“So’m I,” said the A.B., pulling on a blue jacket. “There’s a bag on Sand Street that thinks I’m papa.”
“Loan me a dollar, Al. An’ I’ll go with you.”
“A dollar?” He laughed again without looking.
“I’ll pay you back in Panama,” said the ordinary.
“We don’t get no draw in Panama,” said Al, and left.
Some of the men followed him and the others climbed into their bunks. The lights went out. The old sailor snored uneasily through the bitter ghosts of his life. In the bunk above him the young ordinary tried to forget Sand Street. He wanted to think about a secluded little valley on the Pacific coast—so far away. He remembered the thick smell of clover and the believing, fresh eyes of a girl he had left—for this? His bunk felt damp and he turned wearily.... His shipmate was on Sand Street now. There would be light-haired women and dark-haired women. There would be dancing and an orchestra.... The boy rolled on his stomach and held a pillow tightly against his eyes. The darkness brought fields and sunsets; branches and yellow, curving rivers. Memory covered Sand Street—Sand Street with its gin-mills, its red mouth and perspiration. The boy held the pillow tighter. Smelling the girl’s lips and the clover—dreaming of the bright, soft land—so far—his mother, his sweetheart, he went to sleep.
Martin had lived in the Bowery a week before he realized that the sounds and odors seemed less offensive to him; that his acquaintances and his surroundings appeared less brutal. Each night in the hotel some man died loudly in his bed. It was an incident. Martin felt himself in a husk through which no poison could penetrate. One day, in an effort to regain his lost perception he left the street, crossed old Italian town, passed barren, rock-like buildings and looked for the first time at Washington Square. He walked across the park, holding it all—the grassy air, the fat babies, the old men with tanned, bald heads and individualities he’d never seen before nor understood. On one bench he saw several of his comrades on Relief. They were sitting quietly in the warm, fall sunshine. “Talked out,” thought Martin, “and glad of it.” He passed them, nodded, smiled and wondered why they thought him so apart, youthfully looking at them for an answer instead of at himself. He then crossed over to the circular pool in the center of the Square where boys and girls were romping in the thin spray of the fountain. In the anticipation of the approaching colder weather when the water would be stopped and this late play ended for a time, they seemed more active than usual. “Why is it,” Martin asked himself, “that I feel kinship among the antitheses—these gay children or the devil!”