For you see, Ethel flourishes. In passion, you know, nothing succeeds
like success; and her affair with Norman Hippisley advertised her, so
that very soon it ranked as the first of a series of successes. She
goes about dressed in stained-glass futurist muslins, and contrives
provocative effects out of a tilted nose, and sulky eyes, and
sallowness set off by a black velvet band on the forehead, and a black
scarf of hair dragged tight from a raking backward peak.
I saw her the other night sketching a frivolous gesture--
THE DICE THROWER
By SIDNEY SOUTHGATE
(Thomas Moult)
(From _Colour_)
1922
Hunger is the most poignant when it has forced physical suffering to
the highest point without impairing the mental functions. Thus it was
with Silas Carringer, a young man of uncommonly high spirit, when he
found himself a total stranger in a ramshackle Mexican city one rainy
night in November. In his possession remained not a single article that
he might have pawned for a morsel of food. And he had already stripped
his body of every shred of clothing except the few garments he was
compelled by an inborn sense of the fitness of things to retain. Bodily
starvation, as a consequence, was added to hunger, and his misery was
complete.
It chanced that an extraordinary happening awaited Silas Carringer that
night in Mexico; otherwise he would either have drowned himself in the
river within twenty-four hours or died of pneumonia within three days.
He had been without food for seventy hours, and his mental desperation
had driven him far in its race with his physical needs to consume the
remaining strength of his emaciated body. Pale, weak, and tottering, he
took what comfort he could find in the savoury odours which came
streaming up from the basement kitchens of the restaurants in the main
streets. He lacked the courage to beg or steal. For he had been reared
as a gentleman, and was accordingly out of place in the world.
His teeth chattered, his eyes had dark, ugly lines under them, he
shambled, stooped, and gasped. He was too desperate to curse his
fate--he could only long for food. He could not reason. He could not
reflect. He could not understand that there were pitying hands
somewhere that might gladly have succoured him. He could think only of
the hunger which consumed him, of the food that could give him warmth
and comparative happiness.
Staggering along the streets, he came at last to a restaurant a little
way from the main thoroughfares. Stopping before the window, he stared
greedily at the steaks within, thick and juicy and lined with big, fat
oysters lying on ice; at the slices of ham as large as his hat; at the
roasted chickens, brown and ready for the table; and he ground his
teeth, groaned, and staggered on.
A few steps onward was a drinking saloon. At one side of it was a
private door with the words "Family entrance" painted thereon. And in
the recess of the door (which was closed) there stood the dark figure
of a man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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