428
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Ah," she said with a sharp breath. "Now we're coming to it. How
did you imagine it was going to be-big shot? Everything made smooth
for you? I thought you were leading up to this."
She had not, perhaps, intended to reply as harshly as she did, but
she brooded a great deal and now she could not forbear to punish him
and make him feel pains like those she had to undergo.
He struck the wall again, this time with his knuckles, and he had
scarcely enough air in his lungs to speak in a whisper, because his heart
pushed upward with a frightful pressure. He got up and stamped his
feet in the narrow enclosure, and bit his small teeth together and
thought he was about to lose his reason.
"Haven't I always done my best?" he yelled, though his voice
sounded weak and thin to his own ears. "Everything comes from me
and nothing back again to me. There's no law that'll punish this, but
you are committing a crime against me. Before God-and that's no
joke. I mean that. Before God ... ! Sooner or later the boys will know it."
In a firm tone, levelly, Margaret said to him, "I won't stand to be
howled at. When you can speak normally and have something sensible
to say I'll listen. But not to this." She hung up.
Wilhelm tried to tear the apparatus from the wall. He ground
his teeth and seized the black box with insane digging fingers and
made a stifled cry, and pulled. Then he saw an elderly lady staring
through the glass door, utterly appalled by him, and he ran from the
booth leaving a large amount of change on the shelf. He hurried down
the stairs and into the street.
On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was
almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust
footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores.
And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of
every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every
genius, possessors of every human secret antique and future, in every
face the refinement of one particular motive or essence-I
labor,
I
stJend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy,
I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.
Faster, much faster than any man
could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than a causeway, the
street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed and it seemed
to Wilhelm to throb at the last limit of endurance. And although the
sunlight appeared like a broad tissue, its actual weight made him feel
like a drunkard.
'I'll get a divorce if it's the last thing I do,' he swore. 'As for
Dad ... As for Dad ... I'll have to sell the car for junk and pay the
hotel. I'll have to go on my knees to Olive and say "Stand by me a
while. Don't let her win. Olive!'" And he thought, 'I'll try to start
again with Olive. In fact, I must. Olive loves me. Olive-'
Beside a row of limousines near the curb he thought he saw Dr.
Tamkin. Of course he had been mistaken before about the hat with
the cocoa-colored band and didn't want to make the same mistake
twice. But wasn't that Tamkin who was speaking so earnestly, with
