(Alas, poor Jew! As if C. Green, now past considering, had considered nice “considerations”.)
A taxi-driver, impatiently: “That’s what I’m tellin’ yuh!...I watched him for five minutes before he jumped. He crawled out on the window-sill an’ stood there for five minutes, makin’ up his mind!...Sure, I saw him! Lots of people saw him!” Impatiently, irritably:“Why didn’t we do somethin’ to stop him? F’r Chri’ sake, what was there to do? A guy who’d do a thing like that is nuts to start with! You don’t think he’d listen to anything we had to say, do you?...Sure, we did yell at him!...Jesus!...We was almost afraid to yell at him-we made motions to him to get back—tried to hold his attention while the cops sneaked round the corner into the hotel…Sure, the cops got there just a second after he jumped—I don’t know if he jumped when he heard ‘em comin’, or what happened, but Christ!—he stood there gettin’ ready for five minutes while we watched!”
And a stocky little Czech-Bohemian, who works in the delicatessen-fruit store on the corner, one block down: “Did I hear it! Say, you could have heard it for six blocks! Sure! Everybody heard it! The minute that I heard it, I knew what had happened, too! I come runnin’!”
People press and shuffle in the crowd. A man comes round the corner, presses forward to get a better look, runs into alittle fat, baldheaded man in front of him who is staring at the Thing with a pale, sweating, suffering, fascinated face, by accident knocks off the little’ fat man’s straw hat. The new straw hat hits the pavement dryly, the little fat, baldheaded man scrambles for it, clutches it, and turns round on the man who has knocked it off, both of them stammering frantic apologies:
“Oh, excuse me!...‘Scuse me!...‘Scuse me!...Sorry!”
“Quite all right…All right!...All right.”
Observe now, Admiral, with what hypnotic concentration the people are examining the grimy-white facade of your hotel. Watch their faces and expressions. Their eyes go travelling upwards slowly—up—up—up. The building seems to widen curiously, to be distorted, to flare out wedgelike till it threatens to annihilate the sky, overwhelm the will, and crush the spirit. (These optics, too, American, Admiral Drake.) The eyes continue on past storey after storey up the wall until they finally arrive and come to rest with focal concentration on that single open window twelve floors up. It is no jot different from all the other windows, but now the vision of the crowd is fastened on it with a fatal and united interest. And after staring at it fixedly, the eyes come travelling slowly down again—down—down—down—the faces strained a little, mouths all slightly puckered as if something set the teeth on edge—and slowly, with fascinated measurement—down—down—down—until the eyes reach sidewalk, lamp-post, and—the Thing again.
The pavement finally halts all, stops all, answers all. It is the American pavement, Admiral Drake, our universal city sidewalk, a wide, hard stripe of grey-white cement, blocked accurately with dividing lines. It is the hardest, coldest, cruellest, most impersonal pavement in the world: all of the indifference, the atomic desolation, the exploded nothingness of one hundred million nameless “Greens” is in it.
In Europe, Drake, we find worn stone, all hollowed out and rubbed to rounded edges. For centuries the unknown lives of men now buried touched and wore this stone, and when we see it something stirs within our hearts, and something strange and dark and passionate moves our souls, and—“They were here!” we say.
Not so, the streets, the sidewalks, the paved places of America. Has man been here? No. Only unnumbered nameless Greens have swarmed and passed here, and none has left a mark.
Did ever the eye go seaward here with searching for the crowded sail, with longing for the strange and unknown coasts of Spain? Did ever beauty here come home to the heart and eyes? Did ever, in the thrusting crowd, eye look to eye, and face to face, and heart to heart, and know the moment of their meeting—stop and pause, and be oblivious in this place, and make one spot of worn pavement sacred stone? You won’t believe it, Admiral Drake, but it is so—these things have happened on the pavements of America. But, as you see yourself, they have not left their mark.