At the end of four weeks, with hunger gnawing so avidly at his core that he could not pass a restaurant without twitching muscles and quivering nerves, he turned abruptly from the street into a cigar store and telephoned to Mr. Shayne. The banker was full of sound counsel and ready charity. Hugo regretted the call as soon as he heard Mr. Shayne’s voice; he regretted it when he was ravishing a luxurious dinner at Mr. Shayne’s expense. It was the weakest thing he had done in his life.

Nevertheless he accepted the position offered by Mr. Shayne. That same evening he rented a small apartment, and, lying on his bed, a clean bed, he wondered if he really cared about anything or about anyone. In the morning he took a shower and stood for a long time in front of the mirror on the bathroom door, staring at his nude body as if it were a rune he might learn to read, an enigma he might solve by concentration. Then he went to work. His affiliation with the Down Town Savings Bank lasted into the spring and was terminated by one of the oddest incidents of his career.

Until the day of that incident his incumbency was in no way unusual. He was one of the bank’s young men, receiving fifty dollars weekly to learn the banking business. They moved him from department to department, giving him mentally menial tasks which afforded him in each case a glimpse of a new facet of financial technique. It was fairly interesting. He made no friends and he worked diligently.

One day in April when he had returned from lunch and a stroll in the environs of the Battery—returned to a list of securities and a strip from an adding machine, which he checked item by item—he was conscious of a stirring in his vicinity. A woman employee on the opposite side of a wire wicket was talking shrilly. A vice-president rose from his desk and hastened down the corridor, his usually composed face suddenly white and disconcerted. The tension was cumulative. Work stopped and clusters of people began to chatter. Hugo joined one of them.

“Yeah,” a boy was saying, “it’s happened before. A couple o’ times.”

“How do they know he’s there?”

“They got a telephone goin’ inside and they’re talkin’ to him.”

“I’ll be damned.”

The boy nodded rapidly. “Yeah—some talk! Tellin’ him what to try next.”

“Poor devil!”

“What’s the matter?” Hugo asked.

The boy was glad of a new and uninformed listener. “Aw, some dumb vault clerk got himself locked in, an’ the locks jammed an’ they can’t get him out.”

“Which vault? The big one?”

“Naw. The big one’s got pipes for that kinda trouble. The little one they moved from the old building.”

“It’s not so darn little at that,” someone said.