He told himself so and told himself that he was silly and weak. Still — could such a coarse and brutal face really be the outward mark of warmth and sensitivity? That shapeless blob of nose, those piggish eyes?
Never mind, he would go home in a taxi, not looking at anyone. There was a stand just ahead, in front of the delicatessen.
“Where to?” The door of the cab was open; the hackman’s voice was impersonally insistent.
Hoag caught his eye, hesitated and changed his mind. That brutishness again — eyes with no depth to them and a skin marred by blackheads and enlarged pores.
“Unnh…excuse me. I forgot something.” He turned away quickly and stopped abruptly, as something caught him around the waist. It was a small boy on skates who had bumped into him. Hoag steadied himself and assumed the look of paternal kindliness which he used to deal with children. “Whoa, there, young fellow!” He took the boy by the shoulder and gently dislodged him.
“Maurice!” The voice screamed near his ear, shrill and senseless. It came from a large woman, smugly fat, who had projected herself out of the door of the delicatessen. She grabbed the boy’s other arm, jerking him away and aiming a swipe at his ear with her free hand as she did so. Hoag started to plead on the boy’s behalf when he saw that the woman was glaring at him. The youngster, seeing or sensing his mother’s attitude, kicked at Hoag.
The skate clipped him in the shin. It hurt. He hurried away with no other purpose than to get out of sight. He turned down the first side street, his shin causing him to limp a little, and his ears and the back of his neck burning quite as if he had indeed been caught mistreating the brat. The side street was not much better than the street he had left. It was not lined with shops nor dominated by the harsh steel tunnel of the elevated’s tracks, but it was solid with apartment houses, four stories high and crowded, little better than tenements.
Poets have sung of the beauty and innocence of childhood. But it could not have been this street, seen through Hoag’s eyes, that they had in mind. The small boys seemed rat-faced to him, sharp beyond their years, sharp and shallow and snide. The little girls were no better in his eyes. Those of eight or nine, the shapeless stringy age, seemed to him to have tattletale written in their pinched faces — mean souls, born for trouble-making and cruel gossip. Their slightly older sisters, gutter-wise too young, seemed entirely concerned with advertising their arrogant new sex — not for Hoag’s benefit, but for their pimply counterparts loafing around the drugstore.
Even the brats in baby carriages — Hoag fancied that he liked babies, enjoyed himself in the role of honorary uncle. Not these. Snotty-nosed and sour-smelling, squalid and squalling —
The little hotel was like a thousand others, definitely third rate without pretension, a single bit of neon reading: “Hotel Manchester, Transient & Permanent,” a lobby only a half lot wide, long and narrow and a little dark. They are stopped at by drummers careful of their expense accounts and are lived in by bachelors who can’t afford better. The single elevator is an iron-grille cage, somewhat disguised with bronze paint. The lobby floor is tile, the cuspidors are brass. In addition to the clerk’s desk there are two discouraged potted palms and eight leather armchairs. Unattached old men, who seem never to have had a past, sit in these chairs, live in the rooms above, and every now and then one is found hanging in his room, necktie to light fixture.
Hoag backed into the door of the Manchester to avoid being caught in a surge of children charging along the sidewalk. Some sort of game, apparently — he caught the tail end of a shrill chant, ” — give him a slap to shut his trap; the last one home’s a dirty Jap!”
“Looking for someone, sir? Or did you wish a room?”
He turned quickly around, a little surprised. A room? What he wanted was his own snug apartment but at the moment a room, any room at all, in which he could be alone with a locked door between himself and the world seemed the most desirable thing possible. “Yes, I do want a room.”