Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/570

 And women with spent loins and sleeping croups Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups, With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue With the first trampling of the evening's crew. One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking; Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking; Others by bacchanalia worn out, Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout, Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct, And smooth their legs with hands together linked

It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed, Where lightning madness stains Foreheads with rotting pains, Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed The city and the sea.

Fomá Gordyéeff

(Perhaps the most famous novel of the Russian writer, the life-story of the son of a prosperous merchant, a youth who wrecks himself in a vain search for some outlet for his energies, and at the end commits suicide)

"Where is the merchant to spend his energy? He cannot spend much of it on the Exchange, so he squanders the excess of his muscular capital in drinking-bouts in kabaky; for he has no conception of other applications of his strength, which are more productive, more valuable to life. He is still a beast, and life has already become to him a cage, and it is too nar