Part 4

It concerned a circle of men dumped into chairs in the lobby of a cheap lodging-house--rag-dolls twitching now and then, as though an outside hand were poking them with curiosity. Then the spirit of the lodging-house, sallow and indecently shallow, sidled into the lobby, correctly aimed its tobacco at a spitoon, and gave the dolls snores to create a false appearance of life, whereupon one of them rose and cursed the invisible intruder in his sleep. The spirit of the lodging-house, frightened and angry at the appearance of a soul whose existence it had not imagined, whisked them all off to the torture of their beds. The poem had spoken to Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky but within it a stunned hatred of the world was experimenting with appropriate symbols.

“Irrelevantly, perhaps, I’m thinking of a time when I washed dishes in a lunch-room in St. Louis,” she said. “I was hunting in my mind for something that could deceive the greasy monotone of defiled chinaware. Suddenly the brown and turbid dish-water became a heavy wine, spiced with the aftermaths of earthly pleasures--decay to which a spiritual release had given a liquid significance. I became obsessed by the verity of this idea, and finally, quite entranced, I raised the pan of dirty water to my lips and was about to drink it when, at that moment, the proprietor came in. He squawked ‘crazee-e,’ ‘crazee-e,’ and discharged me. I wrote an excellent poem about it, though.”

“Let’s see, what would they say about this,” he muttered. “Neurasthenia, insanity, exalted paranoia, minor conceit, trivial pose, empty fantasy--they have so many putrid labels to hide the inner rage, damn them!”

They swayed together in the chair, like two babies in a trap, taking the small amount of room possible in the cramped abode.

“Tomorrow we’ll look for work,” she said. “The breath-tablets that you bought to hide the scent of onions have not been able to eradicate a last melodramatic trace of their enemy. We must move our arms to ward off such meaningless intrusions.”

“With an excellent verbosity you mock the concentration of your thoughts,” he said.

They closed their eyes and grew still in the chair. When at last they stirred, each one looked first at the room and then at the other person, with a gradually slain disbelief.

“We are not dead after all,” he cried. “The room does not fade away!”

They sat without moving, while happiness and sadness sprang into combat within them.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Unmatched opening quotation marks on page 17 have been retained from the original, as the transcriber could not ascertain exactly where the closing quotation marks, missing in the original, should be placed.