"Yesterday," answered Waters wearily. "Say, boss, it was only for beatin' up an istvostchik, and I got to have a job."
The fiery monkey-face, pursed in sourest disapproval, did not relax a line. "Yesterday an' now ye come here! Well, we're no' wantin' hands just now, d'ye see? An' if we was, we'd no' want you. So now ye know!"
The angry mask of a face continued to lower at him unwaveringly; it was almost bitter and righteous enough to be funny. Waters surveyed it for a space of moments with a faint interest in its mere grotesqueness; it did not change nor shift under his scrutiny, but continued to glare inhumanly like a baleful lamp. He humped a thin shoulder in resignation and turned away. When he was halfway to the gate, he heard behind him the foreman ordering the gatekeeper not to admit him in future.
Passing again along the cobbled street, he halted suddenly and gazed about him like a man seeking. Everything was as it had been before, from the folk moving in it to the pale sky over it. The little shops, showing idealized pictures of their wares on painted boards beside their doors for the benefit of a public that could not read; the cluster of small gold domes on a church at the corner; the great bearded laboring men in their filthy sheepskins; the Jews, sleek and furtive; the cabman who doffed his hat and crossed himself as he drove by a shrine there was not a house nor a man that he could not identify and classify. He had come back to them from the pain and labor of his imprisonment confident of what he should find; and it was as if a home had become hostile and unwelcoming.
"Guess I'll have to be movin' outta this town," he told himself.
"Seems as if I'd stopped here long enough!"
He had time to confirm this judgment in the days that followed. The approach of winter was bringing its inevitable slackness to all work carried on in the open air, and the big works could afford to be scrupulous about the characters of the men they engaged; and the little tradesmen feared the ban of the police. His slender store of money came to an end, and but for occasional jobs of wood-splitting as the supplies of winter fuel came in, it would have been difficult merely to live. As it was, he dragged his belt tighter about the waist of the old linen blouse and showed to the daylight a face whose whimsicality and vagueness were darkened with a touch of the saturnine. He showed it likewise to Miss Pilgrim when one day she passed him at the noon hour, hurrying past the corner on which he stood, wrapped to the eyes in her greatcoat.
She recognized him suddenly and stopped.
"Good morning," she said. "It's, it's a cold day, isn't it?"
Waters had his back to the wall for shelter, and though he stood thus out of the wind, the air drenched him with its chill like water. He smiled slowly with stiff lips at the brisk outdoor pink in her cheeks.
"This ain't cold," he answered. "You won't call this cold when you've been through a winter here."