CHAPTER LXXIV
Which sees the Day break in the Tavern of The Golden Sun
A misty dark night. The drizzle that slowly drenched the town met with but damp welcome the students and revellers as they poured out of the Bal Bullier at midnight; it sent them swarming into the genial warmth and cheery glitter of the cafés on the Boule Miche.
And the inhospitable rain, having emptied the streets, slyly took itself off into the outer darkness and passed out of the city, leaving the trees weeping in the blackness.
Noll, wearied by the frantic toolings of the students’ Bal Bullier, put up the collar of his coat, and finding that the drizzle no more wet his face, he strolled down the Boule Miche, struck across the cobbles of the riverside quays, and striding into the murk that hung about the river, he found himself on the bridge. He stood and leaned over the parapet, peering into the blackness of the foggy depths that swirled in pitchy fumes below.
The yeasty stillness yielded a sob.
A young woman’s voice near at hand spoke low.
Aubrey’s voice answered her, impatiently. The fog carried every inflection of his drawling irritation and peevish insolence. He pshawed:
“Women take love so seriously,” he said—“it is women who spoil it.... Love is the pastime of life, the gaiety of days, a thing to enrich the senses, to give man his recreation—and women filch it of the very essence of its charm by making it the sordid business of life. Robbed of its delicate mysteries, of its butterfly flitting from flower to flower, it becomes—marriage—and the begetting of children—and the clamour of household needs—and milk-bottles—and soiled linen.... Why are you not content to love many men, Hélène, as I have found the rhapsody of life in loving many women?... It is the spiritual——”