How poignantly these words had come back to Danilo in his agony! But it had not been simple.... He wondered if he were losing the naïve directness of his forefathers. There had been moments when he was almost persuaded that it was not his affair, after all. Claire Robson did not belong to him; she never had. There was no logic in exacting a price from any one who had taken unclaimed property. But there had been insolence and trickery back of the performance.... A million dollars for the Serbian cause! Not only he, but his country, was to have been smirched by the patronage of these two moral derelicts. The purity of his passion for Claire Robson had sharpened his sense of human delinquency and given him the uncompromising judgments of virtue.... Well, he had decided upon Stillman. Some one must pay the price and the woman he loved did not yet seem foul enough for the sacrifice.... Then it was that his ferretings had hunted out the Flint story. From that moment he had been gripped by a blind fury. His thoughts had grown black, formless, devastating. He had been deliberately betrayed—the woman he loved did not exist, not even potentially. It was not a question of what might have been. One did not gather figs from thistles. And above all this angry tumult within him there rose something cool and malevolent and sinister, the fruits of wounded vanity and outraged pride.... And now it was all over. He wondered whether he would be capable of an emotion again. Would he continue to think without the respite of being able to feel, to lie and stare unmoved at the mangled form of his dead hopes? At the sound of the pistol he had closed his eyes upon the horrid sight which he knew must follow. Blood was nothing to him, but the vision of Claire's shattered loveliness was too terrible to face. How easy it was to screen the senses from ugliness! Why was it not possible to shut the inner vision as completely?
He lay for hours, thinking, thinking! He could do nothing else.
Night came on again. Danilo was still thinking. A tray of untasted food sent in by a water-front chop-house drew a half-score of buzzing flies toward the varnished bureau. He lay, still inert, but disquiet had begun to succeed the first hours of emotional exhaustion. And he felt ill, also. His throat was burning and his breathing labored and choked.
"I must have caught cold last night," he thought, "running about without a hat."
Physical discomfort was swinging him back into the paths of every-day experiences. He even had a fleeting impulse to prescribe for himself.
A fever set in. He began to dream.... It seemed to him that Claire was moving about the room, waiting on him, serving him. She had on the peacock-blue dress, but the shawl was gone and her white shoulders and tapering arms gleamed coldly in the uncertain light. "Ah," thought he, "her lips will be red!" He raised his eyes to her face, but he saw only something vague and gray and formless. "She has wrapped her face in a veil," he said, aloud. "What delicacy! She does not wish to remind me of last night.... Yes, that is it!... Last night I pointed my pistol at her mouth. But her mouth was not red last night ... not before I closed my eyes.... Her lips were red once, but she wiped them clean again, for me.... Why did she do this thing for me? I was not her love?" And suddenly the peacock-blue dress was gone and Claire became a gray figure from head to foot, a gray figure with two red lips. Nothing else was visible. She began to move toward him. He tried to turn from her, to lift his body up, to fling himself downward upon his face. But he could not move. She came nearer.... Her lips were widening with every step. She halted by the bed ... she bent over ... she kissed him. Her lips were warm and moist and horrible. He gave a deep, groan and woke up.
He fell asleep again. Now he dreamed of Serbia—his country, a beautiful woman, golden in the morning light. She lay smiling like a blossom in the dawn and her long hair was spread out on either side. Then suddenly a leprous sun beat down upon her and she tried to lift her arms to screen herself from its fury, but could not. Flies gathered, her body grew loathsome, her lips black. Then, coming down a dust-stung road, he saw a gray figure—a gray figure with two smiling red lips showing through a rent in its drab winding-sheet. And his beloved country stirred faintly and gave a deep cry. The gray figure stopped, bent over gently, and, taking two strands of the flowing hair in its wan hands, drew a covering over the festering body.... He looked again. The gray figure was holding out her hands to him! He went toward it joyfully. And at that moment the gray winding-sheet fell away and Claire stood before him, smiling. He dropped on his knees beside her.... He could feel himself being lifted up. "Claire—always Claire!" he cried.... He awoke again, sobbing.
Once he dreamed of Stillman, covered with the lizard-like scales of a million dollars, a venomous creature that darted hither and thither and finally grew confused with the personality of Flint and became a two-headed monster.... In the end the reptile sat calmly down before the cheap varnished bureau and consumed Danilo's untasted meal.
Thus they came and went, dream succeeding dream.