He had another nickel ready for the turnstile and inserted it after expertly feeling for the slot, although had he seen fit to lower his head he could easily have made it out. He did not like to be seen lowering his head.

Coming onto the platform he turned left and strolled leisurely, noting as he went that as usual most of the people were crowded together at the platform’s center. He always went to the front end – as they should if they had the sense to observe that the first car was always emptiest. When a stretch of some twenty yards lay between him and the waiting people, he gradually slowed and came to a halt beside a steel pillar. He turned toward it unobtrusively, and stood with his lace a hand’s width from the indented center of the steel I-beam.

With an acute squint he screwed the pupils of his eyes into focus. Raising and lowering his head he searched the white-painted surface of the pillar. Then his movements stopped. Someone had written here. As he read, his skin began to warm with anticipation. In a pencilled scrawl, hastily written between the arrival and departure of trains, was Come L A 4-4409 beautifull and dumb. As he had many times before, he stood wondering now whether this was actually an advertisement or a wishful joke. A breath of adventure touched him, and he visualized an apartment somewhere … dark and scented with women ….

His eyes searched farther down. A well-drawn ear. Several marks. It was a fairly fruitful pillar, he felt. Often they were washed clean before he arrived in the morning. My name IS NOT ELSIE caught him for a moment and he shook his head and nearly smiled. How angrily Elsie – or whatever her name was – had written that. Why were they calling her Elsie? he wondered. And where was this Elsie now? Was she asleep somewhere? Or on her way to work. Was she happy now or regretful? Mr Newman felt a tie, an attachment with the people who wrote on these pillars, for it seemed to him that they said only what they meant. It was like opening someone’s mail …

His head stopped moving. Above his eyes was carefully printed, Kikes started W A R. Below it, Kill kikes kill ki. Apparently the author had been interrupted by the arrival of his train. Mr Newman swallowed and stared as though caught in the beam of a hypnotizing light. Above the fierce slogan stood the exclamation, Fascists!, with an arrow pointing down at the call to murder.

He turned from the pillar and stood looking down at the tracks. His heart had grown larger, his breathing came faster as a titillation of danger danced upon his mind. It was as though he had just seen a bloody fistfight. Around this pillar the air had witnessed a silent but terrible contest. While above on the street the traffic had calmly moved and people had slept through the night, here below a wild current had flowed darkly and had left its marks and was gone.