he swore that he should not starve in the midst of plenty, batter his knuckles bloody on the four walls of a little cell, break the great shoulder of his power and strength against a barren wall, prowl ceaselessly and damnably a million sterile streets, in which there was neither pause nor curve nor stay, nor door, to enter: he knew there was earth for his feet, food for his hunger, liquor for his thirst, the exultant reality of strong golden joy for all the savage passion of his conviction and desire, and he swore that he should come at length to doors and harbours, he knew he would not starve and sicken in the wilderness, and that the venomous rats of the flesh and of the spirit should never gnaw his bones in triumph in the desert.
Yet, the sense of drowning daily in the man-swarm returned to him. Each day there began anew one of the most ancient and fatal struggles that was ever waged—the struggle of man against the multitude: each day, like a man who is going into battle, he would brace himself with savage resolution, and gird his spirit to the sticking point each time he went out in the streets, and each day, beaten, driven, trembling and inchoate, drowned in horror and oblivion, he would at length retreat into the four walls of his cell again, conscious only of having passed through a maelstrom of sound, movement, violence, and living tissue—of living tissue from which all of the radiant and succulent essences of individual character and memory had been extracted—and which flowed constantly back and forth along the beaten pavement in a lava-like tide of tallowy flesh, dark dead eyes, and grey felt hats. The grey felt hats, in particular, those machine-made millions of neat cheap cones of crisp grey felt, all worn in the same way, and tilted at the same angle, and for the most part shading faces of the same tallowy texture—those million points of changeless grey that bobbed and moved incessantly through a thousand streets—drowned him with their tidal flow of weariness and sterility: they seemed to be the badge, the uniform, of a race of mechanical creatures, who were as essential and inhuman a part of the city’s substance as stone and steel and brick, who had been made of one essential substance and charged with one general and basic energy along with the buildings, tunnels, streets, and a million glittering projectiles of machinery, and who flowed by incessantly, were poured into tunnels or driven through streets, were added to here, and thinned out there, were portioned, doled, and celled out in a million destinations, a thousand swarming heaven-daring hives, the mindless and unwitting automatons of a gigantic and incomprehensible pattern.
