Somewhere in front of him, he
fancied, lay the sea, and towards the sea his footsteps seemed
persistently turning; why he was struggling wearily forward to
that goal he could scarcely have explained, unless he was
possessed by the same instinct that turns a hard-pressed stag
cliffward in its last extremity. In his case the hounds of Fate
were certainly pressing him with unrelenting insistence; hunger,
fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain, and he
could scarcely summon sufficient energy to wonder what underlying
impulse was driving him onward. Stoner was one of those
unfortunate individuals who seem to have tried everything; a
natural slothfulness and improvidence had always intervened to
blight any chance of even moderate success, and now he was at the
end of his tether, and there was nothing more to try. Desperation
had not awakened in him any dormant reserve of energy; on the
contrary, a mental torpor grew up round the crisis of his
fortunes. With the clothes he stood up in, a halfpenny in his
pocket, and no single friend or acquaintance to turn to, with no
prospect either of a bed for the night or a meal for the morrow,
Martin Stoner trudged stolidly forward, between moist hedgerows
and beneath dripping trees, his mind almost a blank, except that
he was subconsciously aware that somewhere in front of him lay the
sea.
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