"'Twas the day before I ran away with the circus," he soliloquized in the midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later, when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it—and it would be something foolish——"
The train slid up to the platform; he boarded it and by some miracle found on the bench behind the door of the last car a narrow space in which he squeezed himself.
"I'll have to stop it," he said decisively.
He drew from his breast pocket a note-book and a pencil. Opening the book out across his knees, he bent over it and began to draw. He worked with concentration, but seemingly with little result, for he drew only detached lines. There were spirals, circles, ovals, parabolas; lines that curved upward, broke, and curved again downward, like gothic arches; lines that curved in gentle languor; lines that breathed like the undulations of a peaceful sea; and then just zipping, swift, straight lines that shot up to the upper end of the paper and seemed to continue invisibly toward an altitudinous nowhere. This is all he drew, and yet as he worked there was in his face the set of stubborn purpose, and in his eyes the glow of aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by dissatisfaction, renewed yearning—and he would begin again.
"By Jove!" he muttered in sudden consternation, straightening away from the book.
And then, "They began at the same time."
And a moment later, "And they are the same."
It had struck him abruptly that the strange urge which made him draw lines was like that which at times convulsed his body into that mysterious manifestation which, for the want of a better word, he called his "flapping." The two things had begun together, and they were of the same essence. The impulse which possessed him as he tried for beauty with paper and pencil was the same which swelled his lungs and his heart, which made him rise a-tip-toe and wave his arms. It came from a feeling of subtle and inexplicable dissatisfaction; it was made of a vague and vast longing. It was the same which, when a boy, had sent him to the brake-beam, the circus, and the sea; it was to be distrusted.
He slammed the book shut and put it in his pocket. "No more of this," he said.
A certain confidence, though, came gradually into his eyes. "After all, these things do not mean much now," he thought. "I was a boy, then, and unhappy. I am a man, now, and happy."