Carl Dell and Anita Starr were speaking of a dead woman who had
influenced their eyes. She had also refined their heads to a chill
protest. Their faces, involved and disconsolate, had not solved her
absence, and their voices were freighted with a primitive martyrdom.
Carl was fencing with the end of his youth. His body held that
inpenetrable cringing which pretends to ignore the coming of middle age
and is only betrayed by rare gestures. He was tall, with a slenderness
that barely escaped being feminine. The upper part of his face was
scholarly and the lower part roguish, and the two gave him the effect
of a sprite who has become erudite but still retains the memory of
his former identity. His protruding eyes were embarrassed, as though
someone behind them had unexpectedly pushed them from a refuge. With
immense finesse they apologised for intruding upon the world. It is
almost tautology to say that they were gray. His small brown moustache
had a candidly misplaced air as it touched the thin bacchanale of his
lips. It was a mourner at the feast.
Anita Starr’s form would have seemed stout but for the sweeping
discipline of its lines, but this careful suppression ended in a riot
when it came to her face. Her face was a small, lyrical revel that had
terminated in a fight. Her nose and chin were strident but her cheeks
and mouth were subtlely unassuming. Her blue eyes brilliantly and
impartially aided both sides of the conflict. Glistening spirals of
reddish brown hair courted her head.
Sitting in the parlor of the Starr home Anita and Carl spoke of a
dead woman who had influenced their eyes. It was two A. M. and the
atmosphere resembled a disillusioned reminiscence: still and heavy.
They had talked about this dead woman throughout the evening,
welcoming any sound that might surprise her profile into life. When
alive she had been the chanting whirlpool of their existences, and when
she died sound ceased for them. Their voices became mere copies of its
past reign.
“Because I loved her any common pebble became a chance word concerning
her and flowers were enthusiastic anecdotes of her presence,” said Carl.
For an hour he had been breaking his love into insatiable
variations--one who seduces the fleeting expressions of a past torture.
“She may have been an august vagabond from another planet--a planet
where loitering is a solemn profession,” said Anita. “Even when she
performed a menial task she awed it with her thoughtful reluctance.
Like a fitful gleaner she crept through bare fields of people,
accepting their bits of laughter and refusal. When she met us she
stepped backward, as from a tempting unreality, and knocked against
death.”
Carl sat, like a groveling fantasy weary of attempting to capture
a genuine animation, but Anita had forced herself into a tormented
erectness. The clock struck three. Without a word or glance in each
other’s direction they left their chairs, turned out the lights, and
ascended the stairway, Carl slightly in advance. They halted at the
first landing and faced each other with the uncomplaining helplessness
of people suddenly scalded by reality.
“In the morning we will eat oranges from a silver dish and glibly cheat
our emotions,” said Carl.
“This deftly impolite proceeding never stops to ask our consent,” said
Anita in a voice whose lethargy barely observed a satirical twinkle.
Another word would have been a ridiculous impropriety. They parted
and entered their rooms. Flower scents filtered through Carl’s open
window, like softly dismayed sins and the cool repentance of a summer
night glided into his room upon a pathway of moonlight. For a while
he sat absent-mindedly burnishing the knives that had divided his
evening. After he had undressed he fell upon his bed like one hurriedly
obliterating an ordeal. His consciousness played with a black hood;
then a crash mastered the room and the door swung open. His blanched
face paid a spasmodic tribute to the sound and his grey eyes greeted
the darkness as though it were an advancing mob. With a strained
stoicism he waited for a repetition of the sound. The moments were
sledge-hammers fanning his face with their close passage. Then his bed
weirdly meddled with his body and became a light cradle rocked by some
arrogant hand. The darkness tingled lifelessly, like an electrocuted
man.
Carl’s waiting began to feel sharply disgraced and his senses planned
a revolt. He tried to rise to a sitting posture but his body insulted
his desire. At this point the darkness softened to the disguised
struggle of a woman striving to reach him. The significance of this
cast an impalpable but potent consolation upon the straining of his
chained body. The rocking of his bed measured a powerfully cryptic
welcome and he tried to decipher it with the beat of his heart. Each
of its syllables became the cadenced impact of another person against
a toughly pliant wall. His body demolished its tenseness and pressed a
refrain into the swaying bed. He decorated the darkness with the crisp
flight of his voice.
“Perish upon the turmoil of each day and make it inaudible, but let the
night be our hermitage,” he cried to a dead woman. As though replying,
the rocking of his bed gradually lessened and the darkness became
an opaque farewell. He turned to the shaft of moonlight which was
tactfully intercepting the floor of his room; it had the unobtrusive
intensity of a melted Chinaman. For hours he gave it his eyes and dimly
contradicted it with his heart. When the dawn made his room aware of
its limitations, he closed his eyes.
At the breakfast table he and Anita greeted each other with a worn
brevity: their eyes found an empty solace in the white tablecloth
and their minds felt a bright impotence, like beggars idling in the
sun. For a while the tinkle of their spoons amiably pardoned their
constraint, but Anita finally spoke with the staccato of one who snaps
unbearable thongs.
“She came to me last night. I heard a sound like a huge menace
stumbling over a chair. The door opened and the darkness grew as heavy
as dead flesh. My bed swayed with the precision of a grieving head.”
Carl’s face broke and gleamed like a soft ground flogged by sudden rain.
“The same things happened to me,” he said in the voice of a child
wrestling with a minor chord.
They sat heavily disputing each other with their eyes.
“Did you lie afterwards, censuring the moonlight?” asked Anita.
Carl nodded. Anita’s mother majestically blundered into the room.
Exuberantly substantial, with the face of a child skillfully rebuked by
an elderly masquerade, she flattered a chair at the table.
“Wasn’t that a terrible storm we had last night,” she babbled. “The
rain kept me awake for hours--I’m such a light sleeper, you know. I do
hope you children managed to rest.”