Transcriber’s Note:
Often, contracted words lack an apostrophe, two words are printed as
one, and elipses and hyphens are used inconsistently. Words may have
multiple spelling variations; all variations were retained as printed.
Dialect, obsolete words, alternative spellings and misspelled words
were not corrected.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or
partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Unprinted
final stops and quotation marks were added.
_Manhattan Transfer_
_By John Dos Passos_
_One Man’s Initiation_
_Three Soldiers_
_Rosinante to the Road Again_
_A Pushcart at the Curb_
_Manhattan Transfer_
_Streets of Night_
[Illustration: design]
Manhattan Transfer
By
John Dos Passos
[Illustration: colophon]
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
MANHATTAN TRANSFER
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY JOHN DOS PASSOS
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
TENTH PRINTING
CONTENTS
_First Section_
I FERRYSLIP _3_
II METROPOLIS _12_
III DOLLARS _49_
IV TRACKS _78_
V STEAMROLLER _112_
_Second Section_
I GREAT LADY ON A WHITE HORSE _129_
II LONGLEGGED JACK OF THE ISTHMUS _144_
III NINE DAYS’ WONDER _169_
IV FIRE ENGINE _202_
V WENT TO THE ANIMALS’ FAIR _217_
VI FIVE STATUTORY QUESTIONS _237_
VII ROLLERCOASTER _249_
VIII ONE MORE RIVER TO JORDAN _255_
_Third Section_
I REJOICING CITY THAT DWELT CARELESSLY _271_
II NICKELODEON _291_
III REVOLVING DOORS _305_
IV SKYSCRAPER _351_
V THE BURTHEN OF NINEVEH _371_
_First Section_
I. Ferryslip
_Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds,
spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered
plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as
the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken
water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches
whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step
out across the crack, men and women press through the
manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed and
jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press._
The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan,
opened the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls
where in the air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung
writhing a faint sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall.
As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips.
The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of
earthworms.
* * * * *
On the ferry there was an old man playing the violin. He had a monkey’s
face puckered up in one corner and kept time with the toe of a cracked
patent-leather shoe. Bud Korpenning sat on the rail watching him, his
back to the river. The breeze made the hair stir round the tight line
of his cap and dried the sweat on his temples. His feet were blistered,
he was leadentired, but when the ferry moved out of the slip, bucking
the little slapping scalloped waves of the river he felt something warm
and tingling shoot suddenly through all his veins. “Say, friend, how
fur is it into the city from where this ferry lands?” he asked a young
man in a straw hat wearing a blue and white striped necktie who stood
beside him.
The young man’s glance moved up from Bud’s road-swelled shoes to the
red wrist that stuck out from the frayed sleeves of his coat, past the
skinny turkey’s throat and slid up cockily into the intent eyes under
the broken-visored cap.
“That depends where you want to get to.”
“How do I get to Broadway?... I want to get to the center of things.”
“Walk east a block and turn down Broadway and you’ll find the center of
things if you walk far enough.”
“Thank you sir. I’ll do that.”
The violinist was going through the crowd with his hat held out, the
wind ruffling the wisps of gray hair on his shabby bald head. Bud
found the face tilted up at him, the crushed eyes like two black pins
looking into his. “Nothin,” he said gruffly and turned away to look
at the expanse of river bright as knifeblades. The plank walls of the
slip closed in, cracked as the ferry lurched against them; there was
rattling of chains, and Bud was pushed forward among the crowd through
the ferryhouse. He walked between two coal wagons and out over a dusty
expanse of street towards yellow streetcars. A trembling took hold of
his knees. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets.
EAT on a lunchwagon halfway down the block. He slid stiffly onto a
revolving stool and looked for a long while at the pricelist.
“Fried eggs and a cup o coffee.”
“Want ’em turned over?” asked the redhaired man behind the counter
who was wiping off his beefy freckled forearms with his apron. Bud
Korpenning sat up with a start.
“What?”
“The eggs? Want em turned over or sunny side up?”
“Oh sure, turn ’em over.” Bud slouched over the counter again with his
head between his hands.
“You look all in, feller,” the man said as he broke the eggs into the
sizzling grease of the frying pan.
“Came down from upstate. I walked fifteen miles this mornin.”
The man made a whistling sound through his eyeteeth. “Comin to the big
city to look for a job, eh?”
Bud nodded. The man flopped the eggs sizzling and netted with brown out
onto the plate and pushed it towards Bud with some bread and butter on
the edge of it. “I’m goin to slip you a bit of advice, feller, and it
won’t cost you nutten. You go an git a shave and a haircut and brush
the hayseeds out o yer suit a bit before you start lookin. You’ll be
more likely to git somethin. It’s looks that count in this city.”
“I kin work all right. I’m a good worker,” growled Bud with his mouth
full.
“I’m tellin yez, that’s all,” said the redhaired man and turned back to
his stove.
* * * * *
When Ed Thatcher climbed the marble steps of the wide hospital entry he
was trembling. The smell of drugs caught at his throat. A woman with a
starched face was looking at him over the top of a desk. He tried to
steady his voice.
“Can you tell me how Mrs. Thatcher is?”
“Yes, you can go up.”
“But please, miss, is everything all right?”
“The nurse on the floor will know anything about the case. Stairs to
the left, third floor, maternity ward.”
Ed Thatcher held a bunch of flowers wrapped in green waxed paper. The
broad stairs swayed as he stumbled up, his toes kicking against the
brass rods that held the fiber matting down. The closing of a door cut
off a strangled shriek. He stopped a nurse.
“I want to see Mrs. Thatcher, please.”
“Go right ahead if you know where she is.”
“But they’ve moved her.”
“You’ll have to ask at the desk at the end of the hall.”
He gnawed his cold lips. At the end of the hall a redfaced woman looked
at him, smiling.
“Everything’s fine. You’re the happy father of a bouncing baby girl.”
“You see it’s our first and Susie’s so delicate,” he stammered with
blinking eyes.
“Oh yes, I understand, naturally you worried.... You can go in and talk
to her when she wakes up. The baby was born two hours ago. Be sure not
to tire her.”
Ed Thatcher was a little man with two blond wisps of mustache and
washedout gray eyes. He seized the nurse’s hand and shook it showing
all his uneven yellow teeth in a smile.
“You see it’s our first.”
“Congratulations,” said the nurse.
Rows of beds under bilious gaslight, a sick smell of restlessly
stirring bedclothes, faces fat, lean, yellow, white; that’s her.
Susie’s yellow hair lay in a loose coil round her little white face
that looked shriveled and twisted. He unwrapped the roses and put them
on the night table. Looking out the window was like looking down into
water. The trees in the square were tangled in blue cobwebs. Down the
avenue lamps were coming on marking off with green shimmer brickpurple
blocks of houses; chimney pots and water tanks cut sharp into a sky
flushed like flesh. The blue lids slipped back off her eyes.
“That you Ed?... Why Ed they are Jacks. How extravagant of you.”
“I couldn’t help it dearest. I knew you liked them.”
A nurse was hovering near the end of the bed.
“Couldn’t you let us see the baby, miss?”
The nurse nodded. She was a lanternjawed grayfaced woman with tight
lips.
“I hate her,” whispered Susie. “She gives me the fidgets that woman
does; she’s nothing but a mean old maid.”
“Never mind dear, it’s just for a day or two.” Susie closed her eyes.
“Do you still want to call her Ellen?”
The nurse brought back a basket and set it on the bed beside Susie.
“Oh isn’t she wonderful!” said Ed. “Look she’s breathing.... And
they’ve oiled her.” He helped his wife to raise herself on her elbow;
the yellow coil of her hair unrolled, fell over his hand and arm. “How
can you tell them apart nurse?”
“Sometimes we cant,” said the nurse, stretching her mouth in a smile.
Susie was looking querulously into the minute purple face. “You’re sure
this is mine.”
“Of course.”
“But it hasnt any label on it.”
“I’ll label it right away.”
“But mine was dark.” Susie lay back on the pillow, gasping for breath.
“She has lovely little light fuzz just the color of your hair.”
Susie stretched her arms out above her head and shrieked: “It’s not
mine. It’s not mine. Take it away.... That woman’s stolen my baby.”
“Dear, for Heaven’s sake! Dear, for Heaven’s sake!” He tried to tuck
the covers about her.
“Too bad,” said the nurse, calmly, picking up the basket. “I’ll have to
give her a sedative.”
Susie sat up stiff in bed. “Take it away,” she yelled and fell back in
hysterics, letting out continuous frail moaning shrieks.
“O my God!” cried Ed Thatcher, clasping his hands.
“You’d better go away for this evening, Mr. Thatcher.... She’ll quiet
down, once you’ve gone.... I’ll put the roses in water.”
On the last flight he caught up with a chubby man who was strolling
down slowly, rubbing his hands as he went. Their eyes met.
“Everything all right, sir?” asked the chubby man.
“Oh yes, I guess so,” said Thatcher faintly.
The chubby man turned on him, delight bubbling through his thick
voice. “Congradulade me, congradulade me; mein vife has giben birth to
a poy.”
Thatcher shook a fat little hand. “Mine’s a girl,” he admitted,
sheepishly.
“It is fif years yet and every year a girl, and now dink of it, a poy.”
“Yes,” said Ed Thatcher as they stepped out on the pavement, “it’s a
great moment.”
“Vill yous allow me sir to invite you to drink a congradulation drink
mit me?”
“Why with pleasure.”
The latticed halfdoors were swinging in the saloon at the corner of
Third Avenue. Shuffling their feet politely they went through into the
back room.
“Ach,” said the German as they sat down at a scarred brown table,
“family life is full of vorries.”
“That it is sir; this is my first.”
“Vill you haf beer?”
“All right anything suits me.”
“Two pottles Culmbacher imported to drink to our little folk.” The
bottles popped and the sepia-tinged foam rose in the glasses. “Here’s
success.... Prosit,” said the German, and raised his glass. He rubbed
the foam out of his mustache and pounded on the table with a pink fist.
“Vould it be indiscreet meester...?”
“Thatcher’s my name.”
“Vould it be indiscreet, Mr. Thatcher, to inquvire vat might your
profession be?”
“Accountant. I hope before long to be a certified accountant.”
“I am a printer and my name is Zucher--Marcus Antonius Zucher.”
“Pleased to meet you Mr. Zucher.”
They shook hands across the table between the bottles.
“A certified accountant makes big money,” said Mr. Zucher.
“Big money’s what I’ll have to have, for my little girl.”
“Kids, they eat money,” continued Mr. Zucher, in a deep voice.
“Wont you let me set you up to a bottle?” said Thatcher, figuring up
how much he had in his pocket. “Poor Susie wouldn’t like me to be
drinking in a saloon like this. But just this once, and I’m learning,
learning about fatherhood.”
“The more the merrier,” said Mr. Zucher. “... But kids, they eat
money.... Dont do nutten but eat and vear out clothes. Vonce I get
my business on its feet.... Ach! Now vot mit hypothecations and the
difficult borrowing of money and vot mit vages going up und these here
crazy tradeunion socialists and bomsters ...”
“Well here’s how, Mr. Zucher.” Mr. Zucher squeezed the foam out of his
mustache with the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “It aint every day
ve pring into the voirld a papy poy, Mr. Thatcher.”
“Or a baby girl, Mr. Zucher.”
The barkeep wiped the spillings off the table when he brought the new
bottles, and stood near listening, the rag dangling from his red hands.
“And I have the hope in mein heart that ven my poy drinks to his poy,
it vill be in champagne vine. Ach, that is how things go in this great
city.”
“I’d like my girl to be a quiet homey girl, not like these young women
nowadays, all frills and furbelows and tight lacings. And I’ll have
retired by that time and have a little place up the Hudson, work in the
garden evenings.... I know fellers downtown who have retired with three
thousand a year. It’s saving that does it.”
“Aint no good in savin,” said the barkeep. “I saved for ten years and
the savings bank went broke and left me nutten but a bankbook for my
trouble. Get a close tip and take a chance, that’s the only system.”
“That’s nothing but gambling,” snapped Thatcher.
“Well sir it’s a gamblin game,” said the barkeep as he walked back to
the bar swinging the two empty bottles.
“A gamblin game. He aint so far out,” said Mr. Zucher, looking down
into his beer with a glassy meditative eye. “A man vat is ambeetious
must take chances. Ambeetions is vat I came here from Frankfort mit at
the age of tvelf years, und now that I haf a son to vork for ... Ach,
his name shall be Vilhelm after the mighty Kaiser.”
“My little girl’s name will be Ellen after my mother.” Ed Thatcher’s
eyes filled with tears.
Mr. Zucher got to his feet. “Vell goodpy Mr. Thatcher. Happy to have
met you. I must go home to my little girls.”
Thatcher shook the chubby hand again, and thinking warm soft thoughts
of motherhood and fatherhood and birthday cakes and Christmas watched
through a sepia-tinged foamy haze Mr. Zucher waddle out through the
swinging doors. After a while he stretched out his arms. Well poor
little Susie wouldn’t like me to be here.... Everything for her and the
bonny wee bairn.
“Hey there yous how about settlin?” bawled the barkeep after him when
he reached the door.
“Didnt the other feller pay?”
“Like hell he did.”
“But he was t-t-treating me....”
The barkeep laughed as he covered the money with a red lipper. “I guess
that bloat believes in savin.”
* * * * *
A small bearded bandylegged man in a derby walked up Allen Street,
up the sunstriped tunnel hung with skyblue and smokedsalmon and
mustardyellow quilts, littered with second hand gingerbread-colored
furniture. He walked with his cold hands clasped over the tails of his
frockcoat, picking his way among packing boxes and scuttling children.
He kept gnawing his lips and clasping and unclasping his hands. He
walked without hearing the yells of the children or the annihilating
clatter of the L trains overhead or smelling the rancid sweet huddled
smell of packed tenements.
At a yellowpainted drugstore at the corner of Canal, he stopped and
stared abstractedly at a face on a green advertising card. It was a
highbrowed cleanshaven distinguished face with arched eyebrows and
a bushy neatly trimmed mustache, the face of a man who had money in
the bank, poised prosperously above a crisp wing collar and an ample
dark cravat. Under it in copybook writing was the signature King C.
Gillette. Above his head hovered the motto NO STROPPING NO HONING. The
little bearded man pushed his derby back off his sweating brow and
looked for a long time into the dollarproud eyes of King C. Gillette.
Then he clenched his fists, threw back his shoulders and walked into
the drugstore.
His wife and daughters were out. He heated up a pitcher of water on the
gasburner. Then with the scissors he found on the mantel he clipped the
long brown locks of his beard. Then he started shaving very carefully
with the new nickelbright safety razor. He stood trembling running his
fingers down his smooth white cheeks in front of the stained mirror. He
was trimming his mustache when he heard a noise behind him. He turned
towards them a face smooth as the face of King C. Gillette, a face with
a dollarbland smile. The two little girls’ eyes were popping out of
their heads. “Mommer ... it’s popper,” the biggest one yelled. His wife
dropped like a laundrybag into the rocker and threw the apron over her
head.
“Oyoy! Oyoy!” she moaned rocking back and forth.
“Vat’s a matter? Dontye like it?” He walked back and forth with the
safety razor shining in his hand now and then gently fingering his
smooth chin.
II. Metropolis
_There were Babylon and Nineveh: they were built of brick.
Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad
arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like
great candles round the Golden Horn ... Steel, glass, tile,
concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed
on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut
glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead
above a thunderstorm._
When the door of the room closed behind him, Ed Thatcher felt very
lonely, full of prickly restlessness. If Susie were only here he’d
tell her about the big money he was going to make and how he’d deposit
ten dollars a week in the savings bank just for little Ellen; that
would make five hundred and twenty dollars a year.... Why in ten years
without the interest that’d come to more than five thousand dollars. I
must compute the compound interest on five hundred and twenty dollars
at four per cent. He walked excitedly about the narrow room. The gas
jet purred comfortably like a cat. His eyes fell on the headline on a
_Journal_ that lay on the floor by the coalscuttle where he had dropped
it to run for the hack to take Susie to the hospital.
MORTON SIGNS THE GREATER NEW YORK BILL
COMPLETES THE ACT MAKING NEW YORK WORLD’S SECOND
METROPOLIS
Breathing deep he folded the paper and laid it on the table. The
world’s second metropolis.... And dad wanted me to stay in his ole fool
store in Onteora. Might have if it hadnt been for Susie.... Gentlemen
tonight that you do me the signal honor of offering me the junior
partnership in your firm I want to present to you my little girl, my
wife. I owe everything to her.
In the bow he made towards the grate his coat-tails flicked a piece of
china off the console beside the bookcase. He made a little clicking
noise with his tongue against his teeth as he stooped to pick it up.
The head of the blue porcelain Dutch girl had broken off from her body.
“And poor Susie’s so fond of her knicknacks. I’d better go to bed.”
He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past
the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He
hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The
world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight
and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps
of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt
a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under
the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards
something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.
The street was suddenly full of running. Somebody out of breath let out
the word Fire.
“Where at?”
The group of boys melted off the stoop across the way. Thatcher turned
back into the room. It was stifling hot. He was all tingling to be
out. I ought to go to bed. Down the street he heard the splattering
hoofbeats and the frenzied bell of a fire engine. Just take a look. He
ran down the stairs with his hat in his hand.
“Which way is it?”
“Down on the next block.”
“It’s a tenement house.”
It was a narrowwindowed sixstory tenement. The hookandladder had just
drawn up. Brown smoke, with here and there a little trail of sparks
was pouring fast out of the lower windows. Three policemen were
swinging their clubs as they packed the crowd back against the steps
and railings of the houses opposite. In the empty space in the middle
of the street the fire engine and the red hosewagon shone with bright
brass. People watched silent staring at the upper windows where shadows
moved and occasional light flickered. A thin pillar of flame began to
flare above the house like a romancandle.
“The airshaft,” whispered a man in Thatcher’s ear. A gust of wind
filled the street with smoke and a smell of burning rags. Thatcher
felt suddenly sick. When the smoke cleared he saw people hanging in a
kicking cluster, hanging by their hands from a windowledge. The other
side firemen were helping women down a ladder. The flame in the center
of the house flared brighter. Something black had dropped from a window
and lay on the pavement shrieking. The policemen were shoving the crowd
back to the ends of the block. New fire engines were arriving.
“Theyve got five alarms in,” a man said. “What do you think of that?
Everyone of ’em on the two top floors was trapped. It’s an incendiary
done it. Some goddam firebug.”
A young man sat huddled on the curb beside the gas lamp. Thatcher found
himself standing over him pushed by the crowd from behind.
“He’s an Italian.”
“His wife’s in that buildin.”
“Cops wont let him get by.” “His wife’s in a family way. He cant talk
English to ask the cops.”
The man wore blue suspenders tied up with a piece of string in back.
His back was heaving and now and then he left out a string of groaning
words nobody understood.
Thatcher was working his way out of the crowd. At the corner a man was
looking into the fire alarm box. As Thatcher brushed past him he caught
a smell of coaloil from the man’s clothes. The man looked up into his
face with a smile. He had tallowy sagging cheeks and bright popeyes.
Thatcher’s hands and feet went suddenly cold. The firebug. The papers
say they hang round like that to watch it. He walked home fast, ran up
the stairs, and locked the room door behind him. The room was quiet and
empty. He’d forgotten that Susie wouldnt be there waiting for him. He
began to undress. He couldnt forget the smell of coaloil on the man’s
clothes.
* * * * *
Mr. Perry flicked at the burdock leaves with his cane. The real-estate
agent was pleading in a singsong voice:
“I dont mind telling you, Mr. Perry, it’s an opportunity not to be
missed. You know the old saying sir ... opportunity knocks but once
on a young man’s door. In six months I can virtually guarantee that
these lots will have doubled in value. Now that we are a part of New
York, the second city in the world, sir, dont forget that.... Why the
time will come, and I firmly believe that you and I will see it, when
bridge after bridge spanning the East River have made Long Island and
Manhattan one, when the Borough of Queens will be as much the heart and
throbbing center of the great metropolis as is Astor Place today.”
“I know, I know, but I’m looking for something dead safe. And besides I
want to build. My wife hasnt been very well these last few years....”
“But what could be safer than my proposition? Do you realize Mr.
Perry, that at considerable personal loss I’m letting you in on
the ground floor of one of the greatest real-estate certainties of
modern times. I’m putting at your disposal not only security, but
ease, comfort, luxury. We are caught up Mr. Perry on a great wave
whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great
deal is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical
inventions--telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless
vehicles--they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the
inside, in the forefront of progress.... My God! I cant begin to tell
you what it will mean....” Poking amid the dry grass and the burdock
leaves Mr. Perry had moved something with his stick. He stooped and
picked up a triangular skull with a pair of spiralfluted horns. “By
gad!” he said. “That must have been a fine ram.”
Drowsy from the smell of lather and bayrum and singed hair that weighed
down the close air of the barbershop, Bud sat nodding, his hands
dangling big and red between his knees. In his eardrums he could still
feel through the snipping of scissors the pounding of his feet on the
hungry road down from Nyack.
“Next!”
“Whassat?... All right I just want a shave an a haircut.”
The barber’s pudgy hands moved through his hair, the scissors whirred
like a hornet behind his ears. His eyes kept closing; he jerked them
open fighting sleep. He could see beyond the striped sheet littered
with sandy hair the bobbing hammerhead of the colored boy shining his
shoes.
“Yessir” a deepvoiced man droned from the next chair, “it’s time the
Democratic party nominated a strong ...”
“Want a neckshave as well?” The barber’s greasyskinned moonface poked
into his.
He nodded.
“Shampoo?”
“No.”
When the barber threw back the chair to shave him he wanted to crane
his neck like a mudturtle turned over on its back. The lather spread
drowsily on his face, prickling his nose, filling up his ears. Drowning
in featherbeds of lather, blue lather, black, slit by the faraway
glint of the razor, glint of the grubbing hoe through blueblack lather
clouds. The old man on his back in the potatofield, his beard sticking
up lathery white full of blood. Full of blood his socks from those
blisters on his heels. His hands gripped each other cold and horny like
a dead man’s hands under the sheet. Lemme git up.... He opened his
eyes. Padded fingertips were stroking his chin. He stared up at the
ceiling where four flies made figure eights round a red crêpe-paper
bell. His tongue was dry leather in his mouth. The barber righted the
chair again. Bud looked about blinking. “Four bits, and a nickel for
the shine.”
ADMITS KILLING CRIPPLED MOTHER ...
“D’yous mind if I set here a minute an read that paper?” he hears his
voice drawling in his pounding ears.
“Go right ahead.”
PARKER’S FRIENDS PROTECT ...
The black print squirms before his eyes. Russians ... MOB STONES ...
(Special Dispatch to the _Herald_) Trenton, N. J.
Nathan Sibbetts, fourteen years old, broke down today after
two weeks of steady denial of guilt and confessed to the
police that he was responsible for the death of his aged
and crippled mother, Hannah Sibbetts, after a quarrel in
their home at Jacob’s Creek, six miles above this city.
Tonight he was committed to await the action of the Grand
Jury.
RELIEVE PORT ARTHUR IN FACE OF ENEMY ... Mrs. Rix Loses Husband’s Ashes.
On Tuesday May 24 at about half past eight o’clock I came
home after sleeping on the steam roller all night, he said,
and went upstairs to sleep some more. I had only gotten to
sleep when my mother came upstairs and told me to get up
and if I didn’t get up she would throw me downstairs. My
mother grabbed hold of me to throw me downstairs. I threw
her first and she fell to the bottom. I went downstairs
and found that her head was twisted to one side. I then
saw that she was dead and then I straightened her neck and
covered her up with the cover from my bed.
Bud folds the paper carefully, lays it on the chair and leaves the
barbershop. Outside the air smells of crowds, is full of noise and
sunlight. No more’n a needle in a haystack ... “An I’m twentyfive years
old,” he muttered aloud. Think of a kid fourteen.... He walks faster
along roaring pavements where the sun shines through the Elevated
striping the blue street with warm seething yellow stripes. No more’n a
needle in a haystack.
* * * * *
Ed Thatcher sat hunched over the pianokeys picking out the Mosquito
Parade. Sunday afternoon sunlight streamed dustily through the heavy
lace curtains of the window, squirmed in the red roses of the carpet,
filled the cluttered parlor with specks and splinters of light. Susie
Thatcher sat limp by the window watching him out of eyes too blue for
her sallow face. Between them, stepping carefully among the roses on
the sunny field of the carpet, little Ellen danced. Two small hands
held up the pinkfrilled dress and now and then an emphatic little voice
said, “Mummy watch my expression.”
“Just look at the child,” said Thatcher, still playing. “She’s a
regular little balletdancer.”
Sheets of the Sunday paper lay where they had fallen from the table;
Ellen started dancing on them, tearing the sheets under her nimble tiny
feet.
“Dont do that Ellen dear,” whined Susie from the pink plush chair.
“But mummy I can do it while I dance.”
“Dont do that mother said.” Ed Thatcher had slid into the Barcarole.
Ellen was dancing to it, her arms swaying to it, her feet nimbly
tearing the paper.
“Ed for Heaven’s sake pick the child up; she’s tearing the paper.”
He brought his fingers down in a lingering chord. “Deary you mustnt do
that. Daddy’s not finished reading it.”
Ellen went right on. Thatcher swooped down on her from the pianostool
and set her squirming and laughing on his knee. “Ellen you should
always mind when mummy speaks to you, and dear you shouldnt be
destructive. It costs money to make that paper and people worked on
it and daddy went out to buy it and he hasnt finished reading it
yet. Ellie understands dont she now? We need con-struction and not
de-struction in this world.” Then he went on with the Barcarole and
Ellen went on dancing, stepping carefully among the roses on the sunny
field of the carpet.
* * * * *
There were six men at the table in the lunch room eating fast with
their hats on the backs of their heads.
“Jiminy crickets!” cried the young man at the end of the table who was
holding a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. “Kin
you beat it?”
“Beat what?” growled a longfaced man with a toothpick in the corner of
his mouth.
“Big snake appears on Fifth Avenue.... Ladies screamed and ran in all
directions this morning at eleven thirty when a big snake crawled
out of a crack in the masonry of the retaining wall of the reservoir
at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street and started to cross the
sidewalk....”
“Some fish story....”
“That aint nothin,” said an old man. “When I was a boy we used to go
snipeshootin on Brooklyn Flats....”
“Holy Moses! it’s quarter of nine,” muttered the young man folding
his paper and hurrying out into Hudson Street that was full of men
and girls walking briskly through the ruddy morning. The scrape of
the shoes of hairyhoofed drayhorses and the grind of the wheels of
producewagons made a deafening clatter and filled the air with sharp
dust. A girl in a flowered bonnet with a big lavender bow under her
pert tilted chin was waiting for him in the door of M. Sullivan & Co.,
Storage and Warehousing. The young man felt all fizzy inside, like a
freshly uncorked bottle of pop.
“Hello Emily!... Say Emily I’ve got a raise.”
“You’re pretty near late, d’you know that?”
“But honest injun I’ve got a two-dollar raise.”
She tilted her chin first to oneside and then to the other.
“I dont give a rap.”
“You know what you said if I got a raise.” She looked in his eyes
giggling.
“An this is just the beginnin ...”
“But what good’s fifteen dollars a week?”
“Why it’s sixty dollars a month, an I’m learning the import business.”
“Silly boy you’ll be late.” She suddenly turned and ran up the littered
stairs, her pleated bellshaped skirt swishing from side to side.
“God! I hate her. I hate her.” Sniffing up the tears that were hot in
his eyes, he walked fast down Hudson Street to the office of Winkle &
Gulick, West India Importers.
* * * * *
The deck beside the forward winch was warm and briny damp. They were
sprawled side by side in greasy denims talking drowsily in whispers,
their ears full of the seethe of broken water as the bow shoved bluntly
through the long grassgray swells of the Gulf Stream.
“J’te dis mon vieux, moi j’fou l’camp à New York.... The minute we
tie up I go ashore and I stay ashore. I’m through with this dog’s
life.” The cabinboy had fair hair and an oval pink-and-cream face; a
dead cigarette butt fell from between his lips as he spoke. “Merde!”
He reached for it as it rolled down the deck. It escaped his hand and
bounced into the scuppers.
“Let it go. I’ve got plenty,” said the other boy who lay on his belly
kicking a pair of dirty feet up into the hazy sunlight. “The consul
will just have you shipped back.”
“He wont catch me.”
“And your military service?”
“To hell with it. And with France too for that matter.”
“You want to make yourself an American citizen?”
“Why not? A man has a right to choose his country.”
The other rubbed his nose meditatively with his fist and then let his
breath out in a long whistle. “Emile you’re a wise guy,” he said.
“But Congo, why dont you come too? You dont want to shovel crap in a
stinking ship’s galley all your life.”
Congo rolled himself round and sat up crosslegged, scratching his head
that was thick with kinky black hair.
“Say how much does a woman cost in New York?”
“I dunno, expensive I guess.... I’m not going ashore to raise hell; I’m
going to get a good job and work. Cant you think of nothing but women?”
“What’s the use? Why not?” said Congo and settled himself flat on the
deck again, burying his dark sootsmudged face in his crossed arms.
“I want to get somewhere in the world, that’s what I mean. Europe’s
rotten and stinking. In America a fellow can get ahead. Birth dont
matter, education dont matter. It’s all getting ahead.”
“And if there was a nice passionate little woman right here now where
the deck’s warm, you wouldn’t like to love her up?”
“After we’re rich, we’ll have plenty, plenty of everything.”
“And they dont have any military service?”
“Why should they? Its the coin they’re after. They dont want to fight
people; they want to do business with them.”
Congo did not answer.
The cabin boy lay on his back looking at the clouds. They floated from
the west, great piled edifices with the sunlight crashing through
between, bright and white like tinfoil. He was walking through tall
white highpiled streets, stalking in a frock coat with a tall white
collar up tinfoil stairs, broad, cleanswept, through blue portals into
streaky marble halls where money rustled and clinked on long tinfoil
tables, banknotes, silver, gold.
“Merde v’là l’heure.” The paired strokes of the bell in the crowsnest
came faintly to their ears. “But dont forget, Congo, the first night we
get ashore ...” He made a popping noise with his lips. “We’re gone.”
“I was asleep. I dreamed of a little blonde girl. I’d have had her if
you hadnt waked me.” The cabinboy got to his feet with a grunt and
stood a moment looking west to where the swells ended in a sharp wavy
line against a sky hard and abrupt as nickel. Then he pushed Congo’s
face down against the deck and ran aft, the wooden clogs clattering on
his bare feet as he went.
* * * * *
Outside, the hot June Saturday was dragging its frazzled ends down
110th Street. Susie Thatcher lay uneasily in bed, her hands spread
blue and bony on the coverlet before her. Voices came through the thin
partition. A young girl was crying through her nose:
“I tell yer mommer I aint agoin back to him.”
Then came expostulating an old staid Jewish woman’s voice: “But Rosie,
married life aint all beer and skittles. A vife must submit and vork
for her husband.”
“I wont. I cant help it. I wont go back to the dirty brute.”
Susie sat up in bed, but she couldn’t hear the next thing the old woman
said.
“But I aint a Jew no more,” suddenly screeched the young girl. “This
aint Russia; it’s little old New York. A girl’s got some rights here.”
Then a door slammed and everything was quiet.
Susie Thatcher stirred in bed moaning fretfully. Those awful people
never give me a moment’s peace. From below came the jingle of a
pianola playing the Merry Widow Waltz. O Lord! why dont Ed come home?
It’s cruel of them to leave a sick woman alone like this. Selfish.
She twisted up her mouth and began to cry. Then she lay quiet again,
staring at the ceiling watching the flies buzz teasingly round the
electriclight fixture. A wagon clattered by down the street. She could
hear children’s voices screeching. A boy passed yelling an extra.
Suppose there’d been a fire. That terrible Chicago theater fire. Oh
I’ll go mad! She tossed about in the bed, her pointed nails digging
into the palms of her hands. I’ll take another tablet. Maybe I can get
some sleep. She raised herself on her elbow and took the last tablet
out of a little tin box. The gulp of water that washed the tablet down
was soothing to her throat. She closed her eyes and lay quiet.
She woke with a start. Ellen was jumping round the room, her green tam
falling off the back of her head, her coppery curls wild.
“Oh mummy I want to be a little boy.”
“Quieter dear. Mother’s not feeling a bit well.”
“I want to be a little boy.”
“Why Ed what have you done to the child? She’s all wrought up.”
“We’re just excited, Susie. We’ve been to the most wonderful play.
You’d have loved it, it’s so poetic and all that sort of thing. And
Maude Adams was fine. Ellie loved every minute of it.”
“It seems silly, as I said before, to take such a young child ...”
“Oh daddy I want to be a boy.”
“I like my little girl the way she is. We’ll have to go again Susie and
take you.”
“Ed you know very well I wont be well enough.” She sat bolt upright,
her hair hanging a straight faded yellow down her back. “Oh, I wish I’d
die ... I wish I’d die, and not be a burden to you any more.... You
hate me both of you. If you didnt hate me you wouldnt leave me alone
like this.” She choked and put her face in her hands. “Oh I wish I’d
die,” she sobbed through her fingers.
“Now Susie for Heaven’s sakes, it’s wicked to talk like that.” He put
his arm round her and sat on the bed beside her.
Crying quietly she dropped her head on his shoulder. Ellen stood
staring at them out of round gray eyes. Then she started jumping up and
down, chanting to herself, “Ellie’s goin to be a boy, Ellie’s goin to
be a boy.”
* * * * *
With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud
walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among
grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and
Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks,
past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts
were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where
steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of
which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the
street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow
brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores,
Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’,
delicatessens. Passing under a scaffolding in front of a new building,
he caught the eye of an old man who sat on the edge of the sidewalk
trimming oil lamps. Bud stood beside him, hitching up his pants;
cleared his throat:
“Say mister you couldnt tell a feller where a good place was to look
for a job?”
“Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller.... There’s jobs
all right.... I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an
I’ve worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.”
“Anything that’s a job’ll do me.”
“Got a union card?”
“I aint got nothin.”
“Cant git no job in the buildin trades without a union card,” said
the old man. He rubbed the gray bristles of his chin with the back
of his hand and leaned over the lamps again. Bud stood staring into
the dustreeking girder forest of the new building until he found the
eyes of a man in a derby hat fixed on him through the window of the
watchman’s shelter. He shuffled his feet uneasily and walked on. If I
could git more into the center of things....
At the next corner a crowd was collecting round a highslung white
automobile. Clouds of steam poured out of its rear end. A policeman was
holding up a small boy by the armpits. From the car a redfaced man with
white walrus whiskers was talking angrily.
“I tell you officer he threw a stone.... This sort of thing has got to
stop. For an officer to countenance hoodlums and rowdies....”
A woman with her hair done up in a tight bunch on top of her head was
screaming, shaking her fist at the man in the car, “Officer he near run
me down he did, he near run me down.”
Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had a
baseball cap on backwards.
“Wassa matter?”
“Hell I dunno.... One o them automoebile riots I guess. Aint you read
the paper? I dont blame em do you? What right have those golblamed
automoebiles got racin round the city knockin down wimen an children?”
“Gosh do they do that?”
“Sure they do.”
“Say ... er ... kin you tell me about where’s a good place to find out
about gettin a job?” The butcherboy threw back head and laughed.
“Kerist I thought you was goin to ask for a handout.... I guess you
aint a Newyorker.... I’ll tell you what to do. You keep right on down
Broadway till you get to City Hall....”
“Is that kinder the center of things?”
“Sure it is.... An then you go upstairs and ask the Mayor.... Tell me
there are some seats on the board of aldermen ...”
“Like hell they are,” growled Bud and walked away fast.
* * * * *
“Roll ye babies ... roll ye lobsided sons o bitches.”
“That’s it talk to em Slats.”
“Come seven!” Slats shot the bones out of his hand, brought the thumb
along his sweaty fingers with a snap. “Aw hell.”
“You’re some great crapshooter I’ll say, Slats.”
Dirty hands added each a nickel to the pile in the center of the circle
of patched knees stuck forward. The five boys were sitting on their
heels under a lamp on South Street.
“Come on girlies we’re waitin for it.... Roll ye little bastards,
goddam ye, roll.”
“Cheeze it fellers! There’s Big Leonard an his gang acomin down the
block.”
“I’d knock his block off for a ...”
Four of them were already slouching off along the wharf, gradually
scattering without looking back. The smallest boy with a chinless face
shaped like a beak stayed behind quietly picking up the coins. Then he
ran along the wall and vanished into the dark passageway between two
houses. He flattened himself behind a chimney and waited. The confused
voices of the gang broke into the passageway; then they had gone on
down the street. The boy was counting the nickels in his hand. Ten.
“Jez, that’s fifty cents.... I’ll tell ’em Big Leonard scooped up the
dough.” His pockets had no bottoms, so he tied the nickels into one of
his shirt tails.
* * * * *
A goblet for Rhine wine hobnobbed with a champagne glass at each
place along the glittering white oval table. On eight glossy white
plates eight canapés of caviar were like rounds of black beads on the
lettuceleaves, flanked by sections of lemon, sprinkled with a sparse
chopping of onion and white of egg. “Beaucoup de soing and dont you
forget it,” said the old waiter puckering up his knobbly forehead. He
was a short waddling man with a few black strands of hair plastered
tight across a domed skull.
“Awright.” Emile nodded his head gravely. His collar was too tight for
him. He was shaking a last bottle of champagne into the nickelbound
bucket of ice on the serving-table.
“Beaucoup de soing, sporca madonna.... Thisa guy trows money about lika
confetti, see.... Gives tips, see. He’s a verra rich gentleman. He dont
care how much he spend.” Emile patted the crease of the tablecloth to
flatten it. “Fais pas, como, ça.... Your hand’s dirty, maybe leava
mark.”
Resting first on one foot then on the other they stood waiting, their
napkins under their arms. From the restaurant below among the buttery
smells of food and the tinkle of knives and forks and plates, came the
softly gyrating sound of a waltz.
When he saw the headwaiter bow outside the door Emile compressed his
lips into a deferential smile. There was a longtoothed blond woman in
a salmon operacloak swishing on the arm of a moonfaced man who carried
his top hat ahead of him like a bumper; there was a little curlyhaired
girl in blue who was showing her teeth and laughing, a stout woman in a
tiara with a black velvet ribbon round her neck, a bottlenose, a long
cigarcolored face ... shirtfronts, hands straightening white ties,
black gleams on top hats and patent leather shoes; there was a weazlish
man with gold teeth who kept waving his arms spitting out greetings in
a voice like a crow’s and wore a diamond the size of a nickel in his
shirtfront. The redhaired cloakroom girl was collecting the wraps. The
old waiter nudged Emile. “He’s de big boss,” he said out of the corner
of his mouth as he bowed. Emile flattened himself against the wall as
they shuffled rustled into the room. A whiff of patchouli when he drew
his breath made him go suddenly hot to the roots of his hair.
“But where’s Fifi Waters?” shouted the man with the diamond stud.
“She said she couldnt get here for a half an hour. I guess the Johnnies
wont let her get by the stage door.”
“Well we cant wait for her even if it is her birthday; never waited for
anyone in my life.” He stood a second running a roving eye over the
women round the table, then shot his cuffs out a little further from
the sleeves of his swallowtail coat, and abruptly sat down. The caviar
vanished in a twinkling. “And waiter what about that Rhine wine coupe?”
he croaked huskily. “De suite monsieur....” Emile holding his breath
and sucking in his cheeks, was taking away the plates. A frost came on
the goblets as the old waiter poured out the coupe from a cut glass
pitcher where floated mint and ice and lemon rind and long slivvers of
cucumber.
“Aha, this’ll do the trick.” The man with the diamond stud raised his
glass to his lips, smacked them and set it down with a slanting look
at the woman next him. She was putting dabs of butter on bits of bread
and popping them into her mouth, muttering all the while:
“I can only eat the merest snack, only the merest snack.”
“That dont keep you from drinkin Mary does it?”
She let out a cackling laugh and tapped him on the shoulder with her
closed fan. “O Lord, you’re a card, you are.”
“Allume moi ça, sporca madonna,” hissed the old waiter in Emile’s ear.
When he lit the lamps under the two chafing dishes on the serving table
a smell of hot sherry and cream and lobster began to seep into the
room. The air was hot, full of tinkle and perfume and smoke. After he
had helped serve the lobster Newburg and refilled the glasses Emile
leaned against the wall and ran his hand over his wet hair. His eyes
slid along the plump shoulders of the woman in front of him and down
the powdered back to where a tiny silver hook had come undone under the
lace rushing. The baldheaded man next to her had his leg locked with
hers. She was young, Emile’s age, and kept looking up into the man’s
face with moist parted lips. It made Emile dizzy, but he couldn’t stop
looking.
“But what’s happened to the fair Fifi?” creaked the man with the
diamond stud through a mouthful of lobster. “I suppose that she made
such a hit again this evening that our simple little party dont appeal
to her.”
“It’s enough to turn any girl’s head.”
“Well she’ll get the surprise of her young life if she expected us to
wait. Haw, haw, haw,” laughed the man with the diamond stud. “I never
waited for anybody in my life and I’m not going to begin now.”
Down the table the moonfaced man had pushed back his plate and was
playing with the bracelet on the wrist of the woman beside him. “You’re
the perfect Gibson girl tonight, Olga.”
“I’m sitting for my portrait now,” she said holding up her goblet
against the light.
“To Gibson?”
“No to a real painter.”
“By Gad I’ll buy it.”
“Maybe you wont have a chance.”
She nodded her blond pompadour at him.
“You’re a wicked little tease, Olga.”
She laughed keeping her lips tight over her long teeth.
A man was leaning towards the man with the diamond stud, tapping with a
stubby finger on the table.
“No sir as a real estate proposition, Twentythird Street has
crashed.... That’s generally admitted.... But what I want to talk to
you about privately sometime Mr. Godalming, is this.... How’s all
the big money in New York been made? Astor, Vanderbilt, Fish.... In
real estate of course. Now it’s up to us to get in on the next great
clean-up.... It’s almost here.... Buy Forty....”
The man with the diamond stud raised one eyebrow and shook his head.
“For one night on Beauty’s lap, O put gross care away ... or something
of the sort.... Waiter why in holy hell are you so long with the
champagne?” He got to his feet, coughed in his hand and began to sing
in his croaking voice:
O would the Atlantic were all champagne
Bright billows of champagne.
Everybody clapped. The old waiter had just divided a baked Alaska and,
his face like a beet, was prying out a stiff champagnecork. When the
cork popped the lady in the tiara let out a yell. They toasted the man
in the diamond stud.
For he’s a jolly good fellow ...