THE DISTANT STREET By FRANCIS EDWARDS FARAGOH From The New Pearson’s (Pearson’s Magazine, 157 E. Ohio St., Chicago, Ill.)

ON the sidewalk pools of yellow light. Stretches of evening-tinted pavement between them, around them. Gray pavement, with touches of black. To Emmanuel, as he stood in the uncertainly lighted doorway of the college building, the street called out. The yellow pools leaped out of their own flatness; they sang and touched his hands.

Still, he dared not leave the doorway. Every evening it was the same. The street was not for him. The yellow bits of sidewalk, stealing their gold from the lights of the soft-curtained doors, low windows along the street, were not his. He was an outsider. For three years, ever since he had started going to the college, he had known that. And now, again, he felt that he would always remain an outsider.

Sometimes, during the day, Emmanuel would look out of the window of one of the classrooms and try to understand the street. But while daylight was on the pavements, the street was very much like other streets. It was only in the evening that it became alluring, that it became forbidding, throwing light-kisses that were not for him.

No, it would not be wise to go into the street, thought Emmanuel. But he knew that, although impotent rage was causing his legs to tremble, he loved all the hasty-gabled houses and arched doorways, the lawns with their now dusky smiles. This street had a song about it. His own street—that other one, downtown, under the humpbacked shadow of the Williamsburg bridge—had no song. It had only butcher shops and fruit stands and grimy children and smells. Garbage cans and stoops that were unswept and slouching houses which pushed their bellies out into the evening and grinned.

Emmanuel waited in the doorway. Someone would come out. Someone always did. Then, together, it would be easier to face the street, talking in fast, loud sentences to shut out the song. He peered into the building. Yes, someone was approaching. Luck! He knew the man, one of his classmates. He knew, also, that he would not be considered welcome by the other. But that didn’t matter. Anything rather than walk alone....

“Are you going to the Subway?” He tried to conceal his anxiety, desperately forcing the question to be casual.

“Why ... yes!” Not cordial, just as Emmanuel had expected. They thought him queer.... Well.... The main thing was that he’d not have to walk to the subway alone. Blocks and blocks.

“Anything happen in the psychiatry class? I cut it, you know.” Had to make conversation! Oh, anything.... The street....

“No. Nothing much. Old man Hedley gassed some more about maniac-depressives. Usual stuff.”

Hedley ... that was the professor ... maniac-depressives ... oh, yes, maniac-depressives.... (Was that somebody laughing up in that window, behind those flowers? A girl) ... maniac....

“He ... he didn’t.... (A girl! Her body can’t be seen, but she must have white shoulders, smiling through the transparent crimson shawl!) ... let me see ... oh, yes ... he didn’t say when those paranoia reports are due?”

“No.”

“He didn’t! That’s funny!” Emmanuel began to laugh softly. He could feel, without actually seeing it, that the other threw him a questioning troubled glance from the corner of his eye. That made him laugh more. The fool! He didn’t know that the laughter belonged to the girl behind the flowers, to the girl who must have silken eyes and a soft throat. “Well, I guess I’ll cut to-morrow again.”

“Yes?” Without interest.

“Yes!” A warmth came over Emmanuel. He felt himself getting angry, at what he didn’t know. “Yes! I’ll cut it as many times as I damn feel like it. See?” He realized that this required an explanation. “I’m no good at the stuff. I don’t want to be good at it. I’ll never be a doctor. I hate the thought of ever being a doctor.”

“Then why did you come to the school?” In spite of himself the man was compelled to ask. He was amazed at the fury in Emmanuel’s words. “Why did you take up medicine?”

“Why? What the hell do you ask me that for? Don’t you know?” Emmanuel wasn’t listening to himself. The questions had come out of his mouth almost automatically. This was not his only conversation of the kind. Just now he was paying attention to the piano that was being played in a house up the street. “No, I guess you can’t know,” his mouth continued. “You’re not a Jew.”

“What has that to do with it?”

A wailing chord ... was there some regret in that music? Who played it? Another girl? One with seeking eyes?

“Everything! When you’re a Jew your family works for you ... your father, your mother, sisters even ... and you study. And all the time they look at you so hungry, so impatient, demanding that you hurry, hurry, through college, through all your years. That you make money. That’s what they want. And then they’ve got their damned pride, too. You must become a professional man. A lawyer, a doctor.... God, their rotten selfishness! Always driving you, hungry, exacting....”

The other was frightened. Emmanuel knew that and he grinned with pleasure. He was flattered. Frightened—of him. That was good! He heard the uncertain tone:

“Well, what would you like to do instead?”

Ah.... It had come! Emmanuel stopped. Under his feet a yellow patch of light, on his hair, uncovered now as he snatched off his hat, the notes of the piano rested for a moment before rushing along the street. Emmanuel could see the chords in the air, he told himself. They glowed. There were flames in them. He threw out his arms, indicating the street:

“This! This is what I’d like to do!”

His companion also had to stop. Out of bewildered gray eyes he looked at Emmanuel. He didn’t understand, of course.

“This?”

“This! You hear that music ...?” He stepped closer to the man, grabbed his lapels. “You hear it? I could do that!”

“Do it?” Absolutely terrified! Emmanuel grinned with satisfaction. He released him. “Why, do you play an instrument?”

“No ... no....” What a fool! But why should he understand?

“Oh, you compose....”

Idiot!

“I don’t have to compose! I don’t have to play!” Snarling: “I said I could do it. You don’t have to know a note to do it.... It’s just got to be in you....” His hands dropped. A silly smile came into his face. What’s the use? “I guess I can’t explain. I don’t know myself exactly what I mean. Take the sky, for instance. It’s like a banner. That’s it, a torn banner. Well, I could do that, too! Not paint it, or write about it, though. Something else....”

The other had left him. Emmanuel looked after the hurrying man and he knew that an empty papier-mâché figure was going there, a papier-mâché figure made of flesh, curiously, and that terror was dogging the steps of that figure. Let him run! Let him think that he, Emmanuel Wolkowitz, is a lunatic! Let him run. Now, now he was not afraid of the street. He turned and shouted into it:

“I won’t be a doctor!”

He shook his fist into the face of the houses:

“I won’t be a doctor!”

Blood rushed to his face. He coughed. Perspiration stood on his forehead. He felt tired, spent. How would he ever get home? The Subway.... He turned into the station. But the music, although that had been blocks beyond, kept on following him. He muttered.

“That’s Rachmaninoff.... No, it isn’t.... I don’t know what it is.... I don’t know one piece from another.... Why don’t I?”

II

“You late again, Manny!”

That was his mother. He didn’t answer her. He looked at the room, at the table with its red tablecloth, now set for the evening meal, at the crayon enlargements of his grandfather and grandmother on the wall. At the ice box in the corner of the dining room. At the long-handled pot in which the soup had been cooked and brought to the table. His father ... long beard ... almost asleep.... Reba—was she dirty or was that just the way she put the rouge on her face? So much rouge! That was his sister.

“Where were you?”

He brushed past his mother. He went into the bedroom. Over his shoulder he told her:

“In school.”

“So late? You get out at five, no?”

“Well....”

He didn’t care to wash up. To hell with hygiene. That was for doctors. He wouldn’t be a doctor.

“Ain’t coming to eat?” His mother again, in the doorway.

“I don’t want to eat. I’m tired.” But he went. He sat down at the table. “I’m tired....”

“Ha! You make me giggle.” Reba. “What should I say then? You tired? My Gawd, you don’t have to stand at the machine all day long, punching them buttons till you think your arm was gonna break off.”

“Now you let ’im alone.” The mother had come to his defence. Always she came to his defence. “Studying ain’t so easy.”

“It ain’t? Wisht to Gawd you would ’ave let me study. How I was begging you to let me go to business school. All the girls I know is stenogs, only I got to work in a factory, because....”

She didn’t say it. But she looked at Emmanuel. The accusation was there. He jumped up. He pushed away his plate and jumped up.

“What do you want of me? Did I stop you from school? Am I making you go to work?” Still, he couldn’t shake off her eyes. They were telling the truth. His mouth twitched, he lowered his voice: “I guess you’re right. If it wasn’t for me you’d.... I’m sorry, Reba!”

She softened, too. She rose and put a hand on his sleeve. She smiled; underneath the thick paint on her face there was something kindly.

“Oh, what’s the matter with you, Manny? I was only kiddin’. Can’t you take a joke?”

Yes, they were all working for him! His father, getting rheumatism in that basement shop of his, haggling, cheating customers out of an extra potato, cheating for the sake of an added cent.... That mother of his, over there. She worked, too. Embroidered with her always diseased eyes. Reba....

“No, I guess you’re right, Reba. I ... I’m just sucking the blood out of you, all of you....”

“Don’t be a fool. My work is all right. You’ll be a doctor soon.”

Ah, he’ll be a doctor soon! That’s why they were willing to work. He was a bank of flesh, into which they put their greasy pennies.... To be returned with interest! What if he told them that he didn’t intend to become a doctor? What if he told them to go to hell? How? How to say it to them? After all this?

He ate his fish. There was no talk in the room. His father drank the soup with gurgling noises. It was borscht soup. It trickled down over his beard, red soup, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. His mother sighed every time she had to rise to bring something to the table. His family!

Suddenly Emmanuel rose. The room was choking him. The walls were coming nearer. The clatter of the dishes was low thunder now.

“I’m through.”

He knew where he was going. Upstairs, to the third floor, to Etta. Etta! Etta! She was real. She had black hair, and when you touched it you could shut your eyes and think you were touching nice warm water. It seemed to lick your fingers with a warm tongue, her hair. Her eyes, too, like the feel of a child-wind in summer....

“Manny!”

She had come to meet him at the door. Their hands touched. He was the first to draw his away. Again he felt warm all over, as he had in the street. When she brushed past him in the dim-lit hall to lead the way to the living room and her body was close to his, Emmanuel was conscious of a feeling of shame, his throat became dry. For no reason at all, as far as he could tell.

Their living room was like any other East Side living room. No—better. Here there was a cheap golden-oak piano, too, and an incongruous gilded music stand with stencilled flowers and angels and birds. Otherwise the usual crayon pictures of bearded ancestors of scheiteled ancestors, the seven-branched candlestick on the mantel, the rocking chair, a vase with artificial roses....

“Listen, Manny, you never heard me sing, did you? I’m gonna sing a new piece I just got. Wanna hear it?”

She seated herself at the piano. She spread the sheets of music. The song was a ballad, a jumble of molasses-coated words, smirking though they meant to whimper. And her hands struck the wrong notes, they slipped off, she had to shake her head and begin all over again. Her voice uncertain, trembling. Still.... Emmanuel, listening to the girl, knew that this was the street returned. His mouth opened in amazement. His arm shook. Then:

“Etta!” he cried, cutting into the cracked notes of the piano. “You can sing!”

She didn’t seem to pay any attention to that. Again she started, false, tremulous. Emmanuel grasped her arm.

“Ouch, you’re hurting me!”

But he would not let her go on.

“Listen, Etta! You can sing. Don’t you understand me? You’ve got it in you. You ... well, you can sing, Etta! Not yet. You know what I mean. Not yet. But it’s in you. You can sing.”

“Yeah?” She was pleased. She brought her face closer to his as he stood there, bending over her.

“You’re going to study....”

“How can I? I got to go to work. I ain’t got time. You feel awful tired after taking dictation all day.”

He waved that aside. Again his hand was cutting into her arm.

“You’ll have to study. You don’t know how good it is. If only I could have studied!”

“Well, you’re studying, ain’t you? You’re gonna be a doctor.”

“That’s not what I mean....” How to explain it? “Listen, Etta, I wanted to study things like history. Not the stuff they gave me at high school. Real history. There is colour in it. The books never speak of that, though. They give you only dates and names. But when you shut your eyes you can see helmets and campfires. Flames and singing people in forests, monks in black hoods, golden coins. That’s funny how those golden coins come to you when you shut your eyes. That.... That’s history.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I never cared much for it in school.”

“Because you never shut your eyes to see. Then, take drawing. The way I imagine it.... Well, I wasn’t good at it, of course. My lines took crazy turns. They moved about the paper and I couldn’t stop them. The teacher was angry. But what could I do? He put there a vase and a strawberry box and I could see only patches of colour and sometimes fountains and sometimes dancing flowers. You know.... The lines went their own way. Sometimes one side was larger than the other, sometimes you could see through it.... And my teacher was angry.”

“I don’t understand you. What you mean flowers was dancing?” She reached out for his hand and patted it. “You say such funny things, Manny. What you shouting for so?”

He felt her face very close to his. Her hair touched his eyes. He brushed that aside. He spoke in whispers now.

“Listen, Etta, I’ll teach you how to sing. I’ll teach you. I can do it. I can’t sing myself, but I can teach you. It’s here in me! Shall I?”

She didn’t seem to care about that. She was flushed, her eyes had grown wide, warm. Her red bit of a tongue moistened her quivering lips:

“Yeah!” Hers was also a whisper. Then her arms were about his neck.

Feeling the touch of her bare elbows, Emmanuel stopped talking. The arms were hot. Through her thin blouse he could see the girl’s shoulders. Suddenly he bent his face to hers, almost bit into her lips. He was happy. No, not the melody of the street ... that was gone just now.... This was something else. His legs trembled.

“Etta, I love you!”

She lay back in his arms. She knew. She kissed him with even more passion than before. He was going to be a doctor....

“We’re sweethearts, ain’t we, Manny?”

“Yes, yes!” Ah, it was good to kiss her.

“We’re gonna go steady, yeah?” He would be a doctor. They would go “steady.” Then there would be a “catered supper” in the pink reception room of an East Side hall after the wedding, with many candles in the hands of the guests, a band for dancing, a paper-flower decorated throne for the bridal pair. “Steady, yes, Manny?”

There was only another year of college....

III

Another year of college.

That was the hardest year. Emmanuel told himself every day that it would have to be the last—another seven hours in the classrooms would kill him. No, not kill him, make him do something, murder, suicide, what did he know? What if he kicked over an apparatus in the laboratory, what if he spat into the dean’s august, bearded face? They’d throw him out then.... Histology, materia medica, physiological chemistry, the rotten, dead stuff ... all the rotten, dead stuff.... And then there would have to be an added year, in a hospital. He, Emmanuel Wolkowitz, an interne. He, Emmanuel Wolkowitz, taking thermometers out of the mouths of patients, making clinical charts, listening to the smutty confidences of leering nurses....

He tried to go through that year, somehow. The street was still there, but since that evening many months ago when he had turned to defy it, he was no longer afraid of it. He was doing something which, he knew, the street must approve of.

He was doing something! He was writing. Writing was easy. Except when the words would not come. Or the wrong ones came. The dictionary was stupid. Dots and dashes and exclamation marks were stupid. They ruined the melody. Who said writing was easy, anyhow? What about the song? It would go on in your head, in your ears, it would paint pictures: dreamfields of the dawn, grottoes where purple and blue flowers sang. When you tried to put all that to paper there were only words and the song was gone. Words were harsh—you couldn’t write down the melody.... But he wrote.

He said to Etta:

“I’ll be a writer!”

“Gowan! Not a doctor?” She didn’t believe what he said, of course. She thought it a good joke. “That ain’t a good trade.”

A trade!

“Oh, yes, it’s very good when it’s a trade,” he replied. “Mine will be art.” He wanted to take back the words immediately. Art! He! When the melody could not be captured. Uncertainly: “Well, of course, it’s not very profitable.”

“Then you can’t be a writer,” decided Etta, “because you’ll have to earn money. Sure!”

“Oh, money!” Emmanuel looked at his shiny trousers. “Money!”

“Now, Manny, get all that foolishness out of your head. You’re gonna be through school in no time now and then we’ll get married. My father will furnish an office for you and....”

Yes, he knew that. Her father would furnish an office for him. All East Side fathers did. He had seen it happen again and again. To some of his classmates, too. An office—then he’d have to practise. Marry Etta, practise, make money for her, for his family, for Reba’s dowry, who would in turn be sold to somebody else, a lawyer or dentist perhaps. Was there no way out of it?

There must be! He would be a writer. An author. After all, there must be money in it. So many magazines. And then, perhaps, he would write a book. Would Etta, would his family care how the money came, as long as he gave them enough? He saw his name on a dull-red volume. In golden letters: Emmanuel Wolkowitz.

But why did they want money so much?

“Why do you want money so much, Etta?”

“Well, my Gawd, who don’t? This ain’t living, the way we go on now. Maybe once a week you take me to the movies. Oh, I ain’t complaining, Manny. Only it’s pretty hard. All the other girls at the office have good times. They go to Coney Island, Broadway, they go to cabarets, dances. I’m as good-looking as they are. I got nice clothes. You’re all right, Manny, but gee, it’s long, waiting like this.”

“Oh....”

“You ain’t sore at me, are you, because I told you? It’ll be all right, Manny! You’ll make good. I’ll speak to my father. He’ll come across.”

“Oh....”

He didn’t go near her for the next three or four days.

There were two letters on the dining-room table. One had come in a large, oblong manila envelope, the other in a cheap pink one.

Emmanuel had just come home from college. He picked up the letters. He saw that his mother had opened them. Now, as he came into the room, her diseased eyes narrowed:

“That’s why we go hungry an education to give you? That’s why?”

He coloured. Angrily.

“You shouldn’t have opened them. You had no business to.”

“What? My own children’s letters I shouldn’t open, maybe?”

Anyway, she couldn’t have read them. She couldn’t read English. One of the things was a returned manuscript, the other a letter from Etta.... Still, his mother must have guessed, because now she turned on him:

“Goils! To spend money on. And this craziness, this story business.”

Pale, he threw at her:

“I’ve got to write if I want to be a writer!”

Her face hardened. She shook her bony, needle-scarred finger in his face:

“A writer he wants to be, with the family starving.” She wiped her nose, her eyes. “A doctor he don’t want to be, what’s a profession. A writer, even if maybe we die and your sister Reba got to break her arms pushing that machine.”

Out in the kitchen he read Etta’s letter. She had spoken to her parents, she wrote—Emmanuel had left that to her because he didn’t have the courage, he didn’t care enough—and her father had expressed willingness to furnish an office for him after the marriage. “Gee, I’m just tickled silly, are you glad, honey?” was her question in the even, characterless business-college handwriting. “I just couldn’t wait until I see you, so I had to write.”

“So that’s it,” he thought. His mouth moved: “Glad....”

His mother was standing next to him again.

“Goils! I’m going blind with embroidery and your father any minute is gonna kill himself with that rheumatism yet. All our lifes, all our lifes for you we worked.”

Oh, yes, all their lives. Putting pennies into him, putting food into him, waiting, waiting....

“It’s all right, Ma, I....”

“My eyes feel like they was on fire....”

“It’s all right, Ma. Listen!” He read her the letter. “You see, Etta’s father is going to furnish an office for me. You see....”

“Manny! Oh, my good God, honest? Honest, Manny? My Manny, my good son, what’s going to be a doctor, what’s going to be so good to his family!”

She kissed him. She pawed over his face, his hair. He suffered that. Writing? Well.... Where was the street? Well.... He’d be a doctor.... Etta, his father, his mother, Reba....

“Sure, Ma.”

IV

Emmanuel watched the patient go out of his office. He hadn’t been able to do anything for the girl. He hadn’t dared to do anything for her. In fact, he had shaken his head even before hearing her request. Her eyes had told him. Sorry for the girl? Yes. Of course he was sorry for her. But it wasn’t ethical.... He had to laugh at the word. Ethics—smug euphemism. Simply afraid, that was the truth. Couldn’t risk it. He, the well-known physician, member of medical associations, “a respected member of the community.”

Seven years ago, perhaps, when money had been needed. When impatient eyes were watching him. Four pairs of eyes—no, six, because there had been Etta’s family, too. Now there was enough money. Now there was his office. The mahogany desk with its impressive medical volumes, the white enamel instrument cabinet. An X-ray apparatus. The elaborate washstand with its gleaming appointments. The blue-lettered sign on the window: E. Manfred Woll, M.D.

“That’s not I, of course,” he told himself.

E. Manfred Woll.... Etta’s doing.

“You can’t have a kike name in a swell neighbourhood like this,” she had told him.

All right, the physician, medicinæ doctor, that was E. Manfred Woll. But then where was Emmanuel Wolkowitz? He didn’t know.

There used to be a street. That wasn’t any more. Upstairs there was only his apartment, with every piece of correct furniture just so, with every proper picture just so, every cushion rigid, every piece of china, every vase as the interior decorator had planned it. He was living in an interior decorator’s apartment! Etta’s doing.

Etta herself, his wife, composed of a pretty face, a carefully, painfully, pretty face, of just so much obedient, matter-of-fact sex, so much wifely devotion, solicitude:

“Dearie, you’re so tired!” Every day.... “Here, let me get the girl to make you a nice hot cup of tea.”

There used to be a melody.... In the beginning he had attempted to get Etta to sing. She had replied:

“Oh, I don’t know! Too much trouble. Lessons and everything. Of course, if I was a single girl it would be nice to learn and get a job in a show or in vaudeville. But ain’t I got the best husband in the world to take care of me now?”

Well, she didn’t understand! Emmanuel watched the things in the office, he watched himself seated at the desk of E. Manfred Woll, M.D. Funny, that was!

Etta came in. As usual:

“Am I disturbing you, dear?”

He didn’t reply. She would come in, anyway. She seated herself on the edge of his desk, her pretty legs two silken flashes as they rocked. She toyed with his paper knife, the self-consciously ornamental onyx knife, her gift.

“That car salesman is going to come around to-morrow. What shall I tell him?”

“The salesman. I don’t know! What do you want to tell him?”

Etta pouted. In spite of the usual smile she had so carefully cultivated during the last seven years, her eyes were cold.

“It isn’t what I want to tell him. You know that. I’m not the one for whose sake we’re getting that limousine. But you can’t be driving around in that dingy sedan. You ought to have a real car. People expect it of you.”

Always that argument. The apartment people expected of him, her dresses people expected of him, his name people expected of him. Nothing for her. Everything for him. Oh, a good wife!

“You expect it of me, too, don’t you, Etta?”

“Well....”

“You all expect it of me? Your father expected an interest on his money: a nice home for you, nice clothes for you. He got it. My family.... Well, they’re well off now, they’ve no troubles. A nice home in the Bronx. Reba got her dowry, she got her lawyer.... Aren’t you, all of you, satisfied yet? What else do you want?”

“Manny, I don’t understand you.”

“No!”

“What is the matter with you to-day?”

To-day.... Seven years, nine, twelve....

“Etta, what would you say if I told you I’m through?”

“What do you mean, ‘through’?”

“That I’m going away?”

“Where are you going?”

He couldn’t answer that. Where would he be going? To the street? The street....

Etta had left him, shrugging her shoulders. She didn’t bother to try to understand him. One of his unaccountable fits! Alone, Emmanuel continued sitting at his desk. Would he really go away?

The telephone rang. He recognized the voice. His uncle. For years the “support of the family,” who had helped him through college, helped his father with the basement penny business. A self-satisfied, ruthless, self-made man, narrow, full of many hatreds. A charitable, religious Jew, a good father. Cloaks and suits.

“Manny, my son Dewey is gonna have for him a graduation party from high school. I want you positively to come.”

Emmanuel promised. He liked Dewey, a boy who was forced to be bright, who was forced to be the best student in his class, Dewey, who had once received a beating in his presence for daring to read a novel on a Saturday instead of going to the synagogue. Was Dewey perhaps like himself?

Emmanuel walked out of the house. At the door his chauffeur asked:

“Shall I get the car, sir?”

“No, I’ll walk.”

The man touched his cap, looked after Emmanuel stupidly. It was raining. Emmanuel didn’t care. The rain would do him good to-day, he thought. It would be good to walk into the street while it was raining. Already the afternoon, dusk-cloaked, was slipping away and in the coming darkness the pavement of the street would reflect the light from the windows. Yellow pools of light.... It would be a long walk. The street was far away.

Too far away. After some five blocks Emmanuel stopped. Could that distance to the street be covered to-day? Could it be covered in a year, in a lifetime? Perhaps it wasn’t there at all. There was no melody now—perhaps there never had been a melody....

And did it matter now? He was a doctor. Could he tell that to the street? Could he tell about his family, about Etta?

Was there nothing else than to go back home? That he couldn’t answer. After all the years, that distant street was still calling Emmanuel. Maybe.... Even if there should be no melody, one could go on toward the street. But—home? He walked on.

Then he remembered. Wasn’t there something he had intended to do on the way? What? Oh, Dewey.... The graduation party would be a grand affair. He wouldn’t go, of course, but a gift would be expected. A set of books?

A set of books for Dewey? Who was so much like himself? Books? Dewey was like himself! But then....

“They were my tools,” the thought came to him. “I couldn’t use them. They weren’t the right tools.... Yes, they were.... Those others weren’t right.... The ones at college. Now they’re at home. Etta’s? She can have them. Let her have them. Wrong tools, all of them wrong tools.... The others, too.... All the books I’ve ever had!” And then the zig-zag pattern: “Tools, books, tools, tools....”

He entered a shop. No books.... He pointed to a table. To the clerk he muttered:

“These....”

He gave Dewey’s name, the address. He stood there, watching the large package being wrapped up. He nodded:

“That’s right....”

A set of carpenter’s tools. A hammer, a saw, a plane.

Out of the shop. He went on. How far the street was! No—there it was, approaching him, coming toward him. There, that was the street. He stopped for a breath. These were the stones ... his feet were touching the pavement.... And the street was dark. But this end had always been dark, he remembered. Emmanuel lifted his head, his eyes searched the darkness. Nothing yet. But he knew. The yellow pools would be farther on, much farther on....