Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Young men -- Conduct of life -- Fiction
He passed through an unsubstantial city of shadows, of sudden,
clangoring sounds, of the blur of lights swaying in strings above his
head, of unsteady luminous bubbles floating before him through ravines
of gloom; bells rang loud and threatening, throats of brass bellowed.
His head began to throb with a sudden pain, and the pain printed clearly
on the bright suffering of his mind a stooping, dusty figure; leaden
eyes, a grey face, peered into his own; slack lips mumbled the story
of a boy dead long ago--Eliza, Eliza was dead--and of a red necktie, a
Sunday suit; a fearful figure, a fearful story, from the low mutter of
which he precipitantly fled. Other faces crowded his brain--Ellie with
her cool, understanding look, his mother, his father frowning at him in
assumed severity; he saw Mrs. Dreen, palely sweet in a starlit gloom.
Then panic swept over him as he realized that he was unable, in a sudden
freak of memory, to summon into that intimate gallery the countenance of
Eliza. It was as though in disappearing from the corporeal world she had
also vanished from the realm of his thoughts, of his longing. He paused,
driving his nails into his palms, knotting his brow, in an agony of
effort to visualize her. In vain. “I can't remember her,” he told an
indistinct human form before him. “I can't remember her.”
A voice answered him, thin and surprisingly bitter. “When you are sober
you will stop trying.”
And then he saw her once more, so vivid, so near, that he gave a sobbing
exclamation of relief. “Don't,” he whispered, “not... lose again--” He
forgot for the moment that she was dead, and put out a hand to touch
her. Thin air. Then he recalled. He commenced his direct, aimless
course, but a staggering weariness overcame him, the toylike progress
grew slower, there were interruptions, convulsive starts.
LIII
AT the same time the haze lightened about him: he saw clearly his
surroundings, the black, glittering windows of stores, the gleaming
rails which bound the stone street. His hat was gone and he had long
before lost the bundle that contained his linen. But the loss was of
small moment now--he had money, a pocketful of it, and forty-seven
thousand dollars waiting in Ellerton: his father was a scrupulous,
truthful and exact man.
Eliza and he would have been immediately married, gone to a little green
village, under a red mountain; Eliza would have worn the most beautiful
dresses made by a parrot; but that, he recognized shrewdly, was an
idiotic fancy--birds didn't make dresses. And now she was dead.
He entered a place of multitudinous mirrors reflecting a woman's
flickering limbs, sly and bearded masculine faces, that somehow were
vaguely familiar.
“Champagne!” he cried, against the bar.
“Your champagne'll come across in a schooner.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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