st 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 tene