The Strike of a Sex: A Novel
9781465550996
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I was greatly fatigued, and a feeling of irresistible drowsiness had begun to creep over my senses, when my flagging energies were suddenly aroused by the appearance of a town which, though I had not before observed it, now seemed quite close at hand. Tall and graceful spires, glistening domes, and high-rearing chimneys, from which poured plentiful volumes of smoke, betokened a place of thrift and business importance. I therefore began to enter one of its residence streets with the pleasant mental exhilaration which the pedestrian feels when he opens his eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of a strange city. But I had not gone far before I was compelled to acknowledge to myself that the city belied in some unaccountable respects the smart appearance which it had borne from a distance. The men whom I began to meet, although seemingly full of a kind of jaded activity, bore strange marks of carelessness, not to say positive disorder in their attire. Their untrimmed beards showed a great lack of taste and neatness. Their collars and cuffs were soiled and wrinkled, and their neckties, fastened about their necks in all sorts of ungainly knots, were very much awry. All had a deeply preoccupied air, and I noticed that many of them had a finger or hand clumsily wrapped in rags of a mottled and dingy hue, as if they had met with untoward accidents, such as burns, cuts, or bruises. The odour of arnica pervaded the atmosphere. But I soon began to perceive that the most perplexing feature of this universal disorder, or I might say dilapidation of attire, was the total absence of buttons from garments of every description. It was as if some greedy speculator or anaconda-like Trust had suddenly made a corner of the entire product of buttons and put them so far beyond the reach of his kind that man had been compelled to supply the place of these indispensable little articles with all sorts of mechanical makeshifts. Pins, strings, hooks, and I observed in some instances, shingle nails, held together the textile frame-work which invested every man I saw. When I had become somewhat accustomed to this oddity, although inwardly much wondering what should cause it, I began to observe that the residences themselves although substantial in structure and ornamental in design, bore the same marks of surprising carelessness that I saw in their owners. The fine stone and marble doorsteps were strangely littered and untidy. Curious utensils for such places such as coffee-pots and dishpans, stood in the front windows of the various rooms. The parlours, which I could plainly see through the carelessly left open windows, were in a state of great disorder. Dust and confusion seemed to reign unmolested, and the curtains were clumsily fastened as if by unskilful hands. These visible signs of a slatternly kind of housekeeping seemed to multiply as I advanced, but my attention to them soon began to be somewhat distracted by my sense of smell. Mysterious and inscrutable odours, defying all my powers of analysis, emanated from these residences. From one it was like burnt rags, from another it seemed to be grease in some stage of decomposition, from another the odour was that of musty and decaying food, while from still others there proceeded an indescribable mixture of all these. More and more puzzled by the strange sights and smells to which my senses had grown more acute as I proceeded, I soon found that they were, after all, almost wholly driven from my mind by an infinitely sharper sense of the utter joylessness of the place. In spite of the hurrying crowds of men who jostled one another upon the streets, I began to be conscious of an overpowering sense of desolation such as I had never before known.
