To most of the students of the International Hostel across the street, the man was an incidental object in that gelid landscape. The older residents rarely took notice of him as they grazed among the periodicals in the reading and visitors’ room, the windows of which fronted on Riverside Drive. New students or their guests, having heard about the eccentric, nearly naked marcher, or else catching a glimpse of him as they hurried indoors to the foyer, paused at the windows, speculating on his circumstances, his painful and bizarre appearance.

What could he be saying to himself? His lips never ceased to move in silent speech. At intervals, he held his arms straight out and turned in slow circles, then listed like a slackening top, and at last straightened up and stood facing the dark Palisades across the river.

If anyone laughed at the man, it was usually a Swiss back from his classes in hotel management at Columbia University a few blocks south of the hostel. “Don’t laugh!” a Spanish student would say sternly, at once adding an ironic comment of his own about the man’s arcane ritual.

The day after Christmas, a Japanese opened the door to the reading room and, noting a chess game in progress between two Chinese in a corner, abruptly withdrew. Someone laughed. Mehta, one of the Indians from New Delhi, who had been standing at the windows observing the man salute the Claremont Inn, turned and explained to the room at large, “It was phosgene gas, without doubt. I have read about your war…extensively.”

Walter Vogel, an unemployed actor since the Federal Theater Project had ended a few months earlier, hated the Indian, who had once said to him, smiling, “Walter, you are like a snake who eats the tiny eggs of birds,” a reference to Walter’s girl-hunting in the hostel cafeteria.

“Ah, India…” said Walter, opening his Daily Worker in Mehta’s face. He disliked all Indians, with their borrowed voices and their women who would look, he imagined, the same lying down as they did standing up.

“Phosgene or chlorine,” Mehta continued, now speaking to an Indian friend. “They used it at Ypres, the German people. But the Allies, as they were called”—the friend smiled—“found the gas mask to be somewhat effective, and, naturally, used gas themselves. The French employed gas shells. Interesting, don’t you think?”

“The West is very inventive,” Mehta’s friend said. “In India, of course, we are not so advanced.”

“How superior of you,” said Hannibal Salazar. “Don’t you think India superior, Walter?”

Walter sat down without replying and continued to read his paper. Hannibal looked toward the window where the girl Walter had brought with him stood, still peering out of it. He went to her.

“A thing thrown away,” said Hannibal softly. “That man…”

“How can he bear it?” the girl asked, her face nearly touching the pane. “The cold…it’s even cold in this room.”