The tragic light of evening falls upon the huge and rusty jungle of South Brooklyn. It falls without glare or warmth upon the faces of all the men with dead eyes and flesh of tallow-grey as they lean upon their window-sills at the sad, hushed end of day.

If at such a time you walk down this narrow street, between the mean and shabby houses, past the eyes of all the men who lean there quietly at their open windows in their shirt-sleeves, and turn in at the alley here and follow the two-foot strip of broken concrete pavement that skirts the alley on one side, and go to the very last shabby house down at the end, and climb up the flight of worn steps to the front entrance and knock loudly at the door with your bare knuckles (the bell is out of order) and then wait patiently until someone comes, and ask whether Mr. George Webber lives here, you will be informed that he most certainly does, and that if you will just come in and go down this stairway to the basement and knock at the door there on your right, you will probably find him in. So you go down the stairway to the damp and gloomy basement hall, thread your way between the dusty old boxes, derelict furniture, and other lumber stored there in the passage, rap on the door that has been indicated to you, and Mr. Webber himself will open it and usher you right into his room, his home, his castle.

The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in. It is long and narrow, running parallel to the hall from front to rear, and the only natural light that enters it comes through two small windows rather high up in the wall, facing each other at the opposite ends, and these are heavily guarded with iron bars, placed there by some past owner of the house to keep the South Brooklyn thugs from breaking in.

The room is furnished adequately but not so luxuriously as to deprive it of a certain functional and Spartan simplicity. In the back half there is an iron bed with sagging springs, a broken-down dresser with a cracked mirror above it, two kitchen chairs, and a steamer trunk and some old suitcases that have seen much use. At the front end, under the yellow glow of an electric light suspended from the ceiling by a cord, there is a large desk, very much scarred and battered, with the handles missing on most of the drawers, and in front of it there is a straight-backed chair made out of some old, dark wood. In the centre, ranged against the walls, where they serve to draw the two ends of the room together into aesthetic unity, stand an ancient gate-legged table, so much of its dark green paint flaked off that the dainty pink complexion of its forgotten youth shows through all over, a tier of book-shelves, unpainted, and two large crates or packing-cases, their thick top boards pried off to reveal great stacks of ledgers and of white and yellow manuscript within. On top of the desk, on the table, on the book-shelves, and all over the floor are scattered, like fallen leaves in autumn woods, immense masses of loose paper with writing on every sheet, and everywhere are books, piled up on their sides or leaning crazily against each other.

This dark cellar is George Webber’s abode and working quarters. Here, in winter, the walls, which sink four feet below the level of the ground, sweat continuously with clammy drops of water. Here, in summer, it is he who does the sweating.

His neighbours, he will tell you, are for the most part Armenians, Italians, Spaniards, Irishmen, and Jews — in short, Americans. They live in all the shacks, tenements, and slums in all the raw, rusty streets and alleys of South Brooklyn.

And what is that you smell?

Oh, that! Well, you see, he shares impartially with his neighbours a piece of public property in the vicinity; it belongs to all of them in common, and it gives to South Brooklyn its own distinctive atmosphere. It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate putrefactions. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smouldering rags, the odours of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incense of putrefying offal, the fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs.

And how does he stand it?

Well, one gets used to it. One can get used to anything, just as all these other people do. They never think of the smell, they never speak of it, they’d probably miss it if they moved away.

To this place, then, George Webber has come, and here “holed in” with a kind of dogged stubbornness touched with desperation. And you will not be far wrong if you surmise that he has come here deliberately, driven by a resolution to seek out the most forlorn and isolated hiding spot that he could find.

Mr. Marple, a gentleman who has a room on the second floor, comes stumbling down the darkened basement stairway with a bottle in his hand and knocks upon George Webber’s door.

“Come in!”

Mr. Marple comes in, introduces himself, does the right thing with the bottle, sits down, and begins to make talk.

“Well, now, Mr. Webber, how d’yah like that drink I mixed for yah?”

“Oh, I like it, I like it.”

“Well, now, if yah don’t, I want yah t’come right out an’ say so.”

“Oh, I would, I would.”

“I mean I’d like to know. I’d appreciate yah tellin’ me. What I mean is, I made that stuff myself from a little private formuler I got — I wouldn’t buy no stuff from a bootlegger — I wouldn’t take no chance wit’ the bastards. I buy the alcohol that goes into that drink from a place I know, an’ I always know what I’m gettin’— d’yah know what I mean?”

“Yes, I certainly do.”

“But I’d like to know what yah think of it, I’d appreciate yah tellin’ me.”

“Oh, it’s fine, it couldn’t be better.”

“I’m glad yah like it, an’ you’re sure I didn’t disturb yah?”

“Oh, no, not at all.”

“Because I was on my way in when I sees your light there in the winder, so I says to myself, now that guy may think I’ve got an orful nerve buttin’ in like this but I’m gonna stop an’ get acquainted an’ ast him if he’d like a little drink.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“But if I disturbed yah I wantcha t’say so.”

“Oh, no, not at all.”

“Because here’s the way it is wit’ me. I’m interested in youman nature — I’m a great student of psychology — I can read faces the minute I look at a guy — it’s somethin’ that I always had — I guess that’s why I’m in the insurance game. So when I sees a guy that interests me I wanta get acquainted wit’ him an’ get his reactions to things. So when I sees your light I says to myself, he may tell me to get the hell outa there but there ain’t no harm in tryin’.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Now Mr. Webber, I think I’m a pretty good judge of character ——”

“Oh, I’m sure you are.”

“— an’ I been lookin’ at yah an’ sorta sizin’ yah up while yah been sittin’ there. Yah didn’t know I was sizin’ yah up but that’s what I been doin’ all the time yah been sittin’ there because I’m a great student of youman nature, Mr. Webber, an’ I gotta size up all grades an’ classes every day in my business —you know — I’m in the insurance game. An’ I wanna ast yah a question. Now if it’s too personal I wantcha t’come right out an’ say so, but if yah don’t mind answerin’ I’m gonna ast it to yah.”

“Not at all. What is it?”

“Well, Mr. Webber, I already reached my own conclusions, but I’m gonna ast it to yah just t’see if it don’t bear me out. Now what I’m gonna ast yah — an’ yah don’t have to answer if yah don’t want to — is — What’s your line? — What business are yah in? Now yah don’t need to tell me if it’s too personal.”

“Not at all. I’m a writer.”

“A what?”

“A writer. I wrote a book once. I’m trying to write another one now.”

“Well now, it may surprise yah but that’s just what I figgered out myself. I says to myself, now there’s a guy, I says, that’s in some kind of intelleckshul work where he’s got t’use his head. He’s a writer or a newspaperman or in the advertisin’ business. Y’see I’ve always been a great judge of youman nature — that’s my line.”

“Yes, I see.”

“An’ now I wanna tell yah somethin’ else, Mr. Webber. You’re doin’ the thing yah was cut out for, you’re doin’ the thing yah was born to do, it’s what yah been preparin’ to do all your life sinct yah was a kid — am I right or wrong?”

“Oh, I guess you’re right.”

“An’ that’s the reason you’re gonna be a big success at it. Stick to writin’, Mr. Webber. I’m a great judge of youman nature an’ I know what I’m talkin’ about. Just stick to the thing yah always wanted to be an’ yah’ll get there. Now some guys never find theirselves. Some guys never know what they wanna be. That’s the trouble wit’ some guys. Now wit’ me it’s different. I didn’t find myself till I was a grown man. You’d have t’laugh, Mr. Webber, if I told yah what it was I wanted t’be when I was a kid.”

“What was it, Mr. Marple?”

“Say, Mr. Webber — y’know it’s funny — yah won’t believe me — but up to the time I was about twenty years old, a grown man, I was crazy to be a railway engineer. No kiddin’. I was nuts about it. An’ I’d a-been just crazy enough to’ve gone ahead an’ got a job on the railway if the old man hadn’t yanked me by the collar an’ told me t’snap out of it. Yah know I’m a Down–Easter by birth — don’t talk like it any more — I been here too long — but that’s where I grew up. My old man was a plumber in Augusta, Maine. So when I tells him I’m gonna be a locomotive engineer he boots me one in the seat of the pants an’ tells me I ain’t no such thing. ‘I’ve sent yah to school,’ he says, ‘you’ve had ten times the schoolin’ that I had, an’ now yah tell me that you’re gonna be a railway hogger. Well, you’re not,’ the old man says, ‘you’re gonna be one member of the fambly that’s comin’ home at night wit’ clean hands an’ a white collar. Now you get the hell outa here an’ hunt yah up a job in some decent high-class business where yah’ll have a chanct t’advance an’ associate wit’ your social ekals.’ Jesus! It was a lucky thing for me he took that stand or I’d never a-got where I am today. But I was good an’ sore about it at the time. An’ say, Mr. Webber — you’re gonna laugh when I tell yah this one — I ain’t actually over the darn thing yet. No kiddin’. When I see one of these big engines bargin’ down the track I still get that funny crawly feelin’ I usta have when I was a kid an’ looked at ’em. The guys at the office had t’laugh about it when I told ’em, an’ now when I come in they call me Casey Jones. — Well, what d’yah say yah have another little snifter before I go?”

“Thanks, I’d like to, but maybe I’d better not. I’ve still got a little work I ought to do before I turn in.”

“Well now, Mr. Webber, I know just how it is. An’ that’s the way I had yah sized up from the first. That guy’s a writer, I says, or in some sort of intelleckshul occupation where he’s got to use his head — was I right or wrong?”

“Oh, you were right.”

“Wel!, I’m glad to’ve metcha, Mr. Webber. Don’t make yourself a stranger round here. Yah know, a guy gets sorta lonely sometimes. My wife died four years ago so I been livin’ upstairs here ever sinct — sorta figgered that a single guy didn’t need no more room than I got here. Come up to see me. I’m interested in youman nature an’ 1 like to talk to people an’ get their different reactions. So any time yah feel like chewin’ the rag a bit, drop in.”

“Oh, I will, I will.”

“Good night, Mr. Webber.”

“Good night, Mr. Marple.”

Good night. Good night. Good night.

Across the basement hall, in another room similar to George Webber’s, lived an old man by the name of Wakefield. He had a son somewhere in New York who paid his rent, but Mr. Wakefield rarely saw his son. He was a brisk and birdy little man with a chirping, cheerful voice; and, although he was almost ninety, he always seemed to be in good health and was still immensely active. His son had provided him with a room to live in, and he had a little money of his own — a few dollars a month from a pension — enough to supply his meagre wants; but he lived a life of utter loneliness, seeing his son only on the occasion of a holiday or a rare visit, and the rest of the time living all by himself in his basement room.

Yet he had as brave and proud a spirit as any man on earth. He longed desperately for companionship, but he would have died rather than admit he was lonely. So independent was he, and so sensitive, that, while he was always courteous and cheerful, his tone when he responded to a greeting was a little cold and distant, lest anyone should think he was too forward and eager. But, once satisfied of one’s friendliness, no one could respond more warmly or more cordially than old man Wakefield.

George grew fond of him and liked to talk with him, and the old man would invite him eagerly into his part of the basement and proudly display his room, which he kept with a soldierlike neatness. He was a veteran of the union Army in the Civil War, and his room was filled with books, records, papers, and old clippings bearing on the war and on the part his regiment had played in it. Although he was alert and eager towards the life round him, and much too brave and hopeful a spirit to live mournfully in the past, the Civil War had been the great and central event in old man Wakefield’s life. Like many of the men of his generation, both North and South, it had never occurred to him that the war was not the central event in everyone’s life. Because it was so with him, he believed that people everywhere still lived and thought and talked about the war all the time.

He was a leading figure in the activities of his Grand Army Post, and was always bustling about with plans and projects for the coming year. It seemed to him that the Grand Army organisation, whose thinning ranks of old and feeble men he still saw with the proud eyes of forty or fifty years before, was the most powerful society in the nation, and that its word of warning or stern reproof was enough to make all the kings of the earth quake and tremble in their boots. He was bitterly scornful and would bristle up immediately at mention of the American Legion: he fancied slights and cunning trickery on the part of this body all the time, and he would ruffle up like a rooster when he spoke of the Legionnaires, and say in an angry, chirping voice:

“It’s jealousy! Nothing in the world but sheer tar-nation jealousy— that’s what it is!”

“But why, Mr. Wakefield? Why should they be jealous of you?”

“Because we reely did some soldierin’— that’s why!” he chirped angrily. “Because they know we fit the Rebels — yes! and fit ’em good — and licked ’em, too!” he cackled triumphantly —“in a war that was a war! . . . Pshaw!” he said scornfully, in a lowered voice, looking out the window with a bitter smile and with eyes that had suddenly grown misty. “What do these fellows know about a war? — Some bob-tail — raggedy — two-by-two— little jackleg feller — of a Legionnary!” He spat the words out with a malignant satisfaction, breaking at the end into a vindictive cackle. “Standin’ to their necks all day in some old trench and never gettin’ within ten miles of the enemy!” he sneered. “If they ever saw a troop of cavalry, I don’t know what they’d make of it! I reckon they’d think it was the circus come to town!” he cackled. “A war! A war! Hell-fire, that warn’t no war!” he cried derisively. “If they wanted to see a war, they should’ve been with us at the Bloody Angle! But, pshaw!” he said. “They’d a-run like rabbits if they’d been there! The only way you could a-kept ’em would’ve been to tie ’em to a tree!”

“Don’t you think they could have beaten the Rebels, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Beat ’em?” he shrilled. “Beat ’em! Why, boy, what are you talkin’ about? . . . Hell! If Stonewall Jackson ever started for that gang, he’d run ’em ragged! Yes, sir! They’d light out so fast they’d straighten out all the bends of the road as they went by!” cried old man Wakefield, cackling. “Pshaw!” he said quietly and scornfully again. “They couldn’t do it! It ain’t in ’em! . . . But I’ll tell you this much!” he cried suddenly in an excited voice. “We’re not goin’ to put up with it much longer! The boys have had just about as much of it as they can stand! If they try to do us like they done last year — pshaw!” he broke off again, and looked out the window shaking his head —“Why it’s all as plain as the nose on your face! It’s jealousy — just plain, confounded jealousy— that’s all in the world it is!”

“What is, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Why, the way they done us last year!” he cried. “Puttin’ us way back there at the tail-end of the pee-rade, when by all the rights — as everybody knows — we should’ve come first! But we’ll fix ’em!” he cried warningly. “We’ve got a way to fix ’em!” he said with a triumphant shake of the head. “I know the thing we’re goin’ to do this year,” he cried, “if they try another trick like that on us!”

“What are you going to do, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Why,” he cackled, “we won’t pee-rade! We simply won’t pee-rade! We’ll tell ’em they can hold their derned pee-rade without us!” he chirped exultantly. “And I reckon that’ll fix ’em! Oh yes! That’ll bring ’em round, or I miss my guess!” he crowed.

“It ought to, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Why, boy,” he said solemnly, “if we ever did a thing like that, there would be a wave of protest — a wave of protest”— he cried with a sweeping gesture of the arm, as his voice rose strongly —“from here to Californy! . . . The people wouldn’t stand for it!” he cried. “They’d make those fellers back down in a hurry!”

And as George left him, the old man would come with him to the door, shake his hand warmly and, with an eager and lonely look in his old eyes, say:

“Come again, boy! I’m always glad to see you! . . . I got stuff in here — photygraphs an’ books, an’ such as that about the war — that you ain’t seen yet. No, nor no one else!” he cackled. “For no one else has got ’em! . . . Just let me know when you’re comin’ an’ I’ll be here.”

Slowly the years crept by and George lived alone in Brooklyn. They were hard years, desperate years, lonely years, years of interminable writing and experimentation, years of exploration and discovery, years of grey timelessness, weariness, exhaustion, and self-doubt. He had reached the wilderness period of his life and was hacking his way through the jungles of experience. He had stripped himself down to the brutal facts of self and work. These were all he had.

He saw himself more clearly now than he had ever done before, and, in spite of living thus alone, he no longer thought of himself as a rare and special person who was doomed to isolation, but as a man who worked and who, like other men, was a part of life. He was concerned passionately with reality. He wanted to see things whole, to find out everything he could, and then to create out of what he knew the fruit of his own vision.

One criticism that had been made of his first book still rankled in his mind. An unsuccessful scribbler turned critic had simply dismissed the whole book as a “barbaric yawp”, accusing Webber of getting at things with his emotions rather than with his brains, and of being hostile towards the processes of the intellect and “the intellectual point of view.” These charges, if they had any truth in them, seemed to George to be the kind of lifeless half-truth that was worse than no truth at all. The trouble with the so-called “intellectuals” was that they were not intellectual enough, and their point of view more often than not had no point, but was disparate, arbitrary, sporadic, and confused.

To be an “intellectual” was, it seemed, a vastly different thing from being intelligent. A dog’s nose would usually lead him towards what he wished to find, or away from what he wished to avoid: this was intelligent. That is, the dog had the sense of reality in his nose. But the “intellectual” usually had no nose, and was lacking in the sense of reality. The most striking difference between Webber’s mind and the mind of the average “intellectual” was that Webber absorbed experience like a sponge, and made use of everything that he absorbed. He really learned constantly from experience. But the “intellectuals” of his acquaintance seemed to learn nothing. They had no capacity for rumination and digestion. They could not reflect.

He thought over a few of them that he had known:

There was Haythorpe, who when George first knew him was an esthete of the late baroque in painting, writing all the arts, author of one-act costume plays —“Gesmonder! Thy hands pale chalices of hot desire!” Later he became an esthete of the primitives — the Greek, Italian, and the German; then esthete of the nigger cults — the wood sculptures, coon songs, hymnals, dances, and the rest; still later, esthete of the comics — of cartoons, Chaplin, and the Brothers Marx; then of Expressionism; then of the Mass; then of Russia and the Revolution; at length, esthete of homo-sexuality; and finally, death’s esthete — suicide in a graveyard in Connecticut.

There was Collingswood, who, fresh out of Harvard, was not so much the esthete of the arts as of the mind. First, a Bolshevik from Beacon Hill, practitioner of promiscuous, communal love as the necessary answer to “bourgeois morality”; then back to Cambridge for post-graduate study at the feet of Irving Babbitt — Collingswood is now a Humanist, the bitter enemy of Rousseau, Romanticism, and of Russia (which is, he now thinks, Rousseau in modern form); the playwright, next — New Jersey, Beacon Hill, or Central Park seen in the classic unities of the Greek drama; at length, disgusted realist —“all that’s good in modern art or letters is to be found in advertisements”; then a job as a scenario writer and two years in Hollywood — all now is the moving picture, with easy money, easy love affairs, and drunkenness; and finally, back to Russia, but with his first love lacking — no sex triflings now, my comrades — we who serve the Cause and wait upon the day lead lives of Spartan abstinence — what was the free life, free love, enlightened pleasure of the proletariat ten years ago is now despised as the contemptible debauchery of “bourgeois decadence”.

There was Spurgeon from the teaching days at the School for Utility Cultures — good Spurgeon — Chester Spurgeon of the Ph.D. — Spurgeon of “the great tradition”— thin-lipped Spurgeon, exstudent of Professor Stuart Sherman, and bearer-onwards of the Master’s Torch. Noble-hearted Spurgeon, who wrote honeyed flatteries of Thornton Wilder and his Bridge—“The tradition of the Bridge is Love, just as the tradition of America and of Democracy is Love. Hence”— Spurgeon hences — Love grows Wilder as the years Bridge on across America. Oh, where now, good Spurgeon, “intellectual” Spurgeon — Spurgeon whose thin lips and narrowed eyes were always so glacial prim on Definitions? Where now, brave intellect, by passion uninflamed? Spurgeon of the flashing mind, by emotion unimpulsed, is now a devoted leader of the intellectual Communists (See Spurgeon’s article entitled: “Mr. Wilder’s Piffle”, in the New Masses). — So, Comrade Spurgeon, hail! Hail, Comrade Spurgeon — and most heartily, my bright-eyed Intellectual, farewell!

Whatever George Webber was, he knew he was not an “intellectual”. He was just an American who was looking hard at the life round him, and sorting carefully through all the life he had ever seen and known, and trying to extract some essential truth out of this welter of his whole experience. But, as he said to his friend and editor, Fox Edwards:

“What is truth? No wonder jesting Pilate turned away. The truth, it has a thousand faces — show only one of them, and the whole truth flies away! But how to show the whole? That’s the question . . .

“Discovery in itself is not enough. It’s not enough to find out what things are. You’ve also got to find out where they come from, where each brick fits in the wall.”

He always came back to the wall.

“I think it’s like this,” he said. “You see a wall, you look at it so much and so hard that one day you see clear through it. Then, of course, it’s not just one wall any longer. It’s every wall that ever was.”

He was still spiritually fighting out the battle of his first book, and all the problems it had raised. He was still searching for a way. At times he felt that his first book had taught him nothing — not even confidence. His feelings of hollow desperation and self-doubt seemed to grow worse instead of better, for he had now torn himself free from almost every personal tie which had ever bound him, and which formerly had sustained him in some degree with encouragement and faith. He was left, therefore, to rely almost completely on his own resources.

There was also the insistent, gnawing consciousness of work itself, the necessity of turning towards the future and the completion of a new book. He was feeling, now as never before, the inexorable pressure of time. In writing his first book, he had been unknown And obscure, and there had been a certain fortifying strength in that, for no one had expected anything of him. But now the spotlight of publication had been turned upon him, and he felt it beating down with merciless intensity. He was pinned beneath the light — he could not crawl out of it. Though he had not won fame, still he was known now. He had been examined, probed, and talked about. He felt that the world was looking at him with a critic eye.

It had been easy in his dreams to envision a long and fluent sequence of big books, but now he was finding it a different matter to accomplish them. His first book had been more an act of utterance than an act of labour. It was an impassioned expletive of youth — something that had been pent up in him, something felt and seen and imagined and put down at white-hot heat. The writing of it had been a process of spiritual and emotional evacuation. But that was behind him now, and he knew he should never try to repeat it. Henceforth his writing would have to come from unending labour and preparation.

In his effort to explore his experience, to extract the whole, essential truth of it, and to find a way to write about it, he sought to recapture every particle of the life he knew down to its minutest details. He spent weeks and months trying to put down on paper the exactitudes of countless fragments — what he called: “the dry, caked colours of America”— how the entrance to a subway looked, the design and webbing of the elevated structure, the look and feel of an iron rail, the particular shade of rusty green with which so many things are painted in America. Then he tried to pin down the foggy colour of the brick of which so much of London is constructed, the look of an English doorway, of a French window, of the roofs and chimney-pots of Paris, of a whole street in Munich — and each of these foreign things he then examined in contrast to its American equivalent.

It was a process of discovery in its most naked, literal, and primitive terms. He was just beginning really to see thousands of things for the first time, to see the relations between them, to see here and there whole series and systems of relations. He was like a scientist in some new field of chemistry who for the first time realises that he has stumbled upon a vast new world, and who will then pick out identities, establish affiliations, define here and there the outlines of sub-systems in crystalline union, without yet being aware what the structure of the whole is like, or what the final end will be.

The same processes now began to inform his direct observation of the life round him. Thus, on his nocturnal ramblings about New York, he would observe the homeless men who prowled in the vicinity of restaurants, lifting the lids of garbage cans and searching round inside for morsels of rotten food. He saw them everywhere, and noticed how their numbers increased during the hard and desperate days of 1932. He knew what kind of men they were, for he talked to many of them; he knew what they had been, where they had come from, and even what kind of scraps they could expect to dig out of the garbage cans. He found out the various places all over the city where such men slept at night. A favourite rendezvous was a corridor of the subway station at Thirty-third Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. There one night he counted thirty-four huddled together on the cold concrete, wrapped up in sheathings of old newspaper.

It was his custom almost every night, at one o’clock or later, to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and night after night, with a horrible fascination, he used to go to the public latrine or “comfort station” which was directly in front of the New York City Hall. One descended to this place down a steep flight of stairs from the street, and on bitter nights he would find the place crowded with homeless men who had sought refuge there. Some were those shambling hulks that one sees everywhere, in Paris as well as New York, in good times as well as bad — old men, all rags and bags and long white hair and bushy beards stained dirty yellow, wearing tattered overcoats in the cavernous pockets of which they carefully stored away all the little rubbish they lived on and spent their days collecting in the streets — crusts of bread, old bones with rancid shreds of meat still clinging to them, and dozens of cigarette-butts. Some were the “stumble bums” from the Bowery, criminal, fumed with drink or drugs, or half insane with “smoke”. But most of them were just flotsam of the general ruin of the time — honest, decent, middle-aged men with faces seamed by toil and want, and young men, many of them mere boys in their teens, with thick, unkempt hair. These were the wanderers from town to town, the riders of freight trains, the thumbers of rides on highways, the uprooted, unwanted male population of America. They drifted across the land and gathered in the big cities when winter came, hungry, defeated, empty, hopeless, restless, driven by they knew not what, always on the move, looking everywhere for work, for the bare crumbs to support their miserable lives, and finding neither work nor crumbs. Here in New York, to this obscene meeting-place, these derelicts came, drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease from their desperation.

George had never before witnessed anything to equal the indignity and sheer animal horror of the scene. There was even a kind of devil’s comedy in the sight of all these filthy men squatting upon those open, doorless stools. Arguments and savage disputes and fights would sometimes break out among them over the possession of these stools, which all of them wanted more for rest than for necessity. The sight was revolting, disgusting, enough to render a man forever speechless with very pity.

He would talk to the men and find out all he could about them, and when he could stand it no more he would come out of this hole of filth and suffering, and there, twenty feet above it, he would see the giant hackles of Manhattan shining coldly in the cruel brightness of the winter night. The Woolworth Building was not fifty yards away, and, a little farther down were the silvery spires and needles of Wall Street, great fortresses of stone and steel that housed enormous hanks. The blind injustice of this contrast seemed the most brutal part of the whole experience, for there, all round him in the cold moonlight, only a few blocks away from this abyss of human wretchedness and misery, blazed the pinnacle of power where a large portion of the entire world’s wealth was locked in mighty vaults.

They were now dosing up the restaurant. The tired waitresses were racking the chairs upon the tables, completing the last formalities of their hard day’s work in preparation for departure. At the cash register the proprietor was totting up the figures of the day’s take, and one of the male waiters hovered watchfully near the table, in a manner politely indicating that while he was not in a hurry he would be glad if the last customer would pay his bill and leave.

George called for his check and gave the man some money. He took it and in a moment returned with the change. He pocketed his tip and said: “Thank you, sir.” Then as George said good night and started to get up and leave, the waiter hesitated and hung round uncertainly as if there was something he wanted to say but scarcely knew whether he ought to say it or not.

George looked at him inquiringly, and then, in a rather embarrassed tone, the waiter said:

“Mr. Webber . . . there’s . . . something I’d like to talk over with you sometime . . . I— I’d like to get your advice about something — that is, if you have time,” he added hastily and almost apologetically.

George regarded the waiter with another inquiring look,-in which the man evidently read encouragement, for now he went on quickly, in a manner of almost beseeching entreaty:

“It’s — it’s about a story.”

The familiar phrase awakened countless weary echoes in Webber’s memory. It also resolved that hard and honest patience with which any man who ever sweated to write a living line and to earn his bread by the hard, uncertain labour of his pen will listen, as an act of duty and understanding, to any other man who says he has a tale to tell. His mind and will wearily composed themselves, his face set in a strained smile of mechanical anticipation, and the poor waiter, thus encouraged, went on eagerly:

“It’s — it’s a story a guy told me several years ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The guy was a foreigner,” said the waiter impressively, as if this fact was enough to guarantee the rare colour and fascinating interest of what he was about to reveal. “He was an Armenian,” said the waiter very earnestly. “Sure! He came from over there!” He nodded his head emphatically. “And this story that he told me was an Armenian story,” said the waiter with solemn emphasis, and then paused to let this impressive fact sink in. “It was a story that he knew about — he told it to me — and I’m the only other guy that knows about it,” said the waiter, and paused again, looking at his patron with a very bright and feverish eye.

George continued to smile with wan encouragement, and in a moment the waiter, after an obvious struggle with his soul, a conflict between his desire to keep his secret and to tell it, too, went on:

“Gee! You’re a writer, Mr. Webber, and you know about these things. I’m just a dumb guy working in a restaurant — but if I could put it into words — if I could get a guy like you who knows how it’s done to tell the story for me — why — why”— he struggled with himself, then burst out enthusiastically —“there’d be a fortune in it for the both of us!”

George felt his heart sink still lower. It was turning out just as he knew it would. But he still continued to smile pallidly. He cleared his throat in an undecided fashion, but then said nothing. And the waiter, taking silence for consent, now pressed on impetuously:

“Honest, Mr. Webber — if I could get somebody like you to help me with this story — to write it down for me the way it ought to beI’d — I’d”— for a moment the waiter struggled with his lower nature, then magnanimity got the better of him and he cried out with t he decided air of a man who is willing to make a generous bargain and stick to it —“I’d go fifty-fifty with him! I’d — I’d be willing to give him half! . . . And there’s a fortune in it!” he cried. “I go to the movies and I read True Story Magazine— and I never seen a story like it! It’s got ’em all beat! I’ve thought about it for years, ever since the guy told it to me — and I know I’ve got a gold mine here if I could only write it down! . . . It’s — it’s ——”

Now, indeed, the waiter’s struggle with his sense of caution became painful to watch. He was evidently burning with a passionate desire to reveal his secret, but he was also obviously tormented by doubts and misgivings lest he should recklessly give away to a comparative stranger a treasure which the other might appropriate to his own use. I I is manner was very much that of a man who has sailed strange seas and seen, in some unknown coral island, the fabulous buried cache of forgotten pirates’ plundering, and who is now being torn between two desperate needs — his need of partnership, of outward help, and his imperative need of secrecy and caution. The fierce interplay of these two powers discrete was waged there on the open battlefield of the waiter’s countenance. And in the end he took the obvious way out. Like an explorer who will take from his pocket an uncut gem of tremendous size and value and cunningly hint that in a certain place he knows of there are many more like it, the waiter decided to tell a little part of his story without revealing it.

“I— I can’t tell you the whole thing to-night,” he said apologetically. “Some other night, maybe, when you’ve got more time. But just to give you an idea of what’s in it”— he looked round stealthily to make sure he was in no danger of being overheard, then bent over and lowered his voice to an impressive whisper —“just to give you an idea, now — there’s one scene in the story where a woman puts an advertisement in the paper that she will give a ten-dollar gold piece and as much liquor as he can drink to any man who comes round to see her the next day!” After imparting this sensational bit of information, the waiter regarded his patron with glittering eyes. “Now!” said the waiter, straightening up with a gesture of finality. “You never heard of anything like that, did you? You ain’t never seen that in a story!”

George, after a baffled pause, admitted feebly that he had not. ............