On a canvas at the opposite side of the room a huge complexly broken arrow emerged from a pale red sky. The black arrow pieces were dotted with tiny yellow, indigo and pink birds. Dark red lips, each twisted to a different expression, stood in the corners of the canvas. Extending down the left side of the painting the following line was written in black against a strip of bare canvas.
“Thus I spoke one afternoon, because—”
Helma Solbert rose from her couch, lit a candle and stood before the arrow-framed painting, gazing at it with a pierced and subtly colorless face. Then she turned on an electric light and its artificial stare, in an instant, brought her an obliterating self-consciousness. With the bearing of one who impudently walks to a gruesome sacrifice she disappeared behind a lavender screen in a corner of the room and fried her evening meal. When she emerged from the screen her face had once more perfected its defensive impertinence. Even in her sleep some hours later her features retained the blurred suspicion of a smile that stayed like a lurking sentinel.
The following morning she was too ill to rise and Mrs. Kildrick summoned a doctor. He was a portly man with a steeply florid face and a dominating beard that had the color of wet sand. While he was in the midst of examining his patient she rose to a sitting posture and stared at him.
“You’re what I tried to hide from; why have you come to plague me?” she said, loudly.
MUSIC
OLGA CRAWFORD fiercely divorced herself from all expression as she maltreated her violin at the Symphony Moving Picture Theater. In its average moments of vivacity her face was a dissembling friar who brightly listened to her sensual lips, but as she played, her face became an emptiness profaned by the wail of her instrument. Her arms desecrated their errands and her head sloped into an unwilling counterfeit of wakefulness. On the screen above her men and women frantically guarded their hallucination of life and a decrepit plot vaguely imitated love and bravery. Rows of faces stolidly massacred the gloom of the theater and stood like a regiment waiting, without thought, for some command. But when one looked closer three expressions broke from the stolidity, as three major harmonies might charm the mind of a composer. The first was a somnolent elation—the mien of a hungry person dozing over some crumbs he is almost too tired to eat. Shop-girls, with pertly robbed faces, became victims of this expression, although an occasional man with lips like determined fiascoes also attained it. The second was a tightly laced impatience—the enmity of one whose feelings have been openly censored. Fat women with flabbily throttled faces and glistening men with bodies like bulky scandals received this expression. The third was a seraphic stupor—the demeanour of one whose formless delights have benignly exiled thought.
To Olga these people gathered into a blanched duplicate of life—a remote comedy that made the monotone of her evening self-conscious. If they had excoriated her she could have forgotten them, but their weighty indifference raped her attention. The dryly sinuous smell of their clothes pelted her like a sandstorm: the little, desperate perfumes they used scarcely survived. Their eyes were scores of tinily inviting bulls-eyes never reached by her hurried arrows.