by Willa Cather
Hallet’s sentence trailed and hung wistfully in the air, while Zablowski put his hand penitently to his forehead.
“Well, Merryweather was quick and he had plenty of spurt and a taking manner, and he didn’t know there had ever been such a thing as modesty or reverence in the world. He got all round the old man, and old Mac was perfectly foolish about him. It was always: ‘Is it well with the young man Absalom?’ Stanley was a year ahead of me in school, and when he came out of Tech the old man took him right into the business. He married a burgeoning Jewish beauty, Fanny Reizenstein, the daughter of the importer, and he hung her with the jewels of the East until she looked like the Song of Solomon done into motion pictures. I will say for Stanley that he never pretended that anything stronger than Botticelli hurt his eyes. He opened like a lotus flower to the sun and made a streak of color, even in New York. Stanley always felt that Boston hadn’t done well by him, and he enjoyed throwing jobs to old Tech men. ‘Largess, largess, Lord Marmion, all as he lighted down.’ When they began breaking ground for the Mont Blanc I applied for a job because I wanted experience in deep foundation work. Stanley beamed at me across his mirror-finish mahogany and offered me something better, but it was foundation work I wanted, so early in the spring I went into the hole with a gang of twenty dagos.3
“It was an awful summer, the worst New York can do in the way of heat, and I guess that’s the worst in the world, excepting India maybe. We sweated away, I and my twenty dagos, and I learned a good deal—more than I ever meant to. Now there was one of those men I liked, and it’s about him I must tell you. His name was Caesaro, but he was so little that the other dagos in the hole called him Caesarino, Little Caesar. He was from the island of Ischia,4 and I had been there when a young lad with my sister who was ill. I knew the particular goat track Caesarino hailed from, and maybe I had seen him there among all the swarms of eager, panting little animals that roll around in the dust and somehow worry through famine and fever and earthquake, with such a curiously hot spark of life in them and such delight in being allowed to live at all.
“Caesarino’s father was dead and his older brother was married and had a little swarm of his own to look out for. Caesarino and the next two boys were coral divers and went out with the fleet twice a year; when they were at home they worked about by the day in the vineyards. He couldn’t remember ever having had any clothes on in summer until he was ten; spent all his time swimming and diving and sprawling about among the nets on the beach. I’ve seen ’em, those wild little water dogs; look like little seals with their round eyes and their hair always dripping. Caesarino thought he could make more money in New York than he made diving for coral, and he was the mainstay of the family. There were ever so many little water dogs after him; his father had done the best he could to insure the perpetuity of his breed before he went under the lava to begin all over again by helping to make the vines grow in that marvelously fruitful volcanic soil. Little Caesar came to New York, and that is where we begin.
“He was one of the twenty crumpled, broken little men who worked with me down in that big hole. I first noticed him because he was so young, and so eager to please, and because he was so especially frightened. Wouldn’t you be at all this terrifying, complicated machinery, after sun and happy nakedness and a goat track on a volcanic island? Haven’t you ever noticed how, when a dago is hurt on the railroad and they trundle him into the station on a truck, another dago always runs alongside him, holding his hand and looking the more scared of the two? Little Caesar ran about the hole looking like that. He was afraid of everything he touched. He never knew what might go off. Suppose we went to work for some great and powerful nation in Asia that had a civilization built on sciences we knew nothing of, as ours is built on physics and chemistry and higher mathematics; and suppose we knew that to these people we were absolutely meaningless as social beings, were waste to clean their engines, as Zablowski says; that we were there to do the dangerous work, to be poisoned in caissons under rivers, blown up by blasts, drowned in coal mines, and that these masters of ours were as indifferent to us individually as the Carthaginians were to their mercenaries? I’ll tell you we’d guard the precious little spark of life with trembling hands.”
“But I say—” sputtered the lawyer from the District Attorney’s office.
“I know, I know, Chambers.” Hallet put out a soothing hand. “We don’t want ’em, God knows. They come. But why do they come? It’s the pressure of their time and ours. It’s not rich pickings they’ve got where I’ve worked with them, let me tell you. Well, Caesarino, with the others, came. The first morning I went on my job he was there, more scared of a new boss than any of the others; literally quaking. He was only twenty-three and lighter than the other men, and he was afraid I’d notice that. I thought he would pull his shoulder blades loose. After one big heave I stopped beside him and dropped a word: ‘Buono soldato.’5 In a moment he was grinning with all his teeth, and he squeaked out: ‘Buono soldato, da boss he talka dago!’ That was the beginning of our acquaintance.”
Hallet paused a moment and smoked thoughtfully. He was a soft man for the iron age, I reflected, and it was easy enough to see why Stanley Merryweather had beaten him in the race. There is a string to every big contract in New York, and Hallet was always tripping over the string.
“From that time on we were friends. I knew just six words of Italian, but that summer I got so I could understand his fool dialect pretty well. I used to feel ashamed of the way he’d look at me, like a girl in love. You see, I was the only thing he wasn’t afraid of. On Sundays we used to poke off to a beach somewhere, and he’d lie in the water all day and tell me about the coral divers and the bottom of the Mediterranean. I got very fond of him. It was my first summer in New York and I was lonesome, too. The game down here looked pretty ugly to me. There were plenty of disagreeable things to think about, and it was better fun to see how much soda water Caesarino could drink. He never drank wine. He used to say: ‘At home—oh, yes-a! At New York,’ making that wise little gesture with the forefinger between his eyes, ‘niente. Sav’-a da mon’.’ But even his economy had its weak spots. He was very fond of candy, and he was always buying ‘pop-a corn off-a da push-a cart.’
“However, he had sent home a good deal of money, and his mother was ailing and he was so frightened about her and so generally homesick that I urged him to go back to Ischia for the winter. There was a poor prospect for steady work, and if he went home he wouldn’t be out much more than if he stayed in New York working on half time. He backed and filled and agonized a good deal, but when I at last got him to the point of engaging his passage he was the happiest dago on Manhattan Island. He told me about it all a hundred times.
“His mother, from the piccola casa on the cliff, could see all the boats go by to Naples. She always watched for them. Possibly he would be able to see her from the steamer, or at least the casa, or certainly the place where the casa stood.
“All this time we were making things move in the hole. Old Macfarlane wasn’t around much in those days. He passed on the results, but Stanley had a free hand as to ways and means. He made amazing mistakes, harrowing blunders. His path was strewn with hairbreadth escapes, but they never dampened his courage or took the spurt out of him. After a close shave he’d simply duck his head and smile brightly and say: ‘Well, I got that across, old Persimmons!’ I’m not underestimating the value of dash and intrepidity. He made the wheels go round. One of his maxims was that men are cheaper than machinery. He smashed up a lot of hands, but he always got out under the fellow-servant act. ‘Never been caught yet, huh?’ he used to say with his pleasant, confiding wink. I’d been complaining to him for a long while about the cabling, but he always put me off; sometimes with a surly insinuation that I was nervous about my own head, but oftener with fine good humor. At last something did happen in the hole.
“It happened one night late in August, after a stretch of heat that broke the thermometers. For a week there hadn’t
been a dry human being in New York. Your linen went down three minutes after you put it on. We moved about insulated in moisture, like the fishes in the sea. That night I couldn’t go down into the hole right away. When you once got down there the heat from the boilers and the steam from the diamond drills made a temperature that was beyond anything the human frame was meant to endure. I stood looking down for a long while, I remember. It was a hole nearly three acres square, and on one side the Savoyard rose up twenty stories, a straight blank, brick wall. You know what a mess such a hole is; great boulders of rock and deep pits of sand and gulleys of water, with drills puffing everywhere and little crumpled men crawling about like tumblebugs under the stream from the searchlight. When you got down into the hole, the wall of the Savoyard seemed to go clear up the sky; that pale blue enamel sky of a midsummer New York night. Six of my men were moving a diamond drill and settling it into a new place, when one of the big clamshells that swung back and forth over the hole fell with its load of sand—the worn cabling, of course. It was directly over my men when it fell. They couldn’t hear anything for the noise of the drill; didn’t know anything had happened until it struck them. They were bending over, huddled together, and the thing came down on them like a brick dropped on an ant hill. They were all buried, Caesarino among them. When we got them out, two were dead and the others were dying. My boy was the first we reached. The edge of the clamshell had struck him, and he was all broken to pieces. The moment we got his head out he began chattering like a monkey. I put my ear down to his lips—the other drills were still going—and he was talking about what I had forgotten, that his steamer ticket was in his pocket and that he was to sail next Saturday. ‘È necessario, signore, è necessario,’ he kept repeating. He had written his family what boat he was coming on, and his mother would be at the door, watching it when it went by to Naples. ‘È necessario, signore, è necessario.’
“When the ambulances got there the orderlies lifted two of the men and had them carried up to the street, but when they turned to Caesarino they dismissed him with a shrug, glancing at him with the contemptuous expression that ambulance orderlies come to have when they see that a man is too much shattered to pick up. He saw the look, and a boy who doesn’t know the language learns to read looks. He broke into sobs and began to beat the rock with his hands. ‘Curs-a da hole, curs-a da hole, curs-a da build’!’ he screamed, bruising his fists on the shale. I caught his hands and leaned over him. ‘Buono soldato, buono soldato,’ I said in his ear. His shrieks stopped, and his sobs quivered down. He looked at me—‘Buono soldato,’ he whispered, ‘ma, perchè?’6 Then the hemorrhage from his mouth shut him off, and he began to choke. In a few minutes it was all over with Little Caesar.
“About that time Merryweather showed up. Some one had telephoned him, and he had come down in his car. He was a little frightened and pleasurably excited. He has the truly journalistic mind—saving your presence, gentlemen—and he likes anything that bites on the tongue. He looked things over and ducked his head and grinned good-naturedly. ‘Well, I guess you’ve got your new cabling out of me now, huh, Freddy?’ he said to me. I went up to the car with him. His hand shook a little as he shielded a match to light his cigarette. ‘Don’t get shaky, Freddy. That wasn’t so worse,’ he said, as he stepped into his car.
“For the next few days I was busy seeing that the boy didn’t get buried in a trench with a brass tag around his neck. On Saturday night I got his pay envelope, and he was paid for only half of the night he was killed; the accident happened about eleven o’clock. I didn’t fool with any paymaster. On Monday morning I went straight to Merryweather’s office, stormed his bower of rose and gold, and put that envelope on the mahogany between us. ‘Merryweather,’ said I, ‘this is going to cost you something. I hear the relatives of the other fellows have all signed off for a few hundred, but this little dago hadn’t any relatives here, and he’s going to have the best lawyers in New York to prosecute his claim for him.’
“Stanley flew into one of his quick tempers. ‘What business is it of yours, and what are you out to do us for?’
“ ‘I’m out to get every cent that’s coming to this boy’s family.’
“ ‘How in hell is that any concern of yours?’
“ ‘Never mind that. But we’ve got one awfully good case, Stanley. I happen to be the man who reported to you on that cabling again and again. I have a copy of the letter I wrote you about it when you were at Mount Desert, and I have your reply.’
“Stanley whirled around in his swivel chair and reached for his checkbook. ‘How much are you gouging for?’ he asked with his baronial pout.
“ ‘Just all the courts will give me. I want it settled there,’ I said, and I got up to go.
“ ‘Well, you’ve chosen your class, sir,’ he broke out, ruffling up red. ‘You can stay in a hole with the guineas7 till the end of time for all of me. That’s where you’ve put yourself.’
“I got my money out of that concern and sent it off to the old woman in Ischia, and that’s the end of the story. You all know Merryweather. He’s the first man in my business since his uncle died, but we manage to keep clear of each other. The Mont Blanc was a milestone for me; one road ended there and another began. It was only a little accident, such as happens in New York every day in the year, but that one happened near me. There’s a lot of waste about building a city. Usually the destruction all goes on in the cellar; it’s only when it hits high, as it did last night, that it sets us thinking. Wherever there is the greatest output of energy, wherever the blind human race is exerting itself most furiously, there’s bound to be tumult and disaster. Here we are, six men, with our pitiful few years to live and our one little chance for happiness, throwing everything we have into that conflagration on Manhattan Island, helping, with every nerve in us, with everything our brain cells can generate, with our very creature heat, to swell its glare, its noise, its luxury, and its power. Why do we do it? And why, in heaven’s name, do they do it? Ma, perchè? as Caesarino said that night in the hole. Why did he, from that lazy volcanic island, so tiny, so forgotten, where life is simple and pellucid and tranquil, shaping itself to tradition and ancestral manners as water shapes itself to the jar, why did he come so far to cast his little spark in the bonfire? And the thousands like him, from islands even smaller and more remote, why do they come, like iron dust to the magnet, like moths to the flame? There must be something wonderful coming. When the frenzy is over, when the furnace has cooled, what marvel will be left on Manhattan Island?”
“What has been left often enough before,” said Zablowski dreamily. “What was left in India, only not half so much.”
Hallet disregarded him. “What it will be is a new idea of some sort. That’s all that ever comes, really. That’s what we are all the slaves of, though we don’t know it. It’s the whip that cracks over us till we drop. Even Merryweather—and that’s where the gods have the laugh on him—every firm he crushes to the wall, every deal he puts through, every cocktail he pours down his throat, he does it in the service of this unborn Idea, that he will never know anything about. Some day it will dawn, serene and clear, and your Moloch8 on the Singer Tower over there will get down and do it Asian obeisance.”
We reflected on this while the launch, returning toward the city, ruffled through the dark furrows of water that kept rolling up into the light. Johnson looked back at the black sea road and said quietly:
“Well, anyhow, we are the people who are doing it, and whatever it is, it will be ours.”
Hallet laughed. “Don’t call anything ours, Johnson, while Zablowski is around.”
“Zablowski,” Johnson said irritably, “why don’t you ever hit back?”
First published in Collier’s, XLIX (May 1912), pp. 16-17, 41.
FROM OBSCURE DESTINIES (1932)
Old Mrs. Harris
I
MRS. DAVID ROSEN, cross-stitch in hand, sat looking out of the window across her own green lawn to the ragged, sunburned ba
ck yard of her neighbours on the right. Occasionally she glanced anxiously over her shoulder toward her shining kitchen, with a black and white linoleum floor in big squares, like a marble pavement.
“Will dat woman never go?” she muttered impatiently, just under her breath. She spoke with a slight accent—it affected only her th’s, and, occasionally, the letter v. But people in Skyline thought this unfortunate, in a woman whose superiority they recognized.
Mrs. Rosen ran out to move the sprinkler to another spot on the lawn, and in doing so she saw what she had been waiting to see. From the house next door a tall, handsome woman emerged, dressed in white broadcloth and a hat with white lilacs; she carried a sunshade and walked with a free, energetic step, as if she were going out on a pleasant errand.
Mrs. Rosen darted quickly back into the house, lest her neighbour should hail her and stop to talk. She herself was in her kitchen housework dress, a crisp blue chambray which fitted smoothly over her tightly corseted figure, and her lustrous black hair was done in two smooth braids, wound flat at the back of her head, like a braided rug. She did not stop for a hat—her dark, ruddy, salmon-tinted skin had little to fear from the sun. She opened the half-closed oven door and took out a symmetrically plaited coffee-cake, beautifully browned, delicately peppered over with poppy seeds, with sugary margins about the twists. On the kitchen table a tray stood ready with cups and saucers. She wrapped the cake in a napkin, snatched up a little French coffee-pot with a black wooden handle, and ran across her green lawn, through the alley-way and the sandy, unkept yard next door, and entered her neighbour’s house by the kitchen.