The great apartment house in which the Jacks lived was not one of those structures which give to the Island of Manhattan its startling and fabulous quality — those cloud-soaring spires whose dizzy vertices and clifflike fa?ades seem to belong to the sky rather than to the earth. These are the special shapes which flash in the mind of a European when he thinks about New York, and which inbound travellers, looking from a liner’s deck, see in all their appalling and inhuman loveliness sustained there lightly on the water. This building was none of these.

It was — just a building. It was not beautiful, certainly, but it was impressive because of its bulk, its squareness, its sheer mass. From the outside, it seemed to be a gigantic cube of city-weathered brick and stone, punctured evenly by its many windows. It filled an entire block, going through one street to the next.

When one entered it, however, one saw that it had been built in the form of a hollow square about a large central court. This court was laid out on two levels. The lower and middle part was covered with loose gravel, and raised above this level was a terrace for flower-beds, with a broad brick pavement flanking it on all four sides. Beyond the walk there was a span of arches which also ran the whole way round the square, giving the place something of the appearance of an enormous cloister. Leading off this cloister at regular intervals were the entrances to the apartments.

The building was so grand, so huge, so solid-seeming, that it gave the impression of having been hewn from the everlasting rock itself. Yet this was not true at all. The mighty edifice was really tubed and hollowed like a giant honeycomb. It was set on monstrous steel stilts, pillared below on vacancy, and sustained on curving arches. Its nerves, bones, and sinews went down below the level of the street to an underworld of storeyed basements, and below all these, far in the tortured rock, there was the tunnel’s depth.

When dwellers in this imperial tenement felt a tremor at their feet, it was only then that they remembered there were trains beneath them — sleek expresses arriving and departing at all hours of the day and night. Then some of them reflected with immense satisfaction on the cleverness with which New York had reversed an order that is fixed and immutable everywhere else in America, and had made it fashionable to live, not merely “beside the tracks”, but on top of them.

A little before seven o’clock that October evening, old John, who ran one of the service elevators in the building, came walking slowly along Park Avenue, ready to go on duty for his night’s work. He had reached the entrance and was just turning in when he was accosted by a man of thirty or thereabouts who was obviously in a state of vinous dilapidation.

“Say, Bud ——”

At the familiar words, uttered in a tone of fawning and yet rather menacing ingratiation, the face of the older man reddened with anger. He quickened his step and tried to move away, but the creature plucked at his sleeve and said in a low voice:

“I was just wonderin’ if you could spare a guy a ——”

“Na-h!” the old man snapped angrily. “I can’t spare you anything! I’m twice your age and I always had to work for everything I got! If you was any good you’d do the same!”

“Oh yeah?” the other jeered, looking at the old man with eyes that had suddenly gone hard and ugly.

“Yeah!” old John snapped back, and then turned and passed through the great arched entrance of the building, feeling that his repartee had been a little inadequate, though it was the best he had been able to manage on the spur of the moment. He was still muttering to himself as he started along the colonnade that led to the south wing.

“What’s the matter, Pop?” It was Ed, one of the day elevator men who spoke to him. “Who got your goat?”

“Ah-h,” John muttered, still fuming with resentment, “it’s these panhandling bums! One of ’em just stopped me outside the building and asked if I could spare a dime! A young fellow no older than you are, tryin’ to panhandle from an old man like me! He ought to be ashamed of himself! I told him so, too. I said: ‘If you was any good you’d work for it!’”

“Yeah?” said Ed, with mild interest.

“Yeah,” said John. “They ought to keep those fellows away from here. They hang round this neighbourhood like flies at a molasses barrel. They got no right to bother the kind of people we got here.”

There was just a faint trace of mollification in his voice as he spoke of “the kind of people we got here”. One felt that on this side reverence lay. “The kind of people we got here” were, at all odds, to be protected and preserved.

“That’s the only reason they hang round this place,” the old man went on. “They know they can play on the sympathy of the people in this building. Only the other night I saw one of ’em panhandle Mrs. Jack for a dollar. A big fellow, as well and strong as you are! I’d a good notion to tell her not to give him anything! If he wanted work, he could go and get him a job the same as you and me! It’s got so if ain’t safe for a woman in the house to take the dog round the block. Some greasy bum will be after her before she gets back. If I was the management I’d put a stop to it. A house like this can’t afford it. The kind of people we got here don’t have to stand for it!”

Having made these pronouncements, so full of outraged propriety and his desire to protect “the kind of people we got here” from further invasions of their trusting sanctity by these cadging frauds, old John, somewhat appeased, went in at the service entrance of the south wing, and in a few minutes he was at his post in the service elevator, ready for the night’s work.

John Enborg had been born in Brooklyn more than sixty years before, the son of a Norwegian seaman and an Irish serving-girl. In spite of this mixed parentage, one would have said without hesitation that he was “old stock” American — New England Yankee, most likely. Even his physical structure had taken on those national characteristics which are perhaps the result, partly of weather and geography, partly of tempo, speech, and local custom — a special pattern of the nerves and vital energies wrought out upon the whole framework of flesh and bone, so that, from whatever complex sources they are derived, they are recognised instantly and unmistakably as “American”.

In all these ways old John was “American”. He had the dry neck — the lean, sinewy, furrowed neck that is engraved so harshly with so much weather. He had the dry face, too, seamed and squeezed of its moisture; the dry mouth, not brutal, certainly, but a little tight and stiff and woodenly inflexible; and the slightly outcropping lower jaw, as if the jarring conflicts in the life around him had hardened the very formations of the bone into this shape of unyielding tenacity. He was not much above the average height, but his whole body had the same stringy leanness of his neck and face, and this made him seem taller. The old man’s hands were large and bony, corded with heavy veins, as if he had done much work with them. Even his voice and manner of talking were distinctively “American”. His speech was spare, dry, nasal, and semi-articulate. It could have passed with most people as the speech of a Vermonter, although it did not have any pronounced twang. What one noticed about it especially was its Yankee economy and tartness, which seemed to indicate a chronic state of sour temper. But he was very far from being an ill-natured old man, though at times he did appear to be. It was just his way. He had a dry humour and really loved the rough and ready exchange of banter that went on among the younger elevator men around him, but he concealed his softer side behind a mask of shortness and sarcastic denial.

This was evident now as Herbert Anderson came in. Herbert was the night operator of the passenger elevator in the south entrance. He was a chunky, good-natured fellow of twenty-four or five, with two pink, mottled, absurdly fresh spots on his plump cheeks. He had lively and good-humoured eyes, and a mass of crinkly brownish hair of which one felt he was rather proud. He was John’s special favourite in the whole building, although one might not have gathered this from the exchange that now took place between them.

“Well, what do you say, Pop?” cried Herbert as he entered the service elevator and poked the old man playfully in the ribs. “You haven’t seen anything of two blondes yet, have you?”

The faint, dry grin about John Enborg’s mouth deepened a little almost to a stubborn line, as he swung the door to and pulled the lever.

“Ah-h,” he said sourly, almost in disgust, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about!”

The car descended and stopped, and he pulled the door open at the basement floor.

“Sure you do!” Herbert flung back vigorously as he walked over to the line of lockers, peeled off his coat, and began to take off his collar and tie. “You know those two blondes I been tellin’ you about, doncha, Pop?” By this time he was peeling the shirt off his muscular shoulders, then he supported himself with one hand against the locker while he stooped to take off his shoe.

“Ah-h,” said the old man, sour as before, “you’re always tellin’ me about something. I don’t even pay no attention to it. It goes in one ear and out the other.”

“Oh yeah?” said Herbert with a rising, ironical inflection. He bent to unlace his other shoe.

“Yeah,” said John dryly.

From the beginning the old man’s tone had been touched with this note of dry disgust, yet somehow he gave the impression that he was secretly amused by Herbert’s chatter. For one thing, he made no move to depart. Instead, he had propped himself against the side of the open elevator door, and, his old arms folded loosely into the sleeves of the worn grey alpaca coat which was his “uniform”, he was waiting there with the stubborn little grin round his mouth as if he was enjoying the debate and was willing to prolong it indefinitely.

“So that’s the kind of guy you are?” said Herbert, stepping out of his neatly-pressed trousers and arranging them carefully on one of the hangers which he had taken from the locker. He hung the coat over the trousers and buttoned it. “Here I go and get you all fixed up and you run out on me. O.K., Pop.” His voice was now shaded with resignation. “I thought you was a real guy, but if you’re goin’ to walk out on a party after I’ve gone to all the trouble, I’ll have to look for somebody else.”

“Oh yeah?” said old John.

“Yeah,” said Herbert in the accent proper to this type of repartee. “I had you all doped out for a live number, but I see I picked a dead one.”

John let this pass without comment. Herbert stood for a moment in his socks and underwear, stiffening his shoulders, twisting, stretching, bending his arms upwards with tense muscular effort, and ending by scratching his head.

“Where’s old Organisin’ Hank?” Herbert said presently. “Seen him to-night?”

“Who?” said John, looking at him with a somewhat bewildered expression.

“Henry. He wasn’t at the door when I come in, and he ain’t down here. He’s gonna be late.”

“Oh!” The word was small but it carried a heavy accent of disapproval. “Say!” The old man waved a gnarled hand stiffly in a downward gesture of dismissal. “That guy’s a pain in the neck!” He spoke the words with the dry precision old men have when they try to “keep up with” a younger man by talking unaccustomed slang. “A pain in the neck!” he repeated. “No, I ain’t seen him to-night.”

“Oh, Hank’s all right when you get to know him,” said Herbert cheerfully. “You know how a guy is when he gets all burned up about somethin’— he gets too serious about it — he thinks everybody else in the world ought to be like he is. But he’s O.K. He’s not a bad guy when you get him talkin’ about somethin’ else.”

“Yeah!” cried John suddenly and excitedly, not in agreement, but by way of introduction to something he had just remembered. “You know what he says to me the other day? ‘I wonder what all the rich mugs in this house would do,’ he says, ‘if they had to get down and do a hard day’s work for a livin’ once in a while.’ That’s what he says to me! ‘And these old bitches’— yeah!” cried John, nodding his head angrily —”‘these old bitches,’ he says, ‘that I got to help in and out of cars all night long, and can’t walk up a flight of stairs by themselves — what if they had to get down on their hands and knees and scrub floors like your mother and my mother did?’ That’s the way he goes on all the time!” cried John indignantly —“and him a-gettin’ his livin’ from the people in this house, and takin’ tips from them — and then talkin’ about them like he does! — Nah-h!” John muttered to himself and rapped his fingers on the wall. “I don’t like that way of talkin’! If he feels that way, let him get out! I don’t like that fellow.”

“Oh,” said Herbert easily and indifferently, “Hank’s not a bad guy, Pop. He don’t mean half of it. He’s just a grouch.”

By this time, with the speed and deftness born of long experience, he was putting on the starched shirt-front which was a part of his uniform on duty, and buttoning the studs. Stooping and squinting in the small mirror that was hung absurdly low on the wall, he said half-absently:

“So you’re goin’ to run out on me and the two blondes? You can’t take it, hunh?”

“Ah-h,” said old John with a return to his surly dryness, “you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I had more girls in my day than you ever thought of.”

“Yeah?” said Herbert.

“Yeah,” said John. “I had blondes and brunettes and every other kind.”

“Never had any red-heads, did you, Pop?” said Herbert, grinning. “Yeah, I had red-heads, too,” said John sourly. “More than you had, anyway.”

“Just a rounder, hunh?” said Herbert. “Just an old petticoat-chaser.”

“Nah-h, I ain’t no rounder or no petticoat-chaser. Hm!” John grunted contemptuously. “I’ve been a married man for forty years. I got grown-up children older’n you are!”

“Why, you old two-timer!” Herbert exclaimed, and turned on him with mock indignation. “Braggin’ to me about your blondes and red-heads, and then boastin’ that you’re a family man! Why, you ——”

“Nah-h,” said John, “I never done no such thing. I wasn’t talkin’ about now — but then! That’s when I had ’em-forty years ago.”

“Who?” said Herbert innocently. ............