Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.

Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.

Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.

Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.

One by one the floors are emptied. . . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.

Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. . . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them.

A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul

The People, Yes

81

Chicago seems all fox and swine,

Dreams interfused with smut, dung, hunger.

Yet Chicago is not all belly and mouth and

overwrought sex and lies and greed

and snobs.

Chicago has something over and beyond.

Sometime the seeds and cross-fertilizations

now moving in Chicago may inaugurate

a crossroads of great gladness.

The same goes for Omaha and points west,

for Buffalo and points east.

Out of the shopping crowds at State and Madison, hot with bundles and bargains,

A humpty-dumpty runt of a man dived at high noon into a forest of rubbernecks craning at a skywriting plane telling you what cigarette to smoke next, what cigarette to buy,

And he came up to say there was too much quick thinking and he would offer a little slow thinking:

“From the museum mummies I came to these ghosts swirling around State and Madison, Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, and about all I learned was this, you can write it on a thumbnail:

“There is a dead past and a blank future and the same humanity is in each and it’s all ham and eggs, dog eat dog, the toughest guts have their way, and they kill and kill to see who’ll get the most marbles, the most cocoanuts, the most little embossed pieces of paper.”