"No, am I really?" said Mr. Nix, anxiously. "Upon my word, Joe, I believe you're right."
What Mr. Nix meant, however, when he said that he felt like a trick juggler, was literally true. He not only felt like it, he dreamt it. This dream was recurrent; he saw himself, dressed in purple tights, one foot on a rope, the other in mid-air, and tossing a dozen golden balls. Beneath him, far, far beneath him, was the sawdust ring, tiers of people rising to either side of it. The balls glittered and winked and tumbled in the fierce electric light. Always they returned to him as though drawn towards his stomach by a magnet, but always present with him was the desperate fear lest one should avoid and escape him. The sweat stood in beads on his forehead; the leg upon which everything depended began to tremble. The balls seemed to develop a wild individuality of their own: they winked at him, they sniggered. They danced and mocked and dazzled. He missed one, he missed two, three ... the crowd beneath him began to shout ... he swerved, he jolted, he was over, he was falling, the balls swinging in laughing derision about him ... falling, falling.... He was awake.
This dream came to him so often that he consulted a doctor. The doctor consoled him, telling him that everyone was having bad dreams just now, that it was the natural reaction after the four years of stress and turmoil through which we have passed. "You yourself, Mr. Nix, have had your troubles I don't doubt?"
Yes, Mr. Nix had lost his only son.
"Ah, well, that is quite enough to account for it. Don't eat a heavy meal at night. Sleep lightly covered ... plenty of fresh air."
This interview only confirmed Mr. Nix in his already deep conviction that all doctors were humbugs.
"The matter with me," he said to himself, "is just this, that I've got too much to do."
Nineteen hundred and nineteen was a very difficult year for anyone engaged in such business as Hortons.
That spontaneous hour or two of mirth and happiness on the morning of the Armistice had its origin in the general human belief that the troubles of those nightmare years were now over. At once, as though the Fairy Firkin had waved her wand, the world would be changed. The world was changed, but only because a new set of difficulties and problems had taken the place of the old ones, and these new troubles were in many ways harder to fight. That was a year of bafflement, bewilderment, disappointment, suspicion. Quite rightly so—but the justice of it could not be seen by the actors in it.