coming down from Mars. What race of men is this, I asked myself. What does
it mean? And there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was
snuffed out in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and
incomprehensible world, a world so removed from me that I had the sensation
of belonging to another planet. From the top of the Empire State Building I
looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below: there they
were, in true perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human
lice with whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail's pace,
each one doubtless fulfilling his micro-cosmic destiny. In their fruitless
desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and
boast. And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had
suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their
senseless warble. At the very summit of their ambition there were these
little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I
thought to myself perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay,
demented ones who would sing about the world to come. Perhaps they would
breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked. Perhaps
in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life below might
flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling
creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might all be
demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has
happened again and again. Another thousand years, or five thousand, or ten
thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a little boy
may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this life now
passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life
with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on dosing
the book will think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a
marvellous life there had once been on this continent which he is now
inhabiting. No race to come, except perhaps the race of blind poets, will
ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this future history
was composed. Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day.
Any day of my life - back there - would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny,
microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back ...
At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn't bounce out of bed. I lay there
till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep - how could I
sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already
due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already
buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden
stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and
repeat yesterday's song and dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out.
Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear. Mondays I got my
allowance from the wife -carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to
her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on.
I couldn't be bothered shaving - there wasn't time enough. I put on the torn
shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she
were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the
subway. I got to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen
calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call
there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two telephones at
once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between
calls. MacGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of
advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook who is trying to sneak
back under a false name. Behind me are the cards and ledgers containing the
name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine. The bad
ones are starred in red ink;
some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is
crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms,
camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away - not
that we don't need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just
won't do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied
hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He's seventy now and
would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of recommendation,
but we can't take any one over forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New
York is the dead line. The telephone rings and it's a smooth secretary from
the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn't I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into
his office - a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so. What did he
do? He tried to rape his sister. An Italian, of course. O'Mara, my
assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him
of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy
throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women faints. A beautiful
looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to
persuade me to take her on. She's a whore clean through and I know if I put
her on there'll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building
uptown - because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few
cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it
were a vaudeville performance. Kronski, the medical student arrives; he says
one of the boys I've just hired has Parkinson's disease. I've been so busy I
haven't had a chance to go to the toilet. All the telegraph operators, all
the managers, suffer from haemorrhoids, so O'Rourke tells me. He's been
having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch
time and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me,
as usual. We gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants
to interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can't keep the
force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New
York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been canvassed
for part time messengers. All the charity bureaux and relief societies have
been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don't even last an
hour. It's a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it's
totally unnecessary. But that's not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as
Kipling says. I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone
ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting
bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I
have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, experience, etc. All
the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then
chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for
it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of
communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly,
so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be
appraised immediately, that is to say within an hour, unless the messenger
to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the
whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas
blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the
directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company, and maybe the telegram reads "Mother dying, come at once", but the
clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages,
spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet
such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you
will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of
course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a
messenger's job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the
docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the brats
to thank the general manager, or perhaps the vice-president himself, for the
kindness and consideration shown. And then one day everybody will be
heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O'Rourke will be
asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him down
if it cost ten thousand dollars. And then the vice-president will issue an
order that no more Jews are to be hired, but after three or four days he
will let up a bit because there are nothing but Jews coming for the job. And
because it's getting so very tough and the timber so damned scarce I'm on
the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would have hired
him if he hadn't broken down and confessed that he was a she. And to make it
worse Valeska takes "it" under her wing, takes "it" home that night and
under pretense of sympathy gives "it" a thorough examination, including a
vaginal exploration with the index finger of the right hand. And the
nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly
attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the
lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath
me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers
were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my
body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a
huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly,
pitilessly. This eye so wide awake seemed to have made all my other
faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take
in the drama of the world.
If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be
it mean? And there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was
snuffed out in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and
incomprehensible world, a world so removed from me that I had the sensation
of belonging to another planet. From the top of the Empire State Building I
looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below: there they
were, in true perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human
lice with whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail's pace,
each one doubtless fulfilling his micro-cosmic destiny. In their fruitless
desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and
boast. And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had
suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their
senseless warble. At the very summit of their ambition there were these
little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I
thought to myself perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay,
demented ones who would sing about the world to come. Perhaps they would
breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked. Perhaps
in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life below might
flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling
creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might all be
demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has
happened again and again. Another thousand years, or five thousand, or ten
thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a little boy
may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this life now
passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life
with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on dosing
the book will think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a
marvellous life there had once been on this continent which he is now
inhabiting. No race to come, except perhaps the race of blind poets, will
ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this future history
was composed. Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day.
Any day of my life - back there - would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny,
microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back ...
At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn't bounce out of bed. I lay there
till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep - how could I
sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already
due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already
buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden
stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and
repeat yesterday's song and dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out.
Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear. Mondays I got my
allowance from the wife -carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to
her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on.
I couldn't be bothered shaving - there wasn't time enough. I put on the torn
shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she
were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the
subway. I got to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen
calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call
there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two telephones at
once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between
calls. MacGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of
advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook who is trying to sneak
back under a false name. Behind me are the cards and ledgers containing the
name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine. The bad
ones are starred in red ink;
some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is
crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms,
camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away - not
that we don't need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just
won't do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied
hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He's seventy now and
would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of recommendation,
but we can't take any one over forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New
York is the dead line. The telephone rings and it's a smooth secretary from
the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn't I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into
his office - a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so. What did he
do? He tried to rape his sister. An Italian, of course. O'Mara, my
assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him
of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy
throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women faints. A beautiful
looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to
persuade me to take her on. She's a whore clean through and I know if I put
her on there'll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building
uptown - because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few
cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it
were a vaudeville performance. Kronski, the medical student arrives; he says
one of the boys I've just hired has Parkinson's disease. I've been so busy I
haven't had a chance to go to the toilet. All the telegraph operators, all
the managers, suffer from haemorrhoids, so O'Rourke tells me. He's been
having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch
time and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me,
as usual. We gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants
to interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can't keep the
force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New
York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been canvassed
for part time messengers. All the charity bureaux and relief societies have
been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don't even last an
hour. It's a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it's
totally unnecessary. But that's not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as
Kipling says. I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone
ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting
bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I
have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, experience, etc. All
the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then
chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for
it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of
communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly,
so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be
appraised immediately, that is to say within an hour, unless the messenger
to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the
whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas
blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the
directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company, and maybe the telegram reads "Mother dying, come at once", but the
clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages,
spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet
such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you
will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of
course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a
messenger's job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the
docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the brats
to thank the general manager, or perhaps the vice-president himself, for the
kindness and consideration shown. And then one day everybody will be
heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O'Rourke will be
asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him down
if it cost ten thousand dollars. And then the vice-president will issue an
order that no more Jews are to be hired, but after three or four days he
will let up a bit because there are nothing but Jews coming for the job. And
because it's getting so very tough and the timber so damned scarce I'm on
the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would have hired
him if he hadn't broken down and confessed that he was a she. And to make it
worse Valeska takes "it" under her wing, takes "it" home that night and
under pretense of sympathy gives "it" a thorough examination, including a
vaginal exploration with the index finger of the right hand. And the
nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly
attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the
lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath
me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers
were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my
body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a
huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly,
pitilessly. This eye so wide awake seemed to have made all my other
faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take
in the drama of the world.
If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be
Конец бесплатного ознакомительного фрагмента