stale, and sour—the successive stages of this journey were filled with such dazed numbness, horror, fear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might feel in the successive stages of a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or the electric chair: the world swarmed blindly, nauseously, drunkenly about him. He looked at the faces in the hotel lobby, the brawling, furious, and chaotic street, and the swarming and rancid corridors, with dizzy swimming eyes and a constricted heart; a thousand unutterable and horrible premonitions and imaginings of ruin and shame swarmed through his mind—every day he felt the impending menace of some new and fatal catastrophe, some indefinable and crushing disgrace with which each hour was ominously, murderously pregnant.
What these fears and forebodings were he could not have told, but they occasionally found articulate expression in some scene of frightful insubordination and rebellion, in which he found himself faced with forty brawling, mocking, swarthily jeering faces who, like savage and untamed horses that have sensed the fear and incompetence of their driver, have now broken the last feeble thread of restraint and are running free and wild before him. The terror and menace of such a disgrace were heightened by the intrusion into the scene at the apex of such a moment of riot and rebellion of one of his employers, the Dean, the head of the department, or a creature with a wry lean face, a convulsive Adam’s apple, a habit of writhing his lean belly and loins erotically as he spoke, and a mind of the most obscene Puritanism, who was employed to oversee the work and methods of the instructors: he could visualize the moment of their fatal entrance into the class-room, and hear their words of stern, curt and immediate dismissal as they drove him out and gathered the reins strongly into their own parched and freckled hands.
A thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his mind, and at the same time there began to smoulder in his heart a dogged resentment and hatred of this nameless fear, this wordless and sourceless shame, impalpable, causeless, maddening, which pressed upon him from the sky, which hovered in the vast unrest and dissonance of the air he breathed, and which at length crept poisonously through all the rivers of life, corrupting the healthy music of the blood, the sweet exultant music of the heart, curdling men’s bowels with fear and withering their loins with sterile impotence. What was this grey lipless shape of fear that stalked their lives incessantly—that was everywhere, legible in
