"I can't do that," responded Cintras, trying not to look flattered, "but I will show you my soul when overtaken by doubt." "Cintras, your soul, like Huysmans's, is a cork one." They were aghast, for Hodson the uncultured one had spoken.
"And where, Hoddy, my brave lad, did you ever in the world hear of Huysmans?" he was asked. "I read that; I thought it fitted Cintras. His soul is like a cork ball that is always rebounding from one idea to another." "Bravo! you will be the literary, not the night city editor, before you die, Hoddy." ... Then Cintras read another prose-poem which he had named
THE MIRROR OF UNFAITH
I looked into my mirror the next morning. With scared cry I again looked into my mirror. With brutish, trembling fingers I tried to cleanse the mist from my eyes, and once more I looked into my mirror, scraped its surface tenderly, but it availed not. There was no reflection of my features in its polished depths; naught but vacancy, steely and profound. There is no God, I had proclaimed; no God in high heaven, no God with the world, no spirit ever moved upon the vasty waters, no spirit ever travailed in the womb of time and conceived the cosmos. There is no God and man is not made in his image; eternity is an eyeless socket—a socket that never beheld the burning splendors of the Deity. There is no God, O my God! And my cries are futile, for have I not gazed into my mirror, gazed with clear ironic frantic gaze and missed my own image! There is no God; yet has my denial been heard in blackest Eblis, and has it not reverberated unto the very edges of Time? There is no God, and from that moment my face was blotted out. I may never see it in the moving waters, in mirrors, in the burnished hearts of things, or in the liquid eyes of woman. I denied God. I mocked His omnipotence. I dared him to mortal combat, and my mirror tells me there is no Me, no image of the man called by my name. I denied God and God denies me!
"If I were in such a mental condition," Hodson eagerly commented, "I'd call a doctor or join the Salvation Army." "Why haven't you written more short stories?" inquired Merville. "Because I've never had the time," Cintras sadly answered. "Once I tried to condense what novelists usually spread over hundreds of pages, and say it in a couple of paragraphs. Every word must illuminate the past, in every sentence may be found the sequel."
"Cintras, I vow your case is hopeless. You are a regular cherry-stone carver. Here you've shown us the skeletons of two stories and yet given none of them flesh enough to live upon." "Berkeley you belong to a past full of novelistic monsters. You are the three volume man with the happy ending tacked on willy-nilly. It is the tact of omission—" "Hang your art-for-art theories. I'll make more money than Cintras ever did when I publish my "Art of Anonymous Letter Writing!" cut in Hodson. Cintras calmly continued, "Here is my title and see if you can follow me."
INELUCTABLE
The light waned as with tense fingers he turned the round, bevelled-edge screw of the lamp. Darkness, immitigable, profound, and soft, must soon succeed yellow radiance. To face this gloom, to live in it and breathe of it, set his heart harshly beating. Yet he slowly turned with tense fingers the bevelled-edge screw of the lamp. He would presently be forced to a criticism of the day, that day, which must brilliantly flame when night closed upon him. As in the vivid agony endured between two bell-strokes of a clock, he strove to answer the oppressing shape threatening him. And his fingers lingeringly revolved the lamp-screw with its brass and bevelled-edge. If only some gust of resolution would arise like the sudden scud of the squall that whitens far-away level summer seas, and drive forth pampered procrastinations! Then might his fingers become flexile, his mind untied. Poor, drab seconds that fooled with eternity and supped on vain courage as they went trooping by. Could not one keen point of consciousness abide? Why must all go humming into oblivion like untuned values? He grasped at a single strand of recollection; he saw her parted lips, the passionate reproach of her eyes and felt her strenuous tacit acquiescence; he sensed the richness of her love. So he stood, unstable, vacillating and a treacherous groper amidst cruel shards of an ineluctable memory, powerless to stay the fair phantom and fearful of looking night squarely in the front. And he remained a dweller in the shadows, as he faintly fingered the bevelled-edge screw of the lamp....
"If Maeterlinck would feed on Henry James and write a dream fugue on your affected title, this might be the result," muttered Berkeley. "Hush!" whispered Merville; "can't you see that it is his own life he is unconsciously relating in this sequence of short stories; the tale of his own pampered procrastinations? If he had only made up his mind perhaps he could have kept her by his side and been happy but"—"But instead," said Berkeley sourly "he wrote queer impossible things about bevelled-edge lamp screws and she couldn't stand it. I don't blame her. I say, nature before art every time." ... Then Hodson shouted, dispelling dangerous reveries:
"Cintras, why don't you finish that book of yours? Ten years ago you told me that you had finished it nearly one-half." "Yes, and in ten years more he will finish the other," remarked Berkeley.