It strengthened his growing hatred of London, a huge battlefield
calling itself the home of civilisation and of peace; battlefield on
which the wounds were of soul no less than of body. In these gaunt
streets along which he passed at night, how many a sad heart
suffered, by the dim glimmer that showed at upper windows, a
hopeless solitude amid the innumerable throng! Human cattle, the
herd that feed and breed, with them it was well; but the few born to
a desire for ever unattainable, the gentle spirits who from their
prisoning circumstance looked up and afar how the heart ached to
think of them! Some girl, of delicate instinct, of purpose sweet and
pure, wasting her unloved life in toil and want and indignity; some
man, whose youth and courage strove against a mean environment,
whose eyes grew haggard in the vain search for a companion promised
in his dreams; they lived, these two, parted perchance only by the
wall of neighbour houses, yet all huge London was between them, and
their hands would never touch. Beside this hunger for love, what was
the stomach-famine of a multitude that knew no other?
The spring drew nigh, and Otway dreaded its coming. It was the time
of his burning torment, of imagination traitor to the worthier mind;
it was the time of reverie that rapt him above everything ignoble,
only to embitter by contrast the destiny he could not break. He rose
now with the early sun; walked fast and far before the beginning of
his day's work, with an aim he knew to be foolish, yet could not
abandon.
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