His arms grew numb; he swung his legs down, one at a time, and dropped lightly to the dirt floor. Pain throbbed in his calves and a deeper pain, a pain induced by the naked sight of the groveling spectacle of those black people whose hearts were hungry for tenderness, whose lives were full of fear and loneliness, whose hands were reaching outward into a cold, vast darkness for something that was not there, something that could never be there, churned within him. Good God! Then he mused in the darkness. Yeah, there’s something that makes folks say God. . . . He shook his head in bewilderment. He had to get away from this. How long had he been down here underground? He did not know; in this darkness time stood still for him; it seemed that the only sense he had of time was when a match flared and the burning flame measured time by its fleeting duration. Plotting his sense of direction, he groped through the black shadows toward the hole leading to the sewer and the waves of song subsided. The rod was as he had left it, leaning against the wall. He took it and climbed back into the hole and started over the familiar ground, feeling the dirt flooring ascending as he went forward. Finally, he caught the faint sound of flowing water and it made him conscious of the measurement of time. So engrossed was he in his feelings of relief at finding his way back that he bumped his head again; he had reached that point in the passageway where the ceiling swooped low. He dropped to his knees and began to crawl. Now that he felt relatively safe, weakness engulfed him. He came to where the earth ended and he heard the noise of the current.

Since he had last crawled out of that water, his feet had become almost dry and now he was loath to wet them again. The water made less rustling in its flowing; no doubt the rain had slackened and most of the water in the sewers had run to the sea. Ain’t no use in staying here, he thought. He climbed out and stood up to his ankles in sewer water and looked around. Ought he to go up into the streets? What would he face if he lifted that manhole cover? At the mere thought of it he became tense; yes, then indeed he would stay. But what could he do down here? As he stared about in the dimness of the sewer, tiny prongs of hazy gold spilled suddenly from the manhole cover and played magically upon the surface of the flowing current. Yeah, them’s street lamps, he mused. Must be night now . . . How was Rachel? He pictured her as being at home, then remembered that he had left her at the hospital. More and more he found it repugnant to think of her, as though the image of her crowded more important things from his mind.