a sense of having yielded up and lost irrevocably into the sponge-like and withdrawing maws of their dark, oily and insatiate hunger, their oriental and parasitic gluttony, all of the rare and priceless energies of creation: he thought with a weary and impotent fury of great plans and soaring ecstasies of hope and ambition—of poems, stories, books which once had swarmed exultantly their cries of glory, joy, and triumph through his brain—and now all this seemed lost and wasted, flung riotously and fruitlessly away into the blind maw of a headless sucking mouth, a dark brainless, obscene and insatiate hunger.
As he looked at them, a horrible memory returned of the great fish which once he had caught in deep-sea water outside Boston harbour: he could feel again the sudden heavy living tug, the wriggling vitality, at the end of 200 feet of line, and then the wet line slipping harshly through his fingers as exultantly he drew the great fish upward to the surface. Then he remembered the sense of loss and disgust and horror when he saw it: it swam upward, wriggling heavily in a flail of heavy dying protest, through a thickened murk of greenish water, and he saw that to its brain was fastened some blind horror of the sea, a foul snake-like shape a foot or more in length, a headless, brainless mouth, a blind suck and sea-crawl, a mindless abomination, glued implacably, fastened in fatal suck in one small rim of bloody foam against the brain-cage of the great dying fish. How often, in a mad fury of escape and freedom, it had lashed its brain to bloody froth against some razored edge, some coral types upon the swarming jungle of the sea, he did not know; but the memory of it had returned a thousand times in abominable waking-sleeping visions of the night to haunt him with its blind and mouthless horror, and now he thought of it again, as they drew in on him their sucking glut of dark insatiate desire.
Their dark flesh had in it the quality of a merciless tide which not only overwhelmed and devoured but withdrew with a powerful sucking glut all rich deposits of the earth it fed upon: they had the absorptive quality of a sponge, the power of a magnet, the end of each class left him sapped, gutted, drained, and with a sense of sterility, loss, and defeat, and in addition to this exhaustion of the mind and spirit, there was added a terrible weariness and frustration of the flesh: the potent young Jewesses, thick, hot, and heavy with a female odour, swarmed around him in a sensual tide, they leaned above him as he sat there at his table, pressing deliberately the crisp nozzles of their melon-heavy breasts against his shoulder; slowly, erotically, they moved their bellies in to him,
