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. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran
from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each
twitching and heave of the sunken body.

In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls
and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long
battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms
of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire-killer, and
tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But
they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could
reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle,
and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he
read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less.
Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2
P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into
that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he
was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That
became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a
half-conscious forcing of himself through the routine work, a look