Chapter I (2)

Frowning, and holding the paper so close to his face that he seemed to be smelling it, Levine read:

Last night a fire broke out in the town hall during a performance
of the Brahms' _Requiem_, given by the Ascension Choral Society.
Flames were discovered by an usher in the cloak room on the
balcony, and the extinguishers immediately applied. It required
the quick action of the fire department, however, to prevent the
flames from spreading. The audience left in good order, except
for a slight panic at one of the exits, which occurred when one
of the ushers had difficulty in opening a door.

Levine put it aside and glanced up inquiringly. "Read them all," Lewis said, shoving them across the desk. "They're pretty much alike, though." There was a peculiar expression on his face, a look of distrust and cunning while he watched his friend read. At one time he rose and began to pace excitedly around the room, rapping everything as he passed. More and more seriously, scarcely daring to look up and ask the meaning of it, Levine read:

Last night a performance of _Faust_ at the Opera House was
temporarily interrupted by the discovery of fire in one of the
property rooms. A fifteen minute delay in raising the curtain on
the third act caused considerable impatience and anxiety among
the audience. The flames were extinguished by stage hands before
any serious damage occurred.

and,

Fire, attributed to the careless lighting of a cigarette, burned
the Trentini Theatre to the ground, last night between nine and
ten o'clock. The fire broke out during a performance of _Cosa
Sia_, and there was a general stampede to the exits. Fireman
Conrad Meltzi was fatally injured when a section of the balcony
collapsed.

The last one was different:

A performance of _The Sunken Bell_ was interrupted last night at
the Playhouse by a disturbance in the audience, due to the sudden
illness of one of the women spectators. Dr. Alfred Downing who
attended the patient announced that she had given birth to a boy
in the women's rest room.

"Interesting! All very interesting!" Levine exclaimed on finishing. He took off his glasses and polished them, speaking meanwhile in a brisk professorial manner. "As I see it, there's a common element in all these notices. In each case a performance seems to have been interrupted. In three cases a fire caused the interruption, in one the premature delivery of a child under unfavorable circumstances. Now if we proceed from this point, our next step--" he looked inquiringly at Lewis. "Our next step, I should say, is to find out ... discover, I should say, what the symbols involved..."

"Do you think it was foolish?" Lewis interrupted.

"Think what foolish..."

"To collect those ... the papers you were reading." He leaned forward impulsively and swept them off the desk. "A hundred times I've been on the point of throwing them away, and yet I couldn't. I treasured them as if they were valuable coins. I insisted on keeping them every time they searched my pockets for things to throw away. People looked at me queerly. Something wrong here, you know, up here." He rapped his forehead three times and burst out laughing. "Yet it's awfully simple. I kept those papers," Lewis began, deliberately tapping off the words on the desk, "as a record of my life ... a simple, clear-cut record of my life. In each case, as you say, a performance is interrupted by fire. Fire is the war, of course, the years I've been away. Now isn't that easy? Don't you feel it when you read it?" He half-rose in his chair and thrust himself forward at Levine, a fixed triumphant expression on his face. Levine, intent on polishing his glasses, looked up gravely.

"Say you're sitting in a theatre," Lewis continued hurriedly. "Say you're listening to the performance ... a beautiful and deliberate performance. And suddenly some one cries fire, and instead you find yourself listening to the horrible crackling of the flames and screams of terror, and the sound of feet trampling over human bodies. Only--and this is the worst part of it--_through_ your panic you still hear the performance going on, even through your terror. Faint and far away you hear it completing itself. And while you struggle and scream and trample over the others you're still listening to it, a thousand times more beautiful and majestic because it comes to you through the fire. But now suppose--" He sat down abruptly, still staring across at Levine with that fixed expression of triumph.

"What should we suppose?" Levine asked mildly.

Lewis looked down and spoke more slowly, finding the words with difficulty. "Suppose that moment ... the moment of panic terror which should normally last only a second," he said, "were to be prolonged indefinitely. Suppose a person was destined to a lifetime of it ... to be haunted by the music even in his terror. If we could imagine such a person, if there was a person who had that fate..."

"Then what?" Levine interrupted drily.

But Lewis could not go on. His face flushed and now he felt a painful quivering in both eyelids, so violent that he wanted to shade his eyes with his hands, to hide it from Levine's scrutiny. "Well, take me for such a person," he finished, looking away shamefacedly.

Levine continued meditatively polishing his glasses. After a while he asked, "When did you figure all this out?"

"Oh, a long time ago ... too long ago," Lewis said wearily. "I got my first idea of it, I remember, one day during the war, when I came across that notice you read about the theatre burning down. Quite accidentally, while I was standing near a flight of steps, I remember, and happened to look down, and I saw an American newspaper lying on the ground. I read that part over and over again, while the paper was still lying on the ground, without knowing why it excited me so. Then I bent down and tore it out and put it away in my pocket. After that--weeks after, I remember--the meaning of it flashed on me. But there were a great many things that went before, before I could understand it."

"Well, what went before?" Levine held his glasses in front of him, turning them this way and that to catch the light from the window.

"There's something I'd have to explain first."

"Namely..."

Lewis hesitated. "The queer ways," he began slowly, "in which people amuse themselves ... comfort themselves when they suffer. Probably you don't know." He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Of course they thought I was acting queerly, collecting those papers and saving them ... but only because they never noticed the queer ways that people have of comforting themselves. There was a fellow, for instance, who seized every scrap of tin foil he could lay hands on, and cut it up into the shape of nickels, and rubbed the design from real nickels on it so that it looked like real money. He must have had a fortune in make-believe nickels ... he carried them around in his pocket and acted as if everyone were trying to steal them. Whenever there was anything to eat, chocolate or cheese that came wrapped in tin foil, he cared more about getting the wrapper than the food. He was so greedy for it that he regularly traded his share of food for it. I lost track of him after a while, but I saw him again one time lying in bed, and making the artificial nickels with the one arm and few fingers he had left. So you see," he looked swiftly at Levine and turned away again, "once you have seen things like that...."

"My dear young man," Levine said drily, "you don't have to justify your ways to me."

"I'm glad, though, that I threw them away." Lewis sighed and touched the papers gingerly with his foot. Meanwhile Levine's gray eyes were fixed on Lewis. With his glasses off, their expression was mild, slightly astonished. Yet there was in that very mildness a hint of something implacable. There was, in Levine's eyes, infinite kindliness, but also infinite insistence ... eyes possessed of implacable patience, that would inevitably draw from whatever they looked at the intimate secret of that thing. Lewis looked away and tried to fixate the narrow line of red ribbon that showed on the typewriter, but the quivering in his eyelids began again and he was forced to look down. He began to trace imaginary circles on the desk, and while he gave his recital in a voice scarcely audible, he seemed intent on the circles he was making, now very rapidly, now slowly.

"It happened to me first," he said, "while I was waiting on line. There is, of course, endless waiting on line. It's not the least of the things one has to go through. This time we were standing in a narrow hallway, all leaning against the wall--some of us with our backs to the wall and our arms folded; and these were the ones who had their heads back as if they were sleeping standing up. And others standing sideways, crouching against the wall as though they had to support it. I think I remember the way we stood so well because it seemed at that moment as if we were all asleep, instead of standing and waiting on line. We were all so listless and tired. Nobody spoke, nobody cared any more whether the doctor's door would ever open again and call the next one in. It made the place where we were unnaturally quiet, the sort of quiet that happens only when there are people together who have been silent for a long time. And while I was standing there, and probably _because_ it was so quiet--I didn't know what it was to be in a quiet place for months together--I began to hear music ... an orchestra playing in the distance, but very clearly. So far away and sad, it seemed to me that I had never heard music before or known how sad it could be. It sounded very distinct, playing a triumphal march.... I heard it from the beginning to the last note, and after the last note it stopped. Only when it stopped, I realized that it hadn't been triumphant, but mournful ... and that all the time it had been going farther away while it played. And then suddenly, suddenly it seemed--" Lewis stopped, his lips twitching so that he could not speak. He sat in silence for a moment, rapping the desk violently with his clenched fist. "How do these things happen?" he asked harshly. "Perhaps _you_ know all about it, Levine. How did it happen that the music I heard then ... that march being played somewhere in the distance, became the symbol for my life ... no, it _was_ my life. It was all the past I had ever lived, every day I ever lived, every moment. Do you believe it, Levine, that a man can suddenly _hear_ his life?" He stared across at his friend with an absurd expression. "But it wasn't ordinary listening," he continued, raising his voice angrily as if someone had challenged him. "I tell you I felt a shock of recognition. I listened to it with horror, as though a physical presence, a ghost in the form of sound, were confronting me...."

Levine was about to speak, but Lewis motioned for silence. "And after that it came back to me ... in the midst of the fighting, when I could not even hear my own shouting, it would come back clearly ... screaming above the noise, never played too fast, but only magnified somehow a thousand times. And in every moment of pain, or when it was intensely quiet ... especially when it was quiet ... or when I couldn't sleep, I heard it again, at such times soft and far away. But often as I heard it, there it was--the strange feeling that my own life was speaking to me."

"Yet after a while," Lewis continued, intent again on the circles his finger traced, "after a while the experience became a sort of horror to me. I lived every minute in fear of it, and once that fear got hold of me, the war seemed to go on in another world, and I did my share of it in a trance. That time is all a blur to me. My real life was the fear of hearing the music. I could face danger, then, without thinking of it, I could kill without knowing it, because I had gone into a stupor of fear. And the strange thing is that it wasn't the fear of anything around me--all the things that threatened my life--but only the fear of hearing the music, the horror that at the next moment I would hear it playing. 'Very well,' I said to myself, quite calmly, 'that's what they mean by going insane.' And I might have gone insane, if not for finding the notice that way. It's so trivial that it sounds ridiculous to speak of it ... yet in some way it had the power to relieve the tension ... it cleared things up for me and lifted me out of my stupor into the world again...."

Lewis paused and looked directly at Levine for the second time in his narrative ... a swift suspicious glance. "Shall I continue," he asked sharply, "or does it sound stupid to you?"

"No ... no ... go on."

"But it _is_ stupid," Lewis insisted, watching him.

It seemed for a time as if Levine had forgotten Lewis. He had been pacing back and forth while he listened, measuring his route diagonally across the room, never varying it by a single step. Now he stopped near the window and busied himself with rubbing off the specks of paint that were spattered on the glass. He went to the typewriter and blew away the dust that lay on it in a thin film. Then a picture on the wall claimed his attention. This he straightened carefully, measuring it by the line of white moulding. In all these actions there was an air of profound absorption.

"No, I don't think it's stupid," he said, standing back to observe the effect of the picture.

"It _was_ stupid," Lewis insisted in a nettled voice. "Perhaps I did go insane ... mildly, without knowing it..."

Levine shrugged his shoulders. "Go on with the story."

"Well, you have to know first," Lewis resumed, his voice deliberately careless, "that I was a musician before the war."

"I know. And now?"

"Now? Why--why that's all over with ... head noises ... tinnitus aurium, the technical name." He laughed self-consciously. "And so it was natural that I should think of my life in terms of music ... as a symphony, let us say, that I was conducting ... something being conducted very deliberately to its end. You understand that I didn't see all this in a flash. It's a matter which I had to figure out, a part occurring to me now and then, and I pieced it together. But I must have been thinking about it for a long time without knowing it. I must have said: my life _will_ be a performance, it will be deliberate. I know that all the steps were planned in my mind, they were to follow each other inevitably like the movements of a symphony. But perhaps..." Lewis paused and stared thoughtfully ... "perhaps one has no right to be so deliberate about living ... or triumphant either? Perhaps there was something wrong with that ... I've often wondered." He was silent, rubbing his forehead and frowning. "Well, what does it matter anyway," he resumed. "At any rate the first step was already over--the first movement, I ought to say. And I began to hear the second, a few introductory notes, that is, nothing more. Do you remember that picture of me at the piano?"

"You mean the one where you were playing and looking over your shoulder?"

Lewis nodded. "The shoulder was too coquettish, by the way. Just nervousness that made me lift it a little when they snapped me."

"Why no, I didn't notice."

"It was, though. You can't imagine how I suffered because of that shoulder. I thought: it's impossible that anyone will take me seriously after that picture. But there it was the next morning ... 'a name that will rank with the greatest ... a musical talent of the first magnitude.' You know, those two phrases kept going through my head for weeks after, practically deafening me. It was terrible, like having the words of a popular song in your head. One time it occurred to me, just as I was starting to play, that the first one ... about the name that would rank ... made the opening words for my minuet ... the one that goes this way..." he hummed a few measures, emphasizing the time with short rhythmic movements of his right hand. "It seemed to me it was actually written for those words, light but sort of important. Or sometimes I amused myself by arranging the words like notes. A musical talent of the first magnitude ... that's sixth-eighth time. A name that will rank with the greatest, either three-quarter or..."

Lewis stopped and burst out laughing ... a paroxysm of laughing and coughing that made the tears stream from his eyes. He put his handkerchief to his mouth and looked over it at Levine, his eyes widening with an expression of surprise, that turned into alarm as the coughing continued. When at last he was able to withdraw the handkerchief, his face was red and he turned away sheepishly.

"No, really," he said, wiping his eyes, "I shouldn't laugh. It's nothing to laugh at, I assure you."

Levine sat down and looked thoughtfully at Lewis. He clasped his hands in front of him, then released the right hand and shook off an invisible drop of water from his thumb and forefinger. But the gesture failed him, and he rose abruptly and continued with his pacing back and forth. For a long time he seemed absorbed in his own thoughts, until a knock at the door roused him. He opened it to admit a stout little man whom he addressed as Lustbader. Lustbader sat down in a corner of the room, and with a quick dainty movement vaulted one leg across the other.

"I'll wait, I'll wait!" he protested, looking brightly from Levine to Lewis. "Nothing special, Levine, just a friendly call." And by way of establishing this, he looked off into the distance, whistling, and occupied himself with throwing his cane from one hand to the other. This he did with a skill and precision that fascinated Lewis.

Later, when Lustbader removed his hat, he revealed that the fringe of hair on his head, his eyebrows and eyelashes, even the little tuft of mustache, were all of the same color ... a dull brick red, which seemed to cast a reflected glow on his cheeks; and not merely of the same color, but perfectly matched in shading and texture. And this uniform coloring made his face look so unreal, so much as if it were made up for a masquerade, that Lewis found himself unable to take his eyes from the newcomer. He was staring open-mouthed when Levine called him to attention, and he realized that they were being introduced.

"Lewis Orling, whom you may be able to use in your theatre, a musician before the war, but he's been out of things for a long time--"

Lustbader interrupted with an imperious motion of his hand. "The name is no good," he said, and then, nodding genially to everything that Levine said, he permitted him to continue. "Excellent! Very excellent!" he said, when Levine had finished. "We have a musical audience in the theatre ... he'll appreciate that. Besides, he can work up a little orchestra later on. Go around tomorrow, Levine will give you the address, and ask for Mr. Lange. Be sure you say Lan-ge, in two syllables like that. He always insists on it." He looked from one to the other with a droll wink, and then burst into a mighty laugh, from which he abruptly extricated himself. Switching on a most serious expression, he stared at Lewis as if he were noticing him for the first time.

"The name is entirely too short," he said emphatically. "But we can fix it, we can fix it. How about adding something? Orlingoff? No, that won't do. Have to make it something Italian, you know. Antonini is one I've often used. Now when will you report, Antonini? Tomorrow, say, at three?"

Lewis nodded as if hypnotized. He looked toward Levine, but seeing him absorbed in sorting out papers, he took his leave with a muttered and self-conscious good-bye to Lustbader. As he went down the stairs, a feeling of complete weariness and indifference to everything overcame him. But he remembered, on his way home, to call up Bannerman, to find out whether Poldy had been there. He was told that Poldy had not been heard from all day.

4

The subway train ran out of the station, flashing sparks from the rear like a sudden bright excretion. Poldy stood on the platform looking after it ... listening to the wheels spinning themselves out in the distance, spinning themselves into a sharp needle of sound that went probing through his brain.

It seemed to him that everyone knew his purpose, everyone was waiting for it to happen ... walking impatiently around him, glancing at him slyly as they passed. He wanted to say to them, "Be patient ... in a little while..." Even the newsboy grew tired. He put down his papers angrily, slapped the back of his hands to his buttocks, and began to dance up and down on his heels. "Wait ... only wait," Poldy wanted to plead with him. "I've been afraid all day ... in a little while ... when the next train comes it will happen." And while he thought of these words, the newsboy looked at him as if he understood, and sat down on his papers and patiently watched the tracks.

Poldy wondered whether he had spoken out loud and the boy had really heard, or whether it was only a coincidence that he sat down that way and watched the tracks. It was strange. It was all part of the strange feeling that had come over him since the moment he left Lewis and continued his way alone ... a feeling that he could not tell any more what part of reality he dreamed to himself, made up as he went along, and what part actually existed. A painful feeling that he had entered into a waking dream, and that everything that happened ... faces he saw and words that he heard ... played up to it, like actors called on to improvise ... a dream that he was powerless to stop and could not escape from by waking. There were only unexpected moments when it was suddenly lifted from him; and then he would look around self-consciously, ashamed of what had happened in his fantasy, ashamed of what he had made the others say and do...

But now it seemed to be growing darker. He could feel the darkness hanging lower over his eyes each time, as if he were being slowly blindfolded. Everything was quiet. The noise of the trains and the clapping of turnstiles and the shouts of the newsboys had all stopped together. Nothing was left of it but the silent shuffling of feet around him, like the part of a parade where there is no music.

And now a tall negro carrying a monkey wrench came walking down the platform. He picked out one of the slot machines and began to pry it loose from the steel pillar. He turned, as he worked, with his cheek to the mirror, and Poldy could see his eye reflected. All around it there was heavy wrinkled flesh, and his eye nested snugly in the flesh, white and round as an egg. And when the negro looked down, he seemed to be covering the egg and laughing to himself because he had hidden it.

"When he is through he will put the slot machine on his head and bend his knees outward, and walk down the platform that way, frightening them..." and he smiled, knowing what would happen. But the newsboy turned to him severely.

"There's a train coming," the newsboy said.

"I can't hear it."

"There's a train coming."

"Let me alone ... I feel sleepy."

And Poldy closed his eyes and dozed off at once; but every time that his head seemed to fall into something which was cool and bottomless water, and then to be catapulted to the surface again, he would open his eyes and give a long, low whistle: "Did you see that one?" But the boy stood up as if he had just reminded himself of something. He picked up one of the papers and waved it over his head, turning himself slowly around under it. "Fourteen killed," he intoned, "fourteen killed..."

"You needn't turn around that way."

"Ah ... but watch this." Bubbles of saliva began to wink at the corners of his mouth, he curved the paper over his head for a sail and whirled himself faster and faster, crying to all the mirrors of the air: "Fourteen killed ... fourteen killed..." until they were caught in a network of voices, in the whirling deafening center of it, and every voice was calling in the same pitch and rhythm: "Fourteen killed..."

Poldy put his hands to his ears. "Stop them now," he said irritably. The boy stopped whirling at once and it was quiet again.

"Besides, fourteen what? It might be rabbits."

"There's a train coming..."

The whistle of the train sounded in the distance. His eyes grew blurred with a vision of wheels ... an imprint of wheels whirling wherever he turned, and in the hollow rim of each wheel a curve of light swinging, swishing itself gleefully to and fro. He shut his eyes, but with a cunning quick motion they began to rotate under his eyelids, swifter and swifter rotating in their narrow framework, until they beat against it with a fury of imprisoned motion ... until his head was set quivering with the impact, and his whole body fluttered back and forth in the air like some huge tuning fork. "Now ... now," the boy whispered ecstatically. But instead Poldy put his hand out and caught the steel pillar near him, he waited with fingers clamped to the shaft until the train passed. Again he saw it flash an excretion of light, he heard the wheels spinning themselves out in the distance. Then the wheels under his eyelids stopped turning, his body touched with something hard and rigid, was steady again ... nothing was left but a slow deliberate pulse in his head like part of a machine that has to swing itself still....

Poldy went to the bench and sat down. The newsboy followed, staring at him rapt and attentive, and once he thrust his cap back from his forehead with an excited motion.

"It won't happen," Poldy said humbly. "But there's a man walking on the tracks, it may happen to him."

"You were afraid."

"I'll buy a paper. Will that fix it?"

The boy handed him the paper without answering and walked away. He was almost out of sight when a wind blew his blouse out in back, as if he were flashing back an obscene gesture.

And now the man came strolling out of the tunnel. There was something queer about his face. All the features sagged into the right cheek, as if the face had been fluid once and congealed while it was being held at the wrong angle. He was very short and thin, and a large red can was attached to his side, like the strange cylinders that insects wear. He was filling it with papers, prying them out from the tiny crevices under the tracks, rubbing them for a moment between his fingers and slipping them away. But once he glanced up and saw that everyone was watching him. Then he seemed to be frightened and he crossed over to the platform and paced back and forth in front of it, peering into all the spaces underneath for a place where he could crawl in. There, where no one would see him, he would shift his cylinder to his back, fold his arms and legs under him and go to sleep....

But in a little while this man on the tracks was going to be run over. It was known beforehand to Poldy. He knew it by the way the man was standing ... in shoes that were too big for him, and turned out and sprawling away from each other ... the same way that the shoes looked in his dream: that a man had been run over and the crowd gathered to see him, and all they could see was his shoes sticking out from under the wheels, sprawling away from each other at a crazy angle. He knew it because he remembered the wheels ... how a curve of light sat swinging in each wheel, swishing itself gleefully to and fro with a foreknowledge of its prey.

So he turned to the old man sitting near him. "There's a fellow down there on the tracks who's going to be run over."

The old man did not answer.

"He looks Jewish," Poldy thought, "and he's a peddler. There's a fellow down there on the tracks who is going to be run over."

But the old man shifted his bundle and moved away. He had a handkerchief tied over his chin, and there was something bulging out underneath. His hand was trembling with palsy, and he held it close to his body and tilted his head to one side, listening to the trembling of his hand, as if to a very faint ticking. After a few minutes he looked at Poldy with a crafty sideways glance. "Do you hear it?" he asked.

Poldy heard it, and the sound of his palsy was so loud that it reverberated through the whole station, it vibrated in his ears, deafening him.

"Stop it!" he snapped.

The old man's eyes widened innocently. "Stop what?"

"That noise you're making with your hand."

"What noise?"

"I tell you it's making me deaf," Poldy retorted angrily, and he caught the old man's hand and held it in his; but under his palm he could feel it craftily vibrating, like a still thing that a little boy picks up, and it suddenly begins to wiggle. He dropped it then, and the old man put it near him again and went on listening to it.

"Besides, what have you under your handkerchief? Why is your chin covered that way? There must be something loathsome on it."

The old man fingered his chin and looked archly at him.

"There's a man down on the tracks who's going to be run over," Poldy said. "Ah ... I knew that would interest you."

"But how do you know?"

"By his shoes."

"By his shoes?"

"Exactly ... did you ever stop to notice your shoes just after you've slipped them off? They stand there at a crazy angle ... nobody ever walks that way...."

"I seem to remember something like that."

"Well, that's the way he's standing down there on the tracks, and that's how his shoes will look when they stick out from under the wheels."

"Indeed!" He looked admiringly at Poldy.

"Yes," Poldy continued. "You can see how the crowd shuffles around him, as if they're waiting for a tardy performer. They want to see him turn his feet out like a clown when he's lying under the wheels ... and his face will be fluid again..."

"Fluid?"

"Ah ... there's the whistle..."

They stood up and went to the edge of the platform, and the old man's fingers were thrumming his handkerchief, as if he wanted to tear it away. People drifted here and there, uncertain where it would happen. The train whistled in short frantic bleats, but the man on the tracks was standing quietly before it, looking up at it with infinite wonder on his face, and once he lifted his hand and flapped it weakly. That was comical, as if a timid patient were trying to wave the dentist away, when he takes up a new instrument. Meanwhile the old man was scurrying around on the edge of the crowd. Poldy took his arm and drew him aside.

"Don't be excited," he advised. "I've a riddle."

"Yes?"

"Why are people always standing on the edge of a crowd and thinking they see something?"

With his free arm the old man gesticulated frantically towards the train.

"Look ... look at that..." Poldy continued. "It's much more fun back here. Just stay here and see how their buttocks quiver. You can tell everything that's happening by watching their buttocks."

But now the people seemed to be going off in different directions, and the old man looked at Poldy in alarm. "What is it ... what is it? Has nothing happened?"

"Wait ... only wait. It's teasing them for a while. Did you ever see anyone holding a piece of candy in the air and teasing the children with it?"

"Of course ... of course."

"They don't know where to stand, because the candy is being waved around all the time. That's how it is."

The old man wagged his finger playfully against his chin. "Ah ... I see, I see..." he murmured. But now Poldy noted with terror that the old man could not stop wagging his finger, but that it went faster and faster, almost tearing away the handkerchief. And he knew that he was waking at last from the dream; for he remembered that in every dream there is the moment when one of the actors will not go on with it; he keeps doing the same thing over and over, and the dreamer is forced to wake up. But because of his disobedience, that actor in the dream is still with him when he awakes, masked with reality and slyly arranging his speech so that it sounds like a continuation of the dream. So Poldy awoke, and found that he was standing next to the old man, and that he had just stepped aside to let him see the accident better. And the old man was looking down into the tracks with a sorrowful face, and murmuring: "Ah, I see ... I see." Meanwhile his finger took the handkerchief from his chin, and there was nothing underneath but his beard. "And he was a young man, too," he added softly, turning to Poldy. "You noticed him on the tracks, didn't you? We were sitting there on the bench."

Poldy nodded.

"And his shoes too big for him. Ach! the poor fellow!"

And it was all as he had foreseen. The shoes were sticking out from under the train and sprawling away from each other, as if someone had placed them carelessly outside the door; and now he thought the old man turned to him accusingly, as though in his dream they had been in some secret place together, and willed that it should happen.

"A young man, wasn't he?"

"Yes, a young man."

"Didn't have time to get away?"

"I don't know..."

"Did he hear the whistle?"

"No..."

A policeman came and ordered them all to move back against the wall. They retreated before him, walking backward with their eyes fixed on the tracks as if they were hypnotized. "Yes, watch ... watch..." Poldy told himself bitterly. "It will all be this way when it happens to you. You thought of suicide quickly but you will see little by little what it is like. You catch something in your hand quickly, but you open your hand slowly to see what it is...."

But now for a time there was nothing to do. It was like a badly-written play that lags ... new players drifted in at regular intervals in response to a silent unsuspected cue. They made desultory gestures and spoke sometimes. The newsboy came running the whole length of the platform. He sat down on his bundle of papers, put his hands on his knees and rode them back and forth, never once looking at the tracks. He seemed to care only to sit there, riding his hands back and forth on his knees. The brakeman came out of the train and jumped down on the tracks, and looked at the shoes for a long time, and then at the wheels and then at the train, involved in strange calculations of his own. At length his face grew puzzled, as if he could not fathom the relation between all these things. He took off his gloves and dusted them against the platform. Then he leaped up cheerfully and hailed the policeman. A man appeared from nowhere, swinging a lantern and shouting: "Back her up ... back her up."

"Here, here ... what's the hurry?" the policeman called back. "It'll keep."

A soldier stepped out of the crowd and planted himself near the policeman. "Say ... perhaps he's living yet," he said.

"Brother, that's an idea."

"Sure ... you never can tell."

The policeman winked at the others and burst into a hearty laugh. They moved nearer and some who were going away turned back, looking eagerly from the policeman to the soldier, as if they were two performers whose repartee would lead up to a joke for all of them.

"You never know what you can pick up living," the soldier began.

"No, you don't."

The old man kept twitching Poldy's coat. "He lies dead," he whispered. "He lies dead and they quarrel."

"Strangest thing how they keep on living ... I've seen it."

"You certainly have," the policeman agreed cordially. He had been facing the crowd, but now he wheeled around to the soldier and raised his voice. "Well, now, suppose he is living..."

The soldier stared at him, completely entranced by the finality of that question. But to Poldy, looking intently at the feet under the wheels, it seemed as if there was a slight movement. The right foot seemed to turn itself inward, with the indifferent movement of a very tired sleeper. "Then if I dream it again tonight," he thought, "I must revise the position of the shoes." But now the old man was twitching Poldy's coat again. His face was pale and he fingered his beard nervously. "The train's moving back," he whispered. They had been coaxing the train backward, and it was moving away reluctantly. The man with the lantern swung it into the air, and the train stood still. Then they ran to the edge of the platform, swift as a litter of kittens when the plate is uncovered, and turned away again, each with the memory of it on his face. The old man mounted the stairs with Poldy. He tucked the handkerchief over his chin and went away. The newsboy ran down the street waving his paper and shouting: Fourteen killed ... There was one thought in Poldy's mind that came to him fluently and impersonally, as if he were reading it: he had gone down into the subway to commit suicide, but the death of the man on the tracks had given him a reprieve. There was one word that he kept repeating to himself as he walked ... tomorrow.