He looked up and down the street, assuming a negligent attitude. His forehead was red. "Nope," he said. No one had seen him. "_She_ saw me this morning," he thought, and the red of his forehead came down to his cheeks. "It's getting worse; a regular habit. Let me see--two, three; it began three weeks ago----"
He shook his head perplexedly and resumed his way toward the Elevated station.
"It may have been all right when I was a boy," he said to himself as he swung along. "But now!
"Let me see. I was fourteen, the first time."
A picture rose before his eyes. It had happened in a far western land--a land that now remained in his memory as a pool of gold beneath a turquoise sky. He was lying there in the wild oats, upon his back, and above him in the sky a hawk circled free. He watched it long thus, relaxed in a sort of droning somnolence; then suddenly, to a particularly fine spiral of the bird in the air, something like a convulsion had shot through his body, and he had found himself erect, head back and chest forward, his arms flapping----
"'Twas the day before I ran away with the circus," he soliloquized in the midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later, when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it--and it would be something foolish----"
The train slid up to the platform; he boarded it and by some miracle found on the bench behind the door of the last car a narrow space in which he squeezed himself.
"I'll have to stop it," he said decisively.
He drew from his breast pocket a note-book and a pencil. Opening the book out across his knees, he bent over it and began to draw. He worked with concentration, but seemingly with little result, for he drew only detached lines. There were spirals, circles, ovals, parabolas; lines that curved upward, broke, and curved again downward, like gothic arches; lines that curved in gentle languor; lines that breathed like the undulations of a peaceful sea; and then just zipping, swift, straight lines that shot up to the upper end of the paper and seemed to continue invisibly toward an altitudinous nowhere. This is all he drew, and yet as he worked there was in his face the set of stubborn purpose, and in his eyes the glow of aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by dissatisfaction, renewed yearning--and he would begin again.