Sleep eluded James Femms. Isolated in umbrageous stillness, the
grosser sensory reactions no longer obstructed the reception of what,
he now conceded, must be the telepathic apperceptions of sixth or
seventh sense. Below the coverlet his body, resentful under mysterious
reproaches from without, expressed its unrest in gyratory saltations;
his mind ached and quivered in sympathy with baffling emotions of which
his awareness was so acute that it all but equalled experience itself.
He was cognizant, dimly but with certitude, of a relation between
these sufferings and the presence, the propinquity, at least, of
the _porte-chapeaux_ that had been Sonoff’s. Again he contemplated
the hypothesis that understanding and affection had established
between James Femms and the inanimate objects of his passion, a
_rapprochement_, a _rapport_ analogous to, if not identical with, the
sympathy that unites the sundered halves of a spiritual union. Below,
from the doorstep, the _porte-chapeaux_ of Mikail Sonoff seemed, to
James Femms, to upraise a muted ululation, a sound of exquisite desire,
as pitiful and penetrant as the call of the widowed wood-dove. He came,
at last, to the window, a panel of translucent pressed glass surrounded
by a bordure of plaquettes, each of a different primary color, now
delicately diminished in the pallor of a moon as cold, Femms thought,
as the belly facet of a flounder.
He slept with the window, after the mode which he sensed intuitively
would have been that of Jambes des Femmes, closed. Lifting it, now,
and shivering in the humid inrush of nocturnal airs, he identified
the crooning note; the leprous, unchaste cry of feline concupiscence.
Femms’s sibilant ejaculation motivated a flitting shadow; the gashed
silence seemed to lick its wounds; there was stillness, but not, for
James Femms, peace.
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