea, had been for him a glorious vision--the white sails of American clippers dotting all the seven seas.

So they were in the late Fifties, when leaving the farm in Illinois he came at sixteen to New York and found a job as time clerk in one of the s.h.i.+p yards along the East River. They are all gone now, but then they were humming and teeming with work. And my young father was deeply excited. He told me of his first day here, when he stood on the deck of a ferry and watched three great clippers go out with the tide, bound for Calcutta. There were pictures of these vessels on the walls of his office, stately East Indiamen bearing such names as _Star of Empire_, _Daniel Webster_, _Ocean Monarch_, _Flying Cloud_--s.h.i.+ps known in every port of the world for their speed. He told how a British vessel, her topsails reefed in a gale of wind, would see a white tower of swelling canvas come out of the spray behind her, come booming, staggering, plunging by--a Yankee clipper under royals. Press of sail? No other nation knew what it meant! Our owners took big chances, it was no trade for nervous men!

He found a harbor that welcomed young men, where cabin boys rose to be captains, and clerks became owners of hundreds of s.h.i.+ps. To work! To rise! To own yards like these, build s.h.i.+ps like these and send them rus.h.i.+ng on their courses out to all parts of the ocean world! This had been his vision, at the time when it was bright and clear. And as now he made me feel it, the crude vital force that had been in his dream poured into me deep, made me feel how shut in and one-sided had been my own vision and standards of life, gave me that profound surprise which many sons, I suppose, never have: