The old man who lived over the corner drugstore turned restlessly in his bed. His eyes were old, but in the blue square of night framed by his window he could detect the pallor of morning. Crooking his elbow under his head, he turned to the east, and lay waiting for the day. He had spied on the coming of dawn many times, as a younger man might spy on a woman. He knew many strange and secret things about the way a day is born and dies.
The day never starts in the city. It starts in the country near the edge of the world. It is a little timid at first, the way it comes tip-toeing over the fields. But once the cocks start crowing it feels like hurrying. With light steps it runs here and there, flicking whatever it passes with a gentle tap, to make sure that everything is awake in the country before it goes on to the shacks at the fringe of the town.
By that time the day is bolder. It gives up worrying about whether the sun will be late. The big laggard has washed his beaming face and is already peeping over the world.
The day starts to cry out, “Wake up! Wake up!” as it leaps over the railroad tracks and comes to the first dishevelled streets, still sprawling in sleep. It has to shout, now, because of the clanking and whistling of the switch engines and the rumble of early trucks. It would really like to steal quietly into the city and rap very softly on the windows, so as not to startle anyone.
How much better it would be if people opened their eyes and were glad that night had crept away, ashamed of all it had been doing in the darkness. How splendid it would be if people jumped up, when light came down the street, and went to their windows joyfully, nodding to it and calling out, “Good morning!”
The day would be able to go on then, encouraged, brightening over the squalid tenements and grim factories, popping into little hole-in-the-corner stores, tickling the eyelids of the tramps on the benches.
But the day is easily put out by the way city people act, as though they wish it had never come. By the time it reaches the down-town corners it has given up caring very much whether it becomes a nice day or not.
The old man who knows why the days sometimes don’t behave very well is already at his window, over the drugstore. It is nearly nine o’clock. Trolleys and automobiles get in each other’s way, clanging and honking. Crowds of office people and clerks and early shoppers wriggle rudely against one another when the traffic lights change. Everybody is in a hurry. Nobody pays any attention to the day.
Even the policeman on the opposite corner is too busy to notice, because he is talking to the bank messenger and the caretaker who is squatting down awkwardly to polish the brass plate outside the bank. The three of them keep on talking. Every now and again the stooped old caretaker shakes his rag in the messenger’s face, and then the policeman screws his neck around in his collar, and fingers his belt portentously. No one notices the sunshine glinting on the bright edges of the letters the caretaker has polished.
Before long the day starts blustering a bit, so that the heedless crowd will become aware of it. By noon the wind is plunging down between the buildings like an angry bird, swooping off hats, flapping overcoats open and jerking at women’s skirts as they cross the corner from the bank to the cigar store.
And in the afternoon, growing angrier and more and more jealous of the attention the crowds are paying to their own little scurrying affairs, the day begins to pelt them with icy sleet.
The old man who knows better then anybody the way a day feels, watches from his window with a crooked smile.
“Sort of jealous, like old Jehovah,” he says to himself very quietly, so that nobody will hear.
The sleet keeps falling. The flakes get bigger and whiter, clinging like fluff to cheeks and noses. On the little flat hats the women are wearing, the soft snow lies like icing on a moving multitude of cakes. The big raucous youth on the cigar store corner, who bellows and slaps newspapers under people’s arms all day, is so plastered from head to foot that he looks like a snowman stamping to and fro.
The day has seen so much ill-humour in hundreds of passing faces that it seems to have caught the infection of petty spitefulness. Only the hoarse-voiced newsboy keeps smiling as he hops about, stamping and shouting. He jokes boisterously with his sullen customers, and because of this one cheerful voice, the day relents, and decides to redeem itself.
The snow dwindles to tiny flakes, and ceases altogether. In the west the clouds roll back out of the way somewhere, and the sun suddenly gleams through the haze. In no time at all it is flashing on the long procession of windshields and getting in people’s eyes. For half an hour before it sinks the unexpected glory of it blazes like a warm glow of hope and promise in the sky.
The old man, who has a lot to do with managing the sun, blinks and draws back a little from his window. To himself, very secretly, he nods and whispers: “Just the way old Jehovah hung the rainbow up in the sky once. I know!”
The day lingers to watch the last light on the hurrying faces, and the old eyes at the window twitch expectantly as the girl with the skittish walk comes round the corner, stepping lightly as though she can hardly keep from dancing. Every night she disappears through the door between the bank and the jeweller’s store, and in a moment or two a light appears over the jeweller’s, and she comes close to the window, taking off her hat.
There are flimsy curtains over the window, but when she is undressed and stands in the light near the dressing table, doing her exercises, it is easy to see her.
After so many spiteful, stingy, cringing faces and fat, slumping bodies, the day delights in the slender figure of a youthful woman, bending and swaying and touching her toes. But when she begins to dress again, the day darkens quickly, feeling guilty at having stayed so long.
The old man chuckles quietly, as he thinks of the garden of Eden, and says to himself: “Old Jehovah got sore when Eve started covering herself up with fig leaves. You bet he did. Sure, he kicked her and Adam out of there.”
The light goes off behind the flimsy curtains, and the old man pushes back his chair and gropes for his hat in the dark.
Downstairs in the drugstore, the thick-lipped Italian soda clerk says to the cashier: “Here comes the Almighty.”
The girl smiles at old Mr. Wherry as he goes past to his usual place at the end of the fountain. “Don’t tease him now,” she says severely to the clerk, but he moves away with a silly swaying motion of his hips and plumps his hands down with a smack on the counter.
“Been a queer kind o’ day,” he leans ever and bawls in the old man’s ear.
“Kind of,” says Mr. Wherry, screwing up his eyes secretively. He isn’t going to tell young Tony how much he’s had to do with it. He isn’t going to tell people all he knows.
While he waits for his sandwich he wonders what kind of a day he will figure out for tomorrow.