He took to sleeping ill again. Io Welland had come back in all the glamorous panoply of waking dreams to command and torment his loneliness of spirit. At night he dreaded the return to the draughtless room on Grove Street. In the morning, rising sticky-eyed and unrested, he shrank from the thought of the humid, dusty, unkempt hurly-burly of the office. Yet his work was never more brilliant and individual.
Having finished his writing, one reeking midnight, he sat, spent, at his desk, hating the thought of the shut-in place that he called home. Better to spend the night on a bench in some square, as he had done often enough in the earlier days. He rose, took his hat, and had reached the first landing when the steps wavered and faded in front of him and he found himself clutching for the rail. A pair of hands gripped his shoulders and held him up.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Banneker?” asked a voice.
“God!” muttered Banneker. “I wish I were back on the desert.”
“You want a drink,” prescribed his volunteer prop.
As his vision and control reestablished themselves, Banneker found himself being led downstairs and to the nearest bar by young Fentriss Smith, who ordered two soda cocktails.
Of Smith he knew little except that the office called him “the permanent twenty-five-dollar man.” He was one of those earnest, faithful, totally uninspired reporters, who can be relied upon implicitly for routine news, but are constitutionally impotent to impart color and life to any subject whatsoever. Patiently he had seen younger and newer men overtake and pass him; but he worked on inexorably, asking for nothing, wearing the air of a scholar with some distant and abstruse determination in view. Like Banneker he had no intimates in the office.
“The desert,” echoed Smith in his quiet, well-bred voice. “Isn’t it pretty hot, there, too?”
“It’s open,” said Banneker. “I’m smothering here.”
“You look frazzled out, if you don’t mind my saying so.”