Then the reaction set in. He went out into the freshness of the night air, hoping to brush away that tenuous film of doubt and bewilderment that still teased his thoughts. His face was flushed and hot, but a chill, beginning in his limbs, had seized his body, and tingling little feet of ice seemed running up and down his back. He sniffed at the fresh river air, and remembered that he had taken no exercise of late, that the engine, as Repellier called it, had been overdriven and neglected. He had a sudden desire to get away from the quietness and loneliness that hung about him. He wanted to get down into the thick of the city and feel life pressing against his sides.
The wind chilled him, so he turned southward and walked aimlessly down through what had ever seemed to him the veritable backyard of all New York. The desolation of those quiet streets drove him Eastward, and dragging his way down the light-spangled, wave-like rise and fall of Amsterdam Avenue, he plodded onward until the flaring sign of a restaurant caught his eye. He went inside and sat down at a little table, and there he ate ravenously—he scarcely remembered what.
Then his spirit of unrest came over him again, and as he wore his way southward he felt that he should like to see Chatham Square once more; a caprice to smell the air of the slums came over him. But his old quarters, he remembered, were too far away to be seen that night. So he turned down into lower Fifth Avenue, and wandered idly on, gazing at times up at the quiet stars, and the great white cross of light that shone from the Mission House, over the Arch and tangled tree tops of Washington Square. Then the lure of lights to the south caught his eye, and he drifted into Thompson Street, turning once more erratically eastward, while for a moment a sudden dizziness came over him and he had to lean against an iron railing for support. Before him the clustered globes of an Italian music-hall chanced to flare its invitation to all passers-by, and he stumbled in, glad of an opportunity to rest. He groped his way to the half-underground ill-smelling bar and asked for wine. There he drank three glasses of acid and biting Chianti, and felt better. He was still weak and dazed, however, so he stepped into the crowded music-hall at the rear, and sank limply into one of the vacant chairs.
The odor of tobacco and garlic reeked in the air, and an orchestra of a half-dozen pieces was crashing out a medley of operatic selections. Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song—it took Hartley back to the night of Repellier's birthday party—a low-browed Neapolitan sitting next to him pounded on the table with his beer-glass, and the sudden applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. He wondered at the fire of their Latin enthusiasm. An ape-like old man tottered and mumbled through the gesticulating crowd, selling meal-cakes. When a corpulent woman in a tawdry yellow costume, swaying her huge body to the throb of the music, sang an Italian love-song that seemed familiar to the crowd, the ape-like old man crouched down on the edge of his blackened basket and listened to the end, with fixed, filmy, eager eyes.
The scene of a sordid and toil-hardened people finding solace in music brought home to Hartley how much he himself had been missing from life; how narrow, of late, his days had grown to be. The chance to wring out of existence its richest wine was before him, had been thrust upon him, and he had neglected it.
As he walked wearily home through the cold night air he determined, with a sudden passionate clutching of his hands, to take what was his due, to grasp at what lay before him in life. He was tired of all empty and enslaving work; the tide had met its turn. A Nietzsche-like madness to throw open his man's arsenal of instinct, a longing to fling his weight against every iron law that seemed, at the moment, to choke and overrun and stultify life, filled him with a sense of tingling opposition. To battle Byronic-like against convention, to ride the whirlwind like the old gods of life, but to fight always, and for all things—that seemed to him life, and the best of life.
And in something that was almost delirium, in one white flash of inspirational, subliminal clearness, came to him the first ideas of his poem on War—a poem which he worked out feverishly, yet not unhappily, during the next few days of culminating weariness and illness, little dreaming of the part it was soon to play in lives other than his own.