And Richard, while day after day he set off, with growing disinclination, to the office in East Twenty-seventh Street and settled down to his task of selecting, from piled-up Catholic books and brochures, the few things that interested him, felt as though his personal self were of no more weight than a floating straw borne on the tide of great irrepressible forces.
This feeling was precisely the one most naturally engendered in New York, where the crowds of men and women scourged by economic necessity seemed to dehumanize themselves and become just one more mechanically moving element, paralleled to the iron and steel and stone and marble, to the steam and electricity, whose forces, brutal and insistent, pounded upon it, hammered upon it, resisted it or drove it relentlessly forward.
Richard was puzzled in the profoundest depths of his nature by Nelly’s attitude towards him. He expected her to be nervous and capricious. He expected her to cling to him, to depend upon him, to share every subtlety of her emotions with him. This strange shrinking away from him into herself, into that dim obscure unfathomable workshop of organic creation where her soul now brooded in its solitude, startled and bewildered him.
He wondered how she behaved with Canyot and whether he suffered from the same mysterious aloofness.
And Nelly’s remoteness from him, her escape from him, was only one more additional element among the blind tremendous forces which seemed invading the last recess of his mind; and then passing on their way, indifferently.
Much of Richard’s depression arose from sheer physical weakness, from his saving money by cutting down on meat and milk and eggs; but a good deal of it was due to a horrible doubt that began to invade his mind — a doubt as to whether he had not made the one irretrievable mistake of his life in marrying Nelly at all.
With the toning down of the more physical elements of their attraction to one another, the accompanying difficulties of the present situation seemed to fill the whole field. Richard became vaguely aware for the first time in his life of a serious deficiency in himself. He fought against this recognition and threw it aside but it kept returning; what it amounted to was that a certain human warmth, a certain tender fidelity, apart from either spiritual or physical excitement, was lamentably lacking in him. His great poetic purpose had been so thwarted and baffled that he found it difficult any more to take refuge in it; but he had to face the fact that all that was best in him was roused and stirred by that kind of thing alone. Apart from that kind of thing, he felt himself to be something hopelessly ignoble, untrustworthy, irresponsible, below the emotional level of ordinary humanity.
He did not attempt to conceal from himself that this ill-balanced economy of his was not really undertaken for his wife’s sake. For her sake — if that was what he was about — he ought obviously to take every care of his health. The real motive that prompted him was a kind of voluptuous self-cruelty, mingled with an angry hatred of her dependence upon Canyot.
When he was quite alone, seated in the overhead railway or struggling with the crowd on Sixth Avenue, all sorts of inhuman egotistic feelings came upon him. Where had his intelligence been, that he had let himself be led into this trap? He had not the least desire that Nelly should have a child, He wanted Nelly, not Nelly’s children. If he could not write wonderful new poetry, poetry that would be read hundreds of years hence — why, then, his old Paris life brought him quite enough fame and pleasure to satisfy any man! And what had he got now? Nelly’s body was dominated by Nelly’s child; Nelly’s mind was dominated by Canyot. He had nothing for himself but odious duties and harassing responsibilities. He supposed that most men were thrilled with joy when the woman they loved had a child by them. Well! He was not thrilled. The idea of having the responsibility of a child gave him not the remotest pleasure. He wanted his name to be perpetuated not by children but by poetry. Children were nature’s will and pleasure. Poetry was the attempt of the spirit of mankind to rise above nature and extricate itself.
Richard had just begun to make a few acquaintances among the literary and theatrical circles when this blow fell. But he let them go now; and they were not sufficiently interested in him to take any trouble in seeking him out. His wife was meeting Canyot’s friends but that did not mean that Richard met them.
As long as he did his work in the office he felt that he had fulfilled every duty that was demanded of him.
Each day he seemed to care less what happened; the promise for the future which his wife was bearing within her seemed to coincide in its growth with the steady loosening of his own hold upon all that he valued in existence.
There were no fields or lanes in Manhattan where he could recover his spirit by drawing upon the deep earth forces. All about him were iron girders and iron cog wheels and iron spikes. All about him were the iron foreheads of such as partook of the nature of the machinery whose slaves they were. And the iron that entered his soul found no force that could resist it; for all the days of his life he had been an epicurean: when the hour called for stoicism he could only answer with a dogged despair.
Chapter 14
One day, about the middle of October, Richard left the office between half-past one and two o’clock to get some lunch. He had been trying to extract the elusive quintessence from some especially recondite Catholic poet in order to make a popular article out of what was the last refinement of subtle and sceptical credulity.
He felt sick of his work, weary of himself, and beaten down by the noises of the street. Between the elaborate sophistications of this Parisian trifler with the faith and the raw harsh brutal aggression of the vortex of ferocious energies that swirled around him there seemed no refuge for his spirit, nothing that was calm and cool and simple and largely noble.
He made his way slowly up Sixth Avenue, searching for some little refreshment room or café where he could eat and read in quiet. He passed many of these places with a shudder. They were crowded and unappealing. The people inside them seemed as though they were eating for a wager, watched by the whole world through plate-glass windows.
He felt hunted by iron dogs whose jaws were worked by machinery and whose mouths breathed forth a savour of ‘poisonous brass and metal sick’.
He crossed street after street, threading his way through the automobiles and the great motor-lorries, jostled and hustled by the crowd. He held grimly to Sixth Avenue, knowing that there alone, in this quarter of the city, could he find any sort of inexpensive retreat. Above him rattled with clanging roar the trains of the elevated railway, supported on a huge iron framework, the very shadows of which, as they broke the burning sunshine, seemed to exude a smell of heated metal. The paraded objects in the store windows leered aggressively and jeeringly at him through their plate glass. Every material fabric in the world, except such as suggested quietness and peace, seemed to flap and nod and make mouths at him. Every man he passed seemed to flaunt an insolent cigar, held tightly between compressed lips, and every woman seemed to jibe mockingly at his decrepitude from under her smart hat.
Suddenly, when he began to feel actually faint and dizzy and was on the point of entering a glaring cavern of marble tables, he caught a glimpse of the front of a theatre down one of the streets on his right hand. It was some distance away but certain well-known words emblazoned on a huge placard made the blood rush to his head.