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Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more quickly
than his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea often
becomes stronger in memory than in its original production he found
himself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than his
earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of
Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter
jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road
to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of
the impulse to go to her, and of final surrender.
In Spokane he outfitted himself, for his clothes were ragged, and with
the remainder of his money bought a ticket to Chicago. Beyond Chicago he
had no thought save one. Some way, somehow, he must get to New York.
Yet all the time he was fighting. He tried again and again to break
away from the emotional associations from which his memory of her was
erected; when that failed he struggled to face reality; the lapse of
time, the certainty of his disappointment, at the best the inevitable
parting when he went back to Norada. But always in the end he found his
face turned toward the East, and her.
He had no fear of starving. If he had learned the cost of a dollar in
blood and muscle, he had the blood and the muscle. There was a time, in
Chicago, when the necessity of thinking about money irritated him, for
the memory of his old opulent days was very clear. Times when his temper
was uncertain, and he turned surly. Times when his helplessness brought
to his lips the old familiar blasphemies of his youth, which sounded
strange and revolting to his ears.
He had no fear, then, but a great impatience, as though, having lost
so much time, he must advance with every minute. And Chicago drove him
frantic. There came a time there when he made a deliberate attempt
to sink to the very depths, to seek forgetfulness by burying one
wretchedness under another. He attempted to find work and failed, and he
tried to let go and sink. The total result of the experiment was that
he wakened one morning in his lodging-house ill and with his money gone,
save for some small silver. He thought ironically, lying on his untidy
bed, that even the resources of the depths were closed to him.
He never tried that experiment again. He hated himself for it.
For days he haunted the West Madison Street employment agencies. But the
agencies and sidewalks were filled with men who wandered aimlessly
with the objectless shuffle of the unemployed. Beds had gone up in the
lodging-houses to thirty-five cents a night, and the food in the cheap
restaurants was almost uneatable. There came a day when the free morning
coffee at a Bible Rescue Home, and its soup and potatoes and carrots at
night was all he ate.