Kedzie acknowledged his conquest, bowed her head, and pouted up at him with such exquisite impudence that he groaned:
“I don't know whether I ought to kiss you or kill you.”
“Take your choice, my master,” Kedzie cooed.
He snarled at her: “I guess the news I bring will do for you. There was a fire in the studio last night. You didn't know of it?”
Kedzie, dumbly aghast, shook her head.
“If you'd read any part of the newspapers except your own press stuff you'd have seen that there was a war in Europe yesterday and a fire in New York last night. I was there trying to save what I could. I got a few blisters and not much else. Most of your unfinished work is finished—gone up in smoke.”
“You don't mean that my beautiful, wonderful films are destroyed?”
He nodded—then caught her as her knees gave way. He felt a stab of pity for her as he dragged her to her chaise longue and let her fall there. She was dazed with the shock.
She had been indifferent to the destruction of fortresses and cathedrals—even of Rheims, with its titanic granite lace. She had read, or might have read, of the airship that dropped a bomb through the great fresco in Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled mastery of aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hierarchies of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on up to Jehovah himself, bending down from infinite heights. The eternal loss of this picture meant nothing to her. But the destruction of her own recorded smiles and tears and the pretty twistings and turnings of her young body—that was cataclysm.
She was like everybody else, in that no multiplication of other people's torments could be so vivid as the catching of her own thumb in a door. Kedzie was too crushed to weep. This little personal Pompeii brought to the dust all the palaces and turrets of her hope upon her head. She whispered to Ferriday: