JOHN THOMPSON
227
steel box conveying a mere few tons of anthracite. The progress is nearly
as stately too. No green amber and red lanterns control these intersections,
no whistle-tooting blue coats; those are reserved for the key corners of
downtown, assuring a fit approach to Bank and Hotel. Nor would it be
seemly for our truck to assert its overwhelming power at these outlying
junctions or to blast its mighty air trumpet to scatter common traffic. "S.A.
Mormon
&
Co. Coal
&
Ice" must comport itself as an engine of conse–
quence and responsibility, yield to clattering streetcar, to horse-drawn
wagon or any lowly transport. So it hisses at corners not in exasperation
but from the sheer excess power of its air brakes, ponders through its chain
and sprocket gears and rolls sedately, buoyed on elastic spring shackles and
humming above its exclusive rubber engine mountings.
Blocks long after blocks long the streets here between the rail mar–
shaling yards and river are lined with the manufactories of the city's wealth
and ambiguous fame. They are three, four, sometimes five stories of com–
mon brick, the gaunt unintended grace of practical builders. Banks of tall
windows, six-on-six lights, delicately chamfered frames painted white, these
stencil a pattern within the coarse masonry walls as if of airy trellises.
Beyond Keeler Brass, we pass Berkey
&
Gay, John Widdicomb,
Woodworking is a cleanly sort of trade. What the Dutch craftsmen inside
are doing amids t the sawdus t, or the Polish women who scrub until they
keel over from the fumes of "French" finish, this is no concern of ours.
Labor then by the light of the day, for the night comes when no man may
work. Soon enough the world will discover it no longer needs the sturdy
home furniture of Grand Rapids, so long prized in the many new house–
holds of our then new families, fittings so derided by devotees of
bow-legged fauteuils called after some bewigged Louis or other. More
window-pierced walls. At last the Roman aqueducts failed but the steep
arches of their engineers remain monuments nobler than all the postured
Emperors in marble. Uncaring, our machine rounds the bend of Godfrey
Avenue towards unmonumental Franklin Viaduct, cab commandingly high
over other traffic.
From his supine sprawl on the living room rug Dick plays his ceiling
game. Upside down, the blank ceiling is the floor of an absolutely empty
room. Its cornice moldings outline exactly the irregular oblong of that
room, a vacant space with not a stick to its name. He has placed it under
an enchantment of blankness, and there it is, a room windows and all with
nothing in it. Why he has exerted this spell he does not question but from
his peculiar vantage, not al together unlike now I come to think of it our
own Olympian stance, merely inverted, he muses at this bewitched room
