care. Being clean doesn’t go with what I
am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside
so that men will stop when they see me on the street.
Sometimes when I have done well I don’t go on
the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean
up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets
me do my washing in the basement at night. I
don’t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks
I am on the streets.”
The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby,
and a fat German waiter came in at the open door and
put more wood on the fire. He stopped by the
table and talked about the mud in the road outside.
From another room came the silvery clink of glasses
and the sound of laughing voices. The girl and
Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns.
Sam felt that he liked her very much and thought that
if she had belonged to him he should have found a
basis on which to live with her contentedly. She
had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking
in people.
As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his
arm.
“I wouldn’t mind about you,” she
said, looking at him frankly.
Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. “It’s
been a good evening,” he said, “we’ll
go through with it as it stands.”
“Thanks for that,” she said, “and
there is something else I want to tell you. Perhaps
you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I
don’t want to go on the streets I get down on
my knees and pray for strength to go on gamely.
Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we
New Englanders.”
As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured
asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her
room. Half way up she stopped and waved her hand
at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish.
Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun
and begin shooting citizens in the streets. He
stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at
Caxton. Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in
the night.
“Are you there, O God? Have you left your
children here on the earth hurting each other?
Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit
men to wreck and hurt and destroy?”
One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering,
Sam got out of his bed in a cold little hotel in a
mining village in West Virginia, looked at the miners,
their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast
cakes, paid his bill at the hotel, and took a train
for New York. He had definitely abandoned the
idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering
about the country and talking to chance acquaintances
by the wayside and in villages, and had decided to
return to a way of life more befitting his income.
