You Can't Go Home Again (28 page)

“Just a pal!” said Herbert with mock bitterness, appealing to the maids. “O.K., then, Pop. Have it your own way. But when those blondes get here, tell ‘em to wait till I come back. You hear?”

“Well, you’d better not be bringin’ any of ‘em round here,” said John. He shook his white, head doggedly and his whole manner was belligerent, but it was evident that he was enjoying himself hugely. “I don’t want any of ‘em comin’ in this building—blondes or brunettes or red-heads or any of ‘em,” he muttered. “If they do, you won’t find ‘em when you come back. I’ll tell ‘em to get out. I’ll handle ‘em for you, all right.”

“
He’s
a friend of mine!” said Herbert bitterly to the two girls, and jerked his thumb towards the old man again. He started to walk away.

“I don’t believe you, anyhow,” John called after his retreating figure. “You ain’t got no blondes. You never did have…You’re a momma’s boy!” he cried triumphantly as an afterthought, as if he had now hit upon the happiest inspiration of the evening. “That’s what you are!”

Herbert paused at the door leading into the main corridor and looked back menacingly at the old man, but the look was belied by the sparkle in his eyes.

“Oh yeah?” he shouted.

He stood and glared fiercely at the old fellow for a moment, then winked at the two girls, passed through the door, and pressed the button of the passenger elevator, whose operator he was to relieve for the night.

“That fellow’s just a lot of talk,” said John sourly as the maids stepped into the service car and he closed the door. “Always gassin’ about the blondes he’s goin’ to bring round—but I ain’t never seen none of ‘em. Nah-h!” he muttered scornfully, almost to himself as the car started up. “He lives with his mother up in the Bronx, and he’d be scared stiff if a girl ever looked at him.”

“Still, Herbert ought to have a girl,” one of the maids said in a practical tone of voice. “Herbert’s a nice boy, John.”

“Oh, he’s all right, I guess,” the old man muttered grudgingly. “And a nice-looking boy, too,” the other maid now said.

“Oh, he’ll do,” said John; and then abruptly: “What are you folks doin’ to-night, anyway? There’s a whole lot of packages waitin’ to come up.”

“Mrs. Jack is having a big party,” one of the girls said. “And, John, will you bring everything up as soon as you can? There may be something there that we need right away.”

“Well,” he said in that half-belligerent, half-unwilling tone that was an inverted attribute of his real good nature. “I’ll do the best I can. Seems like all of them are givin’ their big parties to-night,” he grumbled. “It goes on sometimes here till two or three o’clock in the morning. You’d think all some people had to do was give parties all the time. It’d take a whole regiment of men just to carry up the packages. Yeah!” he muttered to himself. “And what d’you get? If you ever got so much as a word of thanks----”

“Oh, John,” one of the girls now said reproachfully, “you know Mrs. Jack is not like that! You know yourself----”

“Oh, she’s all right, I reckon,” said John, unwillingly as before, yet his tone had softened imperceptibly. “If all of them was like her,” he began—but then the memory of the panhandler came back to him, and he went on angrily: “She’s too kind-hearted for her own good! Them panhandling bums—they swarm round her like flies every time she leaves the building. I saw one the other night get a dollar out of her before she’d gone twenty feet. She’s crazy to put up with it. I’m goin’ to tell her so, too, when I see her!”

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.

14. Zero Hour

Mrs. Jack came from her room a little after eight o’clock and walked along the broad hallway that traversed her big apartment from front to rear. Her guests had been invited for half-past eight, but long experience in these matters told her that the party would not be going at full swing until after nine. As she walked along the corridor at a brisk and rapid little step she felt a tense excitement, not unpleasurable, even though it was now sharpened by the tincture of an apprehensive doubt.

Would all be ready? Had she forgotten anything? Had the girls followed her instructions? Or had they slipped up somewhere? Would something now be lacking?

A wrinkled line appeared between her eyes, and unconsciously she began to slip the old ring on and off her finger with a quick movement of her small hand. It was the gesture of an alert and highly able person who had come to have an instinctive mistrust of other people less gifted than herself. There was impatience and some scorn in it, a scorn not born of arrogance or any lack of warm humanity, but one that was inclined to say a trifle sharply: “Yes, yes, I know! I understand all that. There’s no need telling me that kind of thing. Let’s get to the point. What can you do? What have you done? Can I depend on you to do everything that’s necessary?” So, as she walked briskly down the hall, thoughts too sharp and quick for definition were darting across the surface of her mind like flicks of light upon a pool.

“I wonder if the girls remembered to do everything I told them,” she was thinking. “Oh, Lord! If only Nora hasn’t started drinking again!—And Janie! She’s good as gold, of course, but God, she is a fool!—And Cookie! Well, she can cook, but after that she doesn’t know April from July. And if you try to tell her anything she gets flustered and begins to gargle German at you. Then it’s worse than if you’d never spoken to her at all.—As for May—well, all you can do is to hope and pray.” The line between her troubled eyes deepened, and the ring slipped on and off her finger more rapidly than ever. “You’d think they’d realise how well off they are, and what a good life they lead here! You’d think they’d try to show it!” she thought indignantly. But almost instantly she was touched with a feeling of tender commiseration, and her mind veered back into its more usual channel: “Oh, well, poor things! I suppose they do the best they can. All you can do is to reconcile yourself to it—and realise that the only way you can get anything done right is to do it yourself.”

By this time she had reached the entrance to the living-room and was looking quickly about, assuring herself by a moment’s swift inspection that everything was in its proper place. Her examination pleased her. The worried expression about her eyes began to disappear. She slipped the ring back on her hand and let it stay there, and her face began to take on the satisfied look of a child when it regards in silence some object of its love and self-creation and finds it good.

The big room was ready for the party. It was just quietly the way she always liked to have it. The room was so nobly proportioned as to be almost regal, and yet it was so subtly toned by the labour of her faultless taste that whatever forbidding coldness its essential grandeur may have had was utterly subdued. To a stranger this living-room would have seemed not only homelike in its comfortable simplicity, but even, on closer inspection, a trifle shabby. Almost everything in it was somewhat worn. The coverings of some of the chairs and couches had become in places threadbare. The carpet that covered the floor with its pattern of old, faded green showed long use without apology. An antique gate-legged table sagged a little under the weight of its pleasant shaded lamp and its stacks of books and magazines. Upon the mantel, a creamy slab of marble, itself a little stained and worn, was spread a green and faded strip of Chinese silk, and on top of it was a lovely little figure in green jade, its carved fingers lifted in a Chinese attitude of compassionating mercy. Over the mantel hung a portrait of herself in her young loveliness at twenty, which a painter now dead and famous had made long ago.

On three sides of the room, bookshelves extended a third of the way up the walls, and they were crowded with friendly volumes whose backs bore the markings of warm human hands. Obviously they had been read and read again. The stiff sets of tooled and costly bindings that often ornament the libraries of the rich with unread awe were lacking here. Nor was there any evidence of the greedy and revolting mania of the professional collector. If there were first editions on these utilitarian shelves, they were here because their owner had bought them when they were published, and bought them to be read.

The crackling pine logs on the great marble hearth cast their radiance warmly on the covers of these worn books, and Mrs. Jack had a sense of peace and comfort as she looked at the rich and homely compact of their colours. She saw her favourite novels and histories, plays, poems, and biographies, and the great books of decoration and design, of painting, drawing, and architecture, which she had assembled in a crowded lifetime of work, travel, and living. Indeed, all these objects, these chairs and tables, these jades and silks, all the drawings and paintings, as well as the books, had been brought together at different times and places and fused into a miracle of harmony by the instinctive touch of this woman’s hand. It is no wonder, therefore, that her face softened and took on an added glow of loveliness as she looked at her fine room. The like of it, as she well knew, could nowhere else be found.

“Ah, here it is,” she thought. “It is living like a part of me. And God! How beautiful it is!” she thought. “How warm—how true! It’s not like a rented place—not just another room in an apartment. No”—she glanced down the spacious width of the long hall—“if it weren’t for the elevator there, you’d think it was some grand old house.’ I don’t know—but—” a little furrow, this time of reflectiveness and effort, came between her eyes as she tried to shape her meaning—“there’s something sort of grand—and simple—about it all.”

And indeed there was. The amount of simplicity that could be purchased even in, those times for a yearly rental of fifteen thousand dollars was quite considerable. As if this very thought had found an echo in her mind, she went on: