unrealities, persecuted by memories, the victim of fear, falsities, and
impotent rage. I rushed away from the spot, walked many miles, and at
last, coming to the railroad again, I took a train and for weeks,
without money, rode westward on freight trains. I dropped out of sight.
I lost my name. I even lost much of my flesh. I was as thoroughly dead
as a living man could be. The world had buried me.

Almost immediately the body and its organs, which had borne up with such
infernal endurance for the express purpose of making the ruin of my soul
complete, gave way. Suddenly my stomach, as if possessing a malicious
intelligence of its own, refused the stimulant with which I had helped
to accomplish my slide to the bottom of life and with which I had
expected to be able to dull the mental and physical pains of my final
accounting. My mind now found itself picturing with feverish desire all
the old pleasures. At the same moment my flesh and bones forbade me to
enjoy them. My body had caught my mind like a rat in a trap!

Day followed day, week, week, and year, year. It was a weary monotony of
manual labor, poverty, restless travel, on foot, and hopeless attempts
to recover my birthright--the privileges of excess--which had gone from
me forever. Cities and their bright lights laughed at me.

I suffered the tortures of insomnia, the pains of violent rheumatism,
the dreadful imprisonment of a partial paralysis. I was in and out of
hospitals. I spent months on my back, entertained only by my lurid
memories. My mind became starved for new material on which to work. It
was at that period that I first learned to obscure the awful presence of
my own personality by flinging my thoughts into the problems of chess.

I recalled often enough the fact that somewhere I had a daughter. No
night passed that I did not go to sleep wondering where she might be. I
realized that she was growing up somewhere. I realized, too, that a
child of fancy was growing up in my mind. I could see her in her crib, a
laughing baby uttering meaningless sounds, clasping a flower in her fat
little fist. I could see her in short skirts, trying to walk upstairs,
clinging to the banister. I could hear her first words. I saw her
learning to read. Little by little her hair grew. It reached a length
which made a braid necessary. At times I saw her laugh,--this child of
the imagination,--and once, left alone at dusk, she had wept over some
cross word that had been spo