pale fox-eyes, which said that they looked upon his desperate life and knew the cause of his despair, and felt a bitter triumph over it. The look on their cold faces and in their fox-eyes said to him that there was no hope, no work, no joy, no triumph, and no love for such as he, that there could be nothing but defeat, despair and failure for the living of this world, that life had been devoured and killed by such as these, and had become rats’alley, death-in-life for ever.
And yet he searched their hated faces desperately in that cold red light, he sought frantically in their loathed faces for a ray of hope, and in his drowning desolation shameful words were wrenched from him against his will—words of entreaty, pleading, pitiful begging for an alms of mercy, a beggarly scrap of encouragement, even a word of kindly judgment on his life, from these cold and hateful faces that he loathed.
"But my work—this last work that I did—don’t you think—didn’t it seem to you that there was something good in it—not much, perhaps, but just enough to give me hope?… Don’t you think if I go on I may do something good some day—for God’s sake, tell me if you do?—or must I die here in this barren and accursed light of Friday afternoon, must I drown and smother in this poisonous and lifeless air, wither in this rootless, yellow, barren earth below the barrel, die like a mad dog howling in the wilderness, with the damned, cold, hateful sneer of your impotent lives upon me?
“Tell me, in God’s name, man, is there no life on earth for such as I? Has the world been stripped for such as you? Have all joy, hope, health, sensual love, and warmth and tenderness gone out of life—are living men the false men, then, and is all truth and work and wisdom owned by rats’alley and the living dead such as yourself?—For God’s sake, tell me if there is no hope for me! Let me have the worst, the worst, I beg of you. Is there nothing for me now but the grey gut, the sick heart, and the leaden spirit? Is there nothing now but Friday afternoon in March, Miss Potter’s parties, and your damned poisonous, sterile, cold, life-hating faces? For God’s sake tell me now if I am no good, am false while you, the living dead, are true—and had better cut my throat or blow my brains out than stay on longer in this world of truth, where joy is dead, and only the barren rootless lives of dead men live!—In God’s name, tell me now, if this is true—or do you find a rag of hope for me?”
“Ah,” the old composer Cram would answer, arranging the folds of his dirty scarf, and peering out malevolently underneath his sparse lank webs of dirty grey, as the red and wintry light fell hopelessly on his poisonous
