The old man’s face was flushed with outrage 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 here 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 the stuff up to you.”
For a second or two after the inner door had closed behind the maids, the old man stood there looking at it—just a dull, blank sheet of painted metal with the apartment number on it—and his glance, had anyone seen it, would somehow have conveyed an impression of affectionate regard. Then he closed the elevator door and started down.
Henry, the doorman, was just coming up the basement stairway as the old man reached the ground floor. Uniformed, ready for his night’s work, he passed the service elevator without speaking. John called to him.
“If they try to deliver any packages out front,” he said, “you send ‘em round here.”
Henry turned and looked at the old man unsmilingly, and said curtly: “What?”
“I say,” repeated John, raising his voice a trifle shrilly, for the man’s habitual air of sullen harshness angered him, “if they try to make any deliveries out front, send ‘em back to the service entrance.”
Henry continued to look at him without speaking, and the old man added:
“The Jacks are givin’ a party to-night. They asked me to get everything up in a hurry. If there are any more deliveries, send ‘em back here.”
“Why?” said Henry in his flat, expressionless voice, still staring at him.
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 we got here”—infuriated the old man. A wave of anger, hot and choking, welled up in him, and before he could control himself he rasped out:
“Because that’s where they ought to come—that’s why! Haven’t you been workin’ around places of this kind long enough to know how 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 runnin’ up in the front elevator all the time, mixin’ in with all the people in the house?”
“Why?” said Henry with deliberate insolence. “Why don’t they?”
“Because,” old John shouted, his face now crimson, “if you ain’t got sense enough to know that much, you ought to quit and get a job diggin’ ditches somewhere! 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 by now to do what you’re supposed to do, you’d better quit—that’s why!—and give your job to somebody who knows what it’s all about!”
Henry just looked at him with eyes that were as hard and emotionless as two chunks of agate. Then:
“Listen,” he said in a toneless voice. “You know what’s goin’ 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 the people in this place if they have to ride up in the same elevator with a delivery boy. You’re goin’ to worry about them gettin’ contaminated because they got to ride up in the same car with some guy that carries a package. And you know what’s goin’ to happen, to you, Pop? I’ll tell you what’s goin’ to happen. You’ll be worryin’ about it so much that you ain’t goin’ to notice where you’re goin’. And you’re goin’ to get hit, see?”
The voice was so unyielding in its toneless savagery that for a moment—just for a moment—the old man felt himself trembling all over. And the voice went on:
“You’re goin’ to get hit, Pop. And it ain’t goin’ to be by nothin’ 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’ big and shiny that cost a lot of dough. You’ll get hit by at least a Rolls Royce. And I hope it belongs to one of the people in this house. You’ll die like any other worm, but I want you to push off knowin’ 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. He tried to speak, but no words came. At length, all else having failed him, he managed to choke out the one retort which, in all its infinitely variable modulations, always served perfectly to convey his emotions.
“Oh yeah!” he snarled dryly, and this time the words were loaded with implacable and unforgiving hate.
“Yeah!” said Henry tonelessly, and walked off.