by Thomas Wolfe
Herbert looked flustered but relieved. For a moment he seemed about to speak, but changed his mind. He stooped swiftly, took a final appraising look at his appearance in the small mirror, and then, turning toward the elevator with a simulation of fine regret, he said: “Well, O.K. O.K. If that’s the way you feel, Pop, about the blondes—only you may change your mind when you get a look at them.”
“No, I won’t change my mind, neither,” said John with sour implacability. “About them, or about you.”
“Oh yeah?” he looked at the old man for the first time now, laughing, the pink spots in his fresh cheeks flushed with good-humor, his lively eyes dancing as he slammed the locker door shut and came back, fully uniformed now for the evening’s work, and took his place upon the elevator. “So that’s the kind of guy you think I am?” he said menacingly, and gently poked the old fellow in the ribs with closed fist. “So you don’t believe me, huh?”
“Ah-h,” said John, grouchily, as he slammed the door, “I wouldn’t believe you on a stack of bibles.” He pulled the lever and the elevator started up. “You’re a lot of talk—that’s what you are. I don’t listen to anything you say.” He pulled the lever back and stopped the elevator and opened the heavy green-sheet door of the service car.
“So that’s the kind of a friend you are?” said Herbert, stepping out into the corridor. Full of himself, full of delight with his own humor, he winked swiftly at two pretty, rosey Irish maids who were waiting to go up, and jerking his thumb toward the old man, he said, “What are you goin’ to do with a guy like this anyway? I go and get him all dated up with a blonde and he won’t believe me when I tell him so. He calls me a big wind.”
“Yeah, that’s what he is,” said the old man grimly to the smiling girls. “He’s a lot of wind. He’s always talkin’ about his girls and I bet he never had a girl in his life. If he saw a blonde he’d run like a rabbit.”
“Oh yeah?” said Herbert.
“Yeah,” said John. His manner had not changed an atom in its tone of unyielding belligerence, but it was somehow evident that the old man was enjoying himself hugely.
“Just a pal!” said Herbert with mock bitterness, appealing to the smiling maids. “O.K., then. When they get here, keep ‘em here till I get back?”
“Well, you’d better not be bringin’ any of’em around here,” said John pugnaciously. He shook his white head shortly with a movement of dogged inflexibility. “I don’t want any of ‘em comin’ around here—blondes or brunettes or red-heads or any of’em,” he muttered. “If they do, you won’t find ‘em when you come back.”
“My friend,” said Herbert bitterly, to the two girls and jerked his thumb toward the old man again. “A pal of mine!” he said and started to depart. “Yeah, pals!” the old man muttered. “And I don’t believe you anyway—” he called out as a happy after-thought after Herbert’s plump retreating figure. “You ain’t got no blondes. You never did have—You’re a momma’s boy!” John cried almost triumphantly, as if he had now had the happiest inspiration of the evening. “That’s what you are!”
Herbert paused at the door and looked back menacingly at the old man, a look that was belied by the exuberant sparkle of his eyes. “Oh yeah?” he said, dangerously.
“Yeah!” said John implacably. Herbert stared fiercely at him a moment, then winked swiftly at the two girls and departed.
“That fellow’s just a lot of talk,” said John sourly as the two girls stepped into the car and he closed the door. “Always talkin’ about his girls and the blondes he’s goin’ to bring around. I’ll betcha he never had a girl in his life. Yeah!” he muttered scornfully, almost to himself as he pulled on the lever and the car started up. “He lives with his mother up in the Bronx, and he’d be scared stiff if a girl ever looked at him.”
“Still, John, Herbert ought to have a girl,” one of the girls said practically, in a thick Irish brogue. “Herbert’s a nice boy, John,”
“Oh he’s all right, I guess,” the old man muttered, in a dry and unwilling tone that nevertheless somehow indicated the genuine, though submerged affection for the younger man.
“And a nice looking boy, too,” the other maid now said.
“Oh, he’ll do, I guess,” said John; and then abruptly: “What are you folks doin’ to-night anyway? There are a whole lot of packages waitin’ to come up.”
“Mrs. Jack is having a big party,” one of the girls said. “And, John, will you bring everything up as soon as you can? There may be something we need right away.”
“Well,” he said in that half-belligerent, half-unwilling tone that seemed to be a kind of inverted attribute to his real good-nature, “I’ll do the best I can. If all of them are giving their big parties to-night—” he grumbled, “It goes on some time here till two or three o’clock in the morning. You’d think all some people had to do was give parties all the time. It would take a whole regiment of men just to carry up packages to them. Yeah!” he muttered angrily to himself. “And what do you get? If you ever got so much as a word of thanks—”
“Oh, John,” one of the girls now said reproachfully, “you know that Mrs. Jack is not like that—You know yourself—”
“Oh, she’s all right, I guess,” said John unwillingly as before, and yet his tone had softened imperceptibly, in his voice there was now the same indefinable note of affection as when he had spoken of Herbert, just a moment before. “If all of them was like her,” he began—but then, as the memory of that night’s experience with the pan-handler came back to him, he muttered angrily: “She’s too good-hearted for her own good. Them pan-handling bums—they swarm around her like flies every time she leaves the building. I saw one the other day get a dollar out of her before she’d gone twenty feet. A big strapping fellow not over thirty, looked like he’d never done a day’s work in his life. She’s crazy to put up with it—I’m goin’ to tell her so, too, when I see her!”
The old man’s face had flushed with anger at the memory. He had opened the door on the service landing, and now, as the girls stepped out, he muttered to himself again: “The kind of people we got in this building oughtn’t to have to put up with it. Well then, I’ll see—” he said concedingly, as one of the maids unlocked the service door and went in. “I’ll get it up to you.”
And for a moment, after the door had closed behind the maids—just a blank dull sheet of painted tin with the numerals 9C on it—the old man stood there looking at it with a glance in which somehow affectionate and friendly regard was evident. Then he closed the elevator door, pulled the lever and started down.
Henry was just coming up from the basement as the old man reached the ground floor. The doorman, uniformed, ready for his night’s work, passed morosely without speaking. John called to him.
“If they try to deliver any packages out front,” he said, “You send ‘em around here.”
Henry turned and looked at the old man unsmilingly a moment, and then said curtly: “What?”
“I say,” said John, raising his voice a trifle shrilly, and speaking more rapidly and excitedly, for he did not like Henry and the man’s habitual air of sullen curtness angered him, “—If they try to make any deliveries out front, send them back to the service entrance.”
Henry continued to look at him without speaking, and the old man added: “The Jacks are giving a party to-night. If there are any deliveries, send them back here.”
Henry stared at him a moment longer and then, without inflection, said: “Why?”
The question, with its insolent suggestion of defied authority—someone’s authority, his own, the management’s, or the authority of “the kind of people that live here”—infuriated the old man, affronted his authority-loving soul. His face, beneath its fine shock of silvery silk-white hair, flamed crimson. A wave of anger, hot, choking, insubordinate, welled up in him, and before he could control himself, he rasped harshly: “Because that’s where they ought to come—that’s why. You ought to know enough for that. Haven’t you been
working around places of this kind long enough to know the way to do? Don’t you know the kind of people we got here don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry with a package to deliver running up in the front elevator all the time, mixing in with all the other people, annoying all the people in the house? You ought to have sense enough to have learned that much by now!” he muttered angrily.
“Why?” said Henry with deliberate insolence. “Why should I?”
“Because,” old John shouted, his face now crimson with anger at the effrontery of this insolence—“if you haven’t got sense enough to know it, you ought to quit and get a job diggin’ ditches somewhere. You got no business in a job like this. You’re bein’ paid to know it. That’s part of your job as doorman in a house like this. If you ain’t got sense enough now to know what a doorman’s supposed to do, to where delivery people are supposed to go in a place like this, you’d better quit and give your job to someone who knows what it’s all about.”
Henry did not answer him for a moment. He just looked at him with an expressionless face and with eyes which were just as hard and emotionless as two chunks of agate.
“Listen,” he said in a moment in a quiet and toneless voice. “You know what’s going to happen to you if you don’t watch out? You’re gettin’ old, Pop, and you’d better watch your step. You’re goin’ to be caught in the street some day worryin’ about what’s goin’ to happen to people in this place if they have to ride up in the same elevator with a delivery boy. You’re goin’ to worry about their gettin’ contaminated—about them catchin’ all sorts of diseases because they got to ride up in the same car with some guy who carries a package. And you know what’s goin’ to happen to you, Pop? I’ll tell you what’s goin’ to happen to you. You’re goin’ to worry about it so much that you ain’t goin’ to notice where you’re goin. And you’re goin’ to get hit. See?”
The tone was so hard, so inflexible, so unyielding in its toneless savagery that for a moment—just for a moment—the old man felt something in him tremble at the unutterable passion of that flinty monotone.
“You’re goin’ to get hit, Pop. That’s what’s goin’ to happen to you. And it ain’t goin’ to be by nothing small or cheap. It ain’t goin’ to be by no Ford truck or by no taxi-cab. You’re goin’ to get hit by somethin’ large and shiny that cost a lot of money. You’re goin’ to die happy. You’ll get hit by at least a Rolls Royce. And I hope it belongs to one of the people in this house. Because I want you to be happy, Pop, I want you to push off knowin’ that it wasn’t done by nothin’ cheap. You’ll die like any other worm, but I want you to know that it was done expensive—by a big Rolls Royce—by one of the people in this house. I just want you to be happy, Pop.”
Old John’s face was purple. The veins in his forehead stood out like corded ropes. For a moment, he glared at the hard and flint-like face of the younger man with such murderous fury that it seemed as if apoplectic strangulation was inevitable. He tried to speak but no words came, and at length, all else having failed him, he managed to choke out, but this time with no vestige of even submerged good-nature, only the implacable dryness of unforgiving hate, the familiar phrase: “Oh yeah?”
Just for a moment more the agate eye, the flint-like face surveyed him with their granite hostility.
“Yeah!” said Henry tonelessly, and departed.
BEFORE THE PARTY
• • •
Mrs. Jack came from her room a little after eight o’clock and walked along the broad hallway that traversed her big apartment from front to rear. Her party would begin at half past eight: Her guests had been invited for that hour, but long experience in these matters told her that the affair would not be going at full swing until after nine. Nevertheless, as she walked along the corridor at a brisk and rapid little step, she felt sharply, as she always felt on these occasions, a tension of excitement, not unpleasurable, even though it was now sharpened, as it always was, but the tincture of an apprehensive doubt.
Would all be ready? Had she forgotten anything? Had the girls followed her instructions? Or had they slipped up somewhere, failed or blundered in some way—would something now be lacking?
The wrinkled line between her eyes grew deeper as she thought about these things. Her firm, short step grew brisker and unconsciously she began rapidly to slip the old jade ring on and off her finger with a quick movement of her small, strong hand. It was a familiar and unconscious gesture, a gesture nervous and impatient that defined her state exactly at a time like this. It was the gesture of an alert, resourceful, highly able person who, through reliance on her own superior powers, her own abilities to make, and act, and do, had come to have a certain instinctive mistrust in the abilities of other people less gifted than herself. So understood, it was a gesture of impatience and some scorn, a scorn not born of arrogance, a scorn assuredly not born of wilful pride or any lack of warm humanity, but one that was inclined to say—at least to feel—a trifle sharply: “Yes, yes, I know! I understand all that. There’s no need telling me all that. Let’s get to the point: What can you do? What have you done? Can I depend on you to do what must be done?”
Such thoughts as these, too swift for utterance, too sharp and quick for definition, like water flicks of light upon a pool, were darting across the surface of her mind as she walked briskly down the hall.
“I wonder if I have forgotten anything?” she was thinking. “And have the girls remembered to do everything I told them? Oh, Lord! If only Molly hasn’t started drinking! What has happened to her anyway? She used to be so clean, so sweet, and so reliable—and now! If she’s begun again I’ll!—And Annie! Oh, she’s as good as gold, of course—But, God! She is a fool! And Cookie!—Well, Cookie, she can cook, but after that she doesn’t know April from July! And if you try to tell her anything she gets flustered and begins to gargle German at you! And then it’s worse than if you never spoke to her at all! As for the rest—well, all you can do is to hope and pray! My God, you’d think they’d be so happy to be here!”
The line between her troubled vision deepened. The ring slipped on and off her finger like a flash and for a moment her flowerlike and fresh-colored face burnt deeper with a glow of righteous indignation!
“You’d think they’d be so happy to be here! You’d think they’d realize how well off they are!—How good a life they lead! The life of Riley! The life of Riley!—that’s what it is!”—she thought indignantly, and then the volutes of her nostrils curved just slightly with the dilation of commiserating scorn: “Oh, well, poor things! I suppose they do the best they can. I suppose all you can do is to reconcile yourself to it—realize that the only way you can be sure that everything will be all right is to do it all yourself!” By this, of course, she meant herself.
By this time she had reached the entrance to the living room and still with the worried tension in her eyes, still slipping the jade ring on and off her nervous little hand, she was looking quickly about the room, taking everything in in a dozen splintered little glances, assuring herself by a moment’s swift inspection that everything was in its proper place.
Her examination pleased her. The worried look about her eyes began to disappear. The little wrinkle went away. She slipped the ring back on her hand and let it stay there, and her earnest little face began to undergo a subtle transformation: in fact, it actually began to bloom, to bloom gently, softly, impalpably, to be suffused by a look of peace and of relief, to take on imperceptibly somehow the look of satisfaction of a child when it regards in silence some object of its love and art and self-creation and finds it good.
The big room was ready for the party. It was just quietly the way that she would have it always, perfectly itself. It was a room of grand dimensions, high ceilinged, so nobly proportioned as hardly to escape a regal massiveness, and yet so subtly toned by the labor of her faultless taste that whatever forbidding coldness its essential grandeur may have had was utterly subdued. To a stranger the room would have seemed not only homelike in its comforta
ble simplicity, but even, on a closer inspection, a trifle shabby. Almost everything in it was somewhat worn. The coverings of some of the chairs and couches had become in places threadbare. On three sides of the room were bookshelves extending a third of the way up. And these bookshelves were crowded with a friendly and somewhat dog-eared company of worn-looking books. Obviously the books had been read and read again. The stiff sets of tooled and costly bindings that ornament the bookshelves of the rich with unread awe were lacking here. Neither was there any evidence of the greedy and revolting mania of the professional collector. If there were “first editions” on these friendly shelves, they were here because their owner liked them and had bought them in the first place to be read. They were here because they had been read, because their covers were well thumbed, dog-eared, warm and worn and homely looking, like all the other books up on the shelves.
The warm light of the room, the crackling dance of the pine logs on the great marble hearth all cast their radiance warmly on the three thousand covers of these worn books. Her eyes warmed and glowed with comfort as she looked at the rich and homely compact of their colors; with pride and satisfaction as she looked at the great books of decoration and design, of painting, drawing, architecture, which she had collected in a dozen countries, upon a dozen voyages, throughout a crowded lifetime of work, of travel and of living. She saw the old worn backs of her favorite books, the novels and the histories, the plays, the poems, the biographies. She took the joy and pride in them that she took in all good things which had been born for use and joy and comfort and the growth of man’s estate. And the good books glowed there in warm light as if the knowledge of their use and comfort was written in their very hue.
Everything else in the great room had this same air of homeliness and use. The very carpet that covered the floor with its pattern of old faded green was somewhat threadbare by long use. The gatelegged table with its pleasant shaded lamp and the stacks of books and magazines upon it had the air of waiting to be used. Upon the creamy slab of marble mantle which was itself a little stained and worn, there was spread out, as always, a green, old, faded strip of Chinese silk. And on top of it there was a little figure of green jade. It was one of those lovely figures of compassionating mercy with carved lifted fingers that the Chinese made. There were a few drawings on the high, cream-colored walls, a few of her own designs, a portrait of herself in her young loveliness at twenty-five which a painter now dead and famous had made long ago.