Curious hewn windows, smaller in proportion than the slits in a
doll's house. Are these faces behind the slits? The doors bulge
incessantly under the shock of bodies hurled against them from within.
The whole dirty _nouveau_ business about to crumble.
Glance one.
Glance two: directly before me. A wall with many bars fixed across one
minute opening. At the opening a dozen, fifteen, grins. Upon the bars
hands, scraggy and bluishly white. Through the bars stretching of lean
arms, incessant stretchings. The grins leap at the window, hands
belonging to them catch hold, arms belonging to the hands stretch in my
direction ... an instant; the new grins leap from behind and knock off
the first grins which go down with a fragile crashing like glass smashed:
hands wither and break, arms streak out of sight, sucked inward.
In the huge potpourri of misery a central figure clung, shaken but
undislodged. Clung like a monkey to central bars. Clung like an angel to
a harp. Calling pleasantly in a high boyish voice: "O Jack, give me a
cigarette."
A handsome face, dark, Latin smile, musical fingers strong.
I waded suddenly through a group of gendarmes (they stood around me
watching with a disagreeable curiosity my reaction to this).
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