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By Root 3831 0

step. It was as though he had taught himself to walk that way and I had a feeling that somehow he was acting a part; that something about him wasn't exactly real -- an idea which I dismissed immediately, since there was a quality of unreality over the whole afternoon. He came straight to the table without having to look about for me, as though he had expected me to take that particular table and no other -- although many tables were vacant. He was balancing a plate of cake on top of each cup, setting them down deftly and shoving one toward me as he took his chair.

"I thought you might like a piece of cheese cake," he said.

"Cheese cake?" I said. "I've never heard of it."

"It's nice. Sugar?"

"Go ahead," I said.

"No, after you, brother."

I looked at him, then poured three spoonfuls and shoved the shaker toward him. I was tense again.

"Thanks," I said, repressing an impulse to call him down about the "brother" business.

He smiled, cutting into his cheese cake with a fork and shoving far too large a piece into his mouth. His manners are extremely crude, I thought, trying to put him at a disadvantage in my own mind by pointedly taking a small piece of the cheesy stuff and placing it neatly into my mouth.

"You know," he said, taking a gulp of coffee, "I haven't heard such an effective piece of eloquence since the days when I was in -- well, in a long time. You aroused them so quickly to action. I don't understand how you managed it. If only some of our speakers could have listened! With a few words you had them involved in action! Others would have still been wasting time with empty verbiage. I want to thank you for a most instructive experience!"

I drank my coffee silently. Not only did I distrust him, I didn't know how much I could safely say.

"The cheese cake here is good," he said before I could answer. "It's really very good. By the way, where did you learn to speak?"

"Nowhere," I said, much too quickly.

"Then you're very talented. You are a natural. It's hard to believe."

"I was simply angry," I said, deciding to admit this much in order to see what he would reveal.

"Then your anger was skillfully controlled. It had eloquence. Why was that?"

"Why? I suppose I felt sorry -- I don't know. Maybe I just felt like making a speech. There was the crowd waiting, so I said a few words. You might not believe it, but I didn't know what I was going to say . . ."

"Please," he said, with a knowing smile.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You try to sound cynical, but I see through you. I know, I listened very carefully to what you had to say. You were enormously moved. Your emotions were touched."

"I guess so," I said. "Maybe seeing them reminded me of something."

He leaned forward, watching me intensely now, the smile still on his lips.

"Did it remind you of people you know?"

"I guess it did," I said.

"I think I understand. You were watching a death --"

I dropped my fork. "No one was killed," I said tensely. "What are you trying to do?"

"A Death on the City Pavements -- that's the title of a detective story or something I read somewhere . . ." He laughed. "I only mean meta-phor-ically speaking. They're living, but dead. Dead-in-living . . . a unity of opposites."

"Oh," I said. What kind of double talk was this?

"The old ones, they're agrarian types, you know. Being ground up by industrial conditions. Thrown on the dump heaps and cast aside. You pointed it out very well. 'Eighty-seven years and nothing to show for it,' you said. You were absolutely correct."

"I suppose that seeing them like that made me feel pretty bad," I said.

"Yes, of course. And you made an effective speech. But you musn't waste your emotions on individuals, they don't count."

"Who doesn't count?" I said.

"Those old ones," he said grimly. "It's sad, yes. But they're already dead, defunct. History has passed them by. Unfortunate, but there's nothing to do about them. They're like dead limbs that must be pruned away so that the tree may bear young fruit or the storms of history will blow them down anyway. Better the storm should hit them --"