Totally bewildered, he exclaimed, “Whatever is that?” Yet, like all who have to do with any form of magic, he apparently had lost some of his specific gravity.
He was passing over the light-reflecting pavement in his shabby black as if a rigid crow, although with folded wings should skim.
“Aera,” I said, “sends dreams across the Atlantic.”
“He could not,” protested Insel, off his guard. “He has not got the power.”
There is a way of speaking that word peculiar to those alone who have wielded it — that way was his.
And he glided on, turning towards me his face hung with deflated muscles one felt could be blown about by the wind.
“You cannot glide,” it defied me, and I noticed how I was keeping my distance in my effort to “get at him.”
He had for the moment the stick-fast aloofness of an evil presentiment — the air of a priest of some criminal cult. All the same, this slight impression of criminality he gave off at intervals I did not receive as a direct impress on my own mind, but as a glimpse of a conviction he hid within himself.
“Aren’t you rather bad?” I laughingly inquired.
“Everybody imagines I am the devil, and,” he answered forlornly shrugging his shoulders, “there’s no harm in me at all.”
When we fell into line once more, he resumed the uniformity of all people making for a cafe.
I finally gave Insel the key. His mimicry of salvation convinced me my distress, after all, had not been in vain.
But, oh horror! On arriving at the country, I suddenly seemed to remember the charwoman pouring some Normanol from an antique bottle I had told her to clean into an empty gin bottle. Normanol, being a dissolvent for rhodoid very much stronger than cutex which dissolves the cuticle around the fingernails, I had a shocking vision of Insel’s diaphanous intestines entirely disappearing should he, as would be only natural, mistake it for a graceful token of absentee hospitality — and of myself arraigned for manslaughter.
“For God’s sake, don’t drink anything out of any kind of bottle in that flat,” I wrote him immediately. “It might kill you.”
“Dear Mrs. Jones: However do you think I am comporting myself in your home,” Insel answered. “Were there thirty bottles of the finest schnapps I should not touch them. Rest assured you will find your apartment exactly as you left it.”
He sounded quite comfortably settled. I had also written him to get my charwoman to clean his suit with odorless gasoline at my expense, and inquired how much money he had left.
“Your suggestion for my suit is most kind — however, I am convinced that it is only on account of the dirt in it that it still holds together.”
He had, he said, enough money to last him for a “little” week.
We had agreed that I should come every few days for a dressmaker’s fitting at the further end of the flat where it would not disturb him. When I did go, a bewildered concierge informed me, “Madame, the artist who was to live in your apartment never came.”
“That only means he has not yet been ‘turned out,’ ” I explained to her, while to myself I reflected, “You will find your apartment exactly … the monkey!”
I felt that the end of his little week was no longer my concern, and I forgot all about him.
I would run into Paris for the dressmaker, a tea, a dinner and back to my little hotel in St. Cloud again, until at last the time drew near for exporting pictures — among them were to be included some of Insel’s.
“Pictures, drawings, three o’clock,” I wired him. At a quarter past, he had not arrived and I went to tea with a friend who hailed me from the courtyard, leaving a note on the door, “Will be back shortly.”
When I returned the place was different — in the smoothed out air there was a suspicion of a collapse in time. As if by a magnet, I was drawn into the studio and up to the dark oak table. Upon it lay a flat packet. I could have sworn it emitted a faint phosphorescence that advanced from all the rest of the room. The wrapping paper was so strikingly creaseless it looked unusual. It had in some inexplicable manner become precious as ivory; its squareness was instinctively exact as the hexagons of wasps.
“He has left the drawings,” I supposed, almost reluctantly undoing this magnetic focus of an uncanny precision. But once unfolded, I found it contained only a shabby block of writing paper that had been left lying there and from which I had torn the note I left for him.
“Did you find anything?” he asked when, later having resuscitated from the moribund state in which he preferred to arrive, he was able to articulate.
“Yes. What on earth—?”
“I wrapped it up,” said Insel — an enormous intention fixed in his eyes.
It was at this moment that, for me, Insel, from a seedy man, dissolved into a strange mirage, the only thing in the world at that time to stir my curiosity.
On his arrival with the pictures he had appeared the phantom of himself as I had seen him last. He had so weakened, become so transparent.
Deeply bowed, he clutched his feeble fist in the emptiness where his stomach should have been. From this profound concavity arose a dying whimper of, “Water—aspirine,” as out of the abdominal void rode the unclenching fist — his tremulous fingers, hovering over the bureau, grasped a cigarette.
“Well, you’re in a nice state,” I taunted him to cover my alarmed compassion. “Why didn’t you write?”
He gulped his aspirine as if to alleviate a death rattle. “I did write.”
“Yes, a comic strip. I found my flat exactly as I left it.”
“I know,” said Insel, gently abashed. “I ought to have told you ‘I am not here.’ ”
“Even the least of philanthropists,” I laughed, “has sensibilities — I thought I had been intrusive. You see, Insel, any possible gesture in the face of poverty must inevitably be insolent, its very necessity — in not being outs — makes poverty so aloof.”
“And I thought you were angry because I mentioned money.”
“I had told you to mention money. But all my sympathy for you was buried under that bunch of cheap flowers I put here to welcome the lonely clochard.”
“But, after all, I have been here nearly every day,” he almost sobbed, “to look for you. I could never find you. I knew when you had been here for where you trod there lay little fragments of stuff. I could trace your movements by the pins you shed on the floor. Think what it was like — to seek after a woman, a vanishing woman, and in her stead, to find nothing but pins,” he implored. Then brightening, “I picked them all up. Look,” said Insel, hurriedly reversing the lapel of his jacket. On the underside stuck in rows as precise as in packages from the factory, were my dressmaker’s fallen pins. He dropped the lapel into place again as if too long he had bared this precious hoard of his compelling exactitude.
With an interminable cautiousness Insel had revived. “Ich bin nicht fromm—I am not pious,” he mused, deeply introspective. “And yet how I have prayed, I prayed,” he burst out, a blind agony falling upon his eyes, “I prayed that you would come back!”
“You seem to have been thinking about me a good deal — hadn’t you any steak?”
“I never cease thinking of you,” he muttered, as if fearful I should overhear — and aloud, “None,” he answered flatly yet without reproach.
As mediums on becoming professional, obliged to continuate an intermittent condition, lapse to the most lamentable dupery, Insel would actually plagiarize his innate mediumistic quality of which he appeared to be but partially conscious.