by Willa Cather
“Now,” she announced, getting up out of the drift, “I’ll show you where the church is.”
“Shall I tie your comforter again?”
“No, ’m, thanks. I’m plenty warm.” She put her mittened hand confidingly in mine and trudged along beside me.
Mrs. Dow must have heard us tramping up the snowy steps of the church, for she met us at the door. Every one had gone except the old ladies. A kerosene lamp flickered over the Sunday-school chart, with the lesson-picture of the Wise Men, and the little barrel-stove threw out a deep glow over the three white heads that bent above the baby. There the three friends sat, patting him, and smoothing his dress, and playing with his hands, which made theirs look so brown.
“You ain’t seen nothing finer in all your travels,” said Mrs. Spinny, and they all laughed.
They showed me his full chest and how strong his back was; had me feel the golden fuzz on his head, and made him look at me with his round, bright eyes. He laughed and reared himself in my arms as I took him up and held him close to me. He was so warm and tingling with life, and he had the flush of new beginnings, of the new morning and the new rose. He seemed to have come so lately from his mother’s heart! It was as if I held her youth and all her young joy. As I put my cheek down against his, he spied a pink flower in my hat, and making a gleeful sound, he lunged at it with both fists.
“Don’t let him spoil it,” murmured Mrs. Spinny. “He loves color so—like Nelly.”
BEHIND THE SINGER TOWER
It was a hot, close night in May, the night after the burning of the Mont Blanc Hotel, and some half dozen of us who had been thrown together, more or less, during that terrible day, accepted Fred Hallet’s invitation to go for a turn in his launch, which was tied up in the North River. We were all tired and unstrung and heartsick, and the quiet of the night and the coolness on the water relaxed our tense nerves a little. None of us talked much as we slid down the river and out into the bay. We were in a kind of stupor. When the launch ran out into the harbor, we saw an Atlantic liner come steaming up the big sea road. She passed so near us that we could see her crowded steerage decks.
“It’s the Re di Napoli,” said Johnson of the Herald. “She’s going to land her first cabin passengers tonight, evidently. Those people are terribly proud of their new docks in the North River; feel they’ve come up in the world.”
We ruffled easily along through the bay, looking behind us at the wide circle of lights that rim the horizon from east to west and from west to east, all the way round except for that narrow, much-traveled highway, the road to the open sea. Running a launch about the harbor at night is a good deal like bicycling among the motors on Fifth Avenue. That night there was probably no less activity than usual; the turtle-backed ferryboats swung to and fro, the tugs screamed and panted beside the freight cars they were towing on barges, the Coney Island boats threw out their streams of light and faded away. Boats of every shape and purpose went about their business and made noise enough as they did it, doubtless. But to us, after what we had been seeing and hearing all day long, the place seemed unnaturally quiet and the night unnaturally black. There was a brooding mournfulness over the harbor, as if the ghost of helplessness and terror were abroad in the darkness. One felt a solemnity in the misty spring sky where only a few stars shone, pale and far apart, and in the sighs of the heavy black water that rolled up into the light. The city itself, as we looked back at it, seemed enveloped in a tragic self-consciousness. Those incredible towers of stone and steel seemed, in the mist, to be grouped confusedly together, as if they were confronting each other with a question. They looked positively lonely, like the great trees left after a forest is cut away. One might fancy that the city was protesting, was asserting its helplessness, its irresponsibility for its physical conformation, for the direction it had taken. It was an irregular parallelogram pressed between two hemispheres, and, like any other solid squeezed in a vise, it shot upward.
* * * *
There were six of us in the launch: two newspapermen—Johnson and myself; Fred Hallet, the engineer, and one of his draftsmen; a lawyer from the District Attorney’s office; and Zablowski, a young Jewish doctor from the Rockefeller Institute. We did not talk; there was only one thing to talk about, and we had had enough of that. Before we left town the death list of the Mont Blanc had gone above three hundred.
The Mont Blanc was the complete expression of the New York idea in architecture; a thirty-five story hotel which made the Plaza look modest. Its prices, like its proportions, as the newspapers had so often asseverated, outscaled everything in the known world. And it was still standing there, massive and brutally unconcerned, only a little blackened about its thousand windows and with the foolish fire escapes in its court melted down. About the fire itself nobody knew much. It had begun on the twelfth story, broken out through the windows, shot up long streamers that had gone in at the windows above, and so on up to the top. A high wind and much upholstery and oiled wood had given it incredible speed.
On the night of the fire the hotel was full of people from everywhere, and by morning half a dozen trusts had lost their presidents, two States had lost their Governors, and one of the great European powers had lost its Ambassador. So many businesses had been disorganized that Wall Street had shut down for the day. They had been snuffed out, these important men, as lightly as the casual guests who had come to town to spend money, or as the pampered opera singers who had returned from an overland tour and were waiting to sail on Saturday. The lists were still vague, for whether the victims had jumped or not, identification was difficult, and, in either case, they had met with obliteration, absolute effacement, as when a drop of water falls into the sea.
* * * *
Out of all I had seen that day, one thing kept recurring to me; perhaps because it was so little in the face of a destruction so vast. In the afternoon, when I was going over the building with the firemen, I found on the ledge of a window on the fifteenth floor, a man’s hand snapped off at the wrist as cleanly as if it had been taken off by a cutlass—he had thrown out his arm in falling.
It had belonged to Graziani, the tenor, who had occupied a suite on the thirty-second floor. We identified it by a little-finger ring, which had been given to him by the German Emperor. Yes, it was the same hand. I had seen it often enough when he placed it so confidently over his chest as he began his “Celeste Aida,” or when he lifted—much too often, alas!—his little glasses of white arrack at Martin’s. When he toured the world he must have whatever was most costly and most characteristic in every city; in New York he had the thirty-second floor, poor fellow! He had plunged from there toward the cobwebby life nets stretched five hundred feet below on the asphalt. Well, at any rate, he would never drag out an obese old age in the English country house he had built near Naples.
Heretofore fires in fireproof buildings of many stories had occurred only in factory lofts, and the people who perished in them, fur workers and garment workers, were obscure for more reasons than one; most of them bore names unpronounceable to the American tongue; many of them had no kinsmen, no history, no record anywhere.
But we realized that, after the burning of the Mont Blanc, the New York idea would be called to account by every state in the Union, by all the great capitals of the world. Never before, in a single day, had so many of the names that feed and furnish the newspapers appeared in their columns all together, and for the last time.
* * * *
In New York the matter of height was spoken of jocularly and triumphantly. The very window cleaners always joked about it as they buckled themselves fast outside your office in the forty-fifth story of the Wertheimer tower, though the average for window cleaners, who, for one reason or another, dropped to the pavement was something over one a day. In a city with so many millions of windows that was not perhaps an unreasonable percentage. But we felt that the Mont Blanc disaster
would bring our particular type of building into unpleasant prominence, as the cholera used to make Naples and the conditions of life there too much a matter of discussion, or as the earthquake of 1905 gave such undesirable notoriety to the affairs of San Francisco.
For once we were actually afraid of being too much in the public eye, of being overadvertised. As I looked at the great incandescent signs along the Jersey shore, blazing across the night the names of beer and perfumes and corsets, it occurred to me that, after all, that kind of thing could be overdone; a single name, a single question, could be blazed too far. Our whole scheme of life and progress and profit was perpendicular.
There was nothing for us but height. We were whipped up the ladder. We depended upon the ever-growing possibilities of girders and rivets as Holland depends on her dikes.
“Did you ever notice,” Johnson remarked when we were about halfway across to Staten Island, “what a Jewy-looking thing the Singer Tower is when it’s lit up? The fellow who placed those incandescents must have had a sense of humor. It’s exactly like the Jewish high priest in the old Bible dictionaries.”
He pointed back, outlining with his forefinger the jeweled miter, the high, sloping shoulders, and the hands pressed together in the traditional posture of prayer.
Zablowski, the young Jewish doctor, smiled and shook his head. He was a very handsome fellow, with sad, thoughtful eyes, and we were all fond of him, especially Hallet, who was always teasing him. “No, it’s not Semitic, Johnson,” he said. “That high-peaked turban is more apt to be Persian. He’s a Magi or a fire-worshiper of some sort, your high priest. When you get nearer he looks like a Buddha, with two bright rings in his ears.”
Zablowski pointed with his cigar toward the blurred Babylonian heights crowding each other on the narrow tip of the island. Among them rose the colossal figure of the Singer Tower, watching over the city and the harbor like a presiding Genius. He had come out of Asia quietly in the night, no one knew just when or how, and the Statue of Liberty, holding her feeble taper in the gloom off to our left, was but an archeological survival.
“Who could have foreseen that she, in her high-mindedness, would ever spawn a great heathen idol like that?” Hallet exclaimed. “But that’s what idealism comes to in the end, Zablowski.”
Zablowski laughed mournfully. “What did you expect, Hallet? You’ve used us for your ends—waste for your machine, and now you talk about infection. Of course we brought germs from over there,” he nodded toward the northeast.
“Well, you’re all here, at any rate, and I won’t argue with you about all that tonight,” said Hallet wearily. “The fact is,” he went on as he lit a cigar and settled deeper into his chair, “when we met the Re di Napoli back there, she set me thinking. She recalled something that happened when I was a boy just out of Tech; when I was working under Merryweather on the Mont Blanc foundation.”
We All looked up. Stanley Merryweather was the most successful manipulator of structural steel in New York, and Hallet was the most intelligent; the enmity between them was one of the legends of the Engineers’ Society.
Hallet saw our interest and smiled. “I suppose you’ve heard yarns about why Merryweather and I don’t even pretend to get on. People say we went to school together and then had a terrible row of some sort. The fact is, we never did get on, and back there in the foundation work of the Mont Blanc our ways definitely parted. You know how Merryweather happened to get going? He was the only nephew of old Hughie Macfarlane, and Macfarlane was the pioneer in steel construction. He dreamed the dream. When he was a lad working for the Pennsylvania Bridge Company, he saw Manhattan just as it towers there tonight. Well, Macfarlane was aging and he had no children, so he took his sister’s son to make an engineer of him. Macfarlane was a thoroughgoing Scotch Presbyterian, sound Pittsburgh stock, but his sister had committed an indiscretion. She had married a professor of languages in a theological seminary out there; a professor who knew too much about some Oriental tongues I needn’t name to be altogether safe. It didn’t show much in the old professor, who looked like a Baptist preacher except for his short, thick hands, and of course it is very much veiled in Stanley. When he came up to the Massachusetts Tech he was a big, handsome boy, but there was something in his moist, bright blue eye—well, something that you would recognize, Zablowski.”
Zablowski chuckled and inclined his head delicately forward.
Haller continued: “Yes, in Stanley Merryweather there were racial characteristics. He was handsome and jolly and glitteringly frank and almost insultingly cordial, and yet he was never really popular. He was quick and superficial, built for high speed and a light load. He liked to come it over people, but when you had him, he always crawled. Didn’t seem to hurt him one bit to back down. If you made a fool of him tonight—well, ‘tomorrow’s another day,’ he’d say lightly, and tomorrow he’d blossom out in a new suit of clothes and a necktie of some unusual weave and haunting color. He had the feeling for color and texture. The worst of it was that, as truly as I’m sitting here, he never bore a grudge toward the fellow who’d called his bluff and shown him up for a lush growth; no ill feeling at all, Zablowski. He simply didn’t know what that meant—”
Hallet’s sentence trailed and hung wistfully in the air, while Zablowski put his hand penitently to his forehead.
“Well, Merryweather was quick and he had plenty of spurt and a taking manner, and he didn’t know there had ever been such a thing as modesty or reverence in the world. He got all round the old man, and old Mac was perfectly foolish about him. It was always: ‘Is it well with the young man Absalom?’ Stanley was a year ahead of me in school, and when he came out of Tech the old man took him right into the business. He married a burgeoning Jewish beauty, Fanny Reizenstein, the daughter of the importer, and he hung her with the jewels of the East until she looked like the Song of Solomon done into motion pictures. I will say for Stanley that he never pretended that anything stronger than Botticelli hurt his eyes. He opened like a lotus flower to the sun and made a streak of color, even in New York. Stanley always felt that Boston hadn’t done well by him, and he enjoyed throwing jobs to old Tech men. ‘Largess, largess, Lord Marmion, all as he lighted down.’ When they began breaking ground for the Mont Blanc I applied for a job because I wanted experience in deep foundation work. Stanley beamed at me across his mirror-finish mahogany and offered me something better, but it was foundation work I wanted, so early in the spring I went into the hole with a gang of twenty dagos.
“It was an awful summer, the worst New York can do in the way of heat, and I guess that’s the worst in the world, excepting India maybe. We sweated away, I and my twenty dagos, and I learned a good deal—more than I ever meant to. Now there was one of those men I liked, and it’s about him I must tell you. His name was Caesaro, but he was so little that the other dagos in the hole called him Caesarino, Little Caesar. He was from the island of Ischia, and I had been there when a young lad with my sister who was ill. I knew the particular goat track Caesarino hailed from, and maybe I had seen him there among all the swarms of eager, panting little animals that roll around in the dust and somehow worry through famine and fever and earthquake, with such a curiously hot spark of life in them and such delight in being allowed to live at all.
“Caesarino’s father was dead and his older brother was married and had a little swarm of his own to look out for. Caesarino and the next two boys were coral divers and went out with the fleet twice a year; when they were at home they worked about by the day in the vineyards. He couldn’t remember ever having had any clothes on in summer until he was ten; spent all his time swimming and diving and sprawling about among the nets on the beach. I’ve seen ’em, those wild little water dogs; look like little seals with their round eyes and their hair always dripping. Caesarino thought he could make more money in New York than he made diving for coral, and he was the mainstay of the family. There were ever so
many little water dogs after him; his father had done the best he could to insure the perpetuity of his breed before he went under the lava to begin all over again by helping to make the vines grow in that marvelously fruitful volcanic soil. Little Caesar came to New York, and that is where we begin.
“He was one of the twenty crumpled, broken little men who worked with me down in that big hole. I first noticed him because he was so young, and so eager to please, and because he was so especially frightened. Wouldn’t you be at all this terrifying, complicated machinery, after sun and happy nakedness and a goat track on a volcanic island, with the same old water always rolling in and in? Haven’t you ever noticed how, when a dago is hurt on the railroad and they trundle him into the station on a truck, another dago always runs alongside him, holding his hand and looking the more scared of the two? Little Caesar ran about the hole looking like that. He was afraid of everything he touched. He never knew what might go off. Suppose we went to work for some great and powerful nation in Asia that had a civilization built on sciences we knew nothing of, as ours is built on physics and chemistry and higher mathematics; and suppose we knew that to these people we were absolutely meaningless as social beings, were waste to clean their engines as Zablowski says; that we were there to do the dangerous work, to be poisoned in caissons under rivers, blown up by blasts, drowned in coal mines, and that these masters of ours were as indifferent to us individually as the Carthaginians were to their mercenaries? I’ll tell you we’d guard the precious little spark of life with trembling hands.”
“But I say—” sputtered the lawyer from the District Attorney’s office.
“I know, I know, Chambers.” Hallet put out a soothing hand. “We don’t want ’em, God knows. They come. But why do they come? It’s the pressure of their time and ours. It’s not rich pickings they’ve got where I’ve worked with them, let me tell you. Well, Caesarino, with the others, came. The first morning I went on my job he was there, more scared of a new boss than any of the others; literally quaking. He was only twenty-three and lighter than the other men, and he was afraid I’d notice that. I thought he would pull his shoulder blades loose. After one big heave I stopped beside him and dropped a word: ‘buono soldato.’ In a moment he was grinning with all his teeth, and he squeaked out: ‘Buono soldato, da boss he talka dago!’ That was the beginning of our acquaintance.”
