Phases of an Inferior Planet

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

She lowered her veil and went out. Algarcife stood at the window and heard her footsteps as she descended the stairs. He saw her leave the house, pause for an instant to greet Signor Morani, give the black bag into his hands, and enter the carriage. As she sat down, she leaned out for an instant and glanced up to where he stood. Then the carriage started, turned the corner, and was gone.

Still he did not leave the window. He stood motionless, his head bent, looking down into the heated streets, across which were stretching the slanting shadows from the west. A splash of scarlet, like the impress of a bloody hand, projected above the jagged line of tenement roofs, while a film of rising smoke obscured its lurid distinctness. He felt that complete sense of isolation, that loss of connection with the chain of humanity which follows a separation from one who has shared with us, night and day, the commonplaces of existence. The past and future seemed to have clashed together and shattered into the present.

In the street below men and women were going homeward from the day's work. He noticed that they wore, one and all, an aspect of despair, as if passing automatically along the endless round of a treadmill. He felt a vague wonder at the old, indomitable instinct of the preservation of self which seemed so alien to his mood. Situated as he was above it all, humanity assumed to his indifferent eyes a comic effect, and he found himself laughing cynically at the moving figures that blocked the sidewalk below. A physical disgust for the naked facts of life attacked him like nausea. The struggle for existence, the propagation of the species, the interminable circle of birth, marriage, and death, appeared to him in revolting bestiality. In his bodily and mental wreckage, all action became repellent and hideous, and the slanting sun-rays bespattering the human atoms in the street produced a giddiness in his brain. At that moment he was in the throes of a mental revolution, and his old philosophic sanity was ingulfed.

He remembered suddenly that he had eaten nothing all day, and, turning from the window, drank a cup of tea which had been left upon the table. The continual use of stimulants, in exciting his nervous system, had made sleep impossible, and he felt as if a furnace blazed behind his eyeballs. He sat down, staring blankly at the opposite wall. In the corner, upon a heap of books, the skull and cross-bones had been thrown, and they caught his glance and held it with a curious fascination. They seemed to typify his own life, those remnants of dry bones that had once supported flesh and blood. He regarded himself impersonally, as he might once have regarded a body for dissection. He saw that he had passed the zenith of his physical and mental power, and that from this day forth it would mean to him retrogression or stagnation. He saw that the press of untoward circumstances had forced his intellect from its natural orbit into a common rut from which there was no side-track of escape. He weighed his labors, his knowledge, his impassioned aims for truth, and, in the balance with a handful of dust, he found them wanting. He stirred the ashes heaped where once had been a vital passion, and he found a wasted skeleton and dry bones. He looked at his thin and pallid hand, and it seemed to him as incapable of work as the hand of one palsied.

Before his tragic eyes, the years of his past stood marshalled, and, one and all, they bore the badge of failure.

As he rose from his chair in sudden desperation, the recurring faintness seized him and he steadied himself against the open drawer of the bureau. Looking into it as he turned away, he saw some loose articles which Mariana had forgotten—a bit of veiling, a single stocking, and a tiny, half-worn sock of pink worsted. He closed the drawer and turned hastily away.

Then he sat down beside his desk and bowed his head into his hands.

CHAPTER XX

For a week after Mariana's departure Algarcife worked on ploddingly. He closed his eyes to actualities and allowed his overwrought mind no cessation from labor. It was as if all molecular motion in his brain had been suspended save that relating to the subject in hand, and he wrote with mechanical readiness journalistic essays upon the "Advantages of a Vegetable Diet" and "The Muscular Development of the Body." Then, upon trying to rise one morning, he found that his shattered system was turning in revolt, and that no artificial spur could sting his exhausted brain into action.

Through the long, hot day he lay relaxed and nerveless, conscious of the glare of the sunshine, but dreading to draw the shades, conscious of the closeness of the atmosphere, and conscious of a beating, like the strokes of an anvil, in his temples. When his dinner was brought he drank a cup of tea and sat up. Then he reached for a phial of morphia pellets which he kept in his desk, and, dissolving one in water, swallowed it. For a moment the temptation to take the contents of the phial at a dose assailed him, but, more from inability to venture a decisive step than from any mental determination, he laid the bottle aside. Action of any kind appeared intolerably irksome, and he waived with disgust the solution of the simple problem of his life.