CHAPTER XXIII—THE BUZZER
NEW YORK, as much as Paris or Peking, is the city of bizarre contrasts. One such is modestly illustrated in the life of Hy Lowe.
Hy hurried on this as on every working morning eastward across Broadway and through Astor Place to the large five-story structure, a block in length, near the heart of the Bowery, that had been known for seventy years as Scripture House. Tract societies clustered within the brownstone walls, publishers of hymn books and testaments, lecture bureaus, church extension groups, temperance and anti-cigarette societies, firms of lady typists, and with these, flocks of shorter-lived concerns whose literature was pious and whose aims were profoundly commercial. Long years before, when men wore beavers and stocks and women wore hoopskirts, the building had symbolized the organized evangelical forces that were to galvanize and remake a corrupt world.
But the world had somehow evaded this particular galvanizing process. It had plunged wildly on the little heretical matter of applied science; which in its turn had invaded the building in the form of electric light and power and creakily insecure elevators. The Trusts had come, and Labor Unions and Economic Determinism—even the I. W, W. and the mad Nietzschean propaganda of the Greenwich Village New Russianists. Not to mention War. Life had twisted itself into puzzling shapes. New York had followed farther and farther up-town its elevated roads, subways, steel-built sky-scrapers and amazing palaces of liquors and lobsters, leaving the old building not even the scant privilege of dominating the slums and factories that had crept gradually to and around it. And now as a last negligent insult, a very new generation—a confused generation of Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Slavs, serving as bookkeepers, stenographers, messengers, door girls, elevator boys—idled and flirted and enacted their little worldly comedies and tragedies within the very walls of Scripture House—practised a furtive dance step or two in the dim stock rooms, dreamed of broiled lobsters (even of liquors) while patient men with white string neckties and routine minds sat in inner offices and continued the traditional effort to remake that forgotten old world.
But if the vision had failed, many a successful enterprise, then and now, thrived under the cover of Scripture House. One had thrived there for thirty years—the independent missionary weekly known to you as My Brother's Keeper. This publication was the “meal ticket” to which Hy, at rare intervals, referred. On the ground glass of his office door were the words, lettered in black, “Assistant Editor.” To this altitude had eight years of reporting and editing elevated Hy Lowe. The compensating honorarium was forty-five dollars a week. Not a great amount for one whose nature demanded correct clothing, Broadway dinners, pretty girls and an occasional taxicab; still a bachelor who lives inexpensively as to rooms, breakfasts and lunches and is not too hard on his clothes can go reasonably far on forty-five dollars, even in New York.
On this as on other mornings Hy, after a smile and a wink for the noticeably pretty little telephone girl in the outer office, slid along the inner corridor dose to the wood and glass partition. Though the Walrus' open doorway dominated the corridor, there was always a chance of slipping in unnoted.
He opened and closed his own door very softly; whipped off and hung up his street coat; donned the old black alpaca that was curiously bronzed from the pockets down by thousands of wipings of purple ink: and within twenty seconds was seated at his desk going through the morning's mail.
A buzzer sounded—on the partition just above his head. Hy started; turned and stared at the innocent little electrical machine. His color mounted. He compressed his lips. He picked up the editorial shears and deliberately slipped one blade under the insulated wires that led away from the buzzer.
Again the sound! Hy's fingers relaxed. He snorted, tossed the shears on the desk, strode to the door, paused to compose his features; then wearing the blankly innocent expression that meant forty-five dollars a week, walked quietly into the big room at the end of the corridor where, behind a flat mahogany desk seven feet square, sat the Reverend Hubbell Harkness Wilde, D. D.