clerk, a fat, shuffling old man with a mild, pasty face, and the black African negro who was at the telephone-board, received the news with astonishing calmness and matter of factness, and then acted with admirable coolness, speed and quiet precision, of which Eugene often thought in the months that followed, because it revealed to him a kind of secret knowledge, a hidden seriousness in the hotel’s working, and it showed, moreover, how much knowledge, ability, and decision may be stored behind the faces of inept and foolish-looking men.
Eugene looked at the clock above the office desk: it was now ten minutes after three o’clock in the morning. Within twenty minutes they had an ambulance, a doctor, and two stretcher-bearers at the hotel; the doctor, a young Jew with a little moustache, walked quietly and casually into the room, with the ends of a stethoscope fastened in his ears. Eugene thought that Upshaw was already dead! His face had the upthrust marble rigidity of death, but after a moment’s examination the doctor spoke quietly to the two men with him, they put the stretcher on the floor and laid the withered little figure on it. As they started to move out of the room Upshaw’s arms began to flop and jerk stiffly and grotesquely with every step they took: at another word from the doctor they put their burden on the floor again, the doctor knelt swiftly, unknotted the cravat in Upshaw’s collar and loosely tied his wrists together. Then they all went out, and Martha followed, holding Upshaw’s hat. She rode over in the ambulance to the hospital, which was only a few blocks away in Fifteenth Street. Robert and Eugene followed in a taxi; there was no one on the streets, the buildings and the pavements had the hard, bare angularity they have early in the morning: they waited downstairs in a little room until shortly after five o’clock in the morning, when Martha came down to see them and to tell them that Upshaw had just died.
Then Eugene left Robert and Martha there together and walked back towards the hotel. The streets were still bare, but in the east there was the first width of morning light, cold steel-grey, harsh and sharply clean: day was beginning to break, and he could hear the rumbling jingle of a milk-wagon and the sound of hoof and wheel behind him in the lonely street.
LV
If the hard and rugged lineaments of Abe’s character had not at this time emerged out of the glutinous paste of obscure yearnings, there was
