13. Service Entrance
The great apartment house in which the Jacks lived was not one of those structures which give to the Island of Manhattan its startling and fabulous quality—those cloud-soaring spires whose dizzy vertices and clifflike fa?ades seem to belong to the sky rather than to the earth. These are the special shapes which flash in the mind of a European when he thinks about New York, and which in-bound travellers, looking from a liner’s deck, see in all their appalling and inhuman loveliness sustained there lightly on the water. This building was none of these.
It was—just a building. It was not beautiful, certainly, but it was impressive because of its bulk, its squareness, its sheer mass. From the outside, it seemed to be a gigantic cube of city-weathered brick and stone, punctured evenly by its many windows. It filled an entire block, going through one street to the next.
When one entered it, however, one saw that it had been built in the form of a hollow square about a large central court. This court was laid out on two levels. The lower and middle part was covered with loose gravel, and raised above this level was a terrace for flower-beds, with a broad brick pavement flanking it on all four sides. Beyond the walk there was a span of arches which also ran the whole way round the square, giving the place something of the appearance of an enormous cloister. Leading off this cloister at regular intervals were the entrances to the apartments.
The building was so grand, so huge, so solid-seeming, that it gave the impression of having been hewn from the everlasting rock itself. Yet this was not true at all. The mighty edifice was really tubed and hollowed like a giant honeycomb. It was set on monstrous steel stilts, pillared below on vacancy, and sustained on curving arches. Its nerves, bones, and sinews went down below the level of the street to an underworld of storeyed basements, and below all these, far in the tortured rock, there was the tunnel’s depth.
When dwellers in this imperial tenement felt a tremor at their feet, it was only then that they remembered there were trains beneath them—sleek expresses arriving and departing at all hours of the day and night. Then some of them reflected with immense satisfaction on the cleverness with which New York had reversed an order that is fixed and immutable everywhere else in America, and had made it fashionable to live, not merely “beside the tracks”, but on top of them.
A little before seven o’clock that October evening, old John, who ran one of the service elevators in the building, came walking slowly along Park Avenue, ready to go on duty for his night’s work. He had reached the entrance and was just turning in when he was accosted by a man of thirty or thereabouts who was obviously in a state of vinous dilapidation.
“Say, Bud----”
At the familiar words, uttered in a tone of fawning and yet rather menacing ingratiation, the face of the older man reddened with anger. He quickened his step and tried to move away, but the creature plucked at his sleeve and said in a low voice:
“I was just wonderin’ if you could spare a guy a----”
“Na-h!” the old man snapped angrily. “I can’t spare you anything! I’m twice your age and I always had to work for everything I got! If you was any good you’d do the same!”
“Oh yeah?” the other jeered, looking at the old man with eyes that had suddenly gone hard and ugly.
“Yeah!” old John snapped back, and then turned and passed through the great arched entrance of the building, feeling that his repartee had been a little inadequate, though it was the best he had been able to manage on the spur of the moment. He was still muttering to himself as he started along the colonnade that led to the south wing.
“What’s the matter, Pop?” It was Ed, one of the day elevator men who spoke to him. “Who got your goat?”
“Ah-h,” John muttered, still fuming with resentment, “it’s these panhandling bums! One of ‘em just stopped me outside the building and asked if I could spare a dime! A young fellow no older than you are, tryin’ to panhandle from an old man like me! He ought to be ashamed of himself! I told him so, too. I said: ‘If you was any good you’d work for it!’”
“Yeah?” said Ed, with mild interest.
“Yeah,” said John. “They ought to keep those fellows away from here. They hang round this neighbourhood like flies at a molasses barrel. They got no right to bother the kind of people we got here.”