nauseous stomach in which the rancid wash of a sour distressful coffee growled and rumbled queasily—for in those months, this sense of nameless fear and dread, impending ruin, disgrace and menace, was so great each time he went to meet a class, its damnable victory over all the clean and healthful music of the flesh, the exultant joy of thirst and hunger, so complete and devastating, that he was unable to touch a mouthful of food for hours in advance.
Thus, while a thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his mind, he stood before each class on a small raised platform three or four inches in height, trembling on limbs from which every vital essence of blood and bone and marrow had been drained, staring at the faces that seethed and swarmed below him, with dead glazed eyes, nauseous, and sick, and palsied, left only with something clear and small and shining at the bottom of his mind, one pure small note of conviction and belief at the bottom of this horrible sea-depth of phantasmagoric chaos, of desolation and fury. Then, in a voice that was remote, unreal, and hollow in his throat and ears, he would attempt to silence them, he would begin to speak to them, and one by one, each in his accustomed place, he would see the dark, ugly, grinning faces in their seats below him and become aware of the pale sweat-shop tailors sitting cross-legged on their tables in the buildings just across the street—buildings which the university was acquiring as class-rooms, year by year, and one by one, as the numberless thousands of these dark and brawling hordes, there by God knows what blind fantasticality of purpose, increased.
And then, faint and far, sunken below the furious glare and clamour of the city’s life, fantastic and unreal at first in these machine shops of the brain, the old words, the undying words, the deathless bird-song in the city street returned, and he spoke to them again out of the lips of Herrick, Donne, and Shakespeare, of all the things that never change, of all the things that would abide for ever.
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past—” Clang—a-lang—a-lang—a-lang a-lang! Hard and harsh with the violence of an unexpected blow, the bell that marked the ending of the period rang pat upon the last word of the sentence and as it died, all of his senses rudely shocked out of the potent enchantments of the music, he gave a violent start, as if he had been prodded from behind, stopped reading, and looked up quickly from his book with an angry and bewildered face. The class, which had tittered, now burst into
