“Then you shall.”
The lights in the hall went up to indicate the end of the cycle of pictures.
All that night and through the next day his exaltation continued, and then suddenly it vanished, leaving him racked by monstrous doubts. His mind, the full exercise of which had given him such thrilling delight, seemed to become parched and shriveled as a dried pea. Where had been held out for him the promise of fine action was now darkness, and he sank deeper and deeper into a muddy inertia. Fear possessed him and brought him to agony, dug into his sides with its spur, drove him floundering on, and when out of the depths of his soul he strove to squeeze something of that soaring energy that had visited him or been struck out of him (he knew not which it was) he could summon nothing more powerful to his aid than anger. He wept tears of anger—anger at the world, at himself, and the blind, aimless force of events, at his own impotence to move out of the bog, at the folly and obstinacy which had led him to submit to the affront that had been put upon him by men who for years had been his colleagues and comrades. His anger was blown to a white heat by disgust when he looked back and counted the years he had spent in fatted security mechanically plying a mechanical profession, shut out by habit and custom from both imaginative power and the impotence of exhaustion. He raged and stormed and blubbered, and he marveled at the commotion going on within him as he pursued his daily tasks, read aloud with Matilda, argued with Mr. Copas, took money at the door of the theater in the evening, sat among the dirty, smelling, loutish audience. In his bitterness he found a sort of comfort in reverting to his old bantering attitude toward women, to find it a thousand times intensified. More than half the audience were women, poor women, meanly dressed, miserably corseted; the fat women bulged and heaved out of their corsets, and the thin women looked as though they had been dropped into theirs and were only held up by their armpits. There they sat, hunched and bunched, staring, gaping, giggling, moping, chattering, chattering . . . Ach! They were silly.
And the men? God save us! these sodden, stupid clods were men. They slouched and sprawled and yawned and spat. Their hands were dirty, their teeth yellow, and their speech was thick, clipped, guttural, inhuman. . . . Driven on by a merciless logic he was forced into consideration of himself. As he sat there at the end of the front row he turned his hands over and over; fat, stumpy hands they were, and he put them up and felt the fleshiness of his neck, the bushy hair growing out of his ears, and he ran them along his plump legs and prodded the stoutness of his belly. He laughed at himself. He laughed at the whole lot of them. And he tried to remember a single man or a single woman whom he had encountered in his life and could think of as beautiful. Not one.
He turned his attention to the stage. Copas was almost a dwarf, a strutting, conceited little dwarf, pouring out revolting nonsense, a hideous caricature of human beings who were the caricatures of creation. He said to himself:
“I must get out of this.”
And he found himself using a phrase he had employed for years in dealing with small boys who produced slovenly work and wept when he railed at them:
“Tut! Tut! This will never do!”
At that he gasped. He was using the phrase to himself! He was therefore like a small boy in the presence of outraged authority, and that authority was (words came rushing in on him) his own conscience, his own essence, liberated, demanding, here and now, among men and women as they are, the very fullness of life.
He had not regained his mood of delight, but rather had reached the limit of despair, had ceased blindly and uselessly to struggle, but cunningly, cautiously began to urge his way out of his despond. Whatever happened, he must move forward. Whatever happened, he must know, discover, reach out and grasp.