Yet the nights in here have been paradise. Cool sleep. Escape from the night-sounds of the court. Escape from Miss Holland’s obliviousness of the sounds of the court.
She is dull not to hear. Or strong? Dull strength in not hearing.
Noisy home-comings in the spring. Strident, hideous voices in a reeling procession along the court and dying away in the distance. Drunken monologues. Every sound echoing near and clear in the narrow court. And she heard nothing. The cobbler, noisily taking down his shutters in the early light had called her from sleep, not from feverish dreams. And when the summer came and sounds filled the court till dawn, still she heard nothing.
Why is all this saying itself over so freshly? At some moment every night before I go down into sleep, it says itself. And now I have come back from half-way to sleep it is all there is in my mind. Because I am always trying to ignore it. Never thinking of it by day. And here it is, belonging to me. Closer than anything that happened yesterday.
Hoarse-voiced lovers lingering on after the roystering has died down. Men and women coming in quarrelling from the main street. Voices that had been gentle for each other madly seeking lost gentleness in curses. Curses and blows dying down to a panting stillness; out there, in the dismal court.
Night-long, through open windows, thick, distorted voices in strife. Shut in, maddened. Maddened confined man. Women despairingly mocking. Worst of all, children’s voices sane and sweet in protest, shrilling up, driven by fear, beyond the constriction of malformed throats, into sweetness.
And she had heard nothing.
But this same thickness or dullness had kept her unaware of what it was that in the end had turned this stuffy little back room into a refuge.
She did not know that there were sounds more intolerable than those coming in from the street. The street sounds varied. Were sometimes obliterated by wind and rain, and were at their worst only at the height of the summer. And even at their worst they were life, fierce and coarse, driving off sleep; but real, exciting. Only unendurable because there was no hope during their lifetimes of any alteration in the circumstances within which all these people were confined.
But those other sounds never varied. And spoke of death. That was the worst, that they filled the room with the sense of death and the end.