Maria found Zerkow himself in the back room, cooking some sort of a meal
over an alcohol stove. Zerkow was a Polish Jew--curiously enough his
hair was fiery red. He was a dry, shrivelled old man of sixty odd. He
had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown
keen as those of a lynx from long searching amidst muck and debris; and
claw-like, prehensile fingers--the fingers of a man who accumulates,
but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know
instantly that greed--inordinate, insatiable greed--was the dominant
passion of the man. He was the Man with the Rake, groping hourly in the
muck-heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. It was his dream,
his passion; at every instant he seemed to feel the generous solid
weight of the crude fat metal in his palms. The glint of it was
constantly in his eyes; the jangle of it sang forever in his ears as the
jangling of cymbals.
"Who is it? Who is it?" exclaimed Zerkow, as he heard Maria's footsteps
in the outer room. His voice was faint, husky, reduced almost to a
whisper by his prolonged habit of street crying.
"Oh, it's you again, is it?" he added, peering through the gloom of the
shop.
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