Geroid Latour was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose curly beard
resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips were maroon-colored
and slightly distended, as though forever slyly inviting some
stubbornly inarticulate thought--as though slyly inviting Geroid
Latour. A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he
is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively
stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much
rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and
the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed
angel sometimes listened to his face.
His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought to
reach his eyes with a hat-pin.
“This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once did it much
better with a word.”
A plum-colored parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I am dumb!”
Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment. Geroid and his
wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other regretfully; and sat down
to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the room. Her face was like a
candied moon.
“My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said.
Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre--he was a
facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl
whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street.
“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as
he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently
they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred years.
Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly
killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and
walking to an ultimate trysting-place.”
The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of
her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth.
“Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid.
“It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly.
Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not
quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting
the throat of his mistress.
They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its gray
tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat.
“A cat never eats a cat--goldfish and dead lions are more to his
taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he flees from other cats or pursues
them in turn.”
“I see that you dislike melodrama,” observed a bulbous woman in
penitent lavender, who was beating a carpet in the courtyard.
“You’re mistaken. Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and can
not sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not leave without
complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people have mastered the art
of being profoundly ridiculous.”
“I can see that you’re trying to be ridiculously profound,” said the
woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled down the
street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumbersome sterility
of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs.
“Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said Geroid to
the little girl.
“I don’t quite understand you,” answered the little girl. “I see
nothing but scowls and brownness.”
A tree stood out like the black veins on an unseen fist. A square
house raised its toothless snarl and all the other houses were jealous
imitators. Wooden fences crossed each other with dejected, mathematical
precision. A rat underneath a veranda scuffled with an empty candy box.
The green of dried grasses spread out like poisonous impotence.
“Here is the house where my mother lies dead,” said the little girl.
Her father--peace germinating into greasy overalls--came down the
steps. His blue eyes were parodies on the sky--discs of sinisterly
humourous blue; his face reminded one of a pear that had been stepped
on--resiliently flattened.
“I have come to measure your wife for her coffin,” said Geroid Latour.
“You’ll find her at the bottom of the well in the back-yard,” answered
the man.
“Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said
Latour, waggishly.
“No, I’ll leave that to death,” said the man. “Come inside and warm
your candour.”
“No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said
Geroid, squinting at the man’s sportively cerulean eyes.
“Come out to the well and we’ll haul her up,” said the man.
The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgoblin,
and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of the
house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing on her toes
over the black loam. Her sparse grayish black hair flapped behind her
like a dishrag and her naked body had the color of trampled snow. An
empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head. She had the face of an old
Columbine who still thought herself beautiful.
“A neighbour of mine,” said the man in an awed voice. “She was a
ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my back-yard a
theater. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here, in my back-yard,
she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs. Moonlight turns her
knee joints into miracles!”
“Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together, comes the
little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, sentimentally.
“My wife objected to my joining this woman’s midnight dance,” said the
man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed her. I could
not see a miracle ruined.”
“Only the insane are entertaining,” answered Geroid. “The egoism of
sane people is gruesome--a modulated scale of complacent gaieties--but
insane people often display an artificial ego which is divine. The
artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself, on his divan, is
hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved a lilac bough in one
hand and a broom in the other, one could respect him.”
As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew nearer and
stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water dropped from
her grayish white skin.
“You haven’t killed me yet, my dear husband,” she shouted to the man.
Then, snatching the beer-bottle balanced on her head she struck at him.
Geroid fled to the front gate and sped down the road. Looking back,
from a safe distance, he saw the mountainous woman, the man, and the
little child earnestly gesticulating in the moonlight.