story of man’s dishonour, defeat, or sorrow, with what vicious jibe and jeer they greeted any evidence of mercy, honesty, or love.
By night, the hard and sterile lights of their glittering, barren and obscene streets fell lividly over the pale and swarthy faces of a million rats of the flesh, and by day, in the weary and hatred-laden air of the university, the harsh and merciless light shone on the venomous faces of the rats of the spirit.
In his heart a dogged and furious resentment was beginning to glow and moulder—a savage hate of hate, a fear of fear, a murderous intensity of desire to strangle the shapes of death and barrenness—a resistance, still passive, but growing in bitterness and pugnacity with every passing day, as he saw how uselessly and horribly men allowed themselves to be duped, cheated, and beaten by the living rat and by the fraud of fear, and that was being strengthened momently now by an implacable conviction, a dogged and incontrovertible memory that, incredibly sharpened by his fury and desire, awoke and netted out of the sea-depths of the past, the shining fish of a million living moments. The sound of forest waters in the night, the rustling of cool corn-blades in the dark, the goat-cries of a boy into the wind, the pounding of great wheels upon a rail, the sound of quiet casual voices at a country station in the night, and the thorn of delight, the tongueless cry of ecstasy that trembles on the lips of the country kid as he lies awake for the first time in the night in the top berth of a Pullman car while the great wheels pound beneath him toward the city, and he hears the good-looking woman in the berth below him stir languorously and move, in a gesture of heavied and sensual appeasement, her milky thighs.—These things had been upon the earth, past all the mockery of the old scornmaker’s pride, and would endure for ever. These facts, together with a thousand more—the incredible magic of the peach bloom in the month of April, the smell of rivers after rain, the wordless glory and first green of a young tree seen in a city street at daybreak in the month of May, the bird-song breaking into light once more, a cry, a leaf, the passing of a cloud—these facts, as bright as herrings in a shining water, as literal as nails to fix the hides of falsehood to the wall, as real as April and all magic whatsoever, returned now under the furious light of his awakened and incontrovertible memory.
A murderous hatred against the haters, the mockers, dupers, cheaters, and all of the walking frauds of death rose up in him. He resolved to kill the phantoms of this fear and shame which pressed upon him namelessly;
