Collected Stories

district.”

“Maybe they given you the wrong number?”

“I don’t believe so. But where else can I ask about him?” He felt that this persistence amused them deeply, and in a way he shared their amusement that he should stand up so tenaciously to them. Though smaller, though slight, he was his own man, he retracted nothing about himself, and he looked back at them, gray-eyed, with amusement and also with a sort of courage. On the bench some man spoke in his throat, the words impossible to catch, and a woman answered with a wild, shrieking laugh, which was quickly cut off.

“Well, so nobody will tell me?”

“Ain’t nobody who knows.”

“At least, if he lives here, he pays rent to someone. Who manages the building?”

“Greatham Company. That’s on Thirty-ninth Street.”

Grebe wrote it in his pad. But, in the street again, a sheet of wind-driven paper clinging to his leg while he deliberated what direction to take next, it seemed a feeble lead to follow. Probably this Green didn’t rent a flat, but a room. Sometimes there were as many as twenty people in an apartment; the realestate agent would know only the lessee. And not even the agent could tell you who the renters were. In some places the beds were even used in shifts, watchmen or jitney drivers or short-order cooks in night joints turning out after a day’s sleep and surrendering their beds to a sister, a nephew, or perhaps a stranger, just off the bus. There were large numbers of newcomers in this terrific, blight-bitten portion of the city between Cottage Grove and Ashland, wandering from house to house and room to room. When you saw them, how could you know them? They didn’t carry bundles on their backs or look picturesque. You only saw a man, a Negro, walking in the street or riding in the car, like everyone else, with his thumb closed on a transfer. And therefore how were you supposed to tell? Grebe thought the Greatham agent would only laugh at his question.

But how much it would have simplified the job to be able to say that Green was old, or blind, or consumptive. An hour in the files, taking a few notes, and he needn’t have been at such a disadvantage. When Raynor gave him the block of checks Grebe asked, “How much should I know about these people?” Then Raynor had looked as though Grebe were preparing to accuse him of trying to make the job more important than it was. Grebe smiled, because by then they were on fine terms, but nevertheless he had been getting ready to say something like that when the confusion began in the station over Staika and her children.

Grebe had waited a long time for this job. It came to him through the pull of an old schoolmate in the Corporation Counsel’s office, never a close friend, but suddenly sympathetic and interested—pleased to show, moreover, how well he had done, how strongly he was coming on even in these miserable times. Well, he was coming through strongly, along with the Democratic administration itself. Grebe had gone to see him in City Hall, and they had had a counter lunch or beers at least once a month for a year, and finally it had been possible to swing the job. He didn’t mind being assigned the lowest clerical grade, nor even being a messenger, though Raynor thought he did.

This Raynor was an original sort of guy and Grebe had taken to him immediately. As was proper on the first day, Grebe had come early, but he waited long, for Raynor was late. At last he darted into his cubicle of an office as though he had just jumped from one of those hurtling huge red Indian Avenue cars. His thin, rough face was wind- stung and he was grinning and saying something breathlessly to himself. In his hat, a small fedora, and his coat, the velvet collar a neat fit about his neck, and his silk muffler that set off the nervous twist of his chin, he swayed and turned himself in his swivel chair, feet leaving the ground, so that he pranced a little as he sat. Meanwhile he took Grebe’s measure out of his eyes, eyes of an unusual vertical length and slightly sardonic. So the two men sat for a while, saying nothing, while the supervisor raised his hat from his miscombed hair and put it in his lap. His cold- darkened hands were not clean. A steel beam passed through the little makeshift room, from which machine belts once had hung. The building was an old factory.

“I’m younger than you; I hope you won’t find it hard taking orders from me,” said Raynor. “But I don’t make them up, either. You’re how old, about?”

“Thirty-five.”

‘And you thought you’d be inside doing paperwork. But it so happens I have to send you out.”

“I don’t mind.”

“And it’s mostly a Negro load we have in this district.”

“So I thought it would be.”

“Fine. You’ll get along. C’est un bon boulot. Do you know French?”

“Some.”

“I thought you’d be a university man.”

“Have you been in France?” said Grebe.

“No, that’s the French of the Berlitz School. I’ve been at it for more than a year, just as I’m sure people have been, all over the world, office boys in China and braves in Tanganyika. In fact, I damn well know it. Such is the attractive power of civilization. It’s overrated, but what do you want? Que voulez-vous? I get Le Rire and all the spicy papers, just like in Tanganyika. It must be mystifying, out there. But my reason is that I’m aiming at the diplomatic service. I have a cousin who’s a courier, and the way he describes it is awfully attractive. He rides in the wagon-lits and reads books. While we —What did you do before?”

“I sold.”

“Where?”

“Canned meat at Stop and Shop. In the basement.”

“And before that?”

“Window shades, at Goldblatt’s.”

“Steady work?”

“No, Thursdays and Saturdays. I also sold shoes.”

“You’ve been a shoe-dog too. Well. And prior to that? Here it is in your folder.” He opened the record. “Saint Olafs College, instructor in classical languages. Fellow, University of Chicago, 1926-27. I’ve had Latin, too. Let’s trade quotations—‘Dum spiro spew’.’

”‘De dextram misero.’”

“‘-leajacta est.’”

“‘Excelsior.’”

Raynor shouted with laughter, and other workers came to look at him over the partition. Grebe also laughed, feeling pleased and easy. The luxury of fun on a nervous morning.

When they were done and no one was watching or listening, Raynor said rather seriously, “What made you study Latin in the first place? Was it for the priesthood?”

“No.”

“Just for the hell of it? For the culture? Oh, the things people think they can pull!” He made his cry hilarious and tragic. “I ran my pants off so I could study for the bar, and I’ve passed the bar, so I get twelve dollars a week more than you as a bonus for having seen life straight and whole. I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality. Don’t you think that was clear to your Greeks? They were a thoughtful people, but they didn’t part with their slaves.”

This was a great deal more than Grebe had looked for in his first interview with his supervisor. He was too shy to show all the astonishment he felt. He laughed a little, aroused, and brushed at the sunbeam that covered his head with its dust. “Do you think my mistake was so terrible?”

‘Damn right it was terrible, and you know it now that you’ve had the whip of hard times laid on your back. You should have been preparing yourself for trouble. Your people must have been well-off to send you to the university. Stop me, if I’m stepping on your toes. Did your mother pamper you? Did your father give in to you? Were you brought up tenderly, with permission to go and find out what were the last things that everything else stands for while everybody else labored in the fallen world of appearances?”

“Well, no, it wasn’t exactly like that.” Grebe smiled. The fallen world of appearances! no less. But now it was his turn to deliver a surprise. “We weren’t rich. My father was the last genuine English butler in Chicago—”