Having said this aloud to Gussie, Gussie's mind could also tackle the minor concrete details to the exclusion of the bigger considerations involved in Teddy's plight. That the honest, loving, skylarking boy whom they had grown up with could be a thief and a murderer was something the intelligence rejected as it rejected dreams. They could, therefore, take the new straw suitcase which had once been a family present to Gussie, and which she had never used, pack it with Teddy's other suit and the necessary linen, as if he were really at Paterson or Philadelphia.
"How shall we get it to him?" Gussie asked, when the work was done.
"I'll take it," Jennie answered, "if you'll stay and look after momma."
"Momma won't need much looking after—the way she is."
"Well, that's one comfort anyhow. With this to go through with I'm glad her mind's not what it used to be."
So, stunned and dry eyed, they caught on to the new conditions by doing little perfunctory things, consoling and helping each other.
[CHAPTER XXI]
Teddy's first night in a cell was more tolerable than it might have been for the reason that his faculties seemed to have stopped working. As nearly as possible he had become an inanimate thing, to be struck, pulled, hustled, and chucked wherever they chose. Not only had he no volition, but little or no sensation. A dead body or a sack of flour could hardly have been more lost to a sense of rebellion or indignity.
It was not that he didn't suffer, but that suffering had reached the extreme beyond which it makes no further impression. Nothing registered any more—no horror, no brutalities, no curses or kicks. As far as he could take account of himself, the Teddy Follett even of the shack had been left behind in some vanished world, while the thing that had hands and feet was a clod unable to resent the oaths and blows and flingings to and fro which were all it deserved.
Once he had heard that shout, "I see him!" in the road, he had been like an insect paralyzed by terror that doesn't dare to move. He had lain there till they came and got him. It was not fear alone that pinned him to the spot; his bodily strength had given out. For forty-eight hours he had eaten but little and drunk only the two glasses of water in the pastry shop. Though he had slept the first night, the second had been passed in a fevered, intermittent doze. Furthermore, the agony of approaching suicide had drained his natural forces.