and the faces of the people, tasted it on his lips, and endured it in the screaming and sickened dissonance of ten thousand writhing nerves so that he could no longer sit, rest, or find oblivion, exhaustion, forgetfulness or repose anywhere he went, or release from the wild unrest that drove him constantly about. He went to bed only to get up and prowl again the wet and barren little streets of night; he ate, and instantly vomited up again all he had eaten, and then like a dull, distressed and nauseated brute, he would sullenly and wretchedly eat again.
He saw the whole earth with the sick eyes, the sick heart, the sick flesh, and writhing nerves of this grey accursed weight of shame and horror in which his life lay drowned, and from which it seemed he could never more emerge to know the music of health and joy and power again; and from which, likewise, he could not die, but must live hideously and miserably the rest of his days, like a man doomed to live for ever in a state of retching and abominable nausea of heart, brain, bowels, flesh and spirit.
It seemed to him that all was lost, that he had been living in a fool’s dream for years, and that now he had been brutally wakened and saw himself as he was—a naked fool—who had never had an ounce of talent, and who no longer had an ounce of hope—a madman who had wasted his money and lost precious years when he might have learned some work consonant with his ability and the lives of average men. And it now seemed to him that his family had been terribly and mercilessly right in everything they had said and felt, and that he had been too great a fool to understand it. His sense of ruin and failure was abysmal, crushing, and complete.
XLII
It was in this temper, after two days of aimless and frenzied wandering about the streets of the town, and over the hills that surrounded it, during which time he was no more conscious of what he did, said, ate, thought or felt than a man in a trance, that Eugene started off suddenly to visit his other married sister, who lived in a little town in South Carolina. He had not seen her since his father’s death two years ago; she had written him a few days before asking him to come down, and now, driven more by a fury of flight and movement than by any other impulse, he wired her he was coming, and started out in one of the Public Service motor cars which at that time made the trip across the mountains. Luke had arranged to meet him sixty miles from home at the town of Blackstone, in
