On a black, sultry night in early summer Biff Brannon stood behind the cash register of the New York Café. It was twelve o’clock. Outside the street lights had already been turned off, so that the light from the café made a sharp, yellow rectangle on the sidewalk. The street was deserted, but inside the café there were half a dozen customers drinking beer or Santa Lucia wine or whiskey. Biff waited stolidly, his elbow resting on the counter and his thumb mashing the tip of his long nose. His eyes were intent. He watched especially a short, squat man in overalls who had become drunk and boisterous. Now and then his gaze passed on to the mute who sat by himself at one of the middle tables, or to others of the customers before the counter. But he always turned back to the drunk in overalls. The hour grew later and Biff continued to wait silently behind the counter. Then at last he gave the restaurant a final survey and went toward the door at the back which led upstairs.

Quietly he entered the room at the top of the stairs. It was dark inside and he walked with caution. After he had gone a few paces his toe struck something hard and he reached down and felt for the handle of a suitcase on the floor. He had only been in the room a few seconds and was about to leave when the light was turned on.

Alice sat up in the rumpled bed and looked at him. ‘What you doing with that suitcase?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you get rid of that lunatic without giving him back what he’s already drunk up?’

‘Wake up and go down yourself. Call the cop and let him get soused on the chain gang with cornbread and peas. Go to it, Missis Brannon.’

‘I will all right if he’s down there tomorrow. But you leave that bag alone. It don’t belong to that sponger any more.’

‘I know spongers, and Blount’s not one,’ Biff said. ‘Myself—I don’t know so well. But I’m not that kind of a thief.’

Calmly Biff put down the suitcase on the steps outside. The air was not so stale and sultry in the room as it was downstairs. He decided to stay for a short while and douse his face with cold water before going back.

‘I told you already what I’ll do if you don’t get rid of that fellow for good tonight. In the daytime he takes them naps at the back, and then at night you feed him dinners and beer. For a week now he hasn’t paid one cent. And all his wild talking and carrying-on will ruin any decent trade.’

‘You don’t know people and you don’t know real business,’ Biff said. ‘The fellow in question first came in here twelve days ago and he was a stranger in the town. The first week he gave us twenty dollars’ worth of trade. Twenty at the minimum.’

‘And since then on credit,’ Alice said. ‘Five days on credit, and so drunk it’s a disgrace to the business. And besides, he’s nothing but a bum and a freak.’

‘I like freaks,’ Biff said.

‘I reckon you do! I just reckon you certainly ought to, Mister Brannon—being as you’re one yourself.’

He rubbed his bluish chin and paid her no attention. For the first fifteen years of their married life they had called each other just plain Biff and Alice. Then in one of their quarrels they had begun calling each other Mister and Missis, and since then they had never made it up enough to change it.

‘I’m just warning you he’d better not be there when I come down tomorrow.’

Biff went into the bathroom, and after he had bathed his face he decided that he would have time for a shave. His beard was black and heavy as though it had grown for three days. He stood before the mirror and rubbed his cheek meditatively. He was sorry he had talked to Alice. With her, silence was better. Being around that woman always made him different from his real self. It made him tough and small and common as she was. Biff’s eyes were cold and staring, half-concealed by the cynical droop of his eyelids. On the fifth finger of his calloused hand there was a woman’s wedding ring. The door was open behind him, and in the mirror he could see Alice lying in the bed.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘The trouble with you is that you don’t have any real kindness. Not but one woman I’ve ever known had this real kindness I’m talking about.’

‘Well, I’ve known you to do things no man in this world would be proud of. I’ve known you to——’

‘Or maybe it’s curiosity I mean. You don’t ever see or notice anything important that goes on. You never watch and think and try to figure anything out. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between you and me, after all.’

Alice was almost asleep again, and through the mirror he watched her with detachment. There was no distinctive point about her on which he could fasten his attention, and his gaze glided from her pale brown hair to the stumpy outline of her feet beneath the cover. The soft curves of her face led to the roundness of her hips and thighs. When he was away from her there was no one feature that stood out in his mind and he remembered her as a complete, unbroken figure.

‘The enjoyment of a spectacle is something you have never known,’ he said.

Her voice was tired. ‘That fellow downstairs is a spectacle, all right, and a circus too. But I’m through putting up with him.’

‘Hell, the man don’t mean anything to me. He’s no relative or buddy of mine. But you don’t know what it is to store up a whole lot of details and then come upon something real.’ He turned on the hot water and quickly began to shave.

It was the morning of May 15, yes, that Jake Blount had come in. He had noticed him immediately and watched. The man was short, with heavy shoulders like beams. He had a small, ragged mustache, and beneath this his lower lip looked as though it had been stung by a wasp. There were many things about the fellow that seemed contrary. His head was very large and well-shaped, but his neck was soft and slender as a boy’s. The mustache looked false, as if it had been stuck on for a costume party and would fall off if he talked too fast. It made him seem almost middle-aged, although his face with its high, smooth forehead and wide-open eyes was young. His hands were huge, stained, and calloused, and he was dressed in a cheap white-linen suit. There was something very funny about the man, yet at the same time another feeling would not let you laugh.

He ordered a pint of liquor and drank it straight in half an hour. Then he sat at one of the booths and ate a big chicken dinner. Later he read a book and drank beer. That was the beginning. And although Biff had noticed Blount very carefully he would never have guessed about the crazy things that happened later. Never had he seen a man change so many times in twelve days. Never had he seen a fellow drink so much, stay drunk so long.

Biff pushed up the end of his nose with his thumb and shaved his upper lip. He was finished and his face seemed cooler. Alice was asleep when he went through the bedroom on the way downstairs.

The suitcase was heavy. He carried it to the front of the restaurant, behind the cash register, where he usually stood each evening. Methodically he glanced around the place. A few customers had left and the room was not so crowded, but the set-up was the same. The deaf-mute still drank coffee by himself at one of the middle tables. The drunk had not stopped talking. He was not addressing anyone around him in particular, nor was anyone listening. When he had come into the place that evening he wore those blue overalls instead of the filthy linen suit he had been wearing the twelve days. His socks were gone and his ankles were scratched and caked with mud.

Alertly Biff picked up fragments of his monologue. The fellow seemed to be talking some queer kind of politics again. Last night he had been talking about places he had been—about Texas and Oklahoma and the Carolinas. Once he had got on the subject of cat-houses, and afterward his jokes got so raw he had to be hushed up with beer. But most of the time nobody was sure just what he was saying. Talk—talk—talk. The words came out of his throat like a cataract. And the thing was that the accent he used was always changing, the kinds of words he used. Sometimes he talked like a linthead and sometimes like a professor. He would use words a foot long and then slip up on his grammar. It was hard to tell what kind of folks he had or what part of the country he was from. He was always changing. Thoughtfully Biff fondled the tip of his nose. There was no connection. Yet connection usually went with brains. This man had a good mind, all right, but he went from one thing to another without any reason behind it at all. He was like a man thrown off his track by something.

Biff leaned his weight on the counter and began to peruse the evening newspaper. The headlines told of a decision by the Board of Aldermen, after four months’ deliberation, that the local budget could not afford traffic lights at certain dangerous intersections of the town. The left column reported on the war in the Orient. Biff read them both with equal attention. As his eyes followed the print the rest of his senses were on the alert to the various commotions that went on around him. When he had finished the articles he still stared down at the newspaper with his eyes half-closed. He felt nervous. The fellow was a problem, and before morning he would have to make some sort of settlement with him. Also, he felt without knowing why that something of importance would happen tonight. The fellow could not keep on forever.

Biff sensed that someone was standing in the entrance and he raised his eyes quickly. A gangling, towheaded youngster, a girl of about twelve, stood looking in the doorway. She was dressed in khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes—so that at first glance she was like a very young boy. Biff pushed aside the paper when he saw her, and smiled when she came up to him.

‘Hello, Mick. Been to the Girl Scouts?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t belong to them.’

From the corner of his eye he noticed that the drunk slammed his fist down on a table and turned away from the men to whom he had been talking. Biff’s voice roughened as he spoke to the youngster before him.

‘Your folks know you’re out after midnight?’

‘It’s O.K. There’s a gang of kids playing out late on our block tonight.’

He had never seen her come into the place with anyone her own age. Several years ago she had always tagged behind her older brother. The Kellys were a good-sized family in numbers. Later she would come in pulling a couple of snotty babies in a wagon. But if she wasn’t nursing or trying to keep up with the bigger ones, she was by herself. Now the kid stood there seeming not to be able to make up her mind what she wanted. She kept pushing back her damp, whitish hair with the palm of her hand.

‘I’d like a pack of cigarettes, please. The cheapest kind.’

Biff started to speak, hesitated, and then reached his hand inside the counter. Mick brought out a handkerchief and began untying the knot in the corner where she kept her money. As she gave the knot a jerk the change clattered to the floor and rolled toward Blount, who stood muttering to himself. For a moment he stared in a daze at the coins, but before the kid could go after them he squatted down with concentration and picked up the money. He walked heavily to the counter and stood jiggling the two pennies, the nickel, and the dime in his palm.

‘Seventeen cents for cigarettes now?’

Biff waited, and Mick looked from one of them to the other. The drunk stacked the money into a little pile on the counter, still protecting it with his big, dirty hand. Slowly he picked up one penny and flipped it down.

‘Five mills for the crackers who grew the weed and five for the dupes who rolled it,’ he said. ‘A cent for you, Biff.’ Then he tried to focus his eyes so that he could read the mottoes on the nickel and dime. He kept fingering the two coins and moving them around in a circle. At last he pushed them away. ‘And that’s a humble homage to liberty. To democracy and tyranny. To freedom and piracy.’

Calmly Biff picked up the money and rang it into the till. Mick looked as though she wanted to hang around awhile. She took in the drunk with one long gaze, and then she turned her eyes to the middle of the room where the mute sat at his table alone. After a moment Blount also glanced now and then in the same direction. The mute sat silently over his glass of beer, idly drawing on the table with the end of a burnt matchstick.

Jake Blount was the first to speak. ‘It’s funny, but I been seeing that fellow in my sleep for the past three or four nights. He won’t leave me alone. If you ever noticed, he never seems to say anything.’

It was seldom that Biff ever discussed one customer with another. ‘No, he don’t,’ he answered noncommittally.

‘It’s funny.’

Mick shifted her weight from one foot to the other and fitted the package of cigarettes into the pocket of her shorts. ‘It’s not funny if you know anything about him,’ she said. ‘Mister Singer lives with us. He rooms in our house.’

‘Is that so?’ Biff asked. ‘I declare—I didn’t know that.’

Mick walked toward the door and answered him without looking around. ‘Sure. He’s been with us three months now.’

Biff unrolled his shirt-sleeves and then folded them up carefully again. He did not take his eyes away from Mick as she left the restaurant. And even after she had been gone several minutes he still fumbled with his shirt-sleeves and stared at the empty doorway. Then he locked his arms across his chest and turned back to the drunk again.

Blount leaned heavily on the counter. His brown eyes were wet-looking and wide open with a dazed expression. He needed a bath so badly that he stank like a goat. There were dirt beads on his sweaty neck and an oil stain on his face. His lips were thick and red and his brown hair was matted on his forehead. His overalls were too short in the body and he kept pulling at the crotch of them.

‘Man, you ought to know better,’ Biff said finally. ‘You can’t go around like this. Why, I’m surprised you haven’t been picked up for vagrancy. You ought to sober up. You need washing and your hair needs cutting. Motherogod! You’re not fit to walk around amongst people.’

Blount scowled and bit his lower lip.

‘Now, don’t take offense and get your dander up. Do what I tell you. Go back in the kitchen and tell the colored boy to give you a big pan of hot water. Tell Willie to give you a towel and plenty soap and wash yourself good. Then eat you some milk toast and open up your suitcase and put you on a clean shirt and a pair of britches that fit you. Then tomorrow you can start doing whatever you’re going to do and working wherever you mean to work and get straightened out.’

‘You know what you can do,’ Blount said drunkenly. ‘You can just——’

‘All right,’ Biff said very quietly. ‘No, I can’t. Now you just behave yourself.’

Biff went to the end of the counter and returned with two glasses of draught beer. The drunk picked up his glass so clumsily that beer slopped down on his hands and messed the counter. Biff sipped his portion with careful relish. He regarded Blount steadily with half-closed eyes. Blount was not a freak, although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him—but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.

Biff cocked his head to one side and said, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘Now, you have to be born somewhere. North Carolina—Tennessee—Alabama—some place.’

Blount’s eyes were dreamy and unfocused. ‘Carolina,’ he said.

‘I can tell you’ve been around,’ Biff hinted delicately.

But the drunk was not listening. He had turned from the counter and was staring out at the dark, empty street. After a moment he walked to the door with loose, uncertain steps.

‘Adios,’ he called back.

Biff was alone again and he gave the restaurant one of his quick, thorough surveys. It was past one in the morning, and there were only four or five customers in the room. The mute still sat by himself at the middle table. Biff stared at him idly and shook the few remaining drops of beer around in the bottom of his glass. Then he finished his drink in one slow swallow and went back to the newspaper spread out on the counter.

This time he could not keep his mind on the words before him. He remembered Mick. He wondered if he should have sold her the pack of cigarettes and if it were really harmful for kids to smoke. He thought of the way Mick narrowed her eyes and pushed back the bangs of her hair with the palm of her hand. He thought of her hoarse, boyish voice and of her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show. A feeling of tenderness came in him. He was uneasy.

Restlessly Biff turned his attention to Singer. The mute sat with his hands in his pockets and the half-finished glass of beer before him had become warm and stagnant. He would offer to treat Singer to a slug of whiskey before he left. What he had said to Alice was true—he did like freaks. He had a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples. Whenever somebody with a harelip or T.B. came into the place he would set him up to beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him. And if Singer were a drinking kind of man he could get liquor at half price any time he wanted it. Biff nodded to himself. Then neatly he folded his newspaper and put it under the counter along with several others. At the end of the week he would take them all back to the storeroom behind the kitchen, where he kept a complete file of the evening newspaper that dated back without a break for twenty-one years.

At two o’clock Blount entered the restaurant again. He brought in with him a tall Negro man carrying a black bag. The drunk tried to bring him up to the counter for a drink, but the Negro left as soon as he realized why he had been led inside. Biff recognized him as a Negro doctor who had practiced in the town ever since he could remember. He was related in some way to young Willie back in the kitchen. Before he left Biff saw him turn on Blount with a look of quivering hatred.

The drunk just stood there.

‘Don’t you know you can’t bring no nigger in a place where white men drink?’ someone asked him.

Biff watched this happening from a distance. Blount was very angry, and now it could easily be seen how drunk he was.

‘I’m part nigger myself,’ he called out as a challenge.

Biff watched him alertly and the place was quiet. With his thick nostrils and the rolling whites of his eyes it looked a little as though he might be telling the truth.

‘I’m part nigger and wop and bohunk and chink. All of those.’

There was laughter.

‘And I’m Dutch and Turkish and Japanese and American.’ He walked in zigzags around the table where the mute drank his coffee. His voice was loud and cracked. ‘I’m one who knows. I’m a stranger in a strange land.’

‘Quiet down,’ Biff said to him.

Blount paid no attention to anyone in the place except the mute. They were both looking at each other. The mute’s eyes were cold and gentle as a cat’s and all his body seemed to listen. The drunk man was in a frenzy.

‘You’re the only one in this town who catches what I mean,’ Blount said. ‘For two days now I been talking to you in my mind because I know you understand the things I want to mean.’

Some people in a booth were laughing because without knowing it the drunk had picked out a deaf-mute to try to talk with. Biff watched the two men with little darting glances and listened attentively.

Blount sat down to the table and leaned over close to Singer. ‘There are those who know and those who don’t know. And for every ten thousand who don’t know there’s only one who knows. That’s the miracle of all time—the fact that these millions know so much but don’t know this. It’s like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat and only Columbus and a few other fellows knew the truth. But it’s different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While this truth is so obvious it’s a miracle of all history that people don’t know. You savvy.’

Biff rested his elbows on the counter and looked at Blount with curiosity. ‘Know what?’ he asked.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Blount said. ‘Don’t mind that flat-footed, blue-jawed, nosy bastard. For you see, when us people who know run into each other that’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That’s a bad thing. It’s happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.’

‘Masons?’ Biff asked.

‘Shut up, you! Else I’ll snatch your arm off and beat you black with it,’ Blount bawled. He hunched over close to the mute and his voice dropped to a drunken whisper. ‘And how come? Why has this miracle of ignorance endured? Because of one thing. A conspiracy. A vast and insidious conspiracy. Obscurantism.’

The men in the booth were still laughing at the drunk who was trying to hold a conversation with the mute. Only Biff was serious. He wanted to ascertain if the mute really understood what was said to him. The fellow nodded frequently and his face seemed contemplative. He was only slow—that was all. Blount began to crack a few jokes along with this talk about knowing. The mute never smiled until several seconds after the funny remark had been made; then when the talk was gloomy again the smile still hung on his face a little too long. The fellow was downright uncanny. People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things nobody else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.

Jake Blount leaned across the table and the words came out as though a dam inside him had broken. Biff could not understand him any more. Blount’s tongue was so heavy with drink and he talked at such a violent pace that the sounds were all shaken up together. Biff wondered where he would go when Alice turned him out of the place. And in the morning she would do it, too—like she said.

Biff yawned wanly, patting his open mouth with his fingertips until his jaw had relaxed. It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.

The mute was patient. He had been listening to Blount for almost an hour. Now he began to look at the clock occasionally. Blount did not notice this and went on without a pause. At last he stopped to roll a cigarette, and then the mute nodded his head in the direction of the clock, smiled in that hidden way of his, and got up from the table. His hands stayed stuffed in his pockets as always. He went out quickly.

Blount was so drunk that he did not know what had happened. He had never even caught on to the fact that the mute made no answers. He began to look around the place with his mouth open and his eyes rolling and fuddled. A red vein stood out on his forehead and he began to hit the table angrily with his fists. His bout could not last much longer now.

‘Come on over,’ Biff said kindly. ‘Your friend has gone.’

The fellow was still hunting for Singer. He had never seemed really drunk like that before. He had an ugly look.

‘I have something for you over here and I want to speak with you a minute,’ Biff coaxed.

Blount pulled himself up from the table and walked with big, loose steps toward the street again.

Biff leaned against the wall. In and out—in and out. After all, it was none of his business. The room was very empty and quiet. The minutes lingered. Wearily he let his head sag forward. All motion seemed slowly to be leaving the room. The counter, faces, the booths and tables, the radio in the corner, whirring fans on the ceiling—all seemed to become very faint and still.

He must have dozed. A hand was shaking his elbow. His wits came back to him slowly and he looked up to see what was wanted. Willie, the colored boy in the kitchen, stood before him dressed in his cap and his long white apron. Willie stammered because he was excited about whatever he was trying to say.

‘And so he were l-l-lamming his fist against this here brick w-w-w-all.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Right down one of them alleys two d-d-doors away.’

Biff straightened his slumped shoulders and arranged his tie. ‘What?’

‘And they means to bring him in here and they liable to pile in any minute——’

‘Willie,’ Biff said patiently. ‘Start at the beginning and let me get this straight.’

‘It this here short white man with the m-m-mustache.’

‘Mr. Blount. Yes.’

‘Well—I didn’t see how it commenced. I were standing in the back door when I heard this here commotion. Sound like a big fight in the alley. So I r-r-run to see. And this here white man had just gone hog wild. He were butting his head against the side of this brick wall and hitting with his fists. He were cussing and fighting like I never seen a white man fight before. With just this here wall. He liable to broken his own head the way he were carrying-on. Then two white mens who had heard the commotion come up and stand around and look——’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well—you know this here dumb gentleman—hands in pockets—this here——’

‘Mr. Singer.’

‘And he come along and just stood looking around to see what it were all about. And Mr. B-B-Blount seen him and commenced to talk and holler. And then all of a sudden he fallen down on the ground. Maybe he done really busted his head open. A p-p-p-police come up and somebody done told him Mr. Blount been staying here.’

Biff bowed his head and organized the story he had just heard into a neat pattern. He rubbed his nose and thought for a minute.

‘They liable to pile in here any minute.’ Willie went to the door and looked down the street. ‘Here they all come now. They having to drag him.’

A dozen onlookers and a policeman all tried to crowd into the restaurant. Outside a couple of whores stood looking in through the front window. It was always funny how many people could crowd in from nowhere when anything out of the ordinary happened.

‘No use creating any more disturbance than necessary,’ Biff said. He looked at the policeman who supported the drunk. ‘The rest of them might as well clear out.’

The policeman put the drunk in a chair and hustled the little crowd into the street again. Then he turned to Biff: ‘Somebody said he was staying here with you.’

‘No. But he might as well be,’ Biff said.

‘Want me to take him with me?’

Biff considered. ‘He won’t get into any more trouble tonight. Of course I can’t be responsible—but I think this will calm him down.’

‘O.K. I’ll drop back in again before I knock off.’

Biff, Singer, and Jake Blount were left alone. For the first time since he had been brought in, Biff turned his attention to the drunk man. It seemed that Blount had hurt his jaw very badly. He was slumped down on the table with his big hand over his mouth, swaying backward and forward. There was a gash in his head and the blood ran from his temple. His knuckles were skinned raw, and he was so filthy that he looked as if he had been pulled by the scruff of the neck from a sewer. All the juice had spurted out of him and he was completely collapsed. The mute sat at the table across from him, taking it all in with his gray eyes.

Then Biff saw that Blount had not hurt his jaw, but he was holding his hand over his mouth because his lips were trembling. The tears began to roll down his grimy face. Now and then he glanced sideways at Biff and Singer, angry that they should see him cry. It was embarrassing. Biff shrugged his shoulders at the mute and raised his eyebrows with a what-to-do? expression. Singer cocked his head on one side.

Biff was in a quandary. Musingly he wondered just how he should manage the situation. He was still trying to decide when the mute turned over the menu and began to write.

If you cannot think of any place for him to go he can go home with me. First some soup and coffee would be good for him.

With relief Biff nodded vigorously.

On the table he placed three special plates of the last evening meal, two bowls of soup, coffee, and dessert. But Blount would not eat. He would not take his hand away from his mouth, and it was as though his lips were some very secret part of himself which was being exposed. His breath came in ragged sobs and his big shoulders jerked nervously. Singer pointed to one dish after the other, but Blount just sat with his hand over his mouth and shook his head.

Biff enunciated slowly so that the mute could see. ‘The jitters——’ he said conversationally.

The steam from the soup kept floating up into Blount’s face, and after a little while he reached shakily for his spoon. He drank the soup and ate part of his dessert. His thick, heavy lips still trembled and he bowed his head far down over his plate.

Biff noted this. He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded. With the mute his hands. The kid Mick picked at the front of her blouse to keep the cloth from rubbing the new, tender nipples beginning to come out on her breast. With Alice it was her hair; she used never to let him sleep with her when he rubbed oil in his scalp. And with himself?

Lingeringly Biff turned the ring on his little finger. Anyway he knew what it was not. Not. Any more. A sharp line cut into his forehead. His hand in his pocket moved nervously toward his genitals. He began whistling a song and got up from the table. Funny to spot it in other people, though.

They helped Blount to his feet. He teetered weakly. He was not crying any more, but he seemed to be brooding on something shameful and sullen. He walked in the direction he was led. Biff brought out the suitcase from behind the counter and explained to the mute about it. Singer looked as though he could not be surprised at anything.

Biff went with them to the entrance. ‘Buck up and keep your nose clean,’ he said to Blount.

The black night sky was beginning to lighten and turn a deep blue with the new morning. There were but a few weak, silvery stars. The street was empty, silent, almost cool. Singer carried the suitcase with his left hand, and with his free hand he supported Blount. He nodded good-bye to Biff and they started off together down the sidewalk. Biff stood watching them. After they had gone half a block away only their black forms showed in the blue darkness—the mute straight and firm and the broad-shouldered, stumbling Blount holding on to him. When he could see them no longer, Biff waited for a moment and examined the sky. The vast depth of it fascinated and oppressed him. He rubbed his forehead and went back into the sharply lighted restaurant.

He stood behind the cash register, and his face contracted and hardened as he tried to recall the things that had happened during the night. He had the feeling that he wanted to explain something to himself. He recalled the incidents in tedious detail and was still puzzled.

The door opened and closed several times as a sudden spurt of customers began to come in. The night was over. Willie stacked some of the chairs up on the tables and mopped at the floor. He was ready to go home and was singing. Willie was lazy. In the kitchen he was always stopping to play for a while on the harmonica he carried around with him. Now he mopped the floor with sleepy strokes and hummed his lonesome Negro music steadily.

The place was still not crowded—it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day. The sleepy waitress was serving both beer and coffee. There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

The bank building across the street was very pale in the dawn. Then gradually its white brick walls grew more distinct. When at last the first shafts of the rising sun began to brighten the street, Biff gave the place one last survey and went upstairs.

Noisily he rattled the doorknob as he entered so that Alice would be disturbed. ‘Motherogod!’ he said. ‘What a night!’

Alice awoke with caution. She lay on the rumpled bed like a sulky cat and stretched herself. The room was drab in the fresh, hot morning sun, and a pair of silk stockings hung limp and withered from the cord of the window-shade.

‘Is that drunk fool still hanging around downstairs?’ she demanded.

Biff took off his shirt and examined the collar to see if it were clean enough to be worn again. ‘Go down and see for yourself. I told you nobody will hinder you from kicking him out.’

Sleepily Alice reached down and picked up a Bible, the blank side of a menu, and a Sunday School book from the floor beside the bed. She rustled through the tissue pages of the Bible until she reached a certain passage and began reading, pronouncing the words aloud with painful concentration. It was Sunday, and she was preparing the weekly lesson for her class of boys in the Junior Department of her church. ‘Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.” And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him.’

Biff went into the bathroom to wash himself. The silky murmuring continued as Alice studied aloud. He listened. ‘. . . and in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed. And Simon and they that were with Him followed after Him. And when they had found Him, they said unto Him, “All men seek for Thee.” ’

She had finished. Biff let the words revolve again gently inside him. He tried to separate the actual words from the sound of Alice’s voice as she had spoken them. He wanted to remember the passage as his mother used to read it when he was a boy. With nostalgia he glanced down at the wedding ring on his fifth finger that had once been hers. He wondered again how she would have felt about his giving up church and religion.

‘The lesson for today is about the gathering of the disciples,’ Alice said to herself in preparation. ‘And the text is, “All men seek for Thee.” ’

Abruptly Biff roused himself from meditation and turned on the water spigot at full force. He stripped off his undervest and began to wash himself. Always he was scrupulously clean from the belt upward. Every morning he soaped his chest and arms and neck and feet—and about twice during the season he got into the bathtub and cleaned all of his parts.

Biff stood by the bed, waiting impatiently for Alice to get up. From the window he saw that the day would be windless and burning hot. Alice had finished reading the lesson. She still lay lazily across the bed, although she knew that he was waiting. A calm, sullen anger rose in him. He chuckled ironically. Then he said with bitterness: ‘If you like I can sit and read the paper awhile. But I wish you would let me sleep now.’

Alice began dressing herself and Biff made up the bed. Deftly he reversed the sheets in all possible ways, putting the top one on the bottom, and turning them over and upside down. When the bed was smoothly made he waited until Alice had left the room before he slipped off his trousers and crawled inside. His feet jutted out from beneath the cover and his wiry-haired chest was very dark against the pillow. He was glad he had not told Alice about what had happened to the drunk. He had wanted to talk to somebody about it, because maybe if he told all the facts out loud he could put his finger on the thing that puzzled him. The poor son-of-a-bitch talking and talking and not ever getting anybody to understand what he meant. Not knowing himself, most likely. And the way he gravitated around the deaf-mute and picked him out and tried to make him a free present of everything in him.

Why?

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons—throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to. In some men it is in them—— The text is ‘All men seek for Thee.’ Maybe that was why—maybe—— He was a Chinaman, the fellow had said. And a nigger and a wop and a Jew. And if he believed it hard enough maybe it was so. Every person and every thing he said he was——

Biff stretched both of his arms outward and crossed his naked feet. His face was older in the morning light, with the closed, shrunken eyelids and the heavy, iron-like beard on his cheeks and jaw. Gradually his mouth softened and relaxed. The hard, yellow rays of the sun came in through the window so that the room was hot and bright. Biff turned wearily and covered his eyes with his hands. And he was nobody but—Bartholomew—old Biff with two fists and a quick tongue—Mister Brannon—by himself.