Tito High-Falutini pushed the door open. "Goin' home, Tony, la Signora Kenni has turned me out."
Fairfax pointed to his statue. "Look. If we were in Carrara somebody would lend me a quarry or I would steal one, and turn little Bella into a snow image." He spoke in English, entirely uncomprehended by his companion. He put his hand on Tito's arm.
"Did you do that, Tony? It is valuable. In Italy we make terra-cotta figures like that and sell them."
"Do you think, Tito," his companion replied, "that I would sell little Bella for a few lire, you commercial traveller?"
Tito was acquainted with the Italian quarter, he would find some one who baked in terra-cotta. They had brought their trades with them. Tony could do others: a Savoyard with a hand-organ, those things were very gentile, very brave indeed, and money, said Tito, gloating, money,—why that would cost a dollar at least.
Fairfax covered up the clay and pushed the stool back in its corner.
"You can make a fool of yourself, too," he said good-humouredly, and pushed Falutini out. "Go home and dream of Kenny's daughter Cora, and don't forget to buy a can of crude oil and order a half dozen of those cock-screws. Good-night." He banged the door.
He undressed, still softly whistling, unpinned the curtain from the window, and what there was of heat and freshness came into the room with the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him near
to his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return, his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the Mississippi's tide and silt.
The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek.