I was falling into blissful sleep when a hopeless S.O.S. vibrated on the air — an S.O.S. that sounded like a sobbing “sterben.” I started up in horror of my selfishness. What could I have been thinking of to leave that delicate soul to his longing for suicide on the contemptible grounds that I was sick of the racket he had been causing.
What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe, to find that I, his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal ease I must have “caught” from Insel, I threw on my clothes and more or less floating into the street together with the presage of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners slushing my ankles, hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure to be saved at all costs. Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dôme. The piebald mix-up had disappeared.
“What happened to that skeleton I had with me an hour ago?” I asked the majordomo. “He got into a tangle with some negresses— Was he all right?”
“Oh, perfectly,” he protested as if within his reach nothing could possibly go wrong. “You see, madame,” confidentially, “the fellow lives off these women of the Dôme; there’s bound to be a scrap every now and then!”
10
“—ONE WHO HAS GREATLY SUFFERED,” I WAS astounded to hear myself telling the man — like a nice old maid with illusions — in precisely the somber tones of Insel’s “patroness drive.” Equally astounded, he shrugged his shoulders.
“You’ll find him in one of the little bars round here — he won’t be far, madame.”
I knew better. I had my own vision of him — it was the rustiness of that nail that haunted me. Or would I reach his attic only after an ebony vampire had sucked the last drop of blood from his corrupted carcass?
Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong sight of Insel standing disproportionately at the end of a row of little men before a “zinc,” his head, appearing enormous, shone with a muted gleam.
Without stopping I raised my hand. Insel, although he had his back to me, rushed into the street — he seemed to be continuing to run around.
In his gesture I could see a conclusion of distressful searching in which he had circled during my absence — beating his breast. “Warum, warum, ist diese frau davon gegangen? — Why did this woman go away? I have not ceased to ask myself.” Insel complained again and again in miserable bewilderment. “You went away— Why did you go away?”
“Only to fetch something I left at the other café.”
Tenderly confidential he bent his neck — a gnarl in a stricken tree — I was about to learn what urgent anxiety had drawn me out of bed.
“There was a waiter,” he whispered hoarsely into my hat, “who wouldn’t let me out of the Dôme until I had paid for two cafés fines.” (They had forgotten to include them when I paid for the supper.) “It isn’t that I want you to pay me back,” he protested with his so distinguished courtesy—.”
I always had to order the same drinks for myself as for Insel, or he would not have taken anything— but I made him drink my fine. It would, I felt, have superfluous results were I to even sip alcohol in the company of this weirdly intoxicating creature. At the same time in accordance with my mission as a lifesaver, I begged him to take café au lait—which roused a piteous opposition.
As if wound up he went on beating a mea culpa on his absent breast.
I caught him by the arm.
Instantaneously he displaced to a distance. I was left with my own arm articulated at a right angle, holding in my hand a few inches of gray bone. It had come away with a bit of his sleeve, acutely decorated with the jagged edge of torn black cloth. At the same time, Insel laying his hand on my shoulder, the rag and the bone did a “fade-out.”
“Promise me to stay here,” he whispered, “while I go to the bar. These people would not like it if I did not pay.”
Insel, who seemed to remember our pact, wanted to go back to the Dôme. But I refused.
“It’s time for you to sleep,” I commanded. That persistent teeter in my mind which was always tipping Insel up in a stiff horizontal straight line, his immovable eyes glued to infinity, was laying him out in state on no bed under an awesome canopy of poverty.
“No,” I decided, “I shall put you back in your box — my pet clochard is going to lie in a row — under a bridge.”
11
WE WANDERED OFF IN SEARCH OF THE SEINE— IT was dawn.
Perhaps this showcase hung outside a librairie was a prison and we, therefore, suspecting an isolation, dissolved its wire caging with the crafty focus of sight to set the content free.
We saw the primeval steam (whose last wisp straying endlessly had wreathed itself round Insel’s brain) condense to stone in a frayed torso.
In the darkness it was blind. As the sky broke open, its outline entered the morning gently with the eyes of an animal. As daylight warmed the lids widened to the vision of a pagan.
In conception vast enough to absorb the centuries it survived, now in defiance of time to surpass it — the eternal Thing was looking at us with the fullness of the future. All we had ever understood that was less than itself peeled like spoiled armor.
What enormous foreboding, Insel, in his simplicity, I, in my complexity, recognized in its ideal expression, I cannot say. It was a recognition of something known which, in spite of life, we would know again. Insel, without speaking, turned to me staring at the re-impression of an impression on a book spread out for the passerby we had both, I could see, in identical silence found one significance in an early Greek fragment — I do not remember which.
I have heard that some philosophers assume reality to be absent without an audience. In empty streets the sun had a terrible excessive existence for ourselves alone. We walked together, yet repeatedly, as if having veered in an arc it took no time to describe, Insel would be coming towards me from far away.
“Go back!” he cried in gaunt derangement, “if it disgusts you to look at me.” Shining uselessly, as an electric bulb “left on” by day, his face, unshaven, was partially clouded.
We came to a Raoul Dufy in a dealer’s window; his charming “crook’s technique” disintegrated my meticulous companion. I feared that, the shock reinforcing his perpetual cerebral fit, he was about to throw a physical one. Instead he became covered with verdigris.
We had to relapse at another cafe. Insel disappeared for quite a while.
“Have you been sick?” I asked solicitously. He was looking less green.
“Dufy,” he explained.
I put down the money for the coffee and a twenty-five centime piece rolled to the ground.
“Would you pick that up?” I begged. Insel began pulling himself together but did nothing about it, so I picked it up myself.
“Oh, dear,” he wailed forlornly. “I thought you pointed to me. For God’s sake throw it down again — or I shall never forgive myself,” he pled and pled—.
Nothing would induce me to. I foresaw him distinctly diminishing through the hole in the center of that tiny disc and I had to get him to the Seine.
At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so lightly its lazy barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. Whatever had been an “under-the-bridge” was all boxed in and the sun had crawled so far into the sky it was needless to look for another.
After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless delight round and round the Orangerie. Insel’s boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might have been following him, snapping at his legs.