Laughing, and breaking at once into the loud harsh accents of the city, the class scrambled to its feet, and began to gather up its books. Eugene walked rapidly to his table, which stood upon a little platform a few inches above the floor, and stationing himself behind it he began feverishly and untidily to stuff away into his brief-case text-books and themes and the pile of examination papers in which were written out the results of the short “quiz” he had given them that night. But he knew without looking what those results would be. Miss Feinberg would tell him that “Christabel” had been written by “Keiths,” and that “it was sort of an epic or narrative poem of a very romantic nature such as they had in those days.” Mr. Katz would assure him that “The Eve of St. Agnes” had been written by “Wadsworth,” “and you might say there is something very mysterious and peculiar about the atmosphere of the poem.” Mr. Harry Fishbein would explain that a sonnet “is a kind of poetry they have, usually of a short nature. The first part of a sonnet is called the octrave. Shakespeare wrote some sonnets, as did also Wadsworth and Keiths!” Only Abe — Abe alone, the merciless and relentless and unfaltering Abe, Abe with his dull, grey, scornful face — would make no errors. As for the others, what difference did it make? Would these garbled renderings of what their ears had dully heard make any change for good or ill in the garbled chaos of their lives, the glare and fury of the streets? Would Herrick sing his sweet bird-song to Mr. Shapiro as he roared down to work each morning in the Bronx Express? Would Miss Feinberg think of Crashaw as she ate her noonday cream-cheese sandwich in the drug store? Would it matter much to Katz whether “Wadsworth” or “Keiths” had written “La Belle Dame,” so long as he “got by,” so long as he “got his,” so long as he “got what was comin’ to ‘m”? — Eugene could not think it. He had heard all the reasons for this folly, and the words that had been used were very fine —“a larger vision,”—“a sense of the larger life,” and so on — but the bewilderment of these turbulent and raucous young people was scarcely greater than his own.

At the end of each class, jostling, thrusting, laughing, shouting, and disputing, they would surge in upon him in a hot, clamorous, and insistent swarm, and again, as Eugene backed wearily against the wall and faced them, he had the maddening sense of having been defeated and overcome.

For the weariness of flesh was like the weariness a man has after a great burst of love with a potent and adored mistress — the back was drawn in, half-broken, toward his trembling, wrung, depleted loins, his limbs faltered and his fingers shook, his breath came heavily, his body respired slowly in a state of languorous exhaustion, but where the weariness of triumphant love brings to a man a sense of completion, victory, and finality, the weariness of the class brought to him only a feeling of sterility and despair, a damnable and unresting exacerbation and weariness of the spirit, 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, or rubbed the heavy contours of their thighs against his legs; they looked at him with moist red lips through which their wet red tongues lolled wickedly, and they sat upon the front rows of the class in garments cut with too extreme a style of provocation and indecency, staring up at him with eyes of round lewd innocence, cocking their legs with a shameless and unwitting air, so that they exposed the banded silken ruffle of their garters and the ripe heavy flesh of their underlegs.

Thus, to all his weariness of mind, the terror and torment of his spirit, a thousand erotic images of an aroused but baffled and maddened sensuality were added: they swarmed around him like the embodiment of all the frustrate hunger, desire, and fury he had come to know in the city, with a terrible wordless evocation of men starving in the heart of a great plantation, of men dying of thirst within sight of a shining spring, with a damnable mockery, a nightmare vision of proud, potent and hermetic flesh, of voluptuous forms in hell, for ever near, for ever palpable, but never to be known, owned, or touched.

The girls, the proud and potent Jewesses with their amber flesh, schooled to a goal of marriage, skilled in all the teasings of erotic trickery, with their lustful caution and their hot virginity pressed in around him in a drowning sensual tide: with looks of vacant innocence and with swift counter-glances of ............