“And you just newly wed too.”
“I wouldnt be tellin ye if I thought there was anythin wrong, would I? No he’s playin straight all right.... Well goodby Mrs. Robinson.” She tucked her packages under one arm and swinging her bead bag in the free
hand walked down the street. The sun was still warm although there was a tang of fall in the wind. She gave a penny to a blind man cranking the Merry Widow waltz out of a grindorgan. Still she’d better bawl him out a little when he came home, might get to doing it often. She turned into 200th Street. People were looking out of windows, there was a crowd gathering. It was a fire. She sniffed the singed air. It gave her gooseflesh; she loved seeing fires. She hurried. Why it’s outside our building. Outside our apartmenthouse. Smoke dense as gunnysacks rolled out of the fifthstory window. She suddenly found herself all atremble. The colored elevatorboy ran up to her. His face was green. “Oh it’s in our apartment” she shrieked, “and the furniture just came a week ago. Let me get by.” The packages fell from her, a bottle of cream broke on the sidewalk. A policeman stood in her way, she threw herself at him and pounded on the broad blue chest. She couldnt stop shrieking. “That’s all right little lady, that’s all right,” he kept booming in a deep voice. As she beat her head against it she could feel his voice rumbling in his chest. “They’re bringing him down, just overcome by smoke that’s all, just overcome by smoke.”
“O Stanwood my husband,” she shrieked. Everything was blacking out. She grabbed at two bright buttons on the policeman’s coat and fainted.
VIII. One More River to Jordan
A man is shouting from a soapbox at Second Avenue and Houston in front of the Cosmopolitan Cafè: “... these fellers, men ... wageslaves like I was ... are sittin on your chest ... they’re takin the food outen your mouths. Where’s all the pretty girls I used to see walkin up and down the bullevard? Look for em in the uptown cabarets.... They squeeze us dry friends ... feller workers, slaves I’d oughter say ... they take our work and our ideers and our women.... They build their Plaza Hotels and their millionaire’s clubs and their million dollar theayters and their battleships and what do they leave us?... They leave us shopsickness an the rickets and a lot of dirty streets full of garbage cans.... You look pale you fellers.... You need blood.... Why dont you get some blood in your veins?... Back in Russia the poor people ... not so much poorer’n we are ... believe in wampires, things come suck your blood at night.... That’s what Capitalism is, a wampire that sucks your blood ... day ... and ... night.”
It is beginning to snow. The flakes are giltedged where they pass the streetlamp. Through the plate glass the Cosmopolitan Cafè full of blue and green opal rifts of smoke looks like a muddy aquarium; faces blob whitely round the tables like illassorted fishes. Umbrellas begin to bob in clusters up the snowmottled street. The orator turns up his collar and walks briskly east along Houston, holding the muddy soapbox away from his trousers.
Faces, hats, hands, newspapers jiggled in the fetid roaring subway car like corn in a popper. The downtown express passed clattering in yellow light, window telescoping window till they overlapped like scales.
“Look George,” said Sandbourne to George Baldwin who hung on a strap beside him, “you can see Fitzgerald’s contraction.”