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The pain in his head was now dulled and quite bearable, and the flow of blood had stopped, for he felt the encrustation of it beginning on his cheeks. There was a tremendous noise all around him, and he traced this to the swaying of tree-tops in the gale. But there was an undercurrent of deeper sound water surely, water churning among rocks.
As his critical sense became dulled, his standard of intellectual performance was less exacting, and this was most fortunate, for he gladly went to any public occasion where he could hear, and nothing would be expected of him. He attended the Lyceum and all occasions of speaking or reading in the Town Hall with unfailing pleasure.
At first the mules had plodded with ears pricked forward, and with sundry snorts and stares as if they were seeing portents in the moonshine. Eventually their imaginings dulled, so that they now moved careless of where or why, their heads drooped, their minds devoted to achieving what rest they might in the merely mechanical setting of hoof before hoof. I could not but be aware of my companion.
That effort occupied all the energy I had, and I only heard scraps of the evidence, which seemed, to my dulled brain, to refer to some one else and not to me at all. At last there came a confused noise, shouting and clapping, and above it a stentorian voice. "Silence! Silence in the court!"
Strangely enough, the dulled pandemonium, joined in by dog and owl and drum and chanting savages, made but a single wild and melancholy monotone seeming to suit the time and place as though it were the voice of this fierce wilderness itself.
And yet that heavy affliction darkened his mind as he rolled and unrolled his silks, or carefully matched the skeins that came from the dyers. The sun was shining through the windows, the lower panes of which were dulled in order to obtain a clear high light; but the cloud upon his puckered brow was not lifted. Hour by hour the warehouse clock ticked away the afternoon.
What becomes of these imaginative, inquisitive, myth-making, light-hearted, tender-hearted, and altogether charming young adventurers who start out so gayly to explore the wonder-world? The solemn answer comes, "They after a while are grown-up." Did you ever meditate on that catastrophe which we speak of as being "grown-up"? Habit has dulled our perception of the absurd anti-climax involved in it.
Many donkeys and a few carriages awaited us: the whole equipment previously engaged for to-morrow! and in opaline sunshine which stained with pale rose the Theban hills and piled the shadows full of dark, dulled rubies, we started across an emerald plain, kept ever verdant by Nile water.
He had given up bothering about his hands and feet being so blistered and sore, for all such local pain was dulled by the utter collapse of nerve-sensation. He couldn't think clearly enough to think that he was feeling pain; he could not think at all.
But the dulled and tired worker released from eight or ten hours' drudgery in a factory is apt to be in a psychological state that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost. It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try to make out of a red-blooded young man or woman a mere machine.
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