Approaching a fiercely mustachioed man of clearly defined nationality, I said, “Say, boss, could you give my buddy and me a job?”
Rolling toward me a pair of eyes that would have done credit to a bandit in an opera, he emitted sounds which I can best transcribe as, “Where d’live?”
“That’s the trouble,” I answered, truthfully. “We don’t live anywhere and we should like to.”
He looked us over. “Beat it,” he commanded, nodding toward the central quarters of the city.
“But, boss,” I pleaded, “my buddy and I haven’t got a quarter between us.”
He pointed with his thumb over his left shoulder. “Getta out.”
“We haven’t got a nickel,” I insisted; “we haven’t got a cent.”
“Cristoforo, ca’ da cop.”
As Cristoforo sprang from the ditch to look for a policeman, Lovey and I shuffled off again into the rain.
We stood for a minute at the edge of one of the long, sordid avenues where a sordid life was surging up and down. Men, women, and children of all races and nearly all ranks were hurrying to and fro, each bent on an errand. It was the fact that life provided an errand for each of them that suddenly struck me as the most wonderful thing in creation. There was no one so young or so old, no one so ignorant or so alien, that he was not going from point to point with a special purpose in view. Among the thousands and the tens of thousands who would in the course of the morning pass the spot on which we stood, there would probably not be one who hadn’t dressed, washed, and breakfasted as a return for his daily contribution to the common good. Never before and hardly ever since did I have such a sense of life’s infinite and useful complexity. There was no height to which it didn’t go up; there was no depth to which it didn’t go down. No one was left out but the absolute wastrel like myself, who couldn’t be taken in.