HE felt strangely at ease in a setting so easily strange. There was
a palpable flavor of unreality in the moment, of detachment from the
commonplace round of existence; it was without connection, without
responsibility to yesterday or to to-morrow; he was isolated with the
informal vision of Annot in an hour which seemed neither day nor night.
He felt--inarticulately--divorced from his customary daily personality;
and, with no particular need for speech, lit a cigarette, and blew
clouds of smoke at the ceiling. It was his companion who interrupted
this mood.
“The life that people think so tremendously important,” she observed,
“the things one does, are hardly more real than a suit of clothes, with
religion for a nice, prim white collar, gloves for morals, and a hidden
red silk handkerchief for a rare revolt. And all the time, politely
ignored, decently covered, our bodies are underneath. Now and then some
one slips out of his covering, and stands bare before his shocked
and protesting friends, but they soon hurry something about him, a
conventional shawl, a moral sheet. Do you happen to remember a wonderful
caricature of Louis XIV--simply a wig, a silk suit, buckled shoes and a
staff?”
The mordant humor of that drawing penetrated Anthony's understanding:
he saw rooms, streets, a world full of gesticulating suits, dresses,
nodding hats, bonnets; he saw the unsubstantial concourse haughtily
erect, condescending, cunningly deceptive, veiling in a thousand
subterfuges their essential emptiness. The thought evaporated
in laughter at the obvious humor of such a spectacle; its social
significance missed him totally, happily.
“What an unthinking person you are,” she told him; “you just--live. It's
rather remarkable--one of Bacchus' company caught in the modern streets.
It is all so different now,” she added plaintively; “men get drunk in
saloons or at dinner, and the purple stain of the grape centers in
their noses. I tried myself,” she confessed, “in Geneva. I was with a
specialist who had father. The café balcony overhung the lake; it was at
night, and the villages looked like clusters of fireflies about a black
mirror; and you simply never saw so many stars. We were looking for
a lyric sensation, but it was the most awful fizzle; he insisted on
describing an operation with all the grey and gory details complete, and
I fell fast asleep.”
The outcome of her experiment tallied exactly with that of his own
more involuntary efforts in that field. It established in his mind
a singularly direct sympathy with her; the uneasy element which her
attitude had called up in him disappeared entirely, its place taken by a
comfortable sense of freedom, a total lack of _rot_.
She rose, vanishing into her father's room, then, coming to the door,
nodded shortly, and left for the night.
He found on the bureau in his tower room what remained of the fifty
dollars--it had been reduced to less than eight. Suddenly he remembered
his purpose there, his supreme need of money, the imperative westward
call.... He bitterly cursed his lax character as he recalled the cigars
he had purchased, the silk shirt too, and an unnecessary tie. A deep
gloom settled upon his spirit. He heard in retrospect his father's
clear, high voice--“shiftless, no sense of responsibility.” He sat
miserably on the edge of the bed in the dark, while the petty, unbroken
procession of past failures wheeled through his brain. Then the shining
vision of Eliza, compassionate, tender, folded him in peace; one by one
he would subdue those rebellious elements in himself, of fate, that held
them apart.