The Devil

The devil's dance had begun.

They kept him waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these millions of hurrying human beings.

The General Post Office was itself a town within a town--a mighty labyrinth that made the imagination ache. To find one's way through a fractional block of it, to see a thronged corner of any of its yards, to hear even at a distance the stone thunder made by the smallest stampede of its red carts, irresistibly evoked a realization of one's nothingness. Never would he have believed it possible that the local should thus shrink in presence of the central.

He had taken a bedroom on the top floor of a cheap lodging-house near the Euston Road, and every night as he climbed the dimly-lit staircase he knew that he was toiling upward toward a fit of depression. The house was almost empty of lodgers; no one noticed when he went out or came in; at each flight of the stairs his sense of solitude increased.

He had never before lived in a building that contained so many stories, and at first he was troubled by the great height above the ground; but now he could stand at his open window and look down without giddiness. Wonder used to fill his mind as he stared out toward the southeast at the stupendous field of roofs, chimneys, and towers; at the sparkling powder of street-lamps; at the astounding yellow haze that extended across the horizon, illuminating the sky nearly to the zenith, and seemingly like the onset of a terrific conflagration which only he of all the thousands who were threatened had as yet observed. Even this bit of London, the comparatively small part of the overwhelming whole now visible to his eyes, must be as big as Manninglea Chase. And beyond his half circle of vision, behind him, on either hand, the forest of houses stretched away almost to infinity. The thought of it was as crushing as that of interstellar distances, of the pathless void into which God threw a handful of dust and then quietly ordained that each speck should be a sun and the pivot of a solar system.

He turned from the window to look at the dark little room, groped his way to the chest of drawers, and lighted a candle. Its flame sputtered, then settled and burned unwaveringly. Here in London the nights seemed as stuffy as the days; there was no life or freshness, no movement of the air; it was as if the warm breath of the crowd rose upward and nothing less than a balloon would allow one to escape from its taint. But he noticed that even at this slight elevation he had got free from the noise of the traffic. It would continue--a crashing roar--for hours, and yet it was now scarcely perceptible. Listening attentively he heard it--just a crackling murmur, a curious muffled rhythm, as of drums beaten by an army of drummers marching far away.