“Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said Latour, waggishly.
“No, I’ll leave that to death,” said the man. “Come inside and warm your candour.”
“No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said Geroid, squinting at the man’s sportively cerulean eyes.
“Come out to the well and we’ll haul her up,” said the man.
The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgoblin, and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of the house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing on her toes over the black loam. Her sparse grayish black hair flapped behind her like a dishrag and her naked body had the color of trampled snow. An empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head. She had the face of an old Columbine who still thought herself beautiful.
“A neighbour of mine,” said the man in an awed voice. “She was a ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my back-yard a theater. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here, in my back-yard, she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs. Moonlight turns her knee joints into miracles!”
“Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together, comes the little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, sentimentally.
“My wife objected to my joining this woman’s midnight dance,” said the man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed her. I could not see a miracle ruined.”
“Only the insane are entertaining,” answered Geroid. “The egoism of sane people is gruesome—a modulated scale of complacent gaieties—but insane people often display an artificial ego which is divine. The artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself, on his divan, is hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved a lilac bough in one hand and a broom in the other, one could respect him.”
As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew nearer and stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water dropped from her grayish white skin.