Their bodies were
absolutely limp. Their hands dragged foolishly along the floor as they
were carried. Their upward white faces dangled loosely upon their necks.
Their crumpled fingers sagged in the _planton's_ arms. I recognised Lily
and Renee. Lena I made out at a little distance tottering against the
door of the kitchen opposite the _cabinot_, her hay-coloured head
drooping and swaying slowly upon the open breast of her shirt-waist, her
legs far apart and propping with difficulty her hinging body, her hands
spasmodically searching for the knob of the door. The smoke proceeded
from the open _cabinot_ in great ponderous murdering clouds. In one of
these clouds, erect and tense and beautiful as an angel--her wildly
shouting face framed in its huge night of dishevelled hair, her deep
sexual voice, hoarsely strident above the din and smoke, shouting
fiercely through the darkness--stood, triumphantly and colossally young,
Celina. Facing her, its clenched, pinkish fists raised high above its
savagely bristling head in a big, brutal gesture of impotence and rage
and anguish--the Fiend Himself paused quivering. Through the smoke, the
great bright voice of Celina rose at him, hoarse and rich and sudden and
intensely luxurious, quick, throaty, accurate, slaying deepness:
_SHIEZ, SI VOUS VOULEZ, SHIEZ,_
and over and beneath and around the voice I saw frightened faces of women
hanging in the smoke, some screaming with their lips apart and their eyes
closed, some staring with wide eyes; and among the women's faces I
discovered the large, placid, interested expression of the Gestionnaire
and the nervous clicking eyes of the Surveillant.
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