Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/136

112 houses and the factories, which lay behind them, the overflow was SO copious that, unable to find room in the shallow gutters, it rose above the kerb and flooded the pavements with coloured waves, even up to the worn thresholds of numerous little shops, from whose black, miry interiors was wafted dirt and decay, the smell of herrings, of rotting vegetables or of alcohol.

The houses which were old, tumble-down, dingy, with the plaster crumbling in gaps like wounds, with bare brickwork, here and there of wood or with common panelling, cracking and slipping away by the doors and windows, at the crooked edges of the window-sashes, twisted, jaded, dirty, stood like a ghastly row of corpse-houses, amongst which new ones were thrusting themselves,—three-storied giants with countless windows, not yet whitewashed, without balconies, with makeshift windows, and already full of human antheaps, and the throb of the spinning looms, which worked regardless of Sunday, the rattle of noisy machines, weaving shoddy for export, and the piercing creak of spindles by which the yarn was wound on to bobbins for the use of the hand-looms.

In front of these endless houses, which rose up with their red and frowning walls above the ocean of perishing ruins and bustle of hucksters, lay whole stacks of bricks and wood, blocking up the already narrow street, which swarmed with