Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette,
sitting in the dark by his open front window.
For the first time in over a year he found himself
thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare
pungency in it certainly, a quality almost Southern.
A lonesome town, though. He who had grown up
alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During
the past several months he had been careful, when
he had no engagement for the evening, to hurry to
one of his clubs and find some one. Oh, there
was a loneliness here——
His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds
of curtain with rims of faint white spray, glowed
on until the clock in St. Anne’s down the street
struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty.
The elevated, half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble
of drums—and should he lean from his window
he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting
the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded
of a fantastic romance he had lately read in which
cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and for
a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared
war on Central Park and that this was a north-bound
menace loaded with battle and sudden death. But
as it passed the illusion faded; it diminished to
the faintest of drums—then to a far-away
droning eagle.
There were the bells and the continued low blur of
auto horns from Fifth Avenue, but his own street was
silent and he was safe in here from all the threat
of life, for there was his door and the long hall and
his guardian bedroom—safe, safe! The
arc-light shining into his window seemed for this
hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful
than the moon.
A FLASH-BACK IN PARADISE
Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years,
sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which
blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless
hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately
as they went by and the winds made a soft incessant
flurry in her hair. She was incomprehensible,
for, in her, soul and spirit were one—the
beauty of her body was the essence of her soul.
She was that unity sought for by philosophers through
many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of
winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred
years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.
It became known to her, at length, that she was
to be born again. Sighing, she began a long conversation
with a voice that was in the white wind, a conversation
that took many hours and of which I can give only
a fragment here.
BEAUTY: (Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes
turned, as always, inward upon herself) Whither
shall I journey now?
THE VOICE: To a new country—a land
you have never seen before.
BEAUTY: (Petulantly) I loathe breaking
into these new civilizations. How long a stay
this time?
