He must indeed have carried out some rudimentary sort of domestic programme under the debris at the rear (he certainly did not sleep or eat in the shop).  One or two lower rooms were left fairly intact.  The outward aspect of the place was formless; it grew to be no more than a mound in time; the charred timbers, one or two still standing, lean and naked against the sky, lost their blackness and faded to a silvery gray.  It would have seemed strange, had they not grown accustomed to the thought, to imagine that blind man, like a mole, or some slow slug, turning himself mysteriously in the bowels of that gray mound—­that time-silvered “eye-sore.”

When they saw him, however, he was in the shop.  They opened the door to take in their work (when other cobblers turned them off), and they saw him seated in his chair in the half darkness, his whole person, legs, torso, neck, head, as motionless as the vegetable of which we have spoken—­only his hands and his bare arms endowed with visible life.  The gloom had bleached the skin to the colour of damp ivory, and against the background of his immobility they moved with a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably.  No, they were never still.  One wondered what they could be at.  Surely he could not have had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in motion.  Even far into the night.  Tap-tap-tap!  Blows continuous and powerful.  On what?  On nothing?  On the bare iron last?  And for what purpose?  To what conceivable end?

Well, one could imagine those arms, growing paler, also growing thicker and more formidable with that unceasing labour; the muscles feeding themselves omnivorously on their own waste, the cords toughening, the bone-tissues revitalizing themselves without end.  One could imagine the whole aspiration of that mute and motionless man pouring itself out into those pallid arms, and the arms taking it up with a kind of blind greed.  Storing it up.  Against a day!

“That cachorra!  One day—­”

What were the thoughts of the man?  What moved within that motionless cranium covered with long hair?  Who can say?  Behind everything, of course, stood that bitterness against the world—­the blind world—­blinder than he would ever be.  And against “that cachorra.”  But this was no longer a thought; it was the man.

Just as all muscular aspiration flowed into his arms, so all the energies of his senses turned to his ears.  The man had become, you might say, two arms and two ears.  Can you imagine a man listening, intently, through the waking hours of nine years?

Listening to footfalls.  Marking with a special emphasis of concentration the beginning, rise, full passage, falling away, and dying of all the footfalls.  By day, by night, winter and summer and winter again.  Unravelling the skein of footfalls passing up and down the street!

For three years he wondered when they would come.  For the next three years he wondered if they would ever come.  It was during the last three that a doubt began to trouble him.  It gnawed at his huge moral strength.  Like a hidden seepage of water, it undermined (in anticipation) his terrible resolution.  It was a sign perhaps of age, a slipping away of the reckless infallibility of youth.