I could describe that bed down to the smallest detail; I could draw it accurately, even to the carving; were I a carpenter I could make it. All that I suffered in it, of physical and mental anguish, the vain longings and despair, the hopes and fears, the loneliness, the feverish dreams--the entire dread panorama still hangs in the air between its stained brown foot and the broken sofa, as though of yesterday. I can see a tall man pass the end of it, one eye on me and another on the door, opening a razor slowly as he went. I see the blue eyes narrowing in his white face, the treachery of the coward twisting his lip into a smirk. I can see him sleeping like a child beside me, touching me. Moving stealthily about the room in the darkness too, as, thinking me asleep, he stole on bare feet to recover the confession of forgery I had forced him to sign, I can still see his dim outline, and even hear his tread--a petty scoundrel unwittingly on his way to gaol.
The bed, thus, is vividly present in my memory. By contrast with it, not quite so sharp, perhaps, and a pleasanter feeling associated with it, another New York sleeping-place rises in the mind--a bench in Central Park. Here, however, the humour of adventure softens the picture, though at the time it did not soften the transverse iron arms which made it impossible to stretch out in comfort. Nor is there any touch of horror in it. Precise and detailed recollection fades. The hoboes who shared it with me were companions, even comrades of a sort, and one did not feel them necessarily criminal or degraded. They were "on their uppers" much as I was, and far quicker than I was at the trick of suddenly sitting upright when the night policeman's tread was coming our way. What thoughts they indulged in I had no means of knowing, but I credited them with flitting backwards to a clean room somewhere and a soft white bed, possibly to that ridiculous figure of immense authority, a nurse, just as my own flashed back to a night nursery in the Manor House, Crayford, Kent. That the seats I favoured were near the Swings lent possibly another touch to the childhood's picture.
