# Wings: Tales of the Psychic/Light
### LIGHT

Beneath the sooty velvet of the New York night, Tompkins Square was a blotch of lonely, mean sadness.
No night loungers there waiting for a bluecoat's hickory to tickle their thin patched soles; no wizen news vendor spreading the remnants of his printed wares about him and figuring out the difference between gain on papers sold and discount on those to be returned; no Greek hawker considering the advisability of beating the high cost of living by supping on those figs which he had not been able to sell because of their antiquity; no maudlin drunk mistaking the blur in his whisky-soaked brain for the happy twilight of the foggy green isle.
For Tcmpkins Square is both the soul and the stomach—possibly interchangeable terms—of those who work with cloth and silk and shoddy worsted, with needle and thread, with thimble and sewing-machine, those who out of their starved, haggard East-Side brains make the American women—the ​native-born—the best dressed in all the world. Sweatshop workers they are: men from Russia and Poland, men from the Balkans, from Sicily, Calabria, and Asia Minor; men who set out on their splendid American adventure, not for liberty, but for a chance to earn enough to keep body and soul together—and let the ward boss and the ward association attend to the voting, including the more or less honest counting of votes.
Work—eat—sleep and lights out at ten! Such is the maxim of the neighborhood, since lights cost money, and money buys food.
Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty benches, and a shy gleam of the half -veiled moon where it struck the fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass half hidden in a murky puddle.
On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the lighted window—like a winking eye—directly beneath the roof, high up. The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots, distributed irregularly over its warty façade, where the contractor had got rid of some ​art balconies and carved near-stone struts left over from a bankrupt Bronx job. It towered over the smug red-brick dwellings—remnants of an age when English and German were still spoken thereabouts—with thin, anemic arrogance, like a tubercular giant among a lot of short, stocky, well-fleshed people, sick, yet conscious of his height and the dignity that goes with it.
He saw the lighted window as he crossed the square from the south side, and sat down on one of the benches and stared at it.
Steadily he stared, until his eyes smarted and burned and his neck muscles bunched painfully.
For that glimmering light, gilding the fly-specked pane, meant to him the things he hated, the things he had cheated and cursed and ridiculed—and, by the same token, longed for and loved.
It meant to him, life—and the reasons of life.
It meant to him humanity and the faith of humanity: which is happiness. The right to happiness! The eternal, sacerdotal duty of happiness!
Happiness?
He laughed. Why—damn it!—happiness was a lie. Happiness was hypocrisy. It meant the diet​ing of man's smoldering, natural passions into an artificial, pinchbeck, thin-blooded puritanism. It spelled the mumming of the thinking mind—the mind that was trying to think—into the speciosities of childish fairy-tales. It was a sniveling reminder of pap-fed infancy.
The only thing worth while in life was success—which is selfishness. Selfishness sprawling stark-contoured and unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious, serenely brutal—a five-plied Nietzscheism on a modern business basis which acknowledges neither codified laws nor principles.
It had been the measure and route of his life, and—he whipped out the thought like something shameful and nasty, like a nauseating drug which his mind refused to swallow—it had cheated him.
Yes, by God! It had cheated him, cheated him!
For, first, it had given him gold and power and the envy of men, which was sweet.
Then, as a jest of Fate's own black brewing, it had taken everything away from him overnight, in one huge financial crash, and had made of him what he was to-night: gray, middle-aged, bitter, joyless—and a pauper. It had brought him here, to Tompkins Square, and had chucked him, like a worn-out, ​useless rag, into this dusty, sticky bench whence he was staring at the lighted window, high up.
He wondered what was behind it, and who?
Three days earlier he had come to New York with ten dollars—his last ten dollars—in his pocket. He had taken a room in this tenement-house, and every night he had sat on the bench and had stared at the warty, baroque façade.
Always it had been dark. Always the tenants, the hard-working people who lived there, had turned out their lights around ten o'clock with an almost military regularity that reminded him of barracks and a well-disciplined boarding-school.
He knew most of them. For they had talked to him, on stairs and landings and leaning from windows, with the easy garrulousness of the very poor who can't be snobs since they are familiar with each other's incomes and flesh-pots. They had lifted the crude-meshed veils of their hearts and hearths and had bidden him look—and all he had seen had been misery.
He checked the thought.
No! That wasn't true!
He had also seen love and friendship, and fine, ​sweet faith—and that was why he hated them—why he pitied and despised them.
Faith—love—friendship! To the devil with the sniveling, weak-kneed lot of 'em! They spelled happiness—and happiness did not exist—and—
Happiness!
The thought, the word, recurred to his brain with maddening persistency. It would not budge.
Happiness.
"Why, happiness is behind that lighted window!" The idea came to him—almost the conviction.
But what happiness? And whose?
He speculated who might be up there, in the garret room squeezed by the flat roof. He tried to picture to himself what might be shimmering behind that golden flash.
Perhaps it was Fedor Davidoff, the little hunchbacked Russian tailor, with the fat, golden-haired, sloe-eyed wife. He might be celebrating the coming of freedom to his beloved Russia. Or he might be sitting up late to finish some piece of work—to earn extra money. For his wife was expecting a child. He had three already, curly-haired, straight-backed. But he wanted more—"children make happiness, eh?" he used to say.
​Or—wait! Perhaps it was Peter Macdonald, the artist, dreaming over his lamp and his rank, blackened pipe, and deliberating with himself where he would live—upper West Side or lower Fifth—when the world should have acknowledged his genius and backed up the opinion with solid cash. Peter had lived now for over three months in the tenement-house. "Like the neighborhood—bully atmosphere—marvelous greens and browns," was the reason he gave. But the other tenants smiled. They knew that Peter lived there because his room cost him only two dollars a week, and because he took his meals with the Leibl Finkelsteins on the first floor for three dollars more.
Perhaps a pair of lovers. Enrique Tassetti, the squat, laughing Sicilian, who had taken to himself a bride of his own people. They would have spent fifty cents for a bottle of Chianti, another fifty for bread and mushrooms and oil and pepper to turn into a dish worthy of a Sicilian—or a king.
Again it might be Donchian, the Armenian, burning the midnight oil over the perfection of the mysterious invention of which he spoke at times, after having worked with needle and thread since six o clock in the morning; or old Mrs. Sarah ​Kempinsky, reading and rereading the letter which her soldier son had sent her from France; or—
What did it matter?
Whoever was sitting behind that lighted window was happy—happy—and the man's imagination choked, his mind became flushed and congested.
He was quite unconscious of his surroundings. The stillness of the streets seemed magical, the loneliness absolute. Only from very far came sounds: the Elevated rattling with a steely, throaty sob; a surface-car clanking and wheezing; a hoarse Klaxon blaring snobbishly; a stammering, alcoholic voice throwing the tail-end of a gutter song to the moist purple veils of the night.
But he did not hear.
He was conscious only of the lighted window, high up. It seemed to glitter nervously, to call to him, to stretch out, as if trying to communicate to him an emotion it had borrowed by contact with something—with somebody.
That was just the trouble. He wondered who that Somebody was, what that Something might be. Whoever it was, it seemed urgent, clamorous. Silently clamorous. His subconsciousness grew ​thick with amazement and wonder and doubt. It surged up—crowded, choking, tumultuous.
The lighted window!
What was behind it? What was its riddle?
He knew that he must find out, and so he rose, crossed the street, entered the house, and was up the stairs three steps at the time.
He found the room without any trouble and opened the door. He did not knock.
He stepped inside; and there, on the bed, he saw a motionless figure, faintly outlined beneath a plain white sheet, a tall candle burning yellow at the foot of the bed, another at the head.
He crossed over, lifted a corner of the sheet, and looked. And he saw the face of a dead man. It was calm and serene and unutterably happy.
Then it dawned upon him:
The man on the bed was himself.
THE END