They had reached the studio and were seated opposite to each other.
“And I work every morning in a tobacco shop,” said Carl. “Since life works with ravishing incongruities, everything there should be burned except the cigars. Meditating on this, I am able to wait more peacefully on the customers. Cringing sounds slip from my lips. ‘Yes, MacLane will win the next fight and the weather is terrible.’ Strange, twisted little payments of sound. Life clinks them in his empty purse.”
“Be romantic—make it the brave bow to an indelicate dream,” said Olga.
“A background of colored compensations? They, too, are endurable if you don’t turn your head too often.”
The adventure of stealing from a cautious world to an alcove of unguarded expression changed their physical desires into brightly unheeded guests lurking just outside of their longing to talk to each other. When their hands touched at last, they laughed at the minute surprise tendered by their flesh. They became two secret isolations examining a velvet hallucination of fusion. Their bodies touched while investigating this enticing dream.
CHAPTER XV.
The winter bickered with spring; days gave their imaginary separation of time; Olga and Carl stooped to the task of conjuring myriads of fancifully plausible tongues from their dream of perished identities lost in one search. Then Olga left with a theater company that was about to tour the middle west, having managed to secure the small part of a garrulous chambermaid, and Carl glided into a riot of writing, waiting for the telegram that would send him to join her in a far western city where her company would stage its last performances. In the meantime, he resolved to visit a wealthy uncle who lived in the south and wanted to see this “queer nephew of mine, who scribbles poetry and doesn’t care about making money.”
As he sat one morning in an elevated railroad coach, with valises at his side, commencing the journey to the city in which his uncle lived, his mood was glittering and aimless. He danced with outlines of Olga’s words; hummed briskly saccharine tunes; and trifled with the contours of people seated near him. Across the aisle a fatly rosy man was reading a newspaper and Carl’s gaze idly struck the front page and absorbed the headlines. In a corner of the page he came to the words: “Actress Dies in M——.”
His intuition, springing from that complaint vaguely known as metaphysical, changed his skin to a subtle frost and laid its squeezing pressure upon his eyes. The quick and heavy beat of his heart became frantically audible to his ears, like a gauntly terrifying horseman riding over him, and his mind changed to a loud confusion. He jumped across the aisle, tore the paper from the gaping man, and read that the woman whom he loved had instantly died after an accident. Assailed by an oblique rain of black claws, he tottered from the car, leaving his valises in the aisle. The black claws vanished; his heart and mind became extinct; and nothing remained save a body turned to ice and guided by instinct. Slowly, and with a brittle indecision in each step, he walked through the bickering brightness of one street after another, hearing and seeing nothing. He reached the bold flatness of the stone apartment building; read the delayed telegram held out by his mother, with the barest shiver of returning life, and dropped upon his bed.
Sunlight stood within the small room, like an emaciated patriarch entering through grey shades. Sunlight ignored the glossy chastities of furniture and dull yellow walls, and looked intently at the bed standing in one corner of the room. A long human collapse in black clothes stuck to the white bedspread. A blotch of blonde hair rested stilly in the weak light and hinted of a face. The body shook now and then as though an inquisitively alien hand were investigating its lifelessness. Then sobs pushed their way from the hidden face—an irregular orgy of distorted lyricism. It was as though a martyr were licking up the blood on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles of lunatic delight. The sobs were separated by rattling pauses that reminded one of a still living skeleton endlessly wrestling with death. The skeleton and the martyr sometimes felicitated each other upon their endurance, and short silences, like uneasy lies, glided from the hidden face. Then the bleeding turmoil once more streamed upon the air of the room, almost extinguishing the dim sunlight.