steel had got into the conduits of their blood and spirit, leaving them with a quality that is tough, dry, meagre, tallowy, and somewhat calloused.
What earth had nourished him? Had he been born and grown there among the asphalt lilies and the pavement wheat? What corn was growing from the cobble-stones? Or was there never a cry of earth up through the beaten and unyielding cement of the streets? Had he forgotten the immortal and attentive earth still waiting at the roots of steel?
No. Beneath that cone of neat grey felt, behind the dreary, tallowed pigment of his face, which had that thickened, stunned, and deadened look one often sees upon the faces of old bruisers, as if the violent and furious assault of stone and steel, the million harsh metallic clangours, the brutal stupefaction of the streets, at length had dried the flesh and thickened the skin, and blunted, numbed and calloused the aching tumult of the tortured and tormented senses—there still flowed blood as red and wet as any which ever swarmed into the earth below the laurel bush. He was a part, a drop, an indecipherable fraction of these grey tides of swarming tissue that passed in ceaseless weft and counter-weft upon the beaten pavements, at once a typical man-swarm atom and a living man. Indistinguishable in his speech, gait, dress, and tallowy pigmentation from the typical cell-and-pavement article, at the same time, although ugly, meagre, toughened, gnarled and half-articulate, angular as brick and spare as steel webbing, with little juice and succulence, he was honest, loyal, somehow good and memorable, grained with the life and movement of a thousand streets, seasoned and alert, a living character, a city man. In that horrible desperation of drowning and atomic desolation among the numberless hordes that swept along the rootless pavements, in Eugene’s madness to know, own, intrude behind the million barriers of brick, to root and entrench himself in the hive, he seized upon that dreary, grey and hopeless-looking Jew.
This was his history:
Abraham Jones was one of the youngest members of a large family. In addition to two brothers, younger than himself, there were three older brothers and two sisters. The family life was close, complex, and passionate, torn by fierce dislikes and dissensions, menaced by division among some of its members, held together by equally fierce loyalties and
