Here, in these desolate walls, on many a night long past and desperately accomplished, many a young man had paced the confines of his little cell like a maddened animal, had beat his knuckles bloody on the stamped-out walls, had lashed about him, a creature baffled and infuriated by the million illusions of warmth, love, security and joy which the terrific city offered him and which, tantalus-like, slipped from his fingers like a fume of painted smoke the instant that he tried to get his grasp upon it.
Again, if the Hotel Leopold had housed all of the hope, joy, fury, passion, anguish, and devouring hunger that the earth can know, and that the wild and bitter tenement of youth can hold, it also housed within its walls all of the barren and hopeless bitterness of a desolate old age. For here—unloved, friendless, and unwanted, shunted off into the dreary asylum of hotel life—there lived many old people who hated life, and yet who were afraid to die.
Most of them were old people with a pension, or a small income, which was just meagrely sufficient to their slender needs. Some of them, widowed, withered, childless, and alone, were drearily wearing out the end of their lives here in a barren solitude. Some had sons and daughters, married, living in the city, who came dutifully to stamp the dreary tedium of waning Sunday afternoons with the stale counterfeits of filial devotion.
The rest of the time the old people stayed in their rooms and washed their stockings out and did embroidery, or descended to the little restaurant to eat, or sat together in one corner of the white-tiled lobby and talked.
Why could they never make it come to life? Why was no great vine growing from the hearts of all these old and dying people? Why were their flesh, their sagging, pouch-like jowls and faces so dry, dead, and juiceless, their weary old eyes so dull and lustreless, their tones so nasal, tedious and metallic? Why was it that they seemed never to have known any of the pain, joy, passion, evil, glory of a dark and living past? Why was it that their lives, on which now the strange dark radiance of million-visaged time was shining, seemed to have gained neither wisdom, mystery nor passion from the great accumulation of the buried past—to have been composed, in fact, of an infinite procession of dreary moments and little mean adventures, each forgotten, lost, and buried, as day by day the grey sand of their lives ran out its numberless grains of barren tedium.
