MORNING

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THE WORLD THAT JACK BUILT

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Jack had, in fact, listened to her complaint and her account of her troubles in the recent production, with the serious attention, and the keen interest and amusement that her stories of her labors, trials and adventures in the theatre always aroused in him. For, in addition to the immense pride and satisfaction that he took in his wife’s talent and success, he was like most rich men of his race, and particularly those who like himself were at that time living every day in a glamorous, unreal and fantastic world of speculation, strongly attracted by the glittering electric life of the theatre.

The progress of his life, indeed, for almost forty years when, as a boy, he had come to America from the little Rhineland town where his family lived, had been away from the quieter, more traditional, and as it now seemed to him, duller forms of social and domestic life, to those forms which were more brilliant and gay, filled with the constant excitement of new pleasures and sensations, and touched with a spice of uncertainty and menace. Thus, the life of his boyhood—the life of his family, who for a hundred years had carried on a private banking business in a little German town—now seemed to him impossibly dull and stodgy. Not only its domestic and social life, which went on as steadily and predictably as a clock from year to year, and which was marked at punctual intervals by a ritual of dutiful visits and counter-visits among dull and heavy-witted relatives, but its business life, also, with its small and cautious transactions, now seemed paltry and uninteresting.

His life, in fact, had for more than thirty years moved on from speed to speed and height to height—keeping time indeed, with all the most glittering and magnificent inclines of speed and height in the furious city that roared in constantly increasing crescendo about him. Now, even in the mad world in which he lived by day, and whose feverish air he breathed into his veins exultantly, there was a glittering, inflamed and feverish equality that was not unlike the night time world of the theatre in which the actors lived.

At nine o’clock in the morning of every working day, Jack was hurled southward to his employment in a great glittering projectile of machinery which was driven by a man who was himself as mad, inflamed, and unwholesome as any of the life around him. In fact, as the chauffeur prowled above his wheel, his dark and sallow face twisted bitterly by the thin and dry corruption of his mouth, his dark eyes glittering with the unnatural glitter of a man who is under the stimulation of a powerful drug, he seemed to be a creature which this new and furious city had created—whose dark and tallowy flesh seemed to have compacted, along with millions of other men who wore grey hats and had faces of the same lifeless and unutterable hue, out of a common city-substance—the stuff of pavement grey, as well as the stuff of buildings, towers, tunnels, bridges, streets. In his veins there seemed to pulse and flow, instead of blood, the feverish, unnatural, and electric energies to which the whole city moved, and which was legible in every act and gesture the man made, as his corrupt, toxic and sinister face prowled above the wheel, so that as his glittering eyes darted right and left as, with the coming of a maniac, the skill and precision of a sinister but faultless mechanism grazing, cutting, flanking, shifting, and insinuating, as he snaked and shot the great car through all but impossible channels and with a perilous and murderous recklessness, it was evident that the criminal and unwholesome chemistry that raced in him was consonant to a great energy that was pulsing everywhere about him in the city.

Yet, to be driven downtown by this sinister and toxic creature seemed to increase Jack’s sense of pleasure, power and anticipation: as he sat behind his driver and saw his eyes now sly and cunning as a cat’s, now hard and black as basalt, now glittering humidly with a drugged and feverish glitter, as his thin face now peered slyly and evilly right and left, now full of cunning and sly triumph as he snaked his car ahead around some cursing rival, now from the thin twisted corner of his convulsed, corrupt and obscene mouth snarling out his hate loudly at other drivers or at some careless pedestrian—“Guh-wan ya screwy bast-ed—guh-wan!”—more softly at the menacing figure of some hated policeman, or speaking to his master from the twisted corner of that bitter, sterile, and corrupted mouth a few constricted words of grudging praise for some policeman who would grant him privileges—“Some of dem are all right,” he said. “You know,” with a shining and a powerful and constricted accent of high strained voice. “Dey’re not all basteds. Dis guy”—with a jerk of his head toward the policeman who had nodded and let him pass, “Dis guy’s all right—I know him—Sure! Sure!—He’s a bruddeh of me sisteh-in-law!”

And all of this—the sense of menace, conflict, cunning, stealth, and victory—above all else, the sense of privilege, added to Jack’s pleasure and even gave him a heady tonic joy as he rode down to work. The unnatural and unwholesome energy of his driver, the man’s drugged eyes and evil face evoked in Jack’s mind, as well, a whole image of a phantasmal and theatrical world. Instead of seeing himself as one man among a million other men who were going to their work, in the homely, practical, immensely natural light of day, he saw himself and his driver as two cunning and powerful men pitted triumphantly against the world; and the monstrous and inhuman architecture of the city, the phantasmagoric chaos of the traffic, the web of the streets swarming with a million nameless people became a kind of tremendous, woven, chameleon backdrop for his own activities.

And just as that unreal and feverish world of gigantic speculation in which he lived by day and which had now come to have a theatrical cast and color was everywhere sustained by this great sense of privilege—the privilege of men, selected from the man-swarm of the earth because of some mysterious intuition or knowledge they were supposed to have, to live gloriously with labor or production in a world where their profits mounted incredibly with every ticking of the clock, or where their wealth was increased fabulously by a nod of the head, the lifting of a finger, so did it seem to Jack, not only entirely reasonable but even pleasant and desirable that the whole structure of society from top to bottom should be honeycombed with privilege and dishonesty.

He knew, for example, that this same driver, who was part Irish, part Italian, and whose name was Barney Dorgan, swindled and stole from him right and left, that every bill for fuel, oil, tires, repairs or overhauling was viciously padded, and that this same Dorgan was in collusion with the garage owner for this purpose, and received a handsome percentage from him as a reward. Yet this knowledge did not disturb or anger him. Instead, he actually got from it a feeling of pleasure and cynical amusement. The knowledge that his driver stole from him and that he could afford it, gave him somehow a sense of power and security. If he ever questioned his dishonesty at all, it was only to shrug his shoulders indifferently, and to smile cynically, as he thought: “Well, what of it? There’s nothing to be done about it. They all do it. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.”

Similarly, he knew that the Irish maids in his household were stealing all the time, and that at least three members of the police force, and one red-necked Irish foreman spent most of their hours of ease in his kitchen and in the maid’s sitting or bed rooms. He also knew all these guardians of the public peace and safety ate royally every night of the choicest dishes of his own table, and that their wants were cared for even before he, his family, and his guests were served, and that his best whiskey and his rarest wine was theirs for the asking.

But, beyond an occasional burst of temper and annoyance, when he discovered that a case of real Irish whiskey (with rusty sea-stain markings on the bottles to prove genuineness) had melted away almost overnight, a loss which roused his temper because of the rareness of the thing that was lost, he said very little. When his wife spoke to him about these thefts, as she occasionally did, in a tone of vague protest, saying: “Fritz, I’m sure those girls are stealing from us all the time. I think it’s perfectly dreadful don’t you? What do you think we ought to do about it?” His only answer was to shrug, smile cynically, and show his palms.

And although it had cost him more than seventy thousand dollars the year before to keep the five members of his family provided with shelter, clothing, service, food, and entertainment, the fact that a large part of this shocking amount had been uselessly squandered or actually stolen from him caused him no distress whatever. Rather, the extravagance, waste, and theft in his own household expense seemed to give authority and justification to that unbelievable madness which he was witnessing every day in the business world which was at that time mounting to its crest. Neither was the indifferent and tolerant acquiescence he gave to this shameful waste the fact of a man who feels his world is trembling on a volcanic crust that certain ruin and collapse is before him, and that he will make merry with all his might and spend riotously until the crash comes.

No. He gave consent to the theft, extravagance, and privilege which he saw everywhere about him not because he doubted but because he felt secure, convinced that this rotten fabric was woven from an iron thread, not because he felt that ruin was impending, but because he was so convinced that ruin would never come—that the tottering, corrupt, and fictitious edifice of speculation was hewn from an everlasting granite, and would not only endure, but would grow constantly greater.

It was an ironic fact that this man who now lived in a world in which every value was false and theatrical should see himself, not as a creature tranced by a fatal and illusionary hypnosis, but rather as one of the most practical, hardheaded, and knowing men alive. Just as he saw himself, not as a theatrical and feverishly stimulated gambler, obsessed and fascinated by his belief in the monstrous fictions of speculation, but rather as the brilliant and assured executive of great affairs, who at every moment of the day had his “finger on the pulse” of the nation, so when he looked about him and saw everywhere in the world from top to toe, nothing but the million shapes of privilege, dishonesty and self-interest, he was convinced that this was inevitably “the way things are.”

Moreover, he was so far from understanding that his own vision was distorted, false, and theatrically easy that he flattered himself on his “hardness,” fortitude, and intelligence for being able to swallow this black picture of the earth with such an easy and tolerant cynicism. The real substance of this “hardness,” fortitude, and intelligence was to be painfully demonstrated in another year or two when, the gaudy bubble of his world having been exploded overnight before his eyes, this plump, ruddy, and assured man would shrink and wither visibly in three days’ time into a withered and palsied senility. But now nothing could exceed his satisfaction and assurance. He looked about him in the world, and, like an actor, found that all was false and evil, and this brilliant discovery only enhanced the joy and pleasure which he took in life.

In fact, at this time, the choicest stories which Jack and his associates told each other, all had to do with some facet of human chicanery, treachery, or dishonesty. They delighted in matching stories concerning the delightful knaveries of their chauffeurs, maids, cooks, and bootleggers, describing the way in which these people had cheated them as one would describe the antics of a household pet, and they found that these stories usually had a great success at the dinner table, and were characterized by the ladies as: “I—think—that—is—simply—price-less!” (Spoken slowly and deliberately as if the enormity of the tale has simply stunned and duped the listener into a state of stupefaction), or, “Isn’t it in-credi-i-bul!” (Spoken with a faint rising scream of laughter), or, “Stop! You know he didn’t,” delivered with a lady-like shriek—all the fashionable and stereotyped phrases of people who are listening to an “amusing” story, and whose lives have become so sterile and savorless that laughter has gone dead in them.

One of the stories which Jack told with considerable success, was this: A year or two before (when he was still living in the brown-stone house on Seventy-Fourth Street which he had occupied for more than twenty years), his wife was giving one of the jolly open-house parties which she gave every year to the members of a “group” theatre for which she worked. At the height of the gaiety when the party was in full swing and the actors were swarming through the rooms, gorging themselves to their heart’s content on the food and drink with which the tables were groaning, there was a great screaming of police sirens on Riverside Drive, which was only a few yards away, and the sound of motors driven to their limit, and approaching at top speed. Suddenly the entourage turned into the street, and to the alarm and stupefaction of Jack and his guests who now came crowding to the windows, a high powered motor truck flanked by two motor cycle policemen pulled up before the house, and stopped. Immediately, two burly policemen, whom Jack instantly recognized as friends of his Irish maids, sprang to the ground from the body of the truck and, in a moment more, with the assistance of their fellows, they had lifted a great barrel from the truck and were solemnly rolling it across the sidewalk and up the stone steps into the house. This enormous barrel, it turned out, was filled with beer which the police were contributing to the party to which they had also been invited (for when Jack’s wife, Esther, gave a party to the actors and actresses, the maids and cook were also allowed to give a party to the policemen and firemen in the kitchen).

Then when Jack, moved and gratified by this act of friendship and generosity on the part of the police, had desired to pay them for the trouble and expense the beer had cost them, one of the policeman had said to him: “Forget about it, boss. It’s O.K. I tell you how it is,” the man then said lowering his voice in a tone of quiet and confidential intimacy. “Dis stuff don’t cost us nuttin’, see? Nah!” he vigorously declared. “It’s given to us. Sure! It’s a commission dey give us,” he added delicately, “for seein’ dat dere stuff goes troo O.K. See?”

Jack saw, and told the story many times to his delighted guests. For Jack was really a good and generous little man and an act like this, even when it came from men who had eaten and drunk royally and at his expense for years the value of a hundred barrels of beer, warmed and delighted him.

As is invariably the case with the cynic, cynicism and sentiment were woven indissolubly together, and his black picture of the earth, false and theatrical as it was, was saved from monstrousness by his own character, which had in it so much that was liberal, kind, and tolerant. Of this there was constant and repeated evidence. Jack would act instantly and materially to help people who were in distress, and he did this again and again—for actors down on their luck, for elderly spinsters with schemes for the renovation of the stage which were never profitable,—he even pensioned off every month one of his wife’s aunts, a dyed and varnished old hag of eighty-two, who had cheated his wife and her sister out of the little nest egg which their father had left to them, and whom Jack detested not only for this but for all other reasons.

“Oh,” the old witch would croak at him, as she wagged a vindictive varnished claw in his face on one of her frequent visits to his house, “—Oh, you don’t like me now,” she croaked, but I’ll bet you, Fritz!” she cackled vindictively, “I’ll bet you, if I had a million dollars that you’d treat me different then—Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh!” At which Jack, red in the face from anger and exasperation would fling down his paper, jump to his feet, shout angrily—“You can bet your sweet life I would!” and stamp out of the room. Yet, he not only sent this old harpy an allowance of one hundred dollars on the first of every month, which she rarely found adequate to her own extravagances (the chief of which was a passion for shoes with high red heels which she wore by day and night and in all times and weathers) but he also invariably yielded to her begging cries for additional help, the chief of which the old hag craftily embodied in a plea for new false teeth—(a plea she used so often and so forgetfully that it was found she had desired money for eleven sets within eight months’ time).

Thus, as often happens, there was housed in the compact well-groomed figure of this plump ruddy grey haired Jew with the waxed moustache ends a vision of the earth which was false and black as hell, together with as kind, liberal and tolerant a spirit as one is likely to meet in the course of a day’s journey. If this had not been true, the man would have been a monster. For not only, in his belief, was the dishonesty of his servants, the corruption of the police, and the complete tyranny of privilege everywhere on earth, from the greatest to the most trifling affairs, a condition to be accepted without even the most casual and languid feeling of surprise, but the total corruption of humanity everywhere was also to be understood and accepted in this same matter-of-fact way.

Thus, in his view of the world, every man had certainly his price, as every woman had hers, and if, in any discussion of conduct, it was suggested to him that people had acted as they had for motives other than those of total self-interest and calculating desire—had acted as they had because they loved each other, or because they would rather endure pain themselves than cause it to other people that they loved, or were loyal because of loyalty, or could not be bought or sold for no other reason than the integrity of their own characters—Jack’s answer to this was to smile politely but cynically, make a brief motion with his arms and hands, and say: “All Right. But I thought you were going to be intelligent. Let’s talk of something else that we both understand.”

And that was all.

Such a man, then, was this ruddy, smartly groomed, and faultlessly tailored little fellow of fifty-four who was hurled southward to his business every morning in a powerful projectile of glittering steel that was driven by a maniac and who, as immense and cruel architectures beetled all about him, and he saw the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, found nothing strange therein.

Such a man was Frederick Jack—a spruce, assured, and very prosperous looking figure, who had in his bearing, dress, and feature something of the “distinguished” manner of the great banker, together with that little extra and indefinable cut to everything—a somewhat heightened color, cut, and vividness, an added knowingness and swagger, a kind of sporty dash and tone and recklessness, that was like a dash of paprika, and that somehow related him with others who live constantly among the theatrical and feverish excitement of a life which is disturbed, out of focus, and unnaturally stimulated—in other words, with politicians, gamblers, quack joint-and-gland and lay-the-hand-on specialists, and all other quacks whatever fashionable psycho-analysts, hit-the-trail evangelists, suave racketeers—and actors!

Such a man was Frederick Jack: a little man forever certain and forever wrong, a resident in a world which accepted the fabrications of its own distorted and intoxicated fury as the very heart and care of harsh reality, and which rejected reality itself with an impatient and dismissing gesture and a cynic’s smile. Frederick Jack was a man who daily lived, breathed, and believed in all the acts and passions of a fantastic, theatrical and incredible world, and who subscribed to a vision of life that was as black, as vile, as viciously false and ineptly, uselessly sinister as any on this earth could be—and yet he was a man with as much grace, kindliness, and charity as anyone could wish for the most liberal and tolerant spirit.

He was a loving and indulgent father, who lavished gifts and luxuries upon his two children with prodigal hand, and he had on countless occasions responded with the instant and liberal help of his purse not only to the needs of friends but also to the troubles of many people whom he scarcely knew—to all the improvident, drunken, haphazard, or futile people whom his wife had met in her experience in the theatre, and who, in time of distress inevitably clustered about her strong, clear and victorious personality as slaves of steel cluster about a powerful magnet—as well as to a great motley regiment of others—to a raw-boned half-demented old nurse who had been in attendance at the birth of his two children, and had subsisted largely on his bounty ever since, to his wife’s childhood and schoolgirl friends who had made poor marriages, to decrepit or impoverished relatives of his own and his wife’s family, no matter how distant the relationship or how heartily he detested them, and finally, and always, to members of his own family living in Germany, and to his own begotten blood and seed.

For strangely, curiously, and pathetically, this little man who lived among all the furious and constantly shifting visages of a feverish and unstable world, had always held with a desperate and tenacious devotion to one of the ancient traditions of his race and youth—a belief in the sacred and inviolable stability of the family. And through this devotion, in spite of the sensational tempo and its furious constantly mounting instability of the city life, in spite of the unwholesome life of the theatre in which each member of his family was somehow involved, and which constantly menaced the security of the family life, he had managed to keep his family together. And this was really the only bond which now connected him with his wife. They had never loved each other, they had long since ceased to care what separate loves and ardours each might have, but they had joined together in a material effort to maintain the unity of a family life, as distinct from the lives of each individual in it. And through this effort, and by this compromise—which avoided deliberately and almost studiously, a close inspection of the individual life—they had succeeded in keeping the unity of the family group, and for this reason, and on this ground, Jack respected and had a real affection for his wife.

Such was the well-groomed little man who was delivered at his business every morning by a maniac. And if such dissonance between his own belief and practice, between his sinister view of men’s acts and motives, and the charity and generosity of his own character, seems remarkable, or if his skill and cunning in the acts of balance seems remarkable, where his sole remaining anchor to an older and more traditional form of life was his belief in the permanence of the family, it was by no means so. For every morning, within a hundred yards of the place where his maniac delivered him, ten thousand other men, in dress, style, form and feature much the same as he, in their fantastic and sinister beliefs, and even in kindness, mercy, love and tolerance, much the same as this portly little Jew, were even as he descending from their gleaming thunderbolts and moving towards another day of legend, smoke and fury.

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At length, having been delivered at his business with a murderous haste by this furious automation, Jack was shot up to his office where all day long men in whom this same unnatural and feverish energy seemed to be at work, bought, sold, and traded in an atmosphere which was not so openly, obviously and frantically alive, as it was quietly, murderously alert, with madness.

This madness was everywhere about him all day long, and Jack was himself aware of it. Yet he said nothing. For it was one of the qualities of this time that men should see and feel and know the madness all about them, and never mention it. Jack had known for several months, for example, that Rosenthal, the senior partner of his firm, was mad. Everyone else knew it as well, yet no one spoke of it until two years later when Rosenthal had to be confined in an asylum. Then, to be sure, they all said, with wise nods: “Sure, we knew it, all the time!”

But often in the morning Rosenthal would ride up in the same elevator with Jack, and not only would he fail to respond to his junior partner’s morning greeting, but he would stare at Jack with a gloomy Napoleonic look, seeming to stare right through the other man who was not a foot away from him. Moreover, when Rosenthal entered his office he would enter through a certain door, and give orders that an office boy and his secretary must always be there in the room to greet him, standing at attention and facing the door when he would enter, even when there was no real reason for their being there.

Having seated himself at his magnificent desk—for everything he had as we shall see, pens, paper, desks, inkwells, chairs, and so forth, now had to be the most magnificent and expensive that money could buy—having seated himself at his magnificent desk Rosenthal would at once go into a gloomy Napoleonic attitude of deep meditation from which he would presently start up and rouse himself to say in a harsh tone of voice to his secretary who still was standing dutifully at attention: “Who is waiting?” The girl would answer that Mr. Clark—or whoever it was—was waiting, whereupon Rosenthal would wave his hand in a furious and gloomy gesture of dismissal saying: “Tell him I cannot see him today,” although he had himself made the appointment just the day before.

Then he would lapse into his moody soliloquy again, from which he would presently rouse himself to mutter gloomily: “And who comes next?”

“Mr. Seligman, sir—at nine-thirty.”

There would be a portentous darkening pause, and finally Rosenthal would whisper hoarsely: “Tell him—tell Mr. Seligman—that I shall see him—at ten-fif-teen,” although there was no reason whatsoever for the delay.

Again, when about to sign a letter, he would start to dip his pen in the inkwell, and suddenly stop, drawing back from the inkwell and shuddering as if it were a viper and had stung him.

“This—this—” he would say in a choked and trembling tone, throwing down his pen and pointing to the inkwell with a palsied finger. “Where did this come from?” he would scream, although it had been there on his desk all the time. Then he would seize the inkwell and hurl it against the wall or smash it on the floor, yelling that it was a disgrace that such a man as he should have to use such an inkwell. Then he would shout out orders, and demand the finest inkwell for himself and his secretary “that money could buy.” And they would finally arrive, as his awed secretary would tell her fascinated auditors when she went home to Brooklyn—“made of saw-lid silveh—Duh one on his desk costs sixteh-seven dollehs—an’duh one on my desk costs fawty-six dollehs! O-O-oh! Ya know, I think that’s aw-w-ful! I think that’s ter-ri-bul!”

But this frightened little stenographer was the only one who did. As for the others—Rosenthal’s business partners, and his clients, although they saw the man was mad they considered his madness as being another evidence of his financial genius.

Thus, when he would suddenly emerge from his office and come out into the great room where the stock-board was, casting wild and gloomy glances all about him, peering intensely into the faces of men he had known for twenty years without speaking to them or giving any indication that he recognized them, the while he muttered and mumbled cunningly to himself words that no one understood, rubbing his white plump hands softly and greedily together, and from time to time chuckling craftily as he peered about him, his associates accepted this strange conduct as evidence that deep and cunning projects were being contrived in his brain, and that presently he would startle the entire market with a series of brilliant financial manipulations.

Among all these people, only the frightened little stenographer read in the man’s conduct the omens of ruin and collapse, not only for Rosenthal himself but for the whole structure that supported him, and gave to such a madman its final utter faith. Day by day, this poor girl would go home to the great jungle of obscure and nameless people from which she came and tell her stories, which grew constantly more extravagant and incredible to an awed circle of shop girls, fellow stenographers, and bewildered elders.

“Gee! D’ya know what he says to me this mawnin?” she would begin, as they all crowded forward eagerly. “D’ya know what he asts me? He says ta me, he says, ‘Who is dat man, Miss Feinboig? Who is dat man dat just came in here?’ Wah-h-, Misteh Rosenthal!’ I says. ‘Dontcha remembeh—gee!’ I thought he was kiddin’ me or somethin’—you know!” she cried. “‘Dontcha remembeh Misteh Mahtin? Wah he’s been comin’ in heah to see ya faw yeahs!’ ‘Who’s dat?’ he says. ‘Wah Misteh Mahtin—gee!’ I thought he maht be kiddin’ me or somethin’—you know!” she cried painfully. “So I says, ‘You been doin’ business with Misteh Mahtin all yoeh life.’ ‘Neveh hoid of ‘im before,’ he says, ‘Wah-h, Misteh Rosenthal!’ I says. He don’t remembeh any moeh,” she now cried earnestly. “Honest, he don’t know what he’s doo-in,” she said with comical solemnity. “‘Ya gotta ‘n engagement, Misteh Rosenthal. Ya gotta ‘n engagement to have lunch mit Misteh Huddlem’ an’ ah says, An’ honest! He don’t know what I’m tawkin’ about—He acts as if he’s neveh hoid of ‘im—He don’t remembeh ‘im at all! Gee! Ya know that’s ter-ri-bul! Ya know that’s aw-w-ful!”—But this shocked and frightened little typist was the only one who did.