arm. It was the frightened negro’s head. He went squirming out below Eugene’s arm until he was outside peering with white eyeballs over a policeman’s shoulder, and when Eugene saw they would not try to keep the negro there with him, he went back in the cell and was locked up. He felt very sick, and everything was swimming nauseously around him: for a while he leaned over the w.c. and vomited into it. Then he sat down on the edge of the cot and stared ahead, thinking about nothing, but with something hideous, like a great grey smear, inside him.
XLIII
How long he sat there in this way he did not know, for time would pass in a hideous smear of brownish grey while all things reeled, mixed, and were fused drunkenly and shapelessly around him—and then for a moment time would burn in his mind like a small hard light of brilliant colour, and he would see everything with an exact and blazing vividness and hear the voices of his comrades in their cells.
The cell Eugene sat in was a little cubicle of space, perhaps eight feet deep and four or five feet wide. Its only furnishings were a black iron cot or bed which projected from the wall and could be turned up or out, and which had no springs or mattress on it, and a w.c. of dirty white enamel, which had no seat, and was broken and would not flush so that it had run over and spilled out upon the cement floor. The walls and ceilings of the cell were made of some hard slate-like substance of black-grey, scrawled with the familiar obscenities and pictures of its former occupants. Because of these solid walls, each cell was cut off from its neighbours and for this reason he could not see Emmet Blake, who had the cell next to him, nor Robert, who had the cell on the other side of Emmet, but now, as his mind swam from the stupor of its drunkenness, he could hear their voices and began to listen to their conversation.
Both were still quite drunk, and for a while they continued a kind of mournful drunken chant, each responding to the other with a repetition of his own misfortune.
“Yes, sir,” Robert would say, heaving a sigh and speaking in a hoarse, mournfully drunken voice, “this is certainly a hell of a way to treat a man who’s just been admitted to the bar six weeks ago! A hell of a thing!” he said.
And Blake would answer:
