“Jesus! If the son-of-a-bitch stepped on you with that foot, he wouldn’t leave a grease spot, would he, Joe?”
The last piece of all was an immense fragment of the Solon’s arm and fist, with one huge forefinger pointed upwards in an attitude of solemn objurgation and avowal.
That figure was Katamoto’s masterpiece; and George felt as he saw it pass that the enormous upraised finger was the summit of his art and the consummation of his life: Certainly it was the apple of his eye. George had never seen him before in such a state of extreme agitation. He fairly prayed above the sweating men: It was obvious that the coarse indelicacy of their touch made him shudder. The grin was frozen on his face in an expression of congealed terror. He writhed, he wriggled, he wrung his little hands, he crooned to them. And if anything had happened to that fat, pointed finger, George felt sure that he would have dropped dead on the spot.
At length, however, they got everything stowed away in their big van without mishap and drove off with their Ozymandias, leaving Mr. Katamoto, frail, haggard, and utterly exhausted, looking at the kerb. He came back into the house and saw George standing there and smiled wanly at him.
“Tramp-ling,” he said feebly, and shook his finger, and for the first time there was no mirth or energy in him.
George had never seen him tired before. It had never occurred to him that he could get tired. The little man had always been so full of inexhaustible life. And now, somehow, George felt an unaccountable sadness to see him so weary and so strangely grey. Katamoto was silent for a moment, and then he lifted his face and said, almost tonelessly, yet with a shade of wistful eagerness:
“You see statue — yis?”
“Yes, Kato, I saw it.”
“And you like?”
“Yes, very much.”
“And —” he giggled a little and made a shaking movement with his hands —“you see foot?”
“Yes.”
“I sink,” he said, “he will be tramp-ling — yis?”— and he made laughing sound.
“He ought to,” George said, “with a hoof like that. It’s almost as big as mine,” he added, as an afterthought.
Katamoto seemed delighted with this observation, for he laughed shrilly and said: “Yis! Yis!”— nodding his head emphatically. He was silent for another moment, then hesitantly, but with an eagerness that he could not conceal, he said:
“And you see finger?”
“Yes, Kato.”
“And you like?”— quickly, earnestly.
“Very much.”
“Big finger — yis?”— with a note of rising triumph in his “Very big, Kato.”
“And pointing— yis?” he said ecstatically, grinning from ear to ear and pointing his own small finger heavenward.
“Yes, pointing.”
He sighed contentedly. “Well, zen,” he said, with the appeased’ air of a child, “I’m glad you like.”
For a week or so after that George did not see Katamoto again or even think of him. This was the vacation period at the School for Utility Cultures, and George was devoting every minute of his time, day and, night, to a fury of new writing. Then one afternoon; a long passage completed and the almost illegible pages of his swift scrawl tossed in a careless heap upon the floor, he sat relaxed, looking out of his back window, and suddenly he thought of Katamoto again. He remembered that he had not seen him recently, and it seemed strange that he had not even heard the familiar thud of the little ball against the wall outside or the sound of his high, shrill laughter. This realisation, with its sense of loss, so troubled him that he went downstairs immediately and pressed Katamoto’s bell.
There was no answer. All was silent. He waited, and no one came. Then he went down to the basement and found the janitor and spoke to him. He said that Mr. Katamoto had been ill, No, it was not serious, he thought, but the doctor had advised a rest, a brief period of relaxation from his exhausting labours, and had sent him for care and observation to the near-by hospital.
George meant to go to see him, but he was busy with his writing and kept putting it off. Then one morning, some ten days later, coming back home after breakfast in a restaurant, he found a moving van backed up before the house. Katamoto’s door was open, and when he looked inside the moving people had already stripped the apartment almost bare. In the centre of the once fantastic room, now empty, where Katamoto had performed his prodigies of work, stood a young Japanese, an acquaintance of the sculptor, whom George had seen there several times before. He was supervising the removal of the last furnishings.
The young Japanese looked up quickly, politely, with a toothy grin of frozen courtesy as George came in. He did not speak until George asked him how Mr. Katamoto was. And then, with the same toothy, frozen grin upon his face, the same impenetrable courtesy, he said that Mr. Katamoto was dead.
George was shocked, and stood there for a moment, knowing there was nothing more to say, and yet feeling somehow, as people always feel on these occasions, that there was something that, he ought to say. He looked at the young Japanese and started to speak, and found himself looking into the inscrutable, polite, untelling eyes of Asia.
So he said nothing more. He just thanked the young man and went out.
4. Some Things Will Never Change
Out of his front windows George could see nothing except the sombre bulk of the warehouse across the street. It was an old building, with a bleak and ugly front of rusty, indurated brown and a harsh webbing of fire-escapes, and across the whole width of the facade stretched a battered wooden sign on which, in faded letters, one could make out the name —“The Security Distributing Corp.” George did not know what a distributing corporation was, but every day since he had come into this street to live, enormous motor-vans had driven up before this dingy building and had backed snugly against the worn plankings of the loading platform, which ended with a sharp, sheared emptiness four feet above the pavement. The drivers and their helpers would leap from their seats, and instantly the quiet depths of the old building would burst into a furious energy of work, and the air would be filled with harsh cries:
“Back it up, deh! Back it up! Cuh-mahn! Cuh-mahn! Givvus a hand, youse guys! Hey-y! You!”
They looked at one another with hard faces of smiling derision, quietly saying “Jesus!” out of the corners of their mouths. Surly, they stood upon their rights, defending truculently the narrow frontier of their duty:
“Wadda I care where it goes! Dat’s yoeh look-out! Wat t’hell’s it got to do wit me?”
They worked with speed and power and splendid aptness, furiously, unamiably, with high, exacerbated voices, spurred and goaded by their harsh unrest.
The city was their