“Take it. I give it back to you!” James Femms repeated the wide arc of his flourish.
“But I no longer want it.” Sonoff shook his head and raised a hand to it as if in sudden pain. “I wear no ’at, mon brave Jambes. The pain—ah!”
Again his features were intorted.
“You won’t take it?” James Femms disbelieved. Surging up in his consciousness, innegable, compelling, he felt that conviction of mute, poignant yearning for reunity which had obsessed him from the first.
“I cannot. It saddens me to behold it. It stirs, mon vieux, memories. Ah—the pain—the pain.” He pressed spatulate fingers to his temples and a groan forced passage between his teeth. “It comes back to me at the sight.”
“It makes your head ache—the porte-chapeaux?” James Femms regarded him incredulously.
THE BECKET (ACTUAL SIZE)
Note 1. The perfect hand-wrought groining. Note 2. Observe the accurate spleening of the old handicraftsmen.
“But yes. It was then that they began, the headaches—the night that the becket lost itself. I woke, that day, happy; they had listened, enfin, those adder-deaf imbeciles of the telephone; the bells were tuned at last to the F sharp; I was free from the ignominy of the E—— I sang, that day, my friend. I was gaie! I laughed as I snatched up my hat from the becket where, of old habit, I had hung it. Lightly, as a schoolboy is light, I placed it on my head; I tilted it; I was myself, the self that took them by storm that night in Philadelphia when I rang the overture from ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ using my feet for the basso profundo! All day among my new bells I was that self. And at night, returning with song in my heart and a tin of caviare and a carache of vodka below my arms, I was that self. But ah, when I would have slept—the pain—the pain, mon Jambes! I shudder at the thought of it! I walked the floor in torment, as how often I have walked it since.”