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scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigious music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see-saw.
Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another fancy came to him, this time in metrical form.
“My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched
Over a bubbling cauldron.”
Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being blown up from underneath.
“My soul is a thin tent of gut. . . .”
or better—
“My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane. . . .”