intensity.
He had brought me a present— As he bowed his head over what he held in his hands, all the sweet-stuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with someineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed curiosity wanted to cry, “From what enchanted bed of love have you so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?”
It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious inquiry of this bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with years of wear, yet deodorized by continuous exposure to the all-night air.
His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black passe-partout, was saying, “I want to give you my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell.” The drawing in the passe-partout, like his atmosphere that clung to him as ours clings to the earth, seemed almost astir with that somnolent arrested motion revealing his nature.
It was so white, the flocking skies of a strangely disturbing purity drifted above vortices of snow-like mist in travail of taking shape, coiling the mind into following the spiral, eventual materialization of blindly virginal elementals.
“This,” he continued, “is the first drawing of a new series—all my future work will be based on it. I intend my technique to become more and more minute, until, the grain becoming entirely invisible, it will look like a photograph. Then, when my monsters do evolve, they will create the illusion that they really exist; that they
have
been photographed.”
The while the drift of his words swept me together with the frozen drawing along a current of quiet reverence, expressing gratitude. As under his conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak.
I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be sold for him; but at length when he inquired sadly, “It doesn’t please you? I will give you another,” I promised to keep it.
6
“I’M SO UGLY NAKED,” HE TOLD ME MOST unexpectedly, in a tone of intense and anxious confidence. “I can’t go to the public baths because I daren’t walk down to the water.”
“Your face is naked and you walk about with it.”
“Yes,” he assented miserably, “and it frightens the women. I used to be so beautiful. Is it imaginable?” he asked, peering expectantly into my face.
“I’m tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are.”
“All women are terrified of me,” he continued automatically.
“I said tired—not terrified, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve never really seen you. You always give me the impression that you are
not there
. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch.
Your
way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality.”
“I can materialize for
you
,” he said raptly, “
forever
—on the corner of this street.”
Somehow we were sitting on the Terrasse of the Hotel Lutetia. It stood behind us dressed in its name of a paganParis. It might very well be actually surviving for our blind backs which, taking no part in the present, are carried around with us as if concrete in the past.
Darting about amazingly in the autumn vapor innumerable metal beetles of various species with which modern man, still unable to create soft-machines and so limited to the construction of heavy plagiarisms that sometimes crush him, had sprinkled the
carrefour
facing us, where gasoline impregnating the dust had begotten a vitiated yet exhilarating up-to-date breath of life.
A distant gnat of a thousand
He had brought me a present— As he bowed his head over what he held in his hands, all the sweet-stuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with someineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed curiosity wanted to cry, “From what enchanted bed of love have you so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?”
It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious inquiry of this bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with years of wear, yet deodorized by continuous exposure to the all-night air.
His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black passe-partout, was saying, “I want to give you my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell.” The drawing in the passe-partout, like his atmosphere that clung to him as ours clings to the earth, seemed almost astir with that somnolent arrested motion revealing his nature.
It was so white, the flocking skies of a strangely disturbing purity drifted above vortices of snow-like mist in travail of taking shape, coiling the mind into following the spiral, eventual materialization of blindly virginal elementals.
“This,” he continued, “is the first drawing of a new series—all my future work will be based on it. I intend my technique to become more and more minute, until, the grain becoming entirely invisible, it will look like a photograph. Then, when my monsters do evolve, they will create the illusion that they really exist; that they
have
been photographed.”
The while the drift of his words swept me together with the frozen drawing along a current of quiet reverence, expressing gratitude. As under his conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak.
I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be sold for him; but at length when he inquired sadly, “It doesn’t please you? I will give you another,” I promised to keep it.
6
“I’M SO UGLY NAKED,” HE TOLD ME MOST unexpectedly, in a tone of intense and anxious confidence. “I can’t go to the public baths because I daren’t walk down to the water.”
“Your face is naked and you walk about with it.”
“Yes,” he assented miserably, “and it frightens the women. I used to be so beautiful. Is it imaginable?” he asked, peering expectantly into my face.
“I’m tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are.”
“All women are terrified of me,” he continued automatically.
“I said tired—not terrified, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve never really seen you. You always give me the impression that you are
not there
. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch.
Your
way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality.”
“I can materialize for
you
,” he said raptly, “
forever
—on the corner of this street.”
Somehow we were sitting on the Terrasse of the Hotel Lutetia. It stood behind us dressed in its name of a paganParis. It might very well be actually surviving for our blind backs which, taking no part in the present, are carried around with us as if concrete in the past.
Darting about amazingly in the autumn vapor innumerable metal beetles of various species with which modern man, still unable to create soft-machines and so limited to the construction of heavy plagiarisms that sometimes crush him, had sprinkled the
carrefour
facing us, where gasoline impregnating the dust had begotten a vitiated yet exhilarating up-to-date breath of life.
A distant gnat of a thousand
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