But if he retreated daily, out of this savage and unequal struggle with the Herculean forces of the city, if he returned trembling, beaten and exhausted to the hermitage of his own small cell, it was with no sense of final defeat, no desire for ultimate escape. His pride and fury grew from every beating that they got, his faith grew stubborn on adversity, his spirit fed upon humiliation, and spat into the face of failure, his soul plunged darkly to the sea-floor of blind horror, swarming desolation, and came up dripping with a snarl of hatred and defiance: daily they beat him with their blind appalling mass, daily they drove him livid, shaking, blind with horror, back into his cell, so stunned and stricken by the savage, obscene, and mindless fury of the streets that he could no longer think, feel, or remember; and hour by hour his soul swam upwards out of the jungles of the sea! And every night, the merciful anodyne of dark restored him; sunk deep, at length, in midnight, beastwise aprowl in all the brooding silence of the night, his spirit swept out through the fields of sleep, he heard the heartbeats of six million men: within their million cells sleep crossed the faces of six million sleepers and in the night-time, in the dark, in all the living silence of the night, the sleeping faces of Snodgrass, Weisberg, and O’Hare were strange and dark as his. He saw the city with the great giant webbing of its thousand streets, he heard the long deep notes of warning and departure from the great ships in the harbour; and then he saw the city as a whole, six million sleepers celled in sleep and walled in night, and girdled by the bracelet of two flashing sea-borne tides that isled them round: he held them legible as minted gold within his hand, he saw them plain as apples in the adyts of his brain. Exultant certitude and joy welled up in him, and he knew that his hunger could eat the earth, his eye and brain gulp down the vision of ten thousand streets, ten million faces; he knew he should beat and eat them all one day, and that a man was more than a million, stronger than a wall, and greater than a door, and taller than a ninety-storey tower.
They swept around him on the rootless pavements in drowning tides of grey abomination, of numberless depth and horror, and like the memory of a bird-song in the wood, the memory of all his people who had lived and died alone for two hundred years within the wilderness, and whose buried bones were pointing eighty ways across the continent, returned to him in a rush of savage resolution, and he swore that he would beat death and nothingness and all the abominations of a sterile and nameless fear: he swore it with a sick heart, a trembling lip, and a
