He saw Alice first the next day and called out cheerily. But the little girl was quiet. She was holding the new tennis ball in both hands and her eyes were lowered.
“What’s the matter?” asked Martin, surprised.
She looked up hesitatingly and Martin was shocked by the expression on her face. He found it difficult to analyze, but there was hurt, and fear, and he thought even horror there.
“My mother told me to never play with you again,” said Alice, and her voice was so thin and far away it sounded like a tiny pipe. “Mother said to give this to you,” and she held out the new tennis ball.
Martin put his hand around it. He was not looking at Alice anymore, nor apparently thinking of her; for his vision was directed beyond—at a disassociated blot of ugliness upon the sky; and he spoke so softly that the girl could but faintly hear.
“A voice like a reed in an Indian wind,” he said. “Like a tender, Indian reed.” Then, without addressing the child, he passed her and walked, with eyes implacably bemused, toward the corner of sky that held the dark and obscene smudge.... That afternoon, upon a street he’d never seen before, he remembered curiously it had been the first time he had cried in a great while.
In the PINE LEAF, next morning, his eyes were clear, his skin bright in the sun; but with all of it, he counted every measure of his heart. This was a dead passage—a ship without wings—men beside him shaving without faces. There was no hastiness in his action, though; and with impassible restraint he left the Bowery, its fretful entrances and lanterns thick with sickness.
He went uptown to the Relief Employment Station and stood in line again. Behind and before him, such pitiful neatness would formerly have brought the thought of laughter or poor tears. No more.
A counselor interviewed them quickly. There was a card on his desk marked MR. ROBERTS. Martin studied him with concentration, knowing that this man through whom he might be placed demanded understanding, subtle coyness and perhaps, beauty; for he saw a person hesitant in sex and yet requiring it; a man lurid of cheek, yet pale; a contradiction with a flush abnormal as its pallor. The look of Roberts was more theory than fact; although Martin thought, amusedly, that certainly this personage, most elegant, existed almost regally. The counselor’s eyebrows, alert and thin and dark, commanded all his face. His deep-set cheeks and bold, firm chin absolved too bright, too wide a pouting lower lip. His hair, compressed and black, cut strongly in his temples and took away the color from his eyes. “This masterpiece,” thought Martin, “should be done in platinum; with alabaster, ebony and careful points of gold.” And then, he found that he was next.