Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/77

 strength to draw it open. This sickening hollow feeling was a new and terrible thing. Was it whiskey, he wondered a little wildly, or grief?

He had walked across the Common and come within sight of the Park Street subway entrance when the image of his rooms rose before him. It seemed as unnatural to be going back to them as it would be to go back to English 2. He turned down the street, drifting with the crowds who were hurrying home from the shops. For once the faces and advertisements and noises were not repellent; they had the effect of a strong liniment. He wandered through a maze of narrow streets until his back ached with weariness, and when he sank exhausted before the marble-topped table of a tawdry restaurant near Scollay Square, he felt as though he no longer existed in a region, but in a state. All things concrete seemed but magnified particles in a vast shifting cloud, as though the only thing ultimately stable was a yearning for the unattainable, a vacuum which life filled with mere weather: winds and showers of futile reality. He thought of himself as a sort of hour-glass. For twenty years the sand had been running into his consciousness, and all he could see was a void into which the sand would have to be poured drearily back.

At his elbows dispirited men and women were feeding: hour-glasses every one, taking life witlessly in,