Presently I was laughing hysterically. Run after him, bawl him out, challenge him to a duel? Why, he wouldn’t even recognize me! I was a nonentity to him, just a voice in the dark asking for alms. I drew myself up still more erect and took a deep breath.
I looked around calmly and deliberately. The street was empty, not even a cab rolling along. I felt strong and chastened, as if I had just taken a whipping I deserved. “You bastard,” I said aloud, looking in the direction of my invisible benefactor, “I’m going to thank you for this! You don’t know what you’ve done for me. Yes sir, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I’m cured.” And laughing quietly, trembling with thanksgiving, I got down on my hands and knees in the rain and began raking in the wet coins.
Those which had rolled into the gutter were covered with mud. I washed them carefully in a little pool of rain water near a post of the elevated line. Then I counted them slowly and deliciously.
Thirty-six cents altogether. A tidy sum. The cellar where we lived was near by. I brought the bright clean coins home to my wife and showed them to her triumphantly. She looked at me as if I had gone out of my head.
“Why did you wash them?” she said nervously.
“Because they had fallen in the gutter,” I answered. “An angel with an opera hat left them there for me. He was in too much of a hurry to pick them up for me. . . .”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” said my wife, eyeing me anxiously.
“I never felt better in my life,” I said. “I’ve just been humiliated, beaten, dragged in the mud and washed in the blood of the Lamb. I’m hungry, are you? Let’s eat.”
And so at 3:10 of an Easter morning we sallied forth from the dungeon arm in arm and ordered two hamburgers and coffee at the greasy spoon cafeteria on Myrtle Avenue corner of Fulton Street.
I was never so wide awake in my life, and after I had offered up a short prayer to St. Anthony I made a vow to remain wide awake and if possible to wake up the whole world, saying in conclusion Amen! and wiping my mouth with a paper napkin.
The end
