And that was about all—no, if one cared to notice, a man, in the early forties, who passed every afternoon just at four, swinging a heavy black cane.
This man was Nicholas Golwein—half Tartar, half Jew.
There was something dark, evil and obscure about Nicholas Golwein, and something bending, kindly, compassionate. Yet he was a very Jew by nature. He rode little, danced less, but smoked great self-reassuring cigars, and could out-ponder the average fidgety American by hours.
He had travelled, he had lived as the “Romans lived,” and had sent many a hot-eyed girl back across the fields with something to forget or remember, according to her nature.
This man had been Nelly Grissard’s lover at the most depraved period of Nelly’s life. At that moment when she was colouring her drinking water green, and living on ox liver and “testina en broda,” Nicholas Golwein had turned her collar back, and kissed her on that intimate portion of the throat where it has just left daylight, yet has barely passed into the shadow of the breast.
To be sure, Nelly Grissard had been depraved at an exceedingly early age, if depravity is understood to be the ability to enjoy what others shudder at, and to shudder at what others enjoy.
Nelly Grissard dreamed “absolutely honestly”—stress on the absolutely—when it was all the fashion to dream obscurely,—she could sustain the conversation just long enough not to be annoyingly brilliant, she loved to talk of ancient crimes, drawing her stomach in, and bending her fingers slightly, just slightly, but also just enough to make the guests shiver a little and think how she really should have been born in the time of the Cenci. And during the craze for Gauguin she was careful to mention that she had passed over the same South Sea roads, but where Gauguin had walked, she had been carried by two astonished donkeys.
She had been “kind” to Nicholas Golwein just long enough to make the racial melancholy blossom into a rank tall weed. He loved beautiful things, and she possessed them. He had become used to her, had “forgiven” her much (for those who had to forgive at all had to forgive Nelly in a large way), and the fact that she was too fluid to need one person’s forgiveness long, drove him into slow bitterness and despair.
The fact that “her days were on her,” and that she did not feel the usual woman’s fear of age and dissolution, nay, that she even saw new measures to take, possessing a fertility that can only come of a decaying mind, drove him almost into insanity.
When the Autumn came, and the leaves were falling from the trees, as nature grew hot and the last flames of the season licked high among the branches, Nicholas Golwein’s cheeks burned with a dull red, and he turned his eyes down.