One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely women had marched in the throng.Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air.A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall.Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name "Marie".It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions.The furniture was chipped and bruised;the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion.Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel.Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony.It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home;and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath.A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter;in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully;above him a banjo tinkled with spirit.Doors banged somewhere;the elevated trains roared intermittently;a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence.And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.