Five Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

the same instant, and the little pig did not scream again until the knife was actually in its throat. There was a shrieking, twitching blare, which sank down into a death-rattle that was no more than a pathetic snore. All these were things Homo saw for the first time in his life.
    When dusk fell, they all gathered in the little vicarage, where they had rented a room to serve as their mess. Admittedly the meat, which came the long way up the mountain only twice a week, was often going off, and not infrequently one had a touch of food-poisoning. But still all of them came here as soon as it was dark, stumbling along the invisible tracks with their little lanterns. For what caused them more suffering than food-poisoning was melancholy and boredom, even though everything was so beautiful. They swilled it away with wine. After an hour a cloud of sadness and ragtime hung over the room. The gramophone went round and round, like a gilded hurdy-gurdy trundling over a soft meadow spattered with wonderful stars. They no longer talked to each other. They merely talked. What should they have said to each other, a literary man of independent means, a business man, a former inspector of prisons, a mining engineer, and a retired major? They communicated in sign-language—and this even though they used words: words of discomfort, of relative comfort, of homesickness—it was an animal language. Often they would argue with superfluous intensity about some question that concerned none of them, and would reach the point of insulting each other, and the next day seconds would be passing to and fro. Then it would turn out that nobody had meant a word of it. They had only done it to kill time, and even if none of them had ever really known anything of the world, each of them felt he had behaved as uncouthly as a butcher, and this filled them with resentment against each other.
    It was that standard psychic unit which is Europe. It was idleness as undefined as at other times their occupation was. It was a longing for wife, child, home comforts. And interspersed with this, ever and again, there was a gramophone. "Rosa, we're going to Lodz, Lodz, Lodz ..." or: "Whate'er befall I still recall...." It was an astral emanation of powder and gauze, a mist of far-off variety-shows and European sexuality. Indecent jokes exploded into guffaws, each joke, it seemed, beginning: "You know the one about the Jew in the train.... " Only once somebody asked: "How far is it to Babylon?" And then everyone fell silent, and the major put on the "Tosca" record and, as it was about to start, said mournfully: "Once I wanted to marry Geraldine Farrar." Then her voice came through the horn, out into the room, and this woman's voice that all these drunken men were marvelling at seemed to step into a lift, and the next instant the lift was flashing away up to the top with her, arriving nowhere, coming down again, bouncing in the air. Her skirts billowed out with the movement, with this up and down, this long lying close to, clinging tightly to, one note, and again there was the rise and fall, and with it all this streaming away as if for ever, and yet again and yet again and again this being seized by yet another spasm, and again a streaming out: a voluptuous ecstasy. Homo felt it was that naked voluptuousness which is distributed throughout all the things there are in cities, a lust no longer distinguishable from manslaughter, or jealousy, or business, or motor-car racing—ah, it was no longer lust, it was a craving for adventure—no, it was not a craving for adventure either, it was a knife slashing down out of the sky, a destroying angel, angelic madness—the war?
    From one of the many long fly-papers trailing from the ceiling a fly had dropped in front of him and was lying on its back, poisoned, in the middle of one of those pools that the light of the paraffin-lamps made in the scarcely perceptible wrinkles in the oilcloth—pools with all that sadness of very early