When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the white forms of its gods upon its walls, and walked slowly down the bank of the river. Since life had been forced back upon him he knew that it was incumbent upon his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands if men would not accept the labor of his brain.
Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too devoted to it body and soul, to seek to sustain existence by the sheer manual exertion which was the only thing that he had left untried for self-maintenance. In a manner too he was too proud; not too proud to labor, but too proud to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the knowledge of others. But now, human charity must have saved him; a charity which he hated as the foulest insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept it like a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as would give him his daily bread.
So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the length of his famine.
The country was well known to him, but the people not at all. He had come by hazard on the old ruin where he dwelt, and had stayed there full a year. These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-clad slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads, these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in soothing contrast to all that his life had known.
These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed always hushed with the sound of bells, these quiet streams on which the calm sunlight slept so peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that stretched away to the dim gray distant sea,—all these had had a certain charm for him.
He had abided with them, partly because amidst them it seemed possible to live on a handful of wheat and a draught of water, unnoticed and unpitied; partly because having come hither on foot through many lands and by long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable of further effort.
Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he had painted innumerable transcripts of its ancient buildings, and of its summer and autumnal landscapes. And of late—through the bitter winter—of late it had seemed to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere.
When a man knows that his dead limbs will be huddled into the common ditch of the poor, the nameless, and the unclaimed, and that his dead brain will only serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside poisonous weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth the ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.
He went now on his way seeking work; he did not care what, he asked for any that might serve to use such strength as hunger had left in him, and to give him his daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this world, and so he found it.
They repulsed him everywhere.