Well, there was the furnace fire to fix. He thrust his feet into slippers, put his dressing-gown over his pyjamas and shuffled downstairs, hearing behind him the firm, regular step of Evangeline as she went from the bathroom to the bedroom. On the way down he woke up enough to realize what made life look so specially intolerable that morning; the return of Jerome Willing and his own definite failure to make good in the new organization of the store. The significance of that and all that it foretold stood out more harshly than ever in the pale, dawn-gray of the cold empty kitchen. Oh, hell!
He flung open the cellar door and ran downstairs to run away from the thought. But it was waiting for him, blackly in the coal-bin, luridly in the firebox.
“It looks just about like the jumping-off place for me,” he thought, rattling the furnace-shaker gloomily; “only I can’t jump. Where to?”
Well, anyhow, in the few minutes before breakfast, while his stomach was empty, he was free from that dull leaden mass of misery turning over and over inside him at intervals, which was the usual accompaniment of his every waking hour. That was something to be thankful for.
He strained his lean arms to throw the coal from his shovel well back into the firebox, and leveled it evenly with the long poker. Evangeline always found time to go down to see if he had done it right before he got away after breakfast.
Then he stood for a moment, struck as he often was, by the leaping many-tongued fury of the little pale-blue pointed flames. He looked at them, fascinated by the baleful lustfulness of their attack on the helpless lumps of coal thrown into their inferno.
“The seat of desolation, void of light
Save what the glimmering of those livid flames
Casts, pale and dreadful. Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible,