“I say, sonny. I’ll go to Greeley’s Slip. Then if you’ve nothin’ else on ’and, you come there, too—and we’ll be fellas together. But don’t—don’t—go to the Down and Out!”
As I walked away from him I had his “fellas together” amusingly, and also pathetically, in my heart. Lovey was little better than an outcast. I knew him by no name but that which some pothouse wag had fixed on him derisively. From hints he had dropped I gathered that he had had a wife and daughters somewhere in the world, and intuitively I got the impression that without being a criminal he had been connected with a crime. As to his personal history he had never confided to me any of the details beyond the fact that in his palmy days he had been in a ’at-shop in the Edgware Road. I fancied that at some time or another in his career his relatives in London—like my own in Canada—had made up a lump sum and bidden him begone to the land of reconstruction. There he had become what he was—an outcast. There I was becoming an outcast likewise. We were “fellas together.” I was thirty-one and he was fifty-two. My comparative youth helped me, in that I didn’t look older than my age; but he might easily have been seventy.
Having got rid of him, I drifted diagonally across the Park, but with a certain method in the seeming lack of method in taking my direction. Though I had an objective point, I didn’t dare to approach it otherwise than by a roundabout route. It is probable that no gaze but that of the angels was upon me; but to me it seemed as if every glance that roved up and down the Park must spot my aim.
For this reason I assumed a manner meant to throw observation off the scent. I loitered to look at young people on horseback or to stare at some specially dashing motor-car. I strolled into by-paths and out of them. I passed under the noses of policemen in gray-blue uniforms and tried to infuse my carriage with the fact which Lovey had emphasized, that I had never yet been pinched. I had never yet, so far as I knew, done anything to warrant pinching; and that I had no intentions beyond those of the ordinary law-abiding citizen was what I hoped my swagger would convey.
Though I was shabby, I was not sufficiently so to be unworthy to take the air. The worst that could be said of me was that I was not shabby as the working-man is at liberty to be. Mine was the suspicious, telltale shabbiness of the gentleman—far more damning than the grime and sweat of a chimney-sweep.
Now that I was alone again, I had a return of the sensation that had been on me since waking in the morning—that I was walking in the air. I felt that I bounced like a bubble every time I stepped. The day before I had been giddy; now I was only light. It was as if at any minute I might go up. Unconsciously I ground my footsteps into the gravel or the grass to keep myself on the solid earth.
It was not the first time I had gone without food for twenty-four hours, but it was the first time I had done it for forty-eight. Moreover, it was the first time I had ever been without some prospect of food ahead of me. With a meal surely in sight on the following day I could have waited for it. More easily I could have waited for a drink or two. Drink kept me going longer than food, for in spite of the reaction after it the need of it had grown more insistent. Had I been offered my choice between food and life, on the one hand, and drink and death, on the other, I think I should have chosen drink and death.
But now there was no likelihood of either. I had husbanded my last pennies after my last meal, to make them spin out to as many drinks as possible. I had begged a few more drinks, and cadged a few more. But I had come to my limit in all these directions. Before I sought the shelter of Greeley’s Slip a hint had been given me at Stinson’s that I might come in for the compliments showered on Lovey ten days previously. Now as I walked in the Park the craving inside me was not because I hadn’t eaten, but because I hadn’t drunk that day.
Two or three bitter temptations assailed me before I reached Fifth Avenue. One was in the form of a pretty girl of eight or ten, who came mincing down a flowery path, holding a quarter between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. Satan must have sent her. I could have snatched the quarter and made my escape, only that I lacked the nerve. Then there was a newsboy counting his gains on a bench. They were laid out in rows before him—pennies, nickels, and dimes. I stood for a minute and looked down at him, estimating the ease with which I could have stooped and swept them all into my palm. He looked up and smiled. The smile didn’t disarm me; I was beyond the reach of any such appeal. It was again that I didn’t have the nerve. Lastly an old woman, a nurse, was dealing out coins to three small children that they might make purchases of a blind man selling bootlaces and pencils. I could have swiped them all as neatly as a croupier pulls in louis d’or with his rake—but I was afraid.
These were real temptations, as fierce as any I ever faced. By the time I had reached the Avenue I was in a cold perspiration, as much from a sense of failure as from the effort at resistance. I wondered how I should ever carry out the plans I had in mind if I was to balk at such little things as this.