Joseph, however, was done for.
He disappeared from the university. His name was no more heard, and after the traditional nine days was utterly forgotten.
It is true that three or four men who saw further than their fellows realized that a force, a potential but very real force, had departed. Some one who, as they believed, was to have done extraordinary things was now crushed and robbed of his power. They perceived that virtue had departed from the intellectual garment that shelters the men who can!
Joseph tried, and tried in vain, to make such a living as his vast mental acquirements and achievements entitled him to. Obscure tutorships, ill-paid lecturing to coteries of cock-cure Socialists, who believed in nothing but their chances of getting a slice of the wealth of men who had worked, and not merely talked—these were his dismal and pitiful endeavours.
He came at last to the very lowest pitch of all. He, the high wrangler, the eminent young mathematician, earned a squalid and horribly precarious living by teaching elementary science to the sons of struggling East End shopkeepers who were ambitious of County Council scholarships for their progeny.
His health was impaired, but his spirit was as a reed bruised and shaken by the winds of adversity, yet not broken. He had known sorrow, was acquainted with grief.
He had plumbed the depths of poverty, and his body was a wreck. Want of food—the mean and squalid resting-places he had perforce to seek—the degradation and vileness of his surroundings, had sapped the life blood. He did not know the defiant trumpet words of a poet of our time, but had he done so, they would have well expressed his attitude—
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud;
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
He turned off into a by-street, and walked on till he came to the docks. His progress was quite aimless. Once he stopped and wearily asked himself whither he was going; but the next moment he was lost in thought, and moved on again.
Once he stumbled over a steel hawser. He nearly lost his balance, and had his arm not shot out with an involuntary movement to clutch the bollard on his left, he would have fallen over the granite-bound edge of the wharf into the foul, black, slimy depths below.