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This short story is copyright © 2000 Paul F. Doering. All rights reserved. It may not be reproduced in any medium in any form without a written license from the author.

For Joseph Tykocinski-Tykociner, graduate engineer, there could be no other destination but London in 1901. Queen Victoria, dead these ten months and deeply missed, had helped make her city the lodestone of the developing world. Encouraged by societal reforms, technology had begun its irresistible penetration of the home and factory, and ideas had gained prestige as a measure of personal value -- at least for people of the proper class.

To a budding renaissance man like Joseph it was an article of faith that no other European city so fostered the enlightened future of humankind. London was progress and opportunity. More to the point for an engineer, it was the standard-bearer and nurturing bosom of a technological revolution. A group of British investors had persuaded even the great radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi to establish a London company to commercialize his inventions. And in Joseph's mind, radio above all other innovations captured the promise of the new millennium.

Now he patiently waited his turn to step onto the Victoria Station platform, completing the journey from Poland. Five-foot-six, slender, and already balding at twenty-four, Joseph went unnoticed among the train's passengers. Yet in close-up his alert eyes, precisely trimmed mustache and confident voice imparted an arresting presence.

He could afford his patience. Dozens of letters of inquiry describing his qualifications were already on the desks of engineering firms throughout London. The facts were simple. After graduating from school in Wloclawek and working for manufacturers of electrical devices in New York, he'd earned a German diploma in engineering, with distinction. Now he was ready to begin his career. Like the man, the letters were truthful without exaggeration and proud without arrogance.

Joseph understood something that had escaped most of the people jostling one another toward the coach's doors. He knew that transplanting oneself unprepared could give no assurance of a better life. Cyclic parades of these boat-trains ate immigrants at the shore, swallowed them in London, and spat last year's failures back into the sea. The monotony of empire: hope in, shame out, day after day, dream after dream.

The press of passengers around Joseph extruded him from the train. The cavernous station was a sounding-box of concrete, steel and glass. It amplified the dragon-snorts of locomotives. It echoed the sharp crunch of steel-wheeled carts on concrete platforms and the screams of infants. All its surfaces -- lampposts, railings, columns, beams, walls -- were slimy with coal dust. What the smoke could not suffocate nor the heat wilt, the steam corroded. "Welcome to London."

Clutching pasteboard suitcases, shepherding frightened children, scanning the station for some hint of where to go and what to do, the crowd surged along the platform toward the immense central hall. Men in shiny suits. Women in handmade dresses and shawls. Some knowing a little English, most not.

Perhaps Joseph alone felt in control of his fate. At eighteen he had bested New York with neither experience, training nor prospects. Six years later he saw himself on the threshold of a lifetime of accomplishment. Yes, Joseph Tykociner was ready for London.

He braided a path along the platform, using his valise as a buffer. Inside the huge waitingroom he bypassed the Babel at the currency exchange, grateful he'd had the foresight to convert his money in Gdansk.

Beside an exit he found a calm in the human maelstrom. From his coat pocket he carefully withdrew the map he had copied in Warsaw. He understood it was a sad approximation of London, out of date and probably inaccurate even when new. Cartography was very much a manual art. Publishers postponed the expense of a new edition as long as possible. Still, this one held more information on one sheet of paper than most newcomers were apt to acquire in months.

So Joseph already commanded some important facts. He knew that for affordable lodging he'd need to make his way eastward to London's older sections, a significant journey. He had two short-term goals. First he had to find shelter for a day or two. Then he had to find permanent quarters so that he might advise potential employers where to contact him. If he marshalled his funds prudently, he could spend perhaps three months picking and choosing among the job-offers.

It was mid-afternoon on a cool October day as he stepped from the shelter of the station onto Buckingham Palace Road. Instantly he was surrounded by porters, by prostitutes and pickpockets, by scruffy children selling flowers or oranges or matches or newspapers, by frayed men hawking fish of unknown age and meat pies of unknowable species. All London, it seemed, played the game of separating immigrants from their money quickly. Anyone new to pounds, shillings and pence was easy to cheat.

From a half-mile south, the smell of the Thames assaulted him. The catastrophic cholera epidemics from the 1830's onward had thrived on the practice of using the river as both a sewer and a source of drinking water. At mid-century the river had swallowed as much as a quarter-million tons of raw sewage every day. Subsequent engineering projects had diverted much of the city's garbage to downstream discharge points, but industrial pollutants remained a serious problem. The smell was not unfamiliar to Joseph, of course. Wretched rivers were a common circumstance throughout Europe. Back home the Vistula still carried Warsaw's effluent through Wloclawek on its way to Gdansk and the sea.

Added to the river's odor were the offensive smells of commerce. Horses were everywhere, fouling the streets and the air. The first primitive motor vehicles added their stinging blue fumes to the grey smoke from thousands of individual coal fires heating London and cooking its meals. Joseph had been on the street only briefly, yet flecks of greasy soot were already soiling his white shirt.

In a cleaner, more breathable air he might have chosen to walk. Given his uncertainty about exactly where to seek a temporary room, though, and the irritation rising in his throat and lungs from merely standing outdoors, he hailed a horsebus and accepted the driver's advice on a suitable destination.

Newcomers had a wide choice of accommodations in London. The poorest paid a few pennies for a bed in one of the filthy firetraps in the dock district east of Tower Bridge. They had negligible heat, an unrelenting stench, no water, and a distinct sense of imminent collapse. Sanitary facilities -- undeserving of the term -- consisted of a rotting outhouse reached by a muddy, debris-littered path and perhaps shared by several houses.

As a tenant's affluence increased, so did the civility of the lodgings. Pubs usually kept a few rooms available on their upper floors at reasonable rates. Since there were hundreds of pubs, they absorbed a significant amount of the demand.

Beyond that, the volume of newcomers had made it profitable to remodel existing buildings as full-scale inns and even more commonly to set aside a room or two in a private dwelling. Such places were popular with families, since the charge was often by the room rather than by the head. Inns usually had one indoor bathroom for each floor, whereas in a private home the guests shared the owner's facilities.

At the top of the social scale were the hotels. Some of the most elegant adjoined railroad terminals and were owned by the railroad companies. Others were privately owned and operated. All competed for the carriage trade with frequent renovations and ever more opulent accouterments. In 1889 the Savoy had stunned London by providing electric lights, elevators, and bathrooms near the bedrooms. It had set off a whole new round of rebuilding.

Optimistic about his chances of finding work quickly, Joseph overspent slightly for his first few nights. However, after visiting several companies he realized that a job might not be secured as easily as he had expected. Other sharp young engineers had gravitated to London in search of the same openings. Clearly, it was going to require more time and substantially more self-promotion than he had envisioned. It was imperative that he find a modestly priced, permanent residence quickly.

Such places were indeed available in appealing sections of the city. At a time when a retail clerk's weekly wages were 15 shillings and a good breakfast cost under a half-shilling, a sparsely furnished corner of a partitioned attic near the British Museum rented for four shillings a week.

It would be pleasant living near the museum, but there were two objections to such facilities for Joseph.

First, he wanted something a bit less spartan. Engineers were the technological architects of a bright future for all humankind. Paid more than a salesgirl, surely he would be able to afford commensurate accommodations.

Second, Joseph quickly found he was unwelcome as a resident of the nicer parts of London. An immigrant might venture into a good English neighborhood to labor by day, but he wouldn't be permitted to stay the night. He wasn't us. He was them. Cultured, educated, mannered though he might be, he was unacceptable. Period.

It must have seemed to this intelligent and gentle man that he was destined to belong nowhere. Here he was an intruder, tolerated grudgingly if he knew and kept his place. In Wloclawek the Russian rulers regarded Poles as subhuman and unworthy of consideration in their own homeland. Only once had he been appreciated for merit and ability. In these first English days he remembered New York with a growing fondness.

London did have its places for outsiders, of course. If he declined to live in the city's slums, Joseph would be commuting by train from enclaves in the outskirts.

In the late 1800's trains had become London's circulatory system, the veins that brought its workers to the city's heart each morning and the arteries that pumped them home again each evening. All of the major railroads were privately owned. Each served a separate geographic region of the kingdom and the logically corresponding sector of London.

Like living creatures, railroads that were not growing were dying, so grow they did. They built opulent stations, each progressively more wondrous and expensive. New stations meant finding new land to accommodate them, not only for the huge terminals themselves but for the tracks that fed them. Yet London had neither empty spaces for massive buildings nor bare swaths for trackage, so a railroad's growth inevitably meant the acquisition and demolition of existing structures.

Whose property was most likely to be razed: the elegant edifices of the commercial interests and the wealthy families, or the humble, close-packed dwellings of the lower classes? No contest. The workers were displaced.

This had a salubrious impact on profits. If the workers were forced to move, where would they go? Why, outward, of course. They would move farther away from their London jobs and thus would have to commute. And who would transport them? The railroads that had made them involuntary refugees in the first place. Was there ever a more efficient mechanism for a self-aggrandizing enterprise?

Under these conditions it would appear that Joseph was trapped. He couldn't afford to commute until he had a job, he couldn't get a job until he had lodgings, and he couldn't find lodgings without commuting.

Fortunately, British politicians had intervened on behalf of the workers. The Great Eastern Railway Company had been pressured into running early morning and late evening trains between London and the northeastern environs at two pennies for the round trip. The GER had accepted this obligation as a palatable alternative to building new housing for the poor who were displaced by the pending construction of its giant Liverpool Street station. To the railroad's delight, the ultimate consequence of these cheap fares was the spreading out of its heavy traffic over a greater span of time, effectively increasing the capacity of the station. The GER therefore actually ran many more low-fare, off-hour trains than had been specified initially. By 1900 the company was selling seven million so-called workmens' tickets a year.

Spotting an advantage, the railroad went beyond restricting merely the times at which workmens' tickets were valid. It also restricted the geographical regions to which they applied. That is, the tickets were good for passage only up to a maximum specified distance from the city. It was a calculated policy to influence where the lower classes could live, assuring its highly profitable first-class patrons that the communities farther out would remain safely free of undesirables.

Joseph stood in the Liverpool station, studying a map of the GER's territory. It would be satisfying to believe that his choosing Stoke Newington, some four miles north, was the result of a thoughtful review of the borough's traditions. Its history does mesh nicely with his own persona.

Stoke Newington had earned a reputation for tolerating dissent. Many sects at odds with the established church had flourished. A college for non-conforming ministers counted Daniel Defoe among its students. A significant number of wealthy Jewish families from Spain and Portugal had settled there in the 18th century, and the Society of Friends had a meeting house.

The borough had experienced explosive settlement in the closing decades of the 19th century. Developers demolished the uneconomical estates of the fleeing upper classes and replaced them with street after street of virtually identical, narrow, three-story rowhouses, up to a hundred in a single unrelieved block. Every unit was set back two or three paces from the roadway and had a small back yard enclosed by a wooden or concrete fence. The expectation was that each family would give its house a unique character through plantings or decor.

Appearance and substance were uncorrelated. Some houses were sound, others collapsed half-built. If some inexpensive architectural filagree became fashionable briefly, it was incorporated into current projects. The next year it was supplanted by some other transiently stylish embellishment. You can trace the history of superficiality in English architecture by comparing the appurtenances from tract to tract around London.

By 1900 the outward wave of migrating laborers had already lapped against Stoke Newington, thanks mainly to the community's inclusion in the workmens'-ticket zone. Families free to do so had begun moving beyond the demarcation line. Those bound to stay were making the best of their circumstances by renting rooms to the newcomers and eventually even to immigrants.

So in Stoke Newington Joseph was welcome.

His approach to finding a room was practical. On the theory that the better regions were those farthest out, he rode from the Liverpool Street station as far as a workmens' ticket would permit. Then he made his way back toward the city until he found an acceptable lodging within his means. This turned out to be a furnished room at 49 Rectory Road, a rowhouse in a squad of thirty mates facing thirty across the street and backing up to thirty more. Number 49 was only a few hundred yards from the Rectory Road passenger station on the GER's Enfield branch and thus well suited to a commuter.

Stairways eat up space in a narrow house, so the rooms were disappointingly cramped. Joseph's room was just above the front door and entry hall. The family that was the principal occupant had the ground floor and the rest of the second.

Two of the three rooms on the top floor were rented to single men of no particular distinction. The third belonged to the family's maid-of-all-work, a young and wretchedly humble girl who toiled twelve to fourteen hours a day all year for a total recompense of £16, about a third of what Joseph might expect as a beginning engineer. They called her Sarah, probably not her real name. Servants often had to accept a new name to suit their new family. Footmen and chauffeurs tended to become James or John or Charles. Maids generally received virtuous biblical names. A name was a small thing to give up for a job.

All occupants shared one bathroom. It was on the second floor next to a separate water closet. The rest of the family's quarters were off-limits to the renters.

Joseph's earlier tour of advertised rooms had proven that "furnished" was not a word of universal meaning. This room at #49 had the grace to include the necessities. It boasted a tolerably unlumpy bed, a two-drawer chest doubling as a washstand, and an ornate oak armoire from grander circumstances. A chair would have been a welcome addition, but where could he have put it?

The window's eastern exposure promised morning sunshine and less need for the gaslight. On spring and autumn days it might even postpone until evening the need for a fire in the small coal-burning fireplace. That there was no central heating was evident from the huge twelve-flued chimney shared with one of the adjoining houses.

On the balance the place was less impressive than Joseph had fancied, but it was clean and as convenient as he could manage under the constraints of prejudice, the stratification of class, the limits of his purse, and the intrigues of the railroads.

So in the quietude of his first English weekend Joseph appraised his circumstances. Allowing for simple meals, necessary personal expenses and frugal pastimes, his five-shilling weekly rent would exhaust his resources shortly before Christmas. He had to hurry. Not only were his competitors numerous, but jobs were less plentiful than his research had led him to expect. There was a very good reason, and he'd overlooked it.

The nation's commerce -- indeed the Empire's -- depended on the predictability of governmental policy. Edward VII's accession in January had disturbed things.

The Victorian Era was more than a convenient name for a period in England's history. Victoria had inherited a monarchy in low esteem and by force of character had restored its honor and influence. Her popularity had acted as a steadying presence while a succession of prime ministers gradually introduced essential social reforms and nudged England into alignment with worldwide liberalizing trends. It can't be said that Victoria caused progress, but she certainly had enabled it. Her presence had also dampened the inclination of the impatient to seek change through violence.

This environment of stability and relative certainty had allowed commerce to proceed with few imponderables in its calculations. Business can tolerate moderate risk, but an unstable government swamps all other factors and reduces success to a matter of luck or influence, neither of which fosters honest enterprise.

And Edward was the playboy king, the antithesis of his mother. How, we wonder, could the quintessential child of the Victorian Era emerge with so few of its virtues? Edward substituted self-indulgence for self-control, sport for culture, adultery for monogamy, extravagance for thrift. Was this the stuff of stability? Without the example of a virtuous monarch, could business count on the responsibility of the politicians and the patience of the people? No, it could not, so it was watching and waiting.

Victoria had invited Joseph to London, but Edward had met him at the train.

Joseph needed an amended strategy. Informing his correspondents of his London address remained task one. He elevated to task two the creation of a budget against which he could measure the changes in his resources to ensure his survival for the longest possible duration without a regular income.

Task three was new. To promote himself above his competitors he had to learn details about each potential employer. That would set up task four: a second round of letters citing the particular aspects of his schooling and experience that made him the uniquely qualified candidate. Each letter must be socially correct, and he must deliver each in person.

This October weekend was the perfect time to begin exploring the vicinity of his new home. Joseph's section of Rectory Road and its associated cross-streets were purely residential, but a short walk west led him to some the area's best retail shops along High Street.

High Street was one section of a straight Roman road stretching single-mindedly from London to York. Once, its entirety had been known as Ermine Road. Wanting none of this one-road/one-name foolishness, thank you, the British had renamed it in parochial little pieces. Now it originates near the Liverpool Street station as Shoreditch High Street, then becomes Kingsland High Street and Stoke Newington High Street. Striking farther north, it's High Road through Tottenham before masquerading under a succession of jolly aliases past the horizon. Joseph rather fancied the notion of building his tomorrow on an engineering masterpiece of yesterday.

On this Saturday afternoon he discovered two invaluable High Street allies. At #62 was the shop of printer and stationer Mr. George Elwood. #80 was the home and office of Miss E. Gosschalk, typist. By suppertime Joseph had exchanged a few precious pennies for advice, professional calling-cards and some impressive notices.

He also now owned a capable pen, a small bottle of black ink, and a modest supply of linen writing-paper and envelopes. It had been a productive afternoon.

Joseph's second week began Monday when he joined the crush of humanity on an early workmens' train. It was already packed with the Enfield throng when it pulled into the Rectory Road station. There was never a possibility of getting a seat for the half-hour journey. That was especially true on trains running closer to the eight o'clock deadline for cheap passage, when nearly a thousand riders were aboard for the last leg into Liverpool Street. A standing passenger's challenge lay in breathing. Close-packed bodies made it difficult. Casual sanitary habits made it unpleasant.

At a penny each, the postage on the change-of-address notices would have added up to more than the cost of a day's meals, so on his way to the library Joseph personally delivered all he could. He devoted the day to research, carefully compiling data about the engineering firms to which he had already written. Here in London he also uncovered many promising companies of which he hadn't known previously. By train-time he possessed a substantially expanded list of possibilities.

Before returning home he listed himself with a few employment agencies not charging a fee to the applicant. Most of these operations served the semi-skilled trades, but in a difficult job-market it made sense not to overlook an advantage.

He spent the balance of the week at the Stoke Newington Public Library, where he could use the reading room for composing his individualized letters emphasizing for each company the strengths he offered its specific interests.

Writing in the period's flowing calligraphy with a steel pen was tedious. He had to pause periodically to rest his eyes and hand, stretch his legs and get some fresh air. Exploring the twisting, densely settled streets, he discovered several independent engineering firms run by individual entrepreneurs. These constituted an unexpected reservoir of employment possibilities, at least until such time as an opportunity might arise in a larger and better known company.

Back at the library he pored over the latest edition of the Stoke Newington street directory. From the resulting list of prospects he mapped a set of efficient walking tours so that even his breaks from letter-writing could be as profitable as possible. To his disappointment, however, most of the listed entrepreneurs had failed in the seven years since the directory's printing. With no newer listing he was forced to resort again to a personal tour of the whole area, but none of the resulting contacts led to anything.

In fact, he found that over half of all local businesses of any description whatsoever had ceased operations or changed hands in those intervening seven years. Clearly, affiliating with any but the large and well established companies carried a substantial risk of impermanence and might find him jobless again on short notice.

After a couple of weeks of monitoring his budget, Joseph saw that his reserves were dwindling unsustainably. The expedient remedy -- moving to less expensive housing -- was closed to him because of the need to retain the address he had given his correspondents. The alternatives were unappealing, now that the pleasant weather seemed to have fled. Still, changes were unavoidable, even if in the extreme they might put his health in jeopardy. He would just have to be careful.

When his schedule allowed, he saved a penny by traveling to and from London on the horse-drawn trams that rode the High Street rails. The journey took nearly an hour, and often he was forced to ride on the unsheltered upper level. He also hand-carried his letters to all but the most inaccessible addresses, an economy which necessitated his walking extended distances through the increasingly bothersome fog.

The fog. We who think ourselves beset by modern pollution have trouble imagining the lethal atmosphere of London's Novembers a hundred years past. Although progress in cleaning up the Thames had ameliorated the condition somewhat, the new century began with Londoners still dying from breathing autumn's perceptibly yellow air. The flow of cold air over the Thames generated a swirling, soupy mist that mixed with greasy smoke from November's more numerous and longer burning coal fires. Until winter was sufficiently entrenched to chill the river, the sky was so dark that gaslights sometimes burned at mid-day. A perverse wind could send the choking fog as far as four miles from the heart of the city. During one nightmarish week a generation earlier seven hundred people had died. It was reported then that walkers had drowned in the Thames for not seeing it and that cattle had suffocated. But Joseph hadn't heard those stories.

His other simple but risky economy involved cutting back on the content and frequency of his meals. He also began eating at coffeeshops advertising lower prices for supposedly the same fare offered elsewhere for more. In the days without effective ways of preserving food and before widespread practice of good hygiene in preparing meals, his plan for reducing expenses was a major gamble.

It was a gamble he lost. By mid-November he was experiencing coughing and indigestion. In a few days these gave way to chills, nausea and weakness. There were several doctors and chemists on High Street, but Joseph was reluctant to spend the money to consult them. He had not accounted for the possibility of ill health when devising his budget, and any significant unforeseen expenditure would be catastrophic to his depleted resources.

As his condition deteriorated, however, he admitted that the choice was no longer his. Trips to London had become exhausting, and all active job-seeking had halted. Although his letters of inquiry theoretically were still pleading his cause while he was unable to do so in person, the few replies he had received had all been terse and negative. Most companies simply had failed to respond at all.

Without a reversal of his decline he would be forced to abandon his plans for a career in London. He would return defeated to Poland and to some kind of work outside the profession that had animated him since his youth. He'd be part of the shuffling sludge he'd seen outbound from Victoria Station.

The cost of a doctor's diagnosis and of the subsequent treatment to effect a full cure was wildly beyond his means by this time. He dragged himself to the nearest chemist's shop and paid more than he could afford for some kind of pungent. yellowish powder. It was intended only to address his symptoms, but maybe even slight relief might enable him to resume his activities, if only on an attenuated level.

He took to his bed to let the medicine work. Not having eaten for two days, he was terribly hungry. Yet the smells that reached his room from the kitchen downstairs turned his stomach. He slept intermittently and unrefreshingly. Meek Sarah, to whom apparently only Joseph had ever extended any courtesy, quietly brought him extra changes of linen and checked each day for his mail. But there was no mail and the bedclothes quickly became soiled again.

Joseph had never been so miserable. Is there any feeling more lonely than when sick in a strange place? And it was not simply his health that was failing, it was his future. For the ambitious, life depends on the will to dream.

Another day came but with it not much hope. Then toward noon, whether through the beneficence of time or the powder, he quite abruptly began to feel better. He tried getting out of bed. He was giddy at first, but each step around the tiny room was little less hesitant. He drank a little water. It stayed down. Presently he felt well enough to bathe, a humanizing process he'd never fully appreciated before.

He was thinking clearly for the first time in almost a week. He counted his money: with luck, a week of rent and food and laundry and transportation and other undeniable necessities.

The time had come to be brutally realistic. His stay in London was effectively over. He had underwritten his dream with every scrap of his resources. Now he lacked even the wherewithal for the return trip to Poland. He knew his father would send him the money, of course. The father who had never abandoned hope that Joseph would join brother Maurice in the family's retail shop. The father who continued to see Wloclawek as the Tykociner home for generations to come. His father would pay for the son's trip home. It would take four or five days for an exchange of letters to bring the money to Stoke Newington. The son could hold on until then.

A humbled son but not a broken one. Joseph shaved. He trimmed his mustache and dressed in his best clothes. He gathered his pen and ink and a piece of paper and an envelope. He strolled slowly but deliberately to the public library to write one last letter. He composed it as he walked. Dear Father....

When a short time later he affixed the stamps and stepped from the post office into the afternoon sunlight, the irretrievability of the letter's message had cleansed him of all doubt about the decision. He had done his best. Guilt accrues to those afraid to try. Shame clings to those who accept it.

Returning to #49, he explained his dilemma and negotiated permission to pay his rent by the day, given the uncertainty of the mails. Wheezing up the steep stairs to his room, he found that the effort of the recent hours had taken more out of him than he'd realized. He felt woozy again, and now he was torn between lying down for a while or going out to eat. Rest or food. It was a tough decision for someone who'd had little of either.

He chose the food, although summoning the energy to leave his room bordered on the heroic. Walking erratically past several places along High Street, he felt curiously disquieted by the smell of food. It was an odd sensation for a hungry man. He finally willed himself into a little downstairs restaurant where he'd eaten occasionally before taking ill. He ordered a simple meal and attributed his lack of enthusiasm for it to his rising fatigue.

By the next morning, however, the phenomenon had more substantial implications. Refusing to surrender to what was displaying all the unhappy signs of a relapse, Joseph tried gamely to put in a full day of job-hunting. He returned home unrewarded, lit a fire to fend off a chill more profound than the weather warranted, and went to bed early.

The reborn sickness kept him in bed throughout the next day. His thoughts kept returning to the chemist's noxious powder. There was no assurance that his previous recovery could be credited to the medicine, but neither was there evidence to the contrary. The only certainty was that another dose would consume most of his remaining money.

It was now the second day since he'd dispatched the letter to his father. It had probably been delivered by now. Perhaps at this very moment his father was posting the requested funds. They could be in Joseph's hands as soon as the day after tomorrow. If so, buying medicine today would mean having to squeak by on the remaining pennies for only a couple of days. It was doable. And he felt so bad, that it was worth the chance.

Sarah tapped on his door and stepped in hesitantly to see how he was. It was wicked of her to be in a man's room, but Joseph wasn't like the others. His smile wasn't a mask for shameful thoughts. He never treated her like property.

When he told her about the medicine, she volunteered to run to the chemist's shop. Run it would have to be, too, because she was forbidden to leave the house on tenants' errands. She counted out the coins and buried them safely under a rag in her pocket. Clutching the empty envelope from the previous dose, she slipped unnoticed out the front door. In fifteen minutes she was back with the powder and a glass of cool water. Kindness begets kindness.

By the following day Joseph felt sufficiently improved to dress and take the air for a while, although he was quite unsteady on his feet. The promise of returning vigor gave him optimism despite the absence of an appetite. It was too soon for his father's reply to have reached London, so there was no anxiety over its whereabouts. On the balance, then, it was a good day.

The next day was not good at all. It was an infuriating day of but's. This was the first day on which the letter might reasonably have been expected to arrive, but it did not. The rent for another day was due, but it might have to be his last. The need for food was becoming acute, but he had scant means to buy it. Securing employment was the only development capable of rescuing the situation, but he had no energy to seek it.

By breakfast time on the following day there was no longer a choice about eating, so he walked to a coffeeshop. Recalling his previous misadventure, he spent three of his remaining pennies for a hard-boiled egg, some dry toast and a pot of tea. He ate slowly and with some trepidation. This time, however, it all tasted just as it should. Every bite was a fresh and exhilarating adventure. By the time he finished, he was allowing himself the hope that his illness might finally be past, and he was extrapolating his optimism into an irrational confidence that this was also The Day of the Letter.

During his more recent confinement it had turned unusually warm for the end of November. He decided to stroll around the neighborhood and make little mental notes about things he'd want to recall and describe when he got back to Wloclawek. So soon back to Wloclawek.

Here was the station where so often he'd merged into a great stew of humanity. Here was the greengrocer with the particularly juicy oranges. Here was the office of the gracious Miss Gosschalk who offered her advice as generously to an immigrant as to a lord. Here was the home of the dark-haired little girl who never failed to curtsy when he tipped his hat, a private game they'd invented spontaneously on his first day in Stoke Newington.

Joseph's eyes began to mist over. He liked it here. Yes, his room was small. Yes, he'd been certain it was going to suffocate him when he'd lain there so sick. But the people here were decent and honest. They worked hard. If he'd had the chance to stay longer, he might have found some lasting friendships among them. This place and its people had earned a role in his dream. Now it seemed that the memory of them would be the dream's only survivor.

It was late morning by the time Joseph crossed the Common and started the long walk through Rectory Road's narrow canyon of rowhouses. Even from that distance, though, he could see someone standing on the front walk at #49. He dared hope what it might mean. He broke into a puffing trot. Closing the gap, he saw that the waiting figure was Sarah, waving frantically at him and grinning uncontrollably. More wickedness.

A letter. She had a letter. She held it high and laughed liked the child she'd never been. He took it from her and looked at it in bewilderment.

The letter wasn't from Poland. It wasn't from his father. It wasn't the money for the trip home. It was addressed to him, all right, but it bore English stamps. His heart faltered and the animation drained from him.

Sarah watched the change and stood dumb. She scanned his face for some hint of an explanation. He looked pale, and the letter trembled in his hand. Perhaps he was getting sick again?

With leaden fingers Joseph put on his glasses and opened the envelope. He unfolded a piece of expensive stationery. He read, but a moment passed before he comprehended.

Joseph held the paper gingerly in his fingertips as if it might combust at any moment. His eyes danced over the words. He wanted to laugh and cry all at the same time.

But of course that wouldn't be proper for an engineer in a respected English firm. Instead he mustered his dignity and quietly read the letter to Sarah. She watched his face all the while and saw strength in it. Nothing needed saying.

He held the door for her and tipped his hat. She went inside smiling, very proud that she knew a great man.

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