Children sprawled in the refuse-laden alleys. One of them ragged and clotted with dirt stood half-dressed on the curbing and urinated into the street.
Wagons rumbled, filled with fruits and iron and rags and vegetables.
Human voices babbled above the noises of the traffic. Moisse watched the lively scene.
“Every day it’s the same,” he thought; “the same smells, the same noise and people swarming over the pavements. I am the only one in the street whose soul is awake. There’s a pretty girl looking at me. She suspects the condition of my soul. Her fingers are dirty. Why doesn’t she buy different shoes? She thinks I am lost. In five years she will be fat. In ten years she will waddle with a shawl over her head.”
The young dramatist smiled.
“Good God,” he thought, “where do they come from? Where are they going? No place to no place. But always moving, shuffling, waddling, crying out. The sun shines on them. The rain pours on them. It burns. It freezes. To-day they are bright with color. To-morrow they are gray with gloom. But they are always the same, always in motion.”
The young dramatist stopped on the corner and looking around him spied a figure sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of a building.
The figure was an old man.
He had a long white beard.
He had his legs tucked under him and an upturned tattered hat rested in his lap.