little, as his strength came back and his senses cleared, he
began to see beyond his momentary gratification; that he
had nearly killed the boss would not help Ona -- not the
horrors that she had borne, nor the memory that would
haunt her all her days. It would not help to feed her and
her child; she would certainly lose her place, while he --
what was to happen to him God only knew.

Half the night he paced the floor, wrestling with this
nightmare; and when he was exhausted he lay down, try~
ing to sleep, but finding instead, for the first time in his
life, that his brain was too much for him. In the cell next
to him was a drunken wife-beater and in the one beyond a
yelling maniac. At midnight they opened the station-
house to the homeless wanderers who were crowded about
the door, shivering in the winter blast, and they thronged
into the corridor outside of the cells. Some of them
stretched themselves out on the bare stone floor and fell to
snoring; others sat up, laughing and talking, cursing and
quarreling. The air was fetid with their breath, yet in
spite of this some of them smelt Jurgis and called down the
torments of hell upon him, while he lay in a far corner
of his cell, counting the throbbings of the blood in his
forehead.

They had brought him his supper, which was "duffers
and dope" -- being hunks of dry bread on a tin plate,
and coffee, called "dope" because it was drugged to
keep the prisoners quiet. Jurgis had not known this, or
he would have swallowed the stuff in desperation; as it
was, every nerve of him was a-quiver with shame and rage.
Toward morning the place fell silent, and he got up and
began to pace his cell; and then within the soul of him
there rose up a fiend, red-eyed and cruel, and tore out
the strings of his heart.

It was not for himself that he suffered -- what did a
man who worked in Durham's fertilizer-mill care about
anything that the world might do to him! What was
any tyranny of prison compared with the tyranny of the
past, of the thing that had happened and could not be
recalled, of the memory that could never be effaced! The

[[184]]

p183 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p184w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p185

v?