The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [7]
CHAPTER IX
Just when Mrs. Renling's construction around me was nearly complete J shoved off. The leading and precipitating reason was that sle proposed to adopt me. I was supposed to become Augie Renlirig, live with them, and inherit all their dough. To see what there was behind this more light is needed than probably I can turn on. But first of all there was something adoptional about me. No doubt this had something to do with the fact that we were in a fashion adopted by Grandma Lausch in our earliest days; to please and reward whom I had been pliable and grateful-seeming, an adoptee. If not really so docile and pliable, this was the hidden ball and surprise about me. Why lad the Einhoms, protecting their son Arthur, had to underscore it that they didn't intend to take me into their family? Because something about me suggested adoption. And then there were some people who were. especially adoption-minded. Some maybe wishing to complete their earthly work. Thus Mrs. Renling in her strenuous and hacked-up way, and the whiteness that came from her compression into her intense purposes. She too had her mission on earth. There's one thing you couldn't easily find out from Mrs. Renling; I never knew what was her most deep desire, owing to her cranky manners and swift conversation. But she wanted to try being a nother. However, I was in a state of removal from all her intentions for me. Why should I turn into one of these people who didn't know wlo they themselves were? And the unvarnished truth is that it wasn't a fate good enough for me, because that was what came out clearly when it lecame a question of my joining up. As son. Otherwise I had nothing against them; just the opposite, I had a lot to thank them for. But all the same I Was not going to be built into Mrs. Renling's world, to consolidate what she affirmed she was. And it isn't only she but a class of people who trust they will be justified, that their thoughts will be as substantial as the seven hills to build on, and by spreading their power they will have an eternal city for vindication on the day when other founders have gone down, bricks and planks, whose thoughts were not real and who built on soft swamp. What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them. And, even literally, Mrs. Renling was very strong, and as she didn't do any visible work it must have come, the development in her muscles, from her covert labor. Mr. Renling also was willing to adopt me and said he would be happy to be my father. I knew it was more than he would say to anyone else. From his standpoint, for me, reared by poor women, it was a big break to be rescued from the rat race and saved by affection. God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few. When I told Mrs. Renling that Simon was going to get married and that Cissie was the daughter of a busted drygoods man, she began to work it out and do the sociology of it for me. She showed me the small flat and the diapers hanging in the kitchen, the installment troubles about furniture and clothes and my brother an old man at thirty from anxiety and cut-off spirit, the captive of the girl and babies. "While you at thirty, Augie, will just start thinking about getting married. You'll have money and culture and your pick of women. " Even a girl like Thea Fenchel. An educated man with a business is a lord. Renling is very clever and has come far, but with science, | literature, and history he would have been a real prince and not just average prosperous--", She pressed in the right place when she mentioned the Fenchels. | It opened up a temptation. But it was only one temptation and that was not enough. I didn't believe Esther Fenchel ever would have me. j And, moreover, though I was still in love with her, my attitude toward 1 her wasn't what it had been. I more and more believed what her sister had said. And then, when I told myself absolutely the truth, I conceded that I didn't have a chance. Anyway, Mrs. Renling put tender weights on me. She called me "son," and she would introduce me to people as "our youngster," and she petted me on the head and so forth. And I was robust and in possession of my sex; I mean by that that it wasn't stroking a boy of eight on his new glossy hair, and there was something more to be assumed than that I was a child. | ;, That I didn't want to be adopted never spontaneously occurred to ^.:, 152: ' her, and she assumed, as if it were normal but not to be mentioned, something else: that, like everyone, I was self-seeking. So that if I had any objections in reserve, they'd be minor ones, and I'd keep them covered. Or if I had thoughts of helping my brothers or Mama, those thoughts would be bound up and kept in the back. She had never seen Mama and didn't intend to; and when I told her in St. Joe that Simon was coming she didn't ask to meet him. There was a little in it of Moses and the Pharaoh's daughter; only I wasn't a bulrush-hidden infant by any means. I had family enough to suit me and history to be loyal to, not as though I had been gotten off of a stockpile. So I drew back; I turned down the hints, and when they became open offers I declined them. I said to Mr. Renling, "I appreciate your kindness, and you two are swell. I'll be grateful to you as long as I live. But I have folks, and I just have a feeling--" "You fool!" said Mrs. Renling. "What folks? What folks?" "Why, my mother, my brothers." "What have they got to do with it? Baloney! Where's your father-- tell me!" I couldn't say. "You don't know even who he is. Now, Augie, don't be a fool. A real family is somebody, and offers you something. Renling and I will be your parents because we will give you, and all the rest is bunk." "Well, let him think about it," said Renling. I think that Renling was out of sorts that day; he had a cowlick at the back of his hair and the loops of his suspenders showed from his vest. Which indicated that he suffered some, with a despair of his own, nothing to do with me, for as a usual thing he presented himself perfect. "Oh, what's to think!" Mrs. Renling cried. "You see how he thinks! He has to learn how to think first, if he wants to be a dumbbell and work for other people all his life. If I let him, he'd be married already to the waitress next door, that Indian with the squashed nose, and waiting for a baby, so in two years he'd be ready to take gas. Offer him gold and he says, no, he chooses shit!" She went on like that and worked ugly terror on me. Renling was disturbed. Not terribly disturbed, but in the manner a nightbird, that knows all about daylight, will beat through it if he must, a crude, big, brown-barred shape, but only if he must, and then he will fly toward the thick of the woods and get back to the darkness. And I--I always heard from women that I didn't have the profounder knowledge of life, that I didn't know its damage or its sufferi / ing or its stupendous ecstasies and glories. Being not weak, nor with breasts where its dreads could hit me. Looking not so strong as to be capable of a superior match with it. Other people showed me their achievements, claims and patents, paradise and hell-evidence, their prospectors' samples--often in their faces, in lumps--and, especially women, told me of my ignorance. Here Mrs. Renling was menacing me, crying out that I was the child of fools, dead sure that I would be crushed in the gate, stamped out in the life struggle. For, listen to her, and I was made for easy conditions, and to rise from' a good bed to the comfort of a plentiful breakfast, to dip my roll in yolk and smoke a cigar with coffee, in sunshine and comfort, free from melancholy or stains. Such the kind faction of the world wanted for me, and if I refused my chance there was oblivion waiting for me instead; the wicked would get hold of me. I tried not to reject the truth in what I was told, and I had a lot of regard for the power of women to know it. But I asked for time to think the matter over, and I could have thought very successfully, for the weather favored it--the first and best of autumn, football weather, cold yellow asters in the fine air, and the full sounds of punting and horses stamping on the bridle path. I took an afternoon off to consult Einhom. Einhom's luck had begun to turn again and he had opened a new office, moving from the poolroom to a flat across the street where he could continue to keep an eye on it. The change made him somewhat egotistical, as also the fact that there was a woman in love with him. It gave him a big boost. He had been putting out his paper for shut-ins again, on the mimeograph machine, and one of his readers, a crippled girl named Mildred Stark, had fallen for him. She wasn't in first youth any more; she was aged about thirty and heavy, but she had a vital if somewhat struggle-weakened head, hair and brows strong and black. She wrote answers m verse to his inspirational poems and at last she had her sister bring her to the office, where she made a scene and wouldn't go away until Einhom had promised to let her work for him. She didn't ask for any salary, only that he should rescue her from homeboredom. Mildred's trouble was with her feet, and she wore orthopedic shoes. They made slow going, and, as I later had the chance to learn, Mildred was somebody for whom impulses came fast and in force, and these impulses ran onto non-conductors and were turned back, stored up until she got dark in the face. In her person, as I say, she was heavy, and her eyes were black, her skin was not well lit. To de154 velop from crippled girl into crippled woman, in the family, in the house such staleness and hardship--that's what it makes for, darkness, saturn'inity, oversat grievance. Being without what's needed to put a satisfied, not dissatisfied, face at the window. But Mildred wouldn't accept lying down and dying, though she never recovered from looking near middle-aged and dark and sore, as a woman forced to sit, or someone who has missed out on children, or whom men have swindled. It could not be rubbed out, though it was arrested by her love for Einhorn, who permitted her to love him. In the beginning she came only two or three times a week to type some letters for him, and ended by becoming his full-time secretary, as well as other things--his servant and confidante. Someone who could literally say, biblically, "Thy handmaiden." Pushing his rolling chair for him, she needed its support in her limping and foot-dragging. He sat, well satisfied, well served. He looked severe and even impatient, but the truth was otherwise. The spirit I found him in was the Chanticleer spirit, by which I refer to male piercingness, sharpness, knotted hard muscle and blood in the comb, jerky, flaunty, haughty and bright, with luxurious slither of feathers. Ah, but there are other facts that have to be satisfied too, after this comparison. It's too bad but it is so. Humankind does not have that sort of simplicity--not the single line that a stick draws on the ground but a vast harrow of countless disks. His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dry ness of days, drear Lness and shabbiness-mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous. To Tillie Einhorn, as far as anybody could tell, Mildred was acceptable. The force of Einhorn on Tillie was such that to judge him wrong was too much of an operation for her. Besides, you have to think of a condition of people that gets into them like a cobbler's stretcher into a shoe; this stretcher for Tillie was Einhorn's special need as a cripple. She was used to making allowances. Well, this was how Einhorn was situated when I came to ask him tor advice; I found him too busy to give me his attention. He kept ookmg to the street as I talked, then asked me to push him to the oilet, which I did, on the gaggling casters that could, as always, stand an oiling. All he replied was, "Well, it's pretty unusual. It's quite an offer. You were born lucky." He gave it less than half his mind, thinking I was telling him the news that the Renlings wanted to adopt me, not that I considered refusing. Naturally he was wrapped up in his own affairs. And I could look at Mildred Stark if I wanted an example of how someone became attached to, and then absorbed into, a family. I finished the afternoon downtown, and while I was eating a liver sandwich at Elfman's and watching the unemployed musicians on the Dearborn corner, I saw a guy named Clarence Ruber passing and knocked on the plate glass with my ring till he noticed me and came in to talk. I knew this Ruber from Crane College, where he had run a baseball pool at the Enark Cafe; he was quiet and dirty-spoken, smooth in the face, fat behind, with a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe on his head and a soft-bosomed fashion of clothes, silky shirts, yellow silk tie, and gray flannel suit. Looking me over, he saw that I was doing well too, in contrast to the Depression musicians and the other eaters, and we traded information. He had opened a small shop on the South Shore, in partnership with a cousin's widow who had a little money. They dealt in lamps, pictures, vases, piano scarves, ashtrays and such bric-a-brac, and since the cousin and his wife had been, before the Bust, interior decorators with big hotels for clients, they did a good trade. "There's dough in this. It's one of these rackets where people pay for being handled a particular way. Dazzle business. Because, if they knew it, they could buy a lot of this crap at the dime store, but they can't trust their judgment. It's a woman's line," he said, "and you have to understand how to tickle their bellies." I asked him what he was doing here among the musicians. "Musicians, my ass," he said. He had been seeing a man in the Bumham Building who had invented a rubberized paint for bathrooms, a waterproof product that, with the widow-cousin's contacts in hotels, ought to make him a fortune. It kept walls from rotting; the water didn't harm the plaster. The inventor was just beginning to go into production. Ruber himself was going to go out and sell it, for there was a lot of money in it. Therefore, he said, they would need a man to replace him in the shop. And since I had experience with rich customers, a ritzy clientele, I was just the man for the substitution. "I don't want any more f---- relatives around; they get in my hair. So if you're interested come out and have a look at the setup. If you like it we can talk terms." Seeing that I could not stay with the Renlings unless I became their adopted son, which by now I knew would suffocate me, no other arrangement possible after I had turned them down, I closed a deal with Ruber. I made up a story to tell Renling about a marvelous busi156 ness opportunity of a lifetime with a school chum, and I pulled out nf Evanston in a cold air--Mrs. Renling iron with anger toward me, and Renling himself on the cool side of well-wishing, but saying any- way that I was to come to him if ever I needed help. I took a room on the South Side, in a house on Blackstone Avenue, four flights up, three of mingy red carpet and one of thready wood, up in the clumsy dust, next door to the can. Here I wasn't far from the Nelson Home, and as it was a Sunday morning when I set myself up, and I had time, I went to visit Grandma Lausch. By now she was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my eyes, having lost her distinguishing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid them down, forgetting where. She didn't seem to recall what grievances she had against me either, and when we sat down together on a bench in the parlor, between some silent old people, asked me, "And how is--is jener, the idiot?" She had forgotten Georgie's name, and it horrified me; yes, it sent me for a loop until I remembered to think how small a part of her life compared with the whole span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be to the sides of an old varicose channel. And as there is a strength or stubbornness about people that doesn't want the first fact about them spoken, also there is a time when that fact or truth can't any more be helpful--what can it do for the ruin of an old woman?-- but it appears as a blot in the eyes over old expressions. What good can this fact be so near death? Except as a benefit to its witnesses, since we human creatures have many reasons to believe there's advantage and profit for someone in everything, even in the worst muds, wastes, and poison by-products; and a charm of chemical medicine or industry is how there are endless uses in cinders, slag, bone, and manure. But in reality we're a long way from being able to profit from everything. Yes, and besides even a truth can get cold from solitude and solitary confinement, and doesn't live long outside the Bastille; if the rescuing republican crowd is the power of death it doesn't live at all. This was how it was with Grandma Lausch, who had only a few months left of life. Whose Odessa black dress was greasy and whitening; who gave me an old cat's gape; who maybe didn't too well place me; who had this blob of original fact, of what had primarily counted with her, like a cast in the eye; weakly, even infant and lunatic. Her we always thought so powerful and shockproof! It really threw me. Yet I also thought she did remember who I was and that old consciousness was not lost but in a phase of a turntable that turned too slowly. I even thought that she appreciated the visit and said I was her neighbor now and would come again. But I couldn't make it, and the same winter she died of pneumonia. In my new job I had a downgrade from the start. Ruber's cousin's widow was a dissatisfied woman; she didn't trust me very much. This lady--she wore her fur coat in the style of a cloak in the store, with a hat of the same creature like a prickly crown, and a face always aware of its imperfections and suffering from them, wretched skin and meager lips--she had stomach troubles and a stiff clamp on bad temper. She cramped my style, the style learned with what I thought was anyway a better class of customers, and she wouldn't let me come near the important ones. And in the office she locked drawers; she didn't want me to know costs. What she wanted was to confine me to the work in the back, packing, wrapping, matting, framing, and winding cellophane on lampshades. So that, with being kept in the rear or out on errands to various little factories and potteries in lofts around Wabash Avenue, I quick caught on that she was pushing me toward the door. And as soon as the rubberized paint went into production I became a salesman for it, as I think Ruber too had all the time intended. He said that the shop didn't actually need me since I seemed satisfied to be errand boy and didn't take enough interest in the business. "I thought you'd have some ideas, not be just a salary man, but that ain't the way it's been," he told me. "Well," I said, "Mrs. Ruber has ideas about me." "Of course," said Ruber, "I seen she's been trying to make you suck hind titty. But the thing is why you let her." Now he took me off salary and put me on a commission basis. There was nothing I saw to do but accept, and went around on the streetcars and El with a can of the paint, to hotels, hospitals, and such, trying to get orders. It was a flop. I couldn't land anything, money was so tight, and I was. dealing with a peculiar sort of people. I had leads from Mrs. Ruber, into hotels, where she claimed to be better known than she actually was (or managers would not acknowledge her till they knew my business); and, moreover, these were not easy people to lay hold of, in the backstairs and workshops of the cream, noble marble, footmanned, razmataz, furnished-for-pontiffs lakeside joints. Also, many hotels had painting contractors or graft arrangements; controlled by receivers, appointed by the courts, the original corporations in bankruptcy; the receivers were themselves interested in the insurance, plumbing, catering, decorating, bars, concessions, and the rest of the interlocking system. To be sent by the manager to the nainting contractor was to be given a runaround. They didn't want to see my rubber paint. I waited on enough of them in outside offices, which I don't say breeds the best thoughts, and soon this was clear. It was now full winter, and barbarous how raw; so going around the city on the spidery cars, rides lasting hours, made you stupid as a stoveside cat because of the closeness inside; and there was something fuddlino besides in the mass piled up of uniform things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper columns and the bricks of buildings. To sit and be trundled, while you see: there's a danger in that of being a bobbin for endless thread or bolt for yard goods; if there's not much purpose anyway in the ride. And if there's some amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the window, it can be even worse for the brain than those iron-deep clouds, just plain brutal and not mitigated. There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens. I did make a few sales. Karas, Einhorn's cousin-in-law, in the Holloway Enterprises, gave me a break and bought a few gallons to try in a little Van Buren Street gray-bedding hotel, almost a bum's flop, near the railroad station, and he said he would never use it in any of his better establishments because it made a loud smell of rubber in the heat and moisture of the shower room. There was also a doctor at State and Lake, a buddy of Ruber's, an abortionist; he was doing over his suite and I got an order from him; and here Ruber tried to chisel from the commission; he didn't need me, he said, to make this sale. I would have quit him flat then and there if I hadn't gotten pretty familiar by then with the situations-wanted columns of the Tribune. I wasn't earning enough to give anything toward Mama's support any more, but at least I was making expenses and Simon didn't have to support me. Of course he beefed because I had quit Renling. How was he going to marry if he had to keep Mama by himself? I said, "You and Cissy can move in with her." But this made him look black, and I understood that Cissy wasn't having any of that, the old flat and Mama to take care of. "Well, Simon, you know I don't want to stick you," I said, "and that I'll try my best." We were having coffee in Raklios's, and my pot of paint was on the table and my gloves on top of that. pen at the seams, the gloves showed how I had lost my grip on prosperity. And I was getting dirty, for a salesman, for whose appearance ere are laws which are supposed to guarantee a certain firmness of personality. I had fallen below the standard, unable to afford cleaning and repairing, nor was able to spare much feeling for it. The way I was living was becoming crude, and I was learning some squatter lessons. Up in my room the heat didn't reach, and I wore my coat and socks at night. In the morning I went down to the drugstore to warm up on a cup of coffee and lay out my route for the day. I carried my razor in my pocket and shaved downtown with the free hot water, liquid soap, and paper towels of public toilets, and I ate in YMCA cafeterias or one-arm joints and beat checks as often as I could. Vigorous at nine, my hope ran out by noon, and then one of my hardships was that I had no place of rest. I could try to pass the afternoon in Einhorn's new office; he was accustomed to people on his bench, outside the railing, who had no special tasks. But I who had worked for him had to be doing something, and he would send me on his business. So that I might as well have been on my own, once I was already on the streetcar. Besides I had an obligation to Simon that would not let me loaf, although simply to move around was in itself of no advantage. It was not only for me that being moored wasn't permitted; there was general motion, as of people driven from angles and corners into the open, by places being valueless and inhospitable to them. In the example of the Son of Man having no place to lay His head; or belonging to the world in general; except that the illuminated understanding of this was absent, nobody much guessing what was up on the face of the earth. I, with my can of paint, no more than others. And once I was under way, streetcars weren't sufficient, nor Chicago large enough to hold me. Coming out of an El station one day, when the snow was running off, at the tail end of winter, I ran into Joe German whom I hadn't seen since after the robbery. He was in a good blue coat of narrow style, and a freshly blocked fedora, dented like a soft bread by the fingers. He was buying magazines, out of the wall of them that hung by the stand. His nose was raised up and he looked ruddy and well, benefited by a good breakfast and the cold morning--although it would have been more like his habit of life to have come from an all-night poker game. Sizing me up, with my sample paint can, it was plain to him that I was having it bad. I had the face of someone pretty much beat. "What's this racket you're in?" he asked me, and when I explained it he said, but not in a triumphing way, "Sucker!" He was certainly right, and I didn't put much force into defending myself. "It's a way of meeting people," I answered, "and something may open up one of these days.". "Yes " he said, "a deep hole. What if you do meet people--you think somebody is going to do something for you because you're a pretty boy? Give you a big break? These days they take care of their relatives first. And what have you got in the way of relatives?" I didn't have much. Five Properties was still driving his milk truck, but I didn't mean to ask him for a job. Coblin had lost everythin except his paper route in the crash. Anyway, I hadn't seen much of either of them since the Commissioner's funeral. "Come and have some cheese and pie on me," he said, and we went into a restaurant. "What's up with you?" I said, for I didn't want to ask explicitly; it was bad manners. "Do you ever see Sailor Bulba?" "Not that dumbhead, he's no good to me. He's in an organization now, slugger for a union, and it's all he's good for. Besides, what I'm in now, I have no use for anybody like that. But I could do something for you if you wanted to earn a fast buck." "Is it risky?" "Nothing like what worried you last time. I don't go in for that any more myself. It's not legitimate, what I'm doing, but it's a lot easier and safer. And what do you think makes the buck so fast?" "Well. what is it?" "Running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse's Point over to Massena Springs, New York." "No," I said, not having forgotten my conversation with Einhorn. "I can't do that." "There's nothing to it." "And if you're caught?" "And if I'm caught? And if I'm not caught?" he said with savage humor, poking fun at me. "You want me to go around and peddle paint? I'd rather sit still, like the pilot light inside the gas; and I can't sit around or I'd go bats." "Thi;> is federal." "You don't have to tell me what it is. I only asked you because you look as if you needed a break. I make this trip two and three times a month, and I'm getting tired of doing all the driving. So if you want to come along and be my relief on the road as far as Massena Springs I'll give you fifty bucks and all expenses. Then if you decide to come the rest of the way I'll up it to a hundred. There'll still be time to think it over on the way, and we'll be back in three days." I took him up on this and considered it a break. Fifty dollars, clear, would go a long way toward easing my mind about Simon. I was fed i* 161 up with trying to peddle the rubberized paint, and my reckoning was that with a little dough to tide me over I could spend a week or two looking for something else, perhaps dope out a way to get back to college, for I had not altogether given up on that. All this was how I | decided, in my outer mind, to go; with the other, the inner, I wanted a change of pressure, and to get out of the city. As for the immigrants, my thought about them was. Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck. I gave the paint to Tillie Einhorn, to decorate her bathroom, and early in the morning Joe German picked me up in a black Buick; it was souped up, I could tell the first instant, from the hell-energy that gives you no time to consider. I wasn't even well settled, with spare shirt wrapped in a newspaper in the back seat and my coat straightened under me, before we were on the far South Side, passing the yards of Carnegie Steel; then the dunes, piled up like sulphur; in and out of Gary in two twists and on the road for Toledo, where the speed increased, and the mouth of the motor opened out like murder, not panting, but liberated to do what it was made for. Slender, pressing down nervous on the wheel, with his long nose of | broken form and the color running fast up his face and making a narrow crossing on his forehead, German was like a jockey in his feeling toward the car. You could see what pleasure he got out of finding what j he needed to wrap his nerves in. Outside Toledo I took the wheel, | and occasionally found him looking sardonically sidewise from his < narrow face, a long dark eye making a new measure of me from its splotch of discoloration by fatigue or by the trouble of a busy will; and he said--they seemed his first words to me, though they weren't literally--"Step it up!" So I apologized that I didn't have the feel of the car yet and obeyed. But he didn't like my driving, particularly that I hesitated to pass trucks on the hills, and took the wheel from me before we had covered much i of the ground to Cleveland. I It was beginning April, and the afternoon was short, so that it was getting dark when we approached Lackawanna. Some way beyond it we stopped for gas, and Gorman gave me a bill to buy some hamburgers at a joint next door. There I went to the can first, and from the window saw a state trooper by the pump, examining the car, and no sign of German. I slipped into the filthy side hall and glanced into the kitchen, where an old Negro was washing dishes, and passed behind him without being noticed, over a bushel in the doorway, into the intervening yard, or lot, and I saw Gorman beating it along the wall of the garage, swiftly, towa'rd the border of trees and bushes where the fields began. I ran parallel, having a start of ten yards or so and met him back of these trees, and there was almost a disaster before he recognized me, for he had a pistol in his hand--the gun Einhom had warned me he carried. I clapped my hand to the barrel and pushed it away. "What've you got that out for?" "Take your hands off, or I'll clobber you with it!" "What's got into you? What're you running from the cops for? It's only for speeding." "The car's hot. Speeding hell!" "I thought it was your car!" "No, it's stolen." We started to run again, hearing the motorcycle in the lot, and threw ourselves down in plowed field. It was open country, but dusk. The trooper came as far as the trees and looked but did not come through. Luck was with us that he didn't, since Gorman had him covered with the gun on a sod for a rest, and was cowboy enough to shoot, so that I tasted puke in my throat from terror. But the trooper turned off, splitting the beams of his lamp on the evergreens, and we beat it over the plowland to a country road well back from the highway. This place, for sure, had a demon; it was blue, lump-earthed, oil-rank, and machinery was cooking in the dark, not far back of us, into heaven, from the Lackawanna chimneys. "You weren't going to shoot, were you?" I said. He was reaching inside his sleeve with a lifted shoulder, almost like a woman pulling up an inside strap. He put away his gun. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking in his own fashion that we didn't make a pair--I of the vanity of being so leaping dangerous, and he, despisingly, that I must have shit in my blood, or such poolroom contempt. "What did you run for?" he said. "Because I saw you running." "Because you were scared." "That too." "Did the guy in the garage notice two of us?" "He must have. And if he didn't somebody in the hamburger joint must be wondering where I went." '"^en we'd better split up. We're not far outside of Buffalo, and pick you up there tomorrow in front of the main post office at nine oclock." r "Pick me up?" "In a car. By then I'll have one. You've got the tenner I gave you for the chow--that'll take care of you. There must be a bus into town. You go up the road and take it; I'll go down. Let a couple of buses go by so we won't be getting on the same one." So we split up, and I felt safer without him. Narrow, tall, sharp in the way his shoulders, hat, and features broke, he seemed, as he watched me get started up the road, like a city specialist on this unfamiliar interurban ground. Then he turned swiftly too, going low on his legs downhill, fast, scraping on the stones. I tramped a considerable distance to take the first crossroad back to the highway. Headlights on a barn approached around a curve and made me drop down. It was a state police car, and what would it be doing on a side lane like this if not looking to pick us up? Probably German hadn't even bothered to change the license plates of the car. I got off the lane into the fields then, and made up my mind to take the shortest way back to Lackawanna and not to meet him in Buffalo. He was too inspired for me, and his kind of outlawry wasn't any idea of mine; therefore why should I be sprawling in the mud waiting for him to commit a hothead crime and get me in as accessory for a stiff sentence? When I had left him to go up the road I had already begun to think of this and was actually on my way back to Chicago. I began to run cross-country because I was tired of picking my way, and I came out to the highway near town, where the edge of Lake Erie approaches. And there I saw a crowd, forming up in old cars, with banners and signs, blocking the traffic. I think it was an organization of the unemployed, many veterans, wearing Legion caps; I was too hard pushed in the crude hard air of darkness to get it straight. But they were gathering for a march on Albany or Washington to ask for a relief increase and starting out to meet the Buffalo contingent. I came up slowly and saw that there were more troopers around, who were trying to keep traffic open, and also town cops, and I figured it to be safer to mingle than to try to go into town. By the lamps I was able to see how much mud had stuck to me, too wet to get off. There was such yelling and sheaving of old engines jockeying to form a line that I got to the tail gate of a jalopy, and, giving a man a hand putting in planks for benches and laying a tarpaulin over the top, I made myself a part of his outfit in the dusk. And now, though no distance at all from Lackawanna, I was about to start for Buffalo anyhow. I might have returned to the fields and gone around into town, but I calculated that, looking as I did, I might be picked up. As I was tying down canvas behind the cab the crowd was slowly , j ^k, and from the beam that was painting back and forth on , oeoole, yellow and red, I knew that a squad car was forcing a path nd saw tbfe eye of it swiveling and rolling smoothly from the top. I twisted backward from the running board to look, and it was as fear had inspired me to suspect, Joe German was sitting in the back seat between two troopers, with blood lines over his chin showing that he had probably tried to fight with them and they had opened up his lip, doing their cops' work. This was what he had come a long way to get, and got it, and looked not dazed but bright awake--which may have been an appearance, as the red of the blood appeared black. I felt powerfully heartsick to see him. The squad car passed, and we started off in the truck at a slow sway, something like twenty men stowed in shank to shank behind the black open roar of the engine. There was nasty weather; rain, first thing, and the wet blowing in, which made a human steam like the steam of rinsing in a dairy, and while we were squelching and rocking over the swells of the road I was thinking of the misery of Joe German's being picked up, how they must have nabbed him, and if he had had a chance to pull his gun. Behind the canvas I didn't get to see the gas station and whether the car we had left was still there, or anything else. Until the truck got into the city I couldn't see a thing. I dropped off the tail gate in the middle of town and found myself a hotel where I was dumb enough not to ask the price; but I was more concerned that the clerk shouldn't see the dirt on me and carried the coat on rny arm. Besides, I was so sick over Joe German I didn't think. Then, when they had beaten me out of two bucks in the morning, or about twice what a fleabag like that should have cost, and after I had paid for a big breakfast, which I had to have, there wasn't enough money for a bus ticket back to Chicago. I telegraphed Simon to wire me some money, and then I went to see the main drag, and I took the excursion to Niagara Falls where nobody seemed to have any business that day, only a few strays beside the crush of the water, like early sparrows in the cathedral square before Notre Dame has opened its doors; and then in the brute sad fog you know that at one time this sulphur coldness didn't paralyze everything, and there's the cathedral to prove it. So I calked around the rails by the dripping black crags until it began to drizzle again, and I returned to see whether Simon's reply had come in yet. Till late afternoon I kept asking, and at last the girl in the cage looked tired of seeing me, and I recognized that I had the option of another night in Buffalo or hitting the road. And I was dim with the troubles I had got into, all this speeding and scattering, Gorman in the squad car pressing through the crowd, then the terrific emptying of Niagara waters, and also hobbling on the Buffalo cars, eating peanuts and hard rolls, my bowels like a screw of rubber, and the town unfriendly and wet--because if I hadn't been in such a dim state I'd have realized sooner that Simon wasn't going to send any money. But all of a sudden I realized that that was so. He might not even have it to spare, just after the first of the month when there was the rent to pay. Thinking this, I told the telegraph girl to forget about the wire, I was leaving town. Not to be picked up on the road in northern New York, I took a ticket to Erie at the Greyhound Station, and I was in the Pennsylvania corner that evening. To get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just materialized, waiting. The flop I found was in a tall clapboard hotel, a kind of bone of a building, with more laths than plaster, with burns in the blanket, splits in the sheet opening on the mattress and its many stains. But I didn't care too much where I was; it would have been a nuisance to care; and I dropped off my shoes and climbed in. It sounded like a gale on the lake that night. Nevertheless it was a serene warm morning when I went out on the road to start thumbing. I wasn't alone; people in great numbers were on the highways. Sometimes they traveled in pairs, but more usually alone, because it was easier to get rides alone. There was the CCC, draining swamps and planting trees in the distance, and on the road was this wanderer population without any special Jerusalem or Kiev in mind, or relics to kiss, or any idea of putting off sins, but only the hope their chances might be better in the next town. In this competition it was hard to get lifts. Appearances were against me too, for the Renling clothes were both smart and filthy. And then in my hurry to put distance between me and the stretch of road near Lackawanna where Joe German had been picked up, I didn't have the patience to stand and flag for long but walked. The traffic dived and quivered past me, and when I reached a place near Ashtabula, Ohio, where the Nickel Plate line approaches the highway, I saw a freight going toward Cleveland with men sitting on 166 the boxcars, and in the flats, and in under-angles of gondolas, and eight or ten guys shagging after and flipping themselves up on the rungs. I ran too, down from the unlucky highway, up the rocky grade where I felt the thinness of my shoes, and took hold of a ladder. I wasn't agile, so ran with the red car, unable to swing from the ground until I was helped by a boost from behind. I never saw who it was that gave it-- someone among the runners who didn't want me tearing my arms from their sockets or breaking the bones of my feet. So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume, chaff and grit flying at your face. There was a hotshot or nonstop express to Toledo making up in the yards, the word came, which would be ready in a couple of hours. Meanwhile I went up to the city to get some food. Going back to the yards, I climbed down a steep path, like a cliff of Pisgah, below the foundations of-factories, and emerged on rusty tracks by the Sherwin Williams paint factory--the vast field of rails and hummocky ground to the sides covered with weed stalks where people were waiting: catching a nap, reading old papers, mending. This was both a boring and a tense afternoon, soon dark with oncoming rain, while we squatted in the weeds, waiting; brackish and yet nerve-touching. Therefore I rushed up when I saw by the rising and motion along the darkening line that the train was coming. In the sudden shift toward the open and the tracks it seemed that hundreds had risen, the most distant already closing in upon the train. The locomotive came slowly, like a bison, the iron shell of the boiler black. The train crashed its boxes and went backwards a moment. It was picking up its last cars. In that moment I got under a gondola carrying coal, into the angle of it between the slope end and the wheels. When we rolled forward the wheels creaked and bit out sparks like grindstones, and the couplings played free and hooked tight in a mechanical game into which your observation and brain were forced. Having to recognize whose kingdom you were in, with tons of coal at the back and ndmg in the tiny blind gallery with the dashing dark rain at the sides. There were four of us sitting in this space; a lean, wolfy man, who stretched his legs clear over the wheels, on the bar, while the rest of us fetched ours up short. I saw his face when he lit a butt, grinning and somewhat sick, blues under his eyes like chain links. He held his fingers in his crotch. On the other side was a young boy. The fourth man, as I didn't know till we were chased off the train at Lorain, was a Negro. All I saw of him as we were running was his yellow raincoat, but when I caught up by a trackside shack he was leaning on the boards, his big eyes shut, a stumpy, heavy man getting his breath with much trouble and his beard sparkling about his mouth with sweat or drizzle. The hotshot stopped at Lorain; it wasn't a hotshot at all. Or perhaps they stopped it because it carried too many free riders. These made a ragged line, like a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes through, only much more numerous. There were flashlights swinging from car to car as the cops emptied them, and then the train went off, cleared of riders, down into the semaphore lights and the oily blues of the track. This stocky young boy Stoney was his nameattached himself to me and we went into the town. The harbor with its artificial peaks and cones of sand and coal was visible from the muddy main stem. In the featureless electric faces of bulbs hung on the dredges, cranes, cables, the rain looked like nothing either and was nullified. I laid out some of my money for bread and peanut butter and a couple of bottles of milk and we had supper. It was after ten and streaming rain. I wasn't going to chase another freight that night, I was too bushed. I said, "Let's find a place to flop," and he agreed. On the sidings we found some boxcars retired from service, of great age, rotten and swollen, filled with old paper and straw, a cheesy old hogshead stink of cast-off things such as draws rats, a marly or fungus white on the walis. There we bedded down in the refuse. I buttoned up, for security as well as the cold, and stretched out. There was plenty of room at first. But till far into the night men kept arriving, roiling back the door, and passing back and forth over us, discussing where to sleep. I heard them coming, grating with the feet along the rows of cars, until our boxcar was so full that newcomers would look in and then pass on. It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction. And when I fell asleep I didn't sleep long, for the man next to me began to press up, and I thought it was only his unconscious habit of the night, that he was used to a bedmate, and I just drew away, but he drew after. Then he must have worked long in secret to open his pants and first to touch my hand as if by accident and then to guide my fingers. I had trouble getting free because he finally held my wrist with both hands, and I knocked his head against the. boards. That couldn't have hurt much, the wood was so rotten it was almost soft, but he let me go and said almost with laughter, "Don't raise a fuss." He rolled back from me a space. I sat up and I reasoned that if I didn't move he might think he wasn't unwelcome to me. As a matter of fact he was waiting and he began to talk, with a hard tremble, both cynical and hopeful, about the filth of women, and when I heard that I went away, helping myself up in back against the wall and stepping over bodies to where I had seen Stoney lie down. A bad nightthe rain rattling hard first on one side and then on the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery. And I lay down by Stoney, who roused a little, recognized me, and fell asleep. Only it was cold; toward morning, deathly cold; and now and then we'd find we were pressed close, rubbing faces and bristles, and we would separate. Until-it was too freezing to take account of being strangerswe were trembling too hardand had to clasp close. I took off my coat and spread it over the both of us to keep in the warmth a little, and even so we lay shivering. There was a rooster some brakeman's family nearby owned, and he had the instinct or the temerariousness to crow in the wet and ashes of the backyard. This morning signal was good enough for us, and we got out of the car. Was it really day? The sky was dripping, and cloud was running as light as smoke; there was pink in it, but whether that was the reflection of the sun or of railroad fire how could you tell? We entered the station where there was a stove of which the bottom skirt was hot to transparency, and we steamed ourselves by it. The heat pushed into your face. "Stand me a cup of coffee," said Stoney. It took five such days of travel to get back to Chicago, for I got a tram to Detroit by error. A brakeman told us there was a train for Toledo coming soon, and I went to catch it. Stoney came along. Our luck seemed good. Because of the hour this freight was practically empty. We had a car to ourselves. Furniture must have been hauled in it the last trip, for there was clean excelsior on the floor, and we made beds in this paper fleece and lay there sleeping. I woke when the angle of the sun was very narrow in the door and guessed it must be noon. If it was that late we must already have gone through Toledo and be crossing Indiana. But these oak woods and the deep-lying farms and scarce cattle were not what I had seen in Indiana crossing it with Joe German. We were going very fast, flying, the locomotive and the empty cars. Then I saw a Michigan license on a truck at a crossing. "We must be bound for Detroit; we missed Toledo," I said. As the sun went south it was back of us and not on the left hand; we were going north. There was no getting off either. I sat down, legs hanging at the open door, back-broken and dry, hungry furthermore, and my eyes followed the spin of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor leaves, and a world of great size beyond, or fair clouds and then of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light. The short afternoon soon darkened; between the trees and stumps it turned blue. The towns became industrial, factories riding up and tank cars and reefers sitting on the spurs. Queer that I didn't worry more about being taken these hundreds of miles out of my way when there were only a few quarters and some thinner stuff in my pocket, about a buck in all. Riding in this dusk and semiwinter, it was the way paltry and immense were so mixed, perhaps, the jointed spine of train racing and swerving, the steels, rusts, bloodlike paints extended space after space in the sky, and then other existence, space after space. Factory smoke was standing away with the wind, and we were in an industrial sub-town--battlefield, cemetery, garbage crater, violet welding scald, mountains of tires sagging, and ashes spuming like crests in front of a steamer, Hooverville crate camps, plague and war fires like the boiling pinnacle of all sackings and Napoleonic Moscow burnings. The freight stopped with a banging and concussion, and we jumped out and were getting over the tracks when someone got us by the shoulders from behind and gave us each a boot in the ass. It was a road dick. He wore a Stetson and a pistol hung on the front of his vest; his whisky face was red as a winter apple and a crazy saliva patch shone on his chin. He yelled, "Next time I'll shoot the shit out of you!" So we ran, and he threw rocks past us. I wished that I could lay for him till he came off duty and tear his windpipe out. However, we were legging it over the rails on the lookout for anything swift that might come down on us out of the steel coldly laid out in the dark and the shrivels of steam and cyclops headlamps, a looserolling car. Also the coal rumbled in the hoppers and bounded grim to the ground. We ran, and I didn't feel angry any more. A highway marker told us we were twenty miles from Detroit. As we stood there the fellow came up who had ridden out of Cleveland under the gondola with us, the wolf-looking one. Though it was dark, t spotted him coming in the road. He didn't seem to have anything special in mind, only to hang around. I said to this stocky boy Stoney, "I have a buck to take me back to Chicago, so let's get some chow." "Hang on to it, we'll mooch something," he said. He tried a few stores along the highway and by and by turned up some stale jelly bismarcks. A truck carrying sheet-metal took all three of us into town. We lay under the tarpaulin, for it was cold now. The truck dragged up the hills in low gear, and it took hours, with all the stops. Stoney slept. Looking capable of harm, Wolfy didn't seem to mean us any; he had only tied in with us to be carried along as we were. As we started again in the late night for the city he began to tell me what a rough town it was, that he had heard the cops were mean and everything rugged; he said he had never been here before himself. While we penetrated more, by a series of funnels of light, into the city, he made me feel dejected, describing it as he did. Then the truck stopped and the driver let us off. I couldn't see where; it was empty and silent, past midnight. There was a small restaurant; all else was closed doors. So we went into this joint to ask where we were. It was narrow as a corridor, laid out with oilcloth. The short-order guy told us we were off the center of town, about a mile, if we followed the car line from the next intersection. When we came out, there was a squad car waiting with open doors and a cop blocking the way who said, "Get in." Two plainclothesmen were inside, and I had to hold Wolfy on my lap while Stoney lay on the floor. This Stoney was only a young boy. Nothing was said. They brought us into the stationconcrete, and small openings everywhere, the bars beginning at the end of a short flight of stairs not far from the sergeant's desk. The cops kept us to one side, for there was another matter being heard, and four or five faces of peculiar night-wildness by the electric globe of the desk, and the sergeant with his large flesh and white fatty face presiding. There was a woman, and it was hard to take in the fact that she had been in the middle of a brawl, she was so modest-looking and dressmakerish, with a green trout knot to her hat. Alongside her there were two men, one with a bloody beehive of bandages, totterheaded, and the other shut up with defiance and meanwhile his hands pressing all his concern to his chest. He was supposed to be the offender. 1 say supposed because it was the cop who did the explaining, the three principals being deaf-mutes. This guy attacked the other with a hammer, was what he said; he said that the woman was a lousy bitch and didn't care for whom she spread, and the bastard was the biggest cause of trouble in the deaf-mute community even if she did look like a schoolteacher. I report what the cop told the sergeant. "What's my idea," he said, "is that this poor jerk thought he was engaged to her and then he caught her with this other joker." "What doin'?" "I wouldn't know. It depends on how much of a sorehead he is. But with the pants off, I wouldn't be surprised." "I wonder what makes 'em so randy. They fight more about love than the dagoes," said the sergeant. His face had a one-eye emphasis, and his cheek was so much rough wall. The arm he had up his sleeve was very thick; I wouldn't have liked to see it used. "Why do they have t'be all the time hittin'? Maybe because they talk with their hands." Stoney and Wolfy grinned, wishing to be of the same humor as the cops. "Well, is anything broke under them bandages?" "They took a couple of stitches on his dome." The bloody-haired topple-bandage was pushed into the light where the sergeant could see. "Well," he said when he had looked, "take an' lock 'em up till we can see if we can get an interpreter tomorrow, and if we can't, then just kick 'em out in the morning. What would they do with this cocky in the workhouse? Anyway, a night in the clink will show them they aren't alone by themselves in the world and can't be carryin' on as if they was." We were next, and I had meantime been worrying about a connection between Joe German's arrest and our being picked up, but there was no such connection. There was only that shirt in the back seat of the stolen Buick to trace me by. The laundry mark. That was farfetched, but I didn't know what else to think. I was relieved when I heard what they had us in for: theft of automobile parts from wrecking yards. "We've never been in Detroit before," I said. "We just arrived in town." "Yeah, where from?" "Cleveland. We're hitchhiking." "You're a sonofabiteh liar. You belong to the Foley gang and you been stealing car parts. But we caught up with you. We'll get all you guys." s* p^" I said, "But we're not even from Detroit. I'm from Chicago." "Where you goin'?" "Home." "That's a fine way to get to Chicago from Cleveland, by way of this town. Your story stinks." He started on Stoney. "Where're you gonna say you come from?" "Pennsy." "Where's that?" "Near Wilkes Barre." "And where you headin' for?" "Nebraska, to study to be a vet'narian." "And what's that?" "About dogs and horses." "About Fords and Chevvies, you mean, you little asswipe hoodlum! And you, where's home for you, what's your story?" He started on Wolfy. "I'm from Pennsylvania too." "Whereabouts?" "Around Scranton. It's a little town." "How little is it?" "About five hundred population or so." "And what's the name of it?" "It ain't much of a name." "I bet. Well, tell me, what is it?" He said, his eyes moving tensely, which was poison to his effort to smile easily. "The name of it is Drumtown." "It must be a tough little hole to breed up rats like you. Okay, we'll see where it is on the map." He opened his drawer. "It ain't on the map. It's too small." "That's okay, if it has a name it'll be on my map. It's got them all." "What I mean is it ain't really incorporated. It's just a little burg and hasn't got around to be incorporated yet." "What do they do there?" "Dig up a little coal. Nothin' much." "Hard coal or soft coal?" "Both," said Wolfy, sinking his head and still grinning a little; but his underiip was somewhat withdrawn from his teeth and his sinews were out. "You belong to Foley's gang, friend," the sergeant said. ^No, I never been in this town before." 'Fetch me Jimmy," the sergeant instructed one of the cops. Jimmy came, slow and old, from the narrow stairs of the lower cells; his flesh was like a stout old woman's; he was wearing cloth slippers and a front-buttoned sweater holding up his wide breasts; he seemed to die a little with every breath. But his eyes were as explicit as otherwise everything was vague about this gray, yellow, and white-haired head, bent with weakness. The eyes, however, trained so they were foreign to anything but their long-time function, they had no personal regard. This Jimmy gazed on Stoney and me and passed us and his look rested on Wolfy. To him he said, "You was in here three years ago. You rolled a guy, and you got six months. It won't be three years yet till May. One month more." This great classifying organ of a police brain! "Well, Bumhead, Pennsylvania?" said the sergeant. "That's right, I did six months. But I don't know Foley, that's the truth, and never stole car parts. I don't know anything about cars." "Lock 'em all up." We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn't what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren't any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pockets your own business: that was the purpose of it. So we gave over our stuff and were taken down, past cells and zoo-rustling straw where some prisoner got off his- sack for a look through the bars. I saw the wounded deaf-mute like a magus holding his head, on a bunk. We were marched to the end of the row where the great memory-man sat sleeping, or perhaps he was only at dim rest all night, in a chair below a fish tail of ribbon tied into the grill of a ventilator. They stuck us in a large cell, a yell going up over us, "We got no room. We got no more room!" and obscene lip sounds and razzberries and flushing of the toilet, ape-wit and defiances. It really was a crowded cell, but they pushed us in anyway, and we did as well as we could, squatting on the floor. The other mute was in here, sitting by the feet of a drunk, crouched up as if in a steerage. An enormous light was on at all hours. There was something heavy about it, like the stone rolled in front of the tomb. Then by the wall, at day, a big dull rolling began, choking, the tubeclunk of trucks and heavy machine fuss, and also the needle-mouth speed of trolleys, fast as dragonflies. I must say I didn't get any great shock from this of personal injustice. I wanted to be out and on my way, and that was nearly all. I suffered over Joe German, caught and beat. .174 However, as I felt on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness It is for everyone. You don't, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a barbershop "September Morn." Nor are lowered into it with visitor's curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, streetpounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who very well know where they are. In the dinky grayness and smell of morning, after giving us coffee and bread, they let Stoney and me out; Wolfy was kept on suspicion. The cops said to us, "Get out of town. We give you a flop last night, but next time you'll get a vagrancy hung on you." There was a dawn smokiness and scratchiness in the station as the patrolmen off the night beat were taking a load off themselves, unstrapping guns, lifting off hats, sitting down to write out reports. Was there a station next door to Tobit, the day the angel visited, it would have been no different. We went along with the main traffic and ended in Campus Martius, which is not like the other Champs de Mars I know. Here all was brick, shaly with oil smoke and the shimmying gas of cars. We started off to ride to city limits on the trolleys; and then it happened that the conductor shook my shoulder to warn me that we were at a transfer point, and I jumped out thinking that Stoney was back of me, but I saw him still asleep by the window as the car passed with air-shut doors, and pounding on the glass didn't wake him. Then I waited the better part of an hour before going on to the end of the line where the highway was. I stayed there till nearly noon. He maybe thought I had shaken him off, which wasn't so. I felt despondent that I had lost him. At last I started to flag rides. First a truck took me to Jackson. I found a cheap flop there. Next afternoon a salesman for a film company picked me up. He was going to Chicago.