In Belshazzar Court
OUR apartment house has all-night elevator service. We have grown accustomed to being awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of violent hammering on the iron door of the elevator shaft, the object of which is to attract the attention of the operator, who is in the habit of running up his car to the top floor and going to sleep in the hall, being roused only with the greatest difficulty. Tenants have complained of the inconvenience; especially when one comes home late from an after-theatre supper at a Broadway hotel. In deference to such complaints our elevator boys are constantly being discharged, but the tradition of going to sleep on the top floor seems to be continuous.
One of the reasons for this, I imagine, is that our landlord underpays his help and is consequently in no position to enforce discipline. However, I speak almost entirely on information and belief, my personal experience with the all-night elevator having been confined to a single instance. That was when we came back from our vacation last summer at an early hour in the morning and rang the bell without eliciting any response. Inasmuch as we live only two flights up, we walked up the stairs, I carrying a suit-case, a hand-bag and the baby, and Emmeline carrying another suit-case and leading by the hand our boy Harold, who was fast asleep.
During the day our elevator is frequently out of order. The trouble, I believe, is with the brake, which every little while fails to catch, so that the car slides down a floor or two and sticks. It is quite probable that if our elevator boys remained long enough to become acquainted with the peculiar characteristics of the machinery in Belshazzar Court such stoppages would come less often. But no serious accidents have ever occurred, to my knowledge, and personally, as I have said, I suffer little inconvenience, since it is no trouble at all to walk up two flights of stairs.
But it is different with Emmeline, who worries over the children. She will not allow the baby to be taken into the car. Instead, she makes the nurse ride up or down with the carriage, then has her fetch the baby by the stairs. Emmeline complains that in cold weather this necessitates her own going downstairs to tuck the child into her cart, a duty which cannot possibly be delegated. It also exposes the baby to draughts while she is being taken out of the cart in the hall, preparatory to being carried upstairs. But Emmeline would rather take that chance than have the elevator drop with baby, as happened twice during the first week after we moved in. I have sometimes argued with her on the subject, maintaining that there cannot be any real danger when the safety of the elevator is guaranteed by no less than three casualty companies; but Emmeline says that is a detached point of view which she cannot share. Our boy Harold is under strict injunctions to walk. He finds it a deprivation, after having twice tasted the joy of being marooned between floors, whence he was rescued by means of a ladder.
It is on account of the large bedrooms that we selected this particular apartment house and cling to it in spite of certain obvious disadvantages. That is, there is really one bedroom only which can be called very large, but it has a fair amount of sunlight and it faces on an open court. Harold has the music-room, which landlords formerly used to call the back parlor. It faces on the avenue and makes an excellent sleeping-room and play-room for the boy. Such rooms are almost impossible to find in a tolerable neighborhood for the really moderate rent we pay; that is, my rent is just a little more than I can afford. Nevertheless you would think it reasonable if you saw what a fine appearance our apartment house makes. It has a façade in Flemish brick, with bay windows belted by handsome railings of wrought iron upon narrow stone balconies. It also has a mansard cornice painted a dull green, which is visible several blocks away over the roofs of the oldfashioned flats by which our house is surrounded.
Our friends, when they come to see us for the first time, are impressed with Belshazzar Court. You pass through heavy grilled doors into a marble-lined vestibule which is separated by a second pair of massive doors from the spacious main hall. This hall is gay with an astonishingly large number of handsome electroliers in imitation cut glass. There is also a magnificent marble fireplace in which the effect of a wood fire is simulated by electric bulbs under a sheet of red-colored isinglass. The heat is furnished by a steam radiator close by. The floor has two large Oriental rugs of domestic manufacture. There is a big leather couch in front of the fire-place. Everywhere are large, comfortable arm-chairs in which I have often thought it would be pleasant to lounge and smoke, but I have never had the time. On a mahogany table, in the centre, the day’s mail is displayed. I have sometimes glanced over the letters in idle curiosity and found that they consist largely of circulars from clothing firms and dyeing establishments. The chandeliers usually have a number of the crystal prisms broken or missing. The rugs are fairly worn, but doubtless the casual visitor does not notice that. The general effect of our main hall is, as I have said, imposing. Sunday afternoons there are several motor cars lined up in front of the house.
The number of young children in our apartment house is not large, a dozen or fifteen, perhaps. The house has six stories and there are nine apartments to the floor, so you can figure out for yourself the rate of increase for the population of Belshazzar Court. My own contribution to the infant statistics of our apartment house is apparently between one sixth and one eighth of the total number. Moreover, if you calculate not by mere number but by the amount of vital energy liberated, my own share is still larger. For there is no denying the justice of the hall boys’ complaint that our Harold creates more disturbance in the house than any other three children. The missing prisms in the hall chandeliers are in considerable degree to be attributed to Harold. Not that he has a predilection for electroliers. He is just as hard on shoes and stockings. The former he destroys in a peculiar manner. As he walks upstairs, he carefully adjusts the upper of his shoe, just over the arch, to the edge of each step, and scrapes it toward the toe slowly but firmly. When in good form he can shave the toes from a new pair of shoes in a single afternoon, and I have known him to reduce his footgear, within a week, to a semblance of degraded destitution that is the despair and mortification of his mother.
However, it must not be supposed that Harold is unpopular with the working staff of Belshazzar Court. The only apparent exception is the house superintendent, who is held responsible for all damages accruing to halls and stairways. His point of view is therefore quite comprehensible. But even the bitter protests of the house superintendent are not, I imagine, a true index to his permanent state of feeling with regard to Harold. At least I know that after the superintendent has called up Emmeline on the telephone to complain of Harold’s fondness for tracing patterns on the mahogany hall table with a wire nail, the boy has been found in the cellar watching the stoking of the furnace with bated breath, a privilege conferred on but few. The superintendent has also given Harold the run of a great pile of cinders and ashes which occasionally accumulates near the furnace doors. From such excursions the boy returns with the knees of his stockings entirely gone, and only the blue of his eyes discernible through a layer of coal dust which lends him an aspect of extraordinary ferocity.
And yet I believe it is Harold’s clamorous career through life that is the secret of his popularity with the people in our house. When he walks down the stairs it sounds like a catastrophe. He engages in furious wrestling bouts with the hall boys, whose life he threatens to take in the most fiendishly cruel manner. His ability to ‘lick’ the elevator boy and the telephone operator single-handed is an open secret to any one who has ever met Harold. But as I have said, there are very few children in the house, and I imagine that the sound of him engaging in mortal combat with the elevator boy, and the clatter of his progress down the stairs, echo rather gratefully at times through the long, sombre hallways.
I am an eye-witness of Harold’s popularity on Sunday mornings when Emmeline and I, with both the children, ride down in the elevator for our weekly stroll along the Boulevard. My bodily presence on Sunday so far removes my wife’s apprehensions with regard to the elevator that she will consent to take the baby down in the car. On such occasions I have observed that our neighbors invariably smile at Harold. Sometimes they will ask him how soon and in just what way he intends to destroy the new hall boy, or they will reach out a hand and pluck at his ear. The women in the car content themselves with smiling at him.
Harold’s friends, who thus salute him on Sunday morning, usually carry or lead a small dog or two which they are taking out for the daily exercise. There are a large number of small dogs in our apartment house. I don’t pretend to know the different breeds, but they are nearly all of them winsome little beasts, with long, silky pelts, retroussé noses, and eyes that blink fiercely at you. Their masters are as a rule big, thick-set men, well advanced toward middle age, faultlessly dressed, and shaven to the quick. Or else the small dogs repose in the arms of tall, heavy women, who go mercilessly corseted and pay full tribute to modern requirements in facial decoration. They seem to lay great store by their pets, but they also find a kind glance for Harold. Sometimes I imagine it is a different glance which they turn from their little dogs to Harold, — a softer look, with the suggestion of wonder in it. From Harold and the baby they usually glance at Emmeline. I pass virtually unnoticed.
I have mentioned the baby. When she is with us, Harold does not monopolize our neighbors’ attention. It would be odd if it were otherwise. I am not so partisan as Emmeline in this matter, but I am inclined to think she is right when she says that our baby’s eyes, of a liquid grayish-blue, staring in fascination out of the soft, pink swell of her cheeks, cannot help going straight to the heart of every normally constituted bystander. The women with small dogs in their arms smile at Harold, but they will bend down to the baby and hold out a finger to her and ask her name. Under such circumstances the behavior of Emmeline is rather difficult to explain. She is proud and resentful at the same time. Her moral judgments are apt to be swift and sharp, and when we are alone she has often characterized these neighbors of ours — the women I mean — in pretty definite terms. Her opinion of women whose interests are satisfied by a husband and a toy dog would please Mr. Roosevelt, I imagine. Yet she never fails to tell me of the extraordinary charm our baby exerts on these very people whose outlook upon life and æsthetic standards she thoroughly despises.
I have a confession to make. Sometimes, during our encounters in the elevator with our close-shaven, frockcoated neighbors and their fashionably dressed wives, I have looked at Emmeline’s clothes and made comparisons not to her discredit but to my own. I should like Emmeline to cut as fine a figure as her neighbors, occasionally. Our neighbors’ wives on a Sunday are dazzling in velvets and furs and plumes, whereas Emmeline has a natural disinclination for ostrich feathers even if we could afford to go in for such things. Her furs are not bad, but they are not new. They have worn well during the four years she has had them; nevertheless they are not new.
I am not hinting at shabbiness. That is the last thing you would think of if you saw Emmeline. An exquisite cleanliness of figure, a fine animation in the eyes and the cut of her lips, an electric youthfulness of gesture — I know that clothes are vanity, but sometimes, on Sundays, I am seized with an extraordinary desire for velvets and feathers and furs. I feel that there must be a certain, spiritual tonic in the knowledge of being splendidly overdressed. It is a plunge into outlawry which has its temptations to quiet people like myself who would never dare to put on a red tie. I sometimes wonder if the ancient Greeks, with all their inborn taste for simplicity in line and color, did not occasionally go in for a sartorial spree. I really do not regret the fact that I cannot afford to give Emmeline a sealskin coat and a hat with aigrettes. Ninetynine times out of a hundred I should feel uneasy to see her thus arrayed. But occasionally, yes, occasionally, I should like it.
Frequently I catch myself wondering how the others can afford it. I take it that even when you make due allowance for the New York temperament it is fairly safe to assume that people living in the same apartment house occupy the same economic level. There are exceptions, of course. Tucked away in some rear-court apartment you will find people whose bank accounts would amaze their neighbors. But these are precisely the ones who make the least display. They are maiden ladies of native American descent and the last of their line; or the widows of Tammany contractors and office-holders who divide their time between works of piety and a cat; or prolific German families of the second generation living after the sober traditions of the race. Still, I feel sure that the majority of our neighbors in Belshazzar Court are in the same income class with myself. How, then, can they afford it all — velvets, furs, the Sunday afternoon motor-car in front of the door? I put aside the obvious explanation, that there are no children. That would make a very considerable difference, but still — motor-cars, bridge three times a week for very considerable stakes, tables reserved at Shanley’s for Election night and New Year’s Eve —
‘They have to afford it,’ says Emmeline, with that incisive justice of hers in which I should sometimes like to see a deeper tincture of mercy. ‘When you come to think of it, a little pinknosed dog cannot fill up a woman’s life. There must be other interests.’
‘ In other words, they can’t afford it. Do these people pay their bills?’
We used to call this a rhetorical question at college. My information on the subject is probably as good as Emmeline’s. Five minutes of pleasant gossip with one’s newsdealer is illuminating. Not that I am given to hanging over shop-counters, or that my newsdealer would be reckless enough to mention names. But since we are by way of being in the same line of business, I writing for the newspapers while he sells them,—and incidentally makes the better income of the two,— we do pass the time of day whenever I drop in for cigars or stationery. On such occasions, without quoting names, he will state it as a regrettable economic puzzle that so many people who ride in motor-cars should find it hard to pay their newspaper bills. There was one account, running up to something over eight dollars, he told me, that he was finally compelled to write down to profit and loss. The figures are instructive. Eleven cents a week — for it is an odd fact that people who ride in motor-cars read only the penny papers — makes forty-four cents a month. Throw in an occasional ten-cent magazine and you have a total expenditure of say seventy or eighty cents a month. An unpaid newspaper bill of eight dollars would therefore argue a condition of acute financial embarrassment extending over a period of nearly a year.
My newsdealer’s explanation was that garage bills must be paid with fair promptness and dinners at Shanley’s must be paid for in cash, seeing that the demand is always greater than the supply. Whereas the competition among newsdealers is so sharp, and literature is on the whole a luxury so easily dispensed with, that the newsvendor must be content to wait for his bill or lose his customer. And he went on to say that there is serious talk among men in his line of business of organizing a newsdealers’ benevolent and protective association for the enforcement of collections from customers living in elevator apartments.
‘And then again,’ says Emmeline, ‘why should n’t they be able to afford it? They don’t eat.’
She goes on to show that inevitably a house with no children in it is a house with very little good food in it. Emmeline has made a study of eugenics, and she has come to the conclusion that the purest milk and a lot of it, the juiciest steaks, and the freshest vegetables constitute the best preventive of a neurotic citizenship in the future. It is a principle which she lives up to so resolutely that our food bills would strike many people as staggering. Now appetite, Emmeline argues, is very susceptible to suggestion. People learn to eat by watching their young. It’s like caviare. But where there are no children life may easily be sustained on soda crackers and a glass of milk.
And it is something more than that. (I am still paraphrasing Emmeline’s views). A dining-room table with children’s eager, hungry faces around it ceases to be a mere dining-room table and becomes an altar. Dinner is not a mere replenishing of the physiological furnaces; it partakes of the nature of a sacrament, with the mother as the high priestess, and the father, — well, let us call him the tithe-gatherer. Eating in common is a form of primitive nature-worship which the purest religions have taken over and sanctified. To break bread together — well, all this is quite obvious. But now try to think of a sacrament as being administered with a can-opener and a chafing-dish.
‘ That is what they live on,’ says Emmeline, ‘things that come out of tins and paper boxes. At the end of a year it means a fur coat.’ Which is n’t really very convincing. A single after-theatre supper on Broadway will easily swallow up a week’s frying-pan economies. But as an index of the attitude of those women who cook for their children to those women who have no children to cook for, Emmeline’s opinion has its value. I admit that, being a woman, she is prejudiced, my own prejudices being to a very great extent the reflection of hers.
Emmeline has a hatred for gossip that is quite extraordinary in one who is so closely confined to her home by household duties. Hence you will wonder where she obtains her information, sometimes so startlingly intimate, regarding our neighbors’ habits. Well, in the first place, Belshazzar Court is very much like those Russian prisons you read about, which hum and echo with news flashing along mysterious channels. The prison walls resound to ghostly taps in the still of the night. The water-pipes beat out their message. A handkerchief is waved at a window. A convict’s shackled feet, dragging along the corridor, send out the Morse code of the cell. So it requires no special gift of imagination to sit in one’s apartment and reconstruct the main outlines of the life about you. The mechanical piano downstairs has its say. There is a scamper of young feet in the hallway above. A voice of exasperation rasps its way down the dumb-waiter. A sewing machine whirs its short half hour and is silent. Little yelping volleys announce meal-time for the silken-haired Pekinese. As night comes on, the lights begin to flash up, revealing momentary silhouettes, groups, bits of still life. The alarm clock in the morning and the heavy, thoughtful tread at midnight bespeak different habits and occupations. It is a world built up out of sounds.
There are the servants. They are the telegraph wires of apartment-house life. Like a good many telegraph wires in the great world outside, they are sadly overburdened with trivialities. Yet a healthy cook or nurse-maid will pick up during a ten minutes’ excursion to the roof an amazing mass of miscellaneous information. This information she insists upon imparting to you. At first Emmeline would refuse to listen, protesting that she did not care to be burdened with other people’s affairs. But we soon learned that the one form of class-distinction which domestic help will not tolerate is a refusal to meet them on the common level of gossip. What makes the problem all the more difficult is that as a rule the best servants have the keenest appetite for petty scandal. Presumably a robust interest in one’s own duties goes hand in hand with a healthy interest in the way other people are living up to their duly. Elizabeth, the only cook we have ever had who will not create a scene when somebody drops in unexpectedly for dinner, simply oozes information. When I think of the secrets into which Elizabeth has initiated us with regard to our neighbors whom we have never met, I feel an embarrassment which is only relieved by the thought that these neighbors must be quite as well informed about ourselves.
Perhaps I should know more of our neighbors if the electric lights in our stately hallways did not burn so dimly. I have mentioned the handsome glass chandeliers in our main hall and vestibule. Unfortunately they give forth a faint, sepulchral light. Our elevator car, a massive cage of iron and copper, is quite dark. It may be that our landlord has artistic leanings and is trying to impart a subdued, studio atmosphere to his halls; very dim illumination being, I understand, the proper thing in advanced circles. Incidentally there must be a saving in electricity bills. At any rate if you will take into consideration the fact that I have a habit of staring at people, even in broad daylight, without recognizing them, and if you will add to that the fact that a day’s fussing over proofs and exchanges in the office is followed by an hour in the Subway over the evening papers, it is quite plain why I have difficulty in remembering the faces of neighbors whom I occasionally run across.
Most of the neighbors are very much the same way. An hour in the dead atmosphere of the Subway wilts the social virtues out of a man. We manage to make our way listlessly into the upper air. We trudge wearily through the handsome iron doors of our apartment house. We take our places in opposite corners of the elevator car and stare up at the roof of the cage or count the floors as we pass. Three or four of us leave at the same floor and go our several ways, I to number 43 on the right, one man to number 42 straight ahead, one to the left, and so forth. As I have said, there are nine apartments to the floor.
Emmeline insists that I should not read in the Subway. She says I ought to lean back and close my eyes and rest. But she forgets that the man you lean back upon is sure to protest. Lateral pressure enforces an attitude of extreme rigidity during the rush hour, and to stand up straight with one’s eyes closed tight is obviously ridiculous. Even when I find a seat, I do not like to close my eyes. It gives people the impression that I am pretending to be asleep in order to avoid giving up my seat to a woman, and on that subject I have the courage of my convictions. An hour in the Subway can be made endurable only by some such narcotic as the evening papers afford; and when you have read through three or four papers, your eyes naturally show the strain.
Of course, if we stay long enough in Belshazzar Court, we shall make acquaintances. Accident will bring that about. For instance, there are a number of men in my line of work and the allied professions who meet every now and then in a little German café on the East side in the ’Eighties. It is not a club, since there are neither members nor bye-laws nor initiation fees, nor, worst of all abominations, a set subject for papers and discussion. People simply drift in and out. We keep late hours, and it is a well-known fact that in the early hours of the morning friendships are rather easily formed. That was the way I met Brewster.
Brewster (I don’t know his first name) is a tall, thin, sallow-faced man of thirty-five who looks the Middle West he comes from. I had seen him at two of our meetings before we fell into talk. He spoke sparingly, not because he was shy, but because as a rule he had trouble in finding the right phrase. It was not until we were walking across town toward the Subway one night that I found out that Brewster is associate professor of mathematics at my old university. But he has ideas outside of Euclid. He is a Radical, he detests New York, and he is looking forward to the time when he can get away. But I imagine that he is not looking forward very eagerly. Your Radical loves the city while he curses it. At any rate, the Subway trains make speed at night and I was at my station before I knew it. Had he passed his own? No, it appeared that this was his station, too. That was pleasant, I said. Living in the same neighborhood I hoped we would see more of each other in the future. He said it would be pleasant indeed; his own address was Belshazzar Court. He had been there more than two years now. He lived on the third floor, in 47.
‘That would be directly across the court from 43?’
He thought it was.
That was two weeks ago. We have not yet found the time to drop in on Brewster. But sometimes I catch a glimpse of him through the window-curtains of his dining-room. Of course I had seen his figure pass across the window before, but naturally had never looked long enough to fix his face in my memory. He has his two children and his unmarried sister in the apartment with him. The mother of the children is dead. The elder is a boy of seven, and I think he must be the pleasant-faced lad who on several occasions has rung our bell and complained that our Harold has robbed him of various bits of personal property — a toy pistol, a clay pipe, and several college emblems of the kind that come in cigarette boxes.
That is all I know of Brewster directly. Emmeline knows a little more. She has it from our cook, who has it from Brewster’s cook. He goes out very rarely. In the morning he escorts the little boy to a private school half a mile away. This he does on his way to the university. He comes home a little earlier than I do, usually with a grip full of books. Our cook says that Brewster is invariably present when his sister gives the little girl her bath before putting her to bed; the child is only two years old. The boy has his supper with his father and aunt, and it is Brewster himself who superintends his going to bed. This process is extremely involved and is marked by a great deal of rough-and-tumble hilarity. Late at night, as I sit reading or Writing, I catch a glimpse of him over his work at the big dining-room table, correcting examination papers, I suppose, though I believe he does some actuarial work for an insurance company. He will get up occasionally for a turn or two about the room, or to fill his pipe, or to fetch from the kitchen a cup of tea which he drinks cold. I see him at work long after midnight.
Have I gone into all this detail concerning Brewster merely because he happens to live in 47, which is just across the court from 43, or because our habits and our interests really do touch at so many points? If Brewster were writing down his impressions of Belshazzar Court at midnight, with myself as the central figure, his story would be very much like mine. A glimpse into the windows of our diningroom would show me, too, in a clutter of papers, rustling through my exchange clippings, dipping into a volume of ‘ Pickwick’ for a moment’s rest, striking innumerable matches to keep a reluctant pipe a-going, and drinking cold tea, — too much cold tea, I am afraid.
Yes, Brewster and I have something in common. But then I wonder, if I were living one floor above, in 53, and chance had made me acquainted with Smith who lives across the court in 57, would Smith and I discover that there are human ties between us other than our dependence on the same central heating plant? For one thing, I know that the Smiths have a baby which frequently cries at night in unison with our own. Sometimes the Smith baby wakes up ours. Sometimes the initiative comes from our own side.
Because I drink so much cold tea before going to bed, I find it difficult to fall asleep. I lie awake and think of Belshazzar Court with a fondness that I cannot muster at any other time. The house offers me an extraordinary sense of security; not for myself, but for those who belong to me. It is a comfort to have one’s wife and children snugly tucked away in one’s own particular cluster of cells at the end of one’s own obscure little passageway, where an enemy would need Ariadne’s guiding thread to find them. The cave man must have felt some such satisfaction when he had stored his young and their mother into some peculiarly inacessible rock cleft.
I suppose the dark is a favorable time for the recurrence of such primordial feelings. In the dark the need for human fellowship wells up to the surface. Athwart the partitions of lath and mortar, we of Belshazzar Court experience the warm, protective sensation which comes from huddling together against the invisible menaces of the night.
Decidedly, I must give up drinking so much cold tea. My eyes to-morrow will show the strain. But it is wonderful, too, this lying awake and feeling that you can almost catch the heartthrob of hundreds, above you, below you, on both sides. My neighbors undergo a magic transformation. Deprived of individuality, — viewed, so to speak, under their eternal aspect, — they grow lovable. Belshazzar Court is transformed. In the day it is a barracks. At night it becomes a walled refuge, a tabernacle almost. The pulse of life beats through its halls with just enough momentum to make a solemn music which gradually overcomes the effects of the cold tea. Intermittent noises twist themselves into vague fugues and arabesques. Somewhere on the floor above, heavy footsteps go back and forth in leisurely preparation for bed. Somewhere across the court, people have returned from the theatre. Evidently they are still under the exhilaration of the lights and the crowd. They pass judgment on the play and their voices are thoughtlessly fresh and animated, considering how late it is; but somehow you are not disturbed. With utter lack of interest you hear a child’s wail break out — it is the Smith baby — and you hear the mother’s ‘hush, hush,’ falling into a somnolent, crooning chant. Outside, a motor-car starts into life with a grinding and a whir and a sputter, and you set yourself to follow its receding hum, which becomes a drone and then a murmur and then silence, but you are not sure whether it is yet silence. As you are still wondering there comes the end of things, except that now and then you stir to the clamor of the elevator bell, ringing indignantly for the boy who has run the car up to the top floor and gone to sleep in the hall.