John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘I’m not a union man.’

‘Well ye’re goin to be aint ye… Us guys of the buildin trades have got to stick together. We’re tryin to get every bloke from night watchmen to inspectors lined up to make a solid front against this here lockout sitooation.’

Harland lit his cigar. ‘Look here, bo, you’re wasting your breath on me. They’ll always need a watchman, strike or no strike… I’m an old man and I haven’t got much fight left in me. This is the first decent job I’ve had in five years and they’ll have to shoot me to get it away from me… All that stuff’s for kids like you. I’m out of it. You sure are wasting your breath if you’re going round trying to organize night watchmen.’

‘Say you don’t talk like you’d always been in this kind o woik.’

‘Well maybe I aint.’

The young man took off his hat and rubbed his hand over his forehead and up across his dense cropped hair. ‘Hell it’s warm work arguin… Swell night though aint it?’

‘Oh the night’s all right,’ said Harland.

‘Say my name’s O’Keefe, Joe O’Keefe… Gee I bet you could tell a guy a lot o things.’ He held out his hand.

‘My name’s Joe too… Harland… Twenty years ago that name meant something to people.’

‘Twenty years from now…’

‘Say you’re a funny fellow for a walking delegate… You take an old man’s advice before I run you off the lot, and quit it… It’s no game for a likely young feller who wants to make his way in the world.’

‘Times are changin you know… There’s big fellers back o this here strike, see? I was talkin over the sitooation with Assemblyman McNiel jus this afternoon in his office.’

‘But I’m telling you straight if there’s one thing that’ll queer you in this town it’s this labor stuff… You’ll remember someday that an old drunken bum told you that and it’ll be too late.’

‘Oh it was drink was it? That’s one thing I’m not afraid of. I don’t touch the stuff, except beer to be sociable.’

‘Look here bo the company detective’ll be makin his rounds soon. You’d better be making tracks.’

‘I ain’t ascared of any goddam company detective… Well so long I’ll come in to see you again someday.’

‘Close that door behind you.’

Joe Harland drew a little water from a tin container, settled himself in his chair and stretched his arms out and yawned. Eleven o’clock. They would just be getting out of the theaters, men in eveningclothes, girls in lowneck dresses; men were going home to their wives and mistresses; the city was going to bed. Taxis honked and rasped outside the hoarding, the sky shimmered with gold powder from electric signs. He dropped the butt of the cigar and crushed it on the floor with his heel. He shuddered and got to his feet, then paced slowly round the edge of the buildinglot swinging his lantern.

The light from the street yellowed faintly a big sign on which was a picture of a skyscraper, white with black windows against blue sky and white clouds. SEGAL AND HAYNES will erect on this site a modern uptodate TWENTYFOUR STORY OFFICE BUILDING open for occupancy January 1915 renting space still available inquire…

Jimmy Herf sat reading on a green couch under a bulb that lit up a corner of a wide bare room. He had come to the death of Olivier in Jean Christophe and read with tightening gullet. In his memory lingered the sound of the Rhine swirling, restlessly gnawing the foot of the garden of the house where Jean Christophe was born. Europe was a green park in his mind full of music and red flags and mobs marching. Occasionally the sound of a steamboat whistle from the river settled breathless snowysoft into the room. From the street came a rattle of taxis and the whining sound of streetcars.

There was a knock at the door. Jimmy got up, his eyes blurred and hot from reading.

‘Hello Stan, where the devil did you come from?’

‘Herfy I’m tight as a drum.’

‘That’s no novelty.’

‘I was just giving you the weather report.’

‘Well perhaps you can tell me why in this country nobody ever does anything. Nobody ever writes any music or starts any revolutions or falls in love. All anybody ever does is to get drunk and tell smutty stories. I think it’s disgusting…’

‘’Ear, ’ear… But speak for yourself. I’m going to stop drinking… No good drinking, liquor just gets monotonous… Say, got a bathtub?’

‘Of course there’s a bathtub. Whose apartment do you think this is, mine?’

‘Well whose is it Herfy?’

‘It belongs to Lester. I’m just caretaker while he’s abroad, the lucky dog.’ Stan started peeling off his clothes letting them drop in a pile about his feet. ‘Gee I’d like to go swimming… Why the hell do people live in cities?’

‘Why do I go on dragging out a miserable existence in this crazy epileptic town… that’s what I want to know.’

‘Lead on Horatius, to the baawth slave,’ bellowed Stan who stood on top of his pile of clothes, brown with tight rounded muscles, swaying a little from his drunkenness.

‘It’s right through that door.’ Jimmy pulled a towel out of the steamertrunk in the corner of the room, threw it after him and went back to reading.

Stan tumbled back into the room, dripping, talking through the towel. ‘What do you think, I forgot to take my hat off. And look Herfy, there’s something I want you to do for me. Do you mind?’

‘Of course not. What is it?’

‘Will you let me use your back room tonight, this room?’

‘Sure you can.’

‘I mean with somebody.’

‘Go as far as you like. You can bring the entire Winter Garden Chorus in here and nobody will see them. And there’s an emergency exit down the fire escape into the alley. I’ll go to bed and close my door so you can have this room and the bath all to yourselves.’

‘It’s a rotten imposition but somebody’s husband is on the rampage and we have to be very careful.’

‘Dont worry about the morning. I’ll sneak out early and you can have the place to yourselves.’

‘Well I’m off so long.’

Jimmy gathered up his book and went into his bedroom and undressed. His watch said fifteen past twelve. The night was sultry. When he had turned out the light he sat a long while on the edge of the bed. The faraway sounds of sirens from the river gave him gooseflesh. From the street he heard footsteps, the sound of men and women’s voices, low youthful laughs of people going home two by two. A phonograph was playing Secondhand Rose . He lay on his back on top of the sheet. There came on the air through the window a sourness of garbage, a smell of burnt gasoline and traffic and dusty pavements, a huddled stuffiness of pigeonhole rooms where men and women’s bodies writhed alone tortured by the night and the young summer. He lay with seared eyeballs staring at the ceiling, his body glowed in a brittle shivering agony like redhot metal.

A woman’s voice whispering eagerly woke him; someone was pushing open the door. ‘I wont see him. I wont see him. Jimmy for Heaven’s sake you go talk to him. I wont see him.’ Elaine Oglethorpe draped in a sheet walked into the room.

Jimmy tumbled out of bed. ‘What on earth?’

‘Isn’t there a closet or something in here… I will not talk to Jojo when he’s in that condition.’

Jimmy straightened his pyjamas. ‘There’s a closet at the head of the bed.’

‘Of course… Now Jimmy do be an angel, talk to him and make him go away.’

Jimmy walked dazedly into the outside room. ‘Slut, slut,’ was yelling a voice from the window. The lights were on. Stan, draped like an Indian in a gray and pinkstriped blanket was squatting in the middle of the two couches made up together into a vast bed. He was staring impassively at John Oglethorpe who leaned in through the upper part of the window screaming and waving his arms and scolding like a Punch and Judy show. His hair was in a tangle over his eyes, in one hand he waved a stick, in the other a cream-andcoffeecolored felt hat. ‘Slut come here… Flagrante delictu that’s what it is… Flagrante delictu. It was not for nothing that inspiration led me up Lester Jones’s fire escape.’ He stopped and stared a minute at Jimmy with wide drunken eyes. ‘So here’s the cub reporter, the yellow journalist is it, looking as if butter wouldnt melt in his mouth is it? Do you know what my opinion of you is, would you like to know what my opinion of you is? Oh I’ve heard about you from Ruth and all that. I know you think you’re one of the dynamiters and aloof from all that… How do you like being a paid prostitute of the public press? How d’you like your yellow ticket? The brass check, that’s the kind of thing… You think that as an actor, an artiste, I dont know about those things. I’ve heard from Ruth your opinion of actors and all that.’