Sleepeluded James Femms. Isolated in umbrageous stillness, the grosser sensory reactions no longer obstructed the reception of what, he now conceded, must be the telepathic apperceptions of sixth or seventh sense. Below the coverlet his body, resentful under mysterious reproaches from without, expressed its unrest in gyratory saltations; his mind ached and quivered in sympathy with baffling emotions of which his awareness was so acute that it all but equalled experience itself.
He was cognizant, dimly but with certitude, of a relation between these sufferings and the presence, the propinquity, at least, of theporte-chapeauxthat had been Sonoff’s. Again he contemplated thehypothesis that understanding and affection had established between James Femms and the inanimate objects of his passion, arapprochement, arapportanalogous to, if not identical with, the sympathy that unites the sundered halves of a spiritual union. Below, from the doorstep, theporte-chapeauxof Mikail Sonoff seemed, to James Femms, to upraise a muted ululation, a sound of exquisite desire, as pitiful and penetrant as the call of the widowed wood-dove. He came, at last, to the window, a panel of translucent pressed glass surrounded by a bordure of plaquettes, each of a different primary color, now delicately diminished in the pallor of a moon as cold, Femms thought, as the belly facet of a flounder.
He slept with the window, after the mode which he sensed intuitively would have been that of Jambes des Femmes, closed. Lifting it, now, and shivering in the humid inrush of nocturnal airs, he identified the crooning note; the leprous, unchaste cry of feline concupiscence. Femms’s sibilant ejaculation motivated a flitting shadow; the gashed silence seemed to lick its wounds; there was stillness, but not, for James Femms, peace.
THE PORTE-CHAPEAUX OF NOISETTE À CHEVAL“Rising in the night, troubled over the yearning of the bassines to be reunited to their original source.”
THE PORTE-CHAPEAUX OF NOISETTE À CHEVAL“Rising in the night, troubled over the yearning of the bassines to be reunited to their original source.”
THE PORTE-CHAPEAUX OF NOISETTE À CHEVAL
“Rising in the night, troubled over the yearning of the bassines to be reunited to their original source.”
Rising, later in the night, convinced at last that hisspirit was troubled by the yearning of the bassines to be reunited to their original source, he bore them down and left them in the embrace of theporte-chapeaux.
Sleep coquetted with him, now, a sleep of caprice, through which, more remotely, James Femms continued to respond to that inanimate yearning, palliated but still passionately unsatisfied.