eet, and staring into the
white-curtained "parlors," searching for the face of a purchaser behind
the India-rubber plants, stuffed birds, and piles of gaudy gilt books
that adorned the windows. One of the blistered doors over the way banged,
and a woman came scurrying out on some errand, and the garden gate
shrieked two melancholy notes as she opened it and let it swing back
after her. The little patches called gardens were mostly untilled,
uncared for, squares of slimy moss, dotted with clumps of coarse ugly
grass, but here and there were the blackened and rotting remains of
sunflowers and marigolds. And beyond, he knew, stretched the labyrinth
of streets more or less squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were
the mud pits and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks, and to the north
was a great wide cold waste, treeless, desolate, swept by bitter wind.
It was all like his own life, he said again to himself, a maze of
unprofitable dreariness and desolation, and his mind grew as black and
hopeless as the winter sky. The morning went thus dismally till twelve
o'clock, and he put on his hat and great-coat. He always went out for an
hour every day between twelve and one; the exercise was a necessity, and
the landlady made his bed in the interval. The wind blew the smoke from
the chimneys into his face as he shut the door, and with the acrid smoke
came the prevailing odor of the street, a blend of cabbage-water and
burnt bones and the faint sickly vapor from the brickfields. Lucian
walked mechanically for the hour, going eastward, along the main road.
The wind pierced him, and the dust was blinding, and the dreariness of
the street increased his misery. The row of common shops, full of common
things, the blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a horrible
stucco parody of a Greek temple with a facade of hideous columns that was
a nightmare, villas like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in cheap
Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by the builder, these were the
pictures of the way. When he got home again he flung himself on the bed,
and lay there stupidly till sheer hunger roused him. He ate a hunch of
bread and drank some water, and began to pace up and down the room,
wondering whether there were no escape from despair. Writing seemed quite
impossible, and hardly knowing what he did he opened his bureau and took
out a book from the shelves. As his eyes fell on the page the air grew
dark and heavy as night, a