The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.
As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.
“I wouldn’t mind about you,” she said, looking at him frankly.
Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. “It’s been a good evening,” he said, “we’ll go through with it as it stands.”
“Thanks for that,” she said, “and there is something else I want to tell you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don’t want to go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders.”
As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.
“Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man, and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt and destroy?”