When, later, he was on the bed,
it was wet under his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one
of the cries of her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her
fingers reached toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a
woman's challenging laughter--one of the travelling beauties Daniel had
mentioned--and he could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the
street of Cobra, the combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and
together beyond description. What a hell of a night, what a night in
hell!
The moths, defrauded in their hunger for light, blundered softly around
the walls; when Lee rose to light a cigarette they would, he felt,
gather at the match and beat it out with their desirous wings. Then he
heard a shot, and uplifted clamoring voices; all as unreal, as
withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the
flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their
fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the
surrounding blackness. Savina, awake, demanded a drink, and he held a
clay water monkey awkwardly to her lips. The faint double blast of a
steam signal rose at the back of the hotel, beyond the town; he had
heard it before and now connected it with Daniel's sugar mill.
His brother hadn't perceptibly changed in fifteen years. During that
time Lee had seen him scarcely at all.
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