THE GREAT BUILDING
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(APRIL, 1930)
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From the outside the building was—just a building. True it was a very impressive one. It was not beautiful, certainly, but it impressed one by its bulk, its weight, its squareness, its sheer massivity. In the course of a day’s journey on that fabled rock one would see a hundred buildings that one could remember more sharply for some startling or sensational quality. There were sky-soaring spires and splintered helves of steel and stone, and dizzy vertices, cliff-like facades, stupendous architectures that seemed themselves a part of the cold atmosphere of the high air. They were an aether of imperial stone and steel that framed the sky in etchings of immortal masonry, that caught the breath of man, appalled his eye, put a cold numbness in his flesh, and gave to that sea-girt isle a portion of its own fabulous and special weather, its time-sense that was so strange, so peculiarly thrilling, so different from the time of any other place on earth.
Yes, there were more special shapes that gave the swarming rock its startling quality, its fabulous uniqueness, its distinctive place among the super-cities of the world. These were the shapes the European thought about when he thought about “New York,” about “America,” the thing that caught the breath of travelers spell-bound, looking from a liner’s deck, as that appalling and inhuman loveliness sustained there lightly on the water like a congeries of fabled smoke first went home to their seafilled eyes, and stilled their tongues.
This building, then, was none of these. In this great brede of appalling and man-daring shapes, the frame of this insolent and tormented loveliness, this square and massive building would have gone unnoticed, and had one seen it in his questing of the tortured rock he might not later have remembered it.
And yet the building in its way was memorable. In all that scheme of splintered jaggedness, the transient landscape of these tormented, ever-changing skies, the building stood for permanence, for enduring substance in the midst of ceaseless change.
It had, where so much else was temporal and ethereal, a monumental quality. The splintered helves would go and be replaced by madder stalactites of steel and stone, the spire-pierced skies would alter to new shapes of jaggedness—but this, one felt, was changeless and would still endure.
A mighty shape, twelve stories high, with basal ramparts of enduring stone, above huge planes of rather grimy, city-weathered brick, spaced evenly by the interstices of a thousand square and solid windows, the great building filled a city block, and went through squarely to another city block, and fronted on both sides. It was so grand, so huge, so solid, and so square-dimensioned that it seemed to grow out of the very earth, to be hewn from the everlasting rock itself, to be built there for eternity, and to endure there while the rock itself endured.
And yet this really was not true at all. That mighty building, so solid-seeming to the eye, was really tubed and hollowed like a giant honeycomb. It was sustained on curving arches, pillared below on riddled vacancy. It was really a structure upon monstrous stilts, its nerves and tubes and bones and sinews went down depth below depth among the channeled rock: below these basal ramparts of enduring stone, there was its underworld of storied basements. Below all these, far in the tortured rock, there was the tunnel’s depth.
Therefore, it happened sometimes that dwellers in this imperial tenement would feel a tremor at their feet as something faint and instant passed below them, and perhaps remember that there were trains there, there were trains, far, far below them in these tunneled depths.
Then all would pass, recede, and fade away into the riddled distances of the tormented rock. The great building would grow solidly to stone and everlastingness again, and people would smile faintly, knowing that it was enduring, solid, and unshaken, now and forever, as it had always been.
A little before seven o’clock, just outside the building, as he was going in for the night’s work, old John was accosted by a man of perhaps thirty years who was obviously in a state of vinous and unkempt dilapidation.
“Say, Mac—” At the familiar words, uttered in a tone of fawning and yet rather menacing ingratiation, the face of the old man reddened with anger, he quickened his step, and tried to move away. But the creature in its greasy clothes kept after him, plucked at his sleeve with unclean fingers, and said in a low tone—“I was just wonderin’ if you could spare a guy a—”
“Nah-h!” the old man snapped angrily before the other one could finish the familiar plea. “I can’t spare you anything! I’m twice your age and I always had to work for everything I had. 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 in the same tone, and then went on, feeling that this ironic repartee was perhaps a little inadequate but the best he could do on the spur of the moment.
He was still muttering to himself as he entered the great arched entrance of the building and started along the colonnade that led to the South wing.
“What’s the matter, Pop?”—It was Ed, the day elevator man who spoke to him—“Who got your goat?”
“Ah-h!” John muttered, still fuming with resentment, and the unsatisfied inadequacy of his own retort—“It’s these panhandling bums! One of’em just stopped me outside the building and asked me 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, in a tone of mild interest.
“Yeah,” said John, feeling a little more satisfied this time with his answer—“‘If you was any good,’ I says, ‘you’d work for it—the way I always had to do.’” He seemed to derive a little comfort from the repetition, for in a moment he went on forcefully but in a less bitter tone. “They ought to keep these fellows away from here,” he said. “They got no right to bother the people in this building. The kind of people we got here oughtn’t to have to stand for it.” There was just a faint trace of mollification in his voice as he spoke the words, “the kind of people we got here”: One felt that on this side reverence lay—“The kind of people we got here” were, at all odds, to be protected and preserved.
“That’s the only reason they hang around this place,” the old man said. “They know they can work on the kind of people we got here and get it out of ‘em. Only the other day I saw one of ‘em panhandle Mrs. Lewis for a dollar. A big fellow, as well and strong as you are! I’d a good notion to tell her not to give him anything! If he wanted work, he could go and get him a job the same as you and I! But of course they know how to play on the sympathy of the kind of people we got here. It’s got so it’s not safe for a woman in the house to take the dog around the block. Some greasy bum will be after her before she gets back. If I was the management I’d put a stop to it. A house of this kind can’t afford it. The kind of people we got here don’t have to stand for it!”
And having made these pronouncements, so redolent of convention, outraged propriety, and his desire to protect “the kind of people we got here” from further invasions of their trusting sanctity by these cadging frauds, old John, somewhat appeased, went on around the colonnade, went in at the service entrance of the south wing, and in a few moments was at his post, ready for the night’s work.