"
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.
Supposing, after all, that his ears should fail him. Supposing they
were capable of being tricked, without his being able to know it.
Supposing that that _cachorra_ should come and go, and he, Boaz,
living in some vast delusion, some unrealized distortion of memory,
should let him pass unknown.
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