“Well I wish I could get rid of a little of my private life.... Well goodnight. I hope you find some private life Jimmy.”
Laughing, Jimmy Herf turned his back on the snow-shovelers and started walking up Broadway, leaning into the wind with his chin buried in his coatcollar. At Houston Street he looked at his watch. Five o’clock. Gosh he was late today. Wouldnt be a place in the world where he could get a drink. He whimpered to himself at the thought of the icy blocks he still had to walk before he could get to his room. Now and then he stopped to pat some life into his numb ears. At last he got back to his room, lit the gasstove and hung over it tingling. His room was a small square bleak room on the south side of Washington Square. Its only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a table piled with books, and the gasstove. When he had begun to be a little less cold he reached under the bed for a basketcovered bottle of rum. He put some water to heat in a tin cup on the gasstove
and began drinking hot rum and water. Inside him all sorts of unnamed agonies were breaking loose. He felt like the man in the fairy story with an iron band round his heart. The iron band was breaking.
He had finished the rum. Occasionally the room would start going round him solemnly and methodically. Suddenly he said aloud: “I’ve got to talk to her ... I’ve got to talk to her.” He shoved his hat down on his head and pulled on his coat. Outside the cold was balmy. Six milkwagons in a row passed jingling.
On West Twelfth two black cats were chasing each other. Everywhere was full of their crazy yowling. He felt that something would snap in his head, that he himself would scuttle off suddenly down the frozen street eerily caterwauling.
He stood shivering in the dark passage, ringing the bell marked Herf again and again. Then he knocked as loud as he could. Ellen came to the door in a green wrapper. “What’s the matter Jimps? Havent you got a key?” Her face was soft with sleep; there was a happy cozy suave smell of sleep about her. He talked through clenched teeth breathlessly.
“Ellie I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Are you lit, Jimps?”
“Well I know what I’m saying.”
“I’m terribly sleepy.”