stared gape-mouthed, he listened, he saw the whole thing blazing in his face again to the tone and movement of its own central, unique, and incomparable energy. It was so real that it was magical, so real that all that men had always known was discovered to them instantly, so real he felt as if he had known it for ever, yet must be dreaming as he looked at it; therefore he looked at it and his spirit cried:
“Incredible! Oh, incredible! It moves, it pulses like a single living thing! It lives, it lives, with all its million faces”—and this is the way he always knew it was.
XLVII
That year—the first year that he lived there in the city—he was twenty-three years old. After these months of frenzy, drunkenness, and arrest, he was at the last gasp of his resources, and the eighteen hundred dollars a year, which was his salary at the university that had employed him as an instructor, seemed to him a wage of princely munificence—a stroke of incredible good fortune.
And although his position as instructor had been given to him in one of the usual ways, through the recommendation of the teachers’bureau at Harvard University, and the letters of some of the professors there, he was tortured constantly by the thought of his inadequacy and ignorance, and by the horrible fear that his incompetence would be discovered and that one day he would be suddenly, peremptorily, ruinously, and disgracefully discharged.
At night, when he went to bed in his little cell at the cheap little hotel nearby where he lived, the thought of the class he had to meet the next day fed at his heart and bowels with cold poisonous mouths of fear, and as the hour for a class drew nigh he would begin to shake and tremble as if he had an ague; the successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold to the class-room at the university a few hundred yards away—from cell to elevator, from the tiled sterility of the hotel lobby to the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside, thence to the brawling and ugly corridors of the university, which drowned one, body and soul, with their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides of dark amber Jewish flesh, and thence into the comparative sanctuary of the class-room with its smaller horde of thirty or forty Jews and Jewesses all laughing, shouting, screaming, thick with their hot and swarthy body-smells, their strong female odours of rut and crotch and arm-pit and cheap perfume, and their hard male smells that were rancid,
