Part 5

Sunlight stuck to the gray floor like curdled honey and clung to the black wall like visible fever on the breast of a savage. This contradiction gave a fugitive radiance to the room in which King Ferdinand stood, moulding figures of happiness. On sunless days the room was a depressed insult to his rejoicing, forcing it into adroit retorts. He had made this chamber a necessary enemy.

As he moulded his figures of happiness, his wife stood beside him, ready with colors.

“You have almost finished this half-pyramid of eyes emerging from a flat surface and ending against a vertical wall,” she said, as though the sound of her words made their obviousness subtle. “What color shall I use to excite your design?”

King Ferdinand turned to her, like a blind man peering into fantastically returning sight. Creative absorption had ruffled his middle-aged face into an ageless insurrection, but when he spoke a wrinkled order once more reigned beneath the granite lull of his forehead.

“Give each eye a different shade of color and, for the wall, make a blue of inhuman brightness: a blue that has swallowed a constellation and defies night,” he said. “This form symbolises my last happiness, wherein the clashing sequences of my life have been smashed to a challenging glare. I have become immortal until I voluntarily tender my immortality to death, if he takes it.”

The wrinkles on King Ferdinand’s cheeks ascended to a sentence of belief hacked upon his forehead. His broadly cumbersome face shrunk to a lighter scope and his red moustache shone like a coal of expectation. His wife played with her dark green gown as though it were relaxed gaiety. Her body, like a plump blunder, ended in the deft recklessness of her head; the high amber of her face raised its slightly turned lines of brooding abandon. She looked at her husband as though she considered his flesh an unimportant tragedy calmed by his words.

The smell of listening earth drifted through a window and bird-cries violated the air, like expiring emotions. King Ferdinand stood in the manner of one to whom motion has become a dim travesty, and the blood in his veins was a prisoned resonance. His folded arms were weighted in a marble posture beneath his long sleeves. Queen Muriel touched his arm and gave him life. She led him to a corner of the room and unveiled a small figure, and her hands were pliant consummations.

“My first happiness,” she said, in a voice of climbing distinctness. They carried the figure to the light. Almost as slim as a personified plant-stem, a conventionalised monk grew straight from the center of two lean hands cupped into the semblance of a flower-pot. The hands met each other in an effortless tenderness; the thinly high monk bore the suggestions of hood and cassock and his face wore a look of indistinct triumph.

“And so I like to believe that your happiness has grown uncertainly from the rarely caught touch of my hands,” she said.

The door of the room opened and two men strode in. One of them curved upward into pompous impatience. The tight inquisitiveness of a gaudy uniform revealed his tall body. His face was like an expansive fallacy--large rolls of flesh indecisively interrogated the thin slant of his nose and slid into the refuge of his brown beard. The second man was waspishly abbreviated and clad in mincing castrations of color. His tinily sharp face suggested a soulless beetle.

“Have you come, as usual, to bestow your explosive admiration on my figures?” said King Ferdinand to the man whose face resembled a redundant mistake.

“Three men of your guard will murder you, with restrained admiration, tomorrow noon,” answered the other man, in whose voice a sneer and apprehension were partners in a minuet. “You will be killed on the palace steps and the cheers of a huge audience will make death’s leer articulate to you. While you have taken the role of a hermit in an aesthetic petticoat your friends have been arranging a last happiness for you. You are considered an imbecile who paints pretty figures with the blood of his country.”

The flashing hardnesses of a wintry repose assaulted King Ferdinand’s face.

“My brothers are quite willing to use this blood as an unsolicited rouge for the lips of their mistresses,” he answered in a tone of remotely amused reproach. “I have not assailed my subjects with taxes or led them to wars and that has been a serious error. They are probably in the position of a man with his chains removed, who is angry because he has forgotten how to dance!”

The acridly shortened man spoke.

“When you are dead, sire, your brothers will gamble for your throne by throwing roses at your head. He who first succeeds in striking your bulging eyes, will win.”

“Death does not like to be made a cheated jester,” said King Ferdinand. “He will doubtless devise a better joke for my winning brother.”

Queen Muriel, whose face had grown old with choked disdain, stepped forward.

“Now that your shrewd bantering has made itself sufficiently nude, tell us why you have come,” she said.

The tall man, who carried with him the air of an animated mausoleum, spoke.

“Today I saw an old libertine tottering down the boulevard. Glancing to his feet he spied a lily, clipped and fresh. He sidled blithely to the edge of the walk to avoid stepping on the flower. There is little pleasure, after all, in flattening a child from another world.... My carriage will take you to the frontier, tonight.”

“My caprices have never been able to strut gorgeously because they hold a sincere sympathy for motion,” said King Ferdinand, still mechanically jesting. His hand rose to one cheek as though signaling for a friendly trance and his eyes closed unceremoniously.

“We will take your carriage,” he said in the voice of an abstracted tight-rope walker.

The two men tilted their gaudiness into imperceptible bows and departed. King Ferdinand and his wife stood staring at each other as though their bodies were teasing curtains. Then, without remembering what had occurred, they let gay words poke each other and began to discuss colors for the monk’s figure rising from cupped hands and blossoming into indistinct triumph.

That night their carriage stopped upon a hilltop and they were killed by three men. One of the three had a thin nose and a brown beard--the tight inquisitiveness of a bright uniform revealed his tall body. Among historians he was to be noted as the man who killed an imbecile king and led his country to glory and prosperity.

PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

Carl Dell and Anita Starr were speaking of a dead woman who had influenced their eyes. She had also refined their heads to a chill protest. Their faces, involved and disconsolate, had not solved her absence, and their voices were freighted with a primitive martyrdom. Carl was fencing with the end of his youth. His body held that inpenetrable cringing which pretends to ignore the coming of middle age and is only betrayed by rare gestures. He was tall, with a slenderness that barely escaped being feminine. The upper part of his face was scholarly and the lower part roguish, and the two gave him the effect of a sprite who has become erudite but still retains the memory of his former identity. His protruding eyes were embarrassed, as though someone behind them had unexpectedly pushed them from a refuge. With immense finesse they apologised for intruding upon the world. It is almost tautology to say that they were gray. His small brown moustache had a candidly misplaced air as it touched the thin bacchanale of his lips. It was a mourner at the feast.

Anita Starr’s form would have seemed stout but for the sweeping discipline of its lines, but this careful suppression ended in a riot when it came to her face. Her face was a small, lyrical revel that had terminated in a fight. Her nose and chin were strident but her cheeks and mouth were subtlely unassuming. Her blue eyes brilliantly and impartially aided both sides of the conflict. Glistening spirals of reddish brown hair courted her head.

Sitting in the parlor of the Starr home Anita and Carl spoke of a dead woman who had influenced their eyes. It was two A. M. and the atmosphere resembled a disillusioned reminiscence: still and heavy. They had talked about this dead woman throughout the evening, welcoming any sound that might surprise her profile into life. When alive she had been the chanting whirlpool of their existences, and when she died sound ceased for them. Their voices became mere copies of its past reign.

“Because I loved her any common pebble became a chance word concerning her and flowers were enthusiastic anecdotes of her presence,” said Carl.

For an hour he had been breaking his love into insatiable variations--one who seduces the fleeting expressions of a past torture.

“She may have been an august vagabond from another planet--a planet where loitering is a solemn profession,” said Anita. “Even when she performed a menial task she awed it with her thoughtful reluctance. Like a fitful gleaner she crept through bare fields of people, accepting their bits of laughter and refusal. When she met us she stepped backward, as from a tempting unreality, and knocked against death.”

Carl sat, like a groveling fantasy weary of attempting to capture a genuine animation, but Anita had forced herself into a tormented erectness. The clock struck three. Without a word or glance in each other’s direction they left their chairs, turned out the lights, and ascended the stairway, Carl slightly in advance. They halted at the first landing and faced each other with the uncomplaining helplessness of people suddenly scalded by reality.

“In the morning we will eat oranges from a silver dish and glibly cheat our emotions,” said Carl.

“This deftly impolite proceeding never stops to ask our consent,” said Anita in a voice whose lethargy barely observed a satirical twinkle.

Another word would have been a ridiculous impropriety. They parted and entered their rooms. Flower scents filtered through Carl’s open window, like softly dismayed sins and the cool repentance of a summer night glided into his room upon a pathway of moonlight. For a while he sat absent-mindedly burnishing the knives that had divided his evening. After he had undressed he fell upon his bed like one hurriedly obliterating an ordeal. His consciousness played with a black hood; then a crash mastered the room and the door swung open. His blanched face paid a spasmodic tribute to the sound and his grey eyes greeted the darkness as though it were an advancing mob. With a strained stoicism he waited for a repetition of the sound. The moments were sledge-hammers fanning his face with their close passage. Then his bed weirdly meddled with his body and became a light cradle rocked by some arrogant hand. The darkness tingled lifelessly, like an electrocuted man.

Carl’s waiting began to feel sharply disgraced and his senses planned a revolt. He tried to rise to a sitting posture but his body insulted his desire. At this point the darkness softened to the disguised struggle of a woman striving to reach him. The significance of this cast an impalpable but potent consolation upon the straining of his chained body. The rocking of his bed measured a powerfully cryptic welcome and he tried to decipher it with the beat of his heart. Each of its syllables became the cadenced impact of another person against a toughly pliant wall. His body demolished its tenseness and pressed a refrain into the swaying bed. He decorated the darkness with the crisp flight of his voice.

“Perish upon the turmoil of each day and make it inaudible, but let the night be our hermitage,” he cried to a dead woman. As though replying, the rocking of his bed gradually lessened and the darkness became an opaque farewell. He turned to the shaft of moonlight which was tactfully intercepting the floor of his room; it had the unobtrusive intensity of a melted Chinaman. For hours he gave it his eyes and dimly contradicted it with his heart. When the dawn made his room aware of its limitations, he closed his eyes.

At the breakfast table he and Anita greeted each other with a worn brevity: their eyes found an empty solace in the white tablecloth and their minds felt a bright impotence, like beggars idling in the sun. For a while the tinkle of their spoons amiably pardoned their constraint, but Anita finally spoke with the staccato of one who snaps unbearable thongs.

“She came to me last night. I heard a sound like a huge menace stumbling over a chair. The door opened and the darkness grew as heavy as dead flesh. My bed swayed with the precision of a grieving head.”

Carl’s face broke and gleamed like a soft ground flogged by sudden rain.

“The same things happened to me,” he said in the voice of a child wrestling with a minor chord.

They sat heavily disputing each other with their eyes.

“Did you lie afterwards, censuring the moonlight?” asked Anita.

Carl nodded. Anita’s mother majestically blundered into the room. Exuberantly substantial, with the face of a child skillfully rebuked by an elderly masquerade, she flattered a chair at the table.

“Wasn’t that a terrible storm we had last night,” she babbled. “The rain kept me awake for hours--I’m such a light sleeper, you know. I do hope you children managed to rest.”

LOVE

The night received the moonlight in the manner of a sophisticated braggart who slaps the face of an old, impassive man. Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor observed this illusion and painted it upon one of the lanterns lighting a little party within her heart. The guests at the party, fat sophists and slatterns in gay, patched clothes, gathered around the lantern and felt relieved at the impersonal novelty of its decoration. If Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor had been a philosopher or a scientist she would have changed the night to an unseen background, or a chemical diagram; she would have ignored the pleading of her heart for pictorial distraction. But since she was a society-woman, tired of sensual toys and a mental twilight, she welcomed the night as her first effectual lover. Sitting in the garden of her country home she could see the lighted windows of her crowded ballroom, and hear the saccharine pandemonium of a jazz orchestra. The noise reminded her of a middle-aged roué, snickering as he rolled his huge dice while gambling for a new mistress. She felt glad that her new lover, the night, did not seek to court her with such a blustering clatter.

The night was incredibly sophisticated but held the pungently awkward body of a youth, crashing against trees and bushes. This mixture pierced Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor and slid far beneath those sensual routines which are the delight of psycho-analysts--slid to a depth where aesthetic passion slays the flesh and blends it into a sexless potency. She felt a sense of bodiless conflagration striding with wide steps beside the night. When the limitless glow died within her, she glanced down and found that she was naked. The complicated shrewdness of her clothes had disappeared.

By this time she had ceased to be Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor--she had become an expectant novice in a new world, and even the jazz music and ballroom laughter had changed to the mumbled rumours of a past existence. Therefore her nakedness failed to disconcert her. She touched her shoulder, with a gesture of matter-of-fact congratulation, and loosened her hair to rid herself of a last dab of incongruity. Then she rose from the stone bench and walked down a pathway leading to the great lake that bounded one side of her country estate. She felt the powerful and sober curiosity of one who has decided to become a recluse and examines the deserted possibilities of his roofless plateau. She reached a high bluff rising over the placid vanity of the huge lake, combing its bluish black hair with moonlight. Suddenly she became aware of a figure standing beside her. She turned with a gasp of strangled aloofness. The ethereal composure of her small face, defended by moonlight, sheered into an ebony cast of hermit-like annoyance. But when the color and outlines of the figure shrunk within her eyes, her face changed again. An astounded immersion crowned her head, tugging at her short nose, straightening her thick lips, and cleaving her gray eyes. The slightly deteriorated slenderness of her short body lowered a bit toward the earth, not from fear but because of a weakening incredulity. The figure before her was that of a sexless human being, small and slim of statute, nude, and hued with an inhumanly concentrated black. The head held large eyes that shone like metaphysical diamonds, as though ten thousand stars were carousing together, in a realm of compressed light. The figure spoke to Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor, and its voice seemed thrown forth by the rays from its eyes. The voice was distinct and subdued.

“You are not a hermit who has turned a garden into a solitary castle,” said the figure.

“What am I?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor.

“Your mind and heart are no longer clad in their heavy mirages of love, fear, and sleep,” said the figure. “The surface pictures have gone and the twin bazaars of your heart and mind are exchanging a long-deferred greeting. Within the now mingled bazaars emotions and thoughts have become friends and sell each other endless variations in color, light, and form. I am the being who rules this proceeding.”

“Have you a name?” asked Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor, using the unashamed naïveté of a child.

“Men call me Aesthetics,” answered the figure. “In my weakest form I make the eyes of the shop-girl hesitate a bit, as she views an unusually gaudy sunset. In my strongest manifestations I help poets and artists to contradict their personal lives. But these are merely my outward indications. I line the hearts and minds of all human beings, often remaining within them, unfelt, until they die. In rare cases such as yours the mirages hiding and dividing me are slain, and I clap my hands, sending motion to the twin bazaars of heart and mind.”

“What caused me to uncover you within myself?” said Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor.

“You yielded to a whim and made the night your lover. Dissatisfied with the loves and fears he found within you, the night threw them aside, one by one, thus slaying the mirages that hid me. Your other lovers of the past were content with more material gifts and did not seek to uncover you.”

“I am bare now. What will you do with me?” said Mrs. Robert Calvin Taylor. The figure laid a hand upon her shoulder. His eyes burnt her to a petal of ashes that fell down between them.

* * * * *

Mr. Robert Calvin Taylor stood over the form of his young wife, who sat slouched down upon a stone bench within their garden. He shook her shoulder, lightly. She uttered a perturbed mumble and did not raise the head resting upon one of her arms. The moonlight fell upon the silken complexities of her dress.

“Poor Dot, I warned her not to take a third glass,” he muttered to himself as he raised her in his arms and staggered down the garden pathway.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.