"How are you getting on downstairs?" he asked, as they tramped over the tiles of the long corridor towards the elevators. "I hear you were over at Brainard's house last night—he's a fine bird. And his son is like him. He's got another, hasn't he—a younger one? In the bank, isn't he? Used to be. Well, he might be without your knowing it. Queer genius—his father don't know what to do with him. He's kind of in the background, as it were. How did you happen to go over there?"
"Papers to sign. Mr. Brainard was at home, sick. It was something that they could hardly give to any of the boys to manage. I met his other daughter."
"Other? Didn't know he had any. Got two, has he? And two sons. Well, he's a great old father, from all I hear, and I shouldn't—D—ow—n!"
But the elevator was too far past them to return.
"Here's another coming," said George, to whom the indicator showed that a cab had left the top story and was half way down to their level.
Ogden had now gone through a novitiate of five or six weeks. After his first wrench—from the East to the West—his second one—from the West Side to the North—seemed an unimportant matter. He had learned his new neighborhood, had made a few acquaintances there, had become familiar with his work at the bank; and the early coming of his own family, who had elected to swell the great westward movement by the contribution of themselves and all their worldly goods, helped him to the feeling of being tolerably well at home. From the vantage-ground of a secure present and a promising future he became an interested observer of the life that swept and swirled about him. He found that there might be an inner quiet under all this vast and apparently unregulated din: he recalled how, in a cotton factory or a copper foundry, the hands talked among themselves in tones lower than the average, rather than higher. The rumble of drays and the clang of street-car gongs became less disconcerting; the town's swarming hordes presently appeared less slovenly in their dress and less offensive in their manners than his startled sensibilities had found them at first; even their varied physiognomies began to take on a cast less comprehensively cosmopolitan. His walks through the streets and his journeyings in the public conveyances showed him a range of human types completely unknown to his past experience; yet it soon came to seem possible that all these different elements might be scheduled, classified, brought into a sort of catalogue raisonné which should give every feature its proper place—skulls, foreheads, gaits, odors, facial angles; ears, with their different shapes and sets; eyes, with their varying shapes and colors; hair, with its divergent shades and textures; noses, with their multiplied turns and outlines; dialects, brogues, patois, accents in all their palatal and labial varieties and according to all the differentiations in pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis.
He disposed as readily of the Germans, Irish, and Swedes as of the negroes and the Chinese. But how to tell the Poles from the Bohemians? How to distinguish the Sicilians from the Greeks? How to catalogue the various grades of Jews? How to tabulate the Medes, and the Elamites, and the Cappadocians, and the dwellers from Mesopotamia?
During the enforced leisure of his first weeks he had gone several times to the City Hall, and had ascended in the elevator to the reading-room of the public library. On one of these occasions a heavy and sudden down-pour had filled the room with readers and had closed all the windows. The down-pour without seemed but a trifle compared with the confused cataract of conflicting nationalities within, and the fumes of incense that the united throng caused to rise upon the altar of learning stunned him with a sudden and sickening surprise—the bogs of Kilkenny, the dung-heaps of the Black Forest, the miry ways of Transylvania and Little Russia had all contributed to it.
The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt of mortality—no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand totality of items.
In a human maelstrom, of which such a scene was but a simple transitory eddy, it was grateful to regain one's bearings in some degree, and to get an opportunity for meeting one or two familiar drops. It had pleased him, therefore, to find that Brainard's house was in the neighborhood of Union Park and in the immediate vicinity of his own first lodgings: and when he went over there with his documents in his pocket he appreciated the privilege of ringing the bell of a door behind which were one or two faces that he might recognize.