Inside the window, a square room with a litter of six-penny novels in a
corner, fifty or sixty books flung haphazard, some of them open with the
leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner, a heap of
commissariat stuff, tins of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and
glasses of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a large jug of
marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked
its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room,
like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the
corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawling. A
hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty glass of the closed window,
and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush armchair. Around the
chair, as if it were a promontory in a heaving sea, were billows of
stale crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across
the page, all flung aside in _ennui_.
The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one
years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and
settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man--moist
flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies
which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them
restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low
buzzing in the sultry room.
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