looked at him queerly, as if to say that they no longer needed his help
and had rather done without him. The cart rolled on, another street or
two, and then through the open gate of the warehouse. The labourers
looked into one another's eyes uneasily, moved about, pulled the bales
off the cart and dragged them a little farther along the wall. Then they
tailed off, one by one, through a small inner door; and he stood there
alone, like a fool. A bit later, he heard them laugh and whisper under
their breaths. When he was tired of waiting, he went up the street again.

Nobody, nobody, nobody wanted him!

He ground his teeth and clenched his fists. In the street through which
he had to go, on the spaces outside the hotels sat ladies and gentlemen
toying with strange foods and sipping their wine out of long goblets.
They chattered gaily and tasted and pecked with dainty lips and turned-up
noses. The waiters ran here, there, like slaves. Those coaxing smells
stung like adders and roused evil thoughts in his brain. His stomach
fretted awfully and his empty head turned.

He hurried away.

In a street with windowless house-fronts, a street without people in it,
he felt better. He let his body lean against the iron post of a gas-lamp,
stuck his hands in his trouser-pockets and stood there looking at the
paving-stones. Now he was damned if he would take another step, he would
rather croak here like a beast; then they would have to take him up and
know that he existed.

The boys coming from school mocked him; they danced in a ring, with him,
the big fellow, in the middle. They hung paper flags on his back and