“'Twere a brick,” said some one in the dark centre of the shop. “Took him over the ear. Dented him in like a plug hat.”
The light of the lamp, lifted in Mr. Barria's hand, fell over his head with its flowing white hair, rabbinical beard, and spectral face. Three-men, one of them a policeman, drew back to one side of the shop, looking startled and feebly embarrassed. On the other side the window lamp shone on Janey, where she lay fallen among the old Annuals.
The three men slipped through the door; those above came down; a doctor bustled in, satchel in hand, and after him several women; Janey was carried up; the shop was empty, except for Mr. Barria sitting by his lamp and muttering softly.
“She could not find it, the peace that is about, and her little happiness it would not stay beside her.”
“I think Mrs. Durdo should be taken to the hospital. St. James, you know. It's not far.”
“She is approaching confinement, and the shock, you know.”
“Whatever iss desirable, Herr Doctor. There iss no need, sir, of the economy in respect to--to whatever iss desirable.”
This was in June. Late in the fall Janey came back from St. James's Hospital, pale, drooping, and alone.
She sat in a black dress by the front window and kept the accounts as before, gazed through the dim panes at Cripple Street, which was made by nature to be dull, but read the Annuals no more, which was perhaps a pity.
Mr. Barria from the rear of the shop watched Janey, sitting among the Annuals and looking out on Cripple Street. He had not entered on the Path himself as a cure for sorrow and suffering; he had come to it from another direction. Yet the first purpose of its system had been the solution of these. It was written:
“Sorrow and suffering will be overcome when this thirst for life is quenched, which makes for continuance, and that desire of separateness and hunger after selfhood are put aside. They will fall away as drops from a lotus leaf.”
And Janey was a type of them as they walk abroad. The measure of her trouble was the measure of the yearning and attainment that had been hers.
“Desire not more then of yearning or attainment, of sight or touch, of life in variety or abundance, but desire none at all, and turning within, the dwelling you build there dwell in it, until both desire and separateness shall in turn disappear.”