But Gumbril would not allow that. “We haven’t had enough to eat yet,” he said, and he gave the cabman Gumbril Senior’s address.
Gumbril Senior was sitting on his little iron balcony among the dried-out pots that had once held geraniums, smoking his pipe and looking earnestly out into the darkness in front of him. Clustered in the fourteen plane trees of the square, the starlings were already asleep. There was no sound but the rustling of the leaves. But sometimes, every hour or so, the birds would wake up. Something—perhaps it might be a stronger gust of wind, perhaps some happy dream of worms, some nightmare of cats simultaneously dreamed by all the flock together—would suddenly rouse them. And then they would all start to talk at once, at the tops of their shrill voices—for perhaps half
