to be her narcotic, like the powder she sometimes sniffed before a performance, to preserve the equilibrium of her private world from change.
He had known when he left the Brussels station bar for the predawn train to Paris that she would resort to the dope in the antique snuffbox. He had felt ridiculous, sitting huddled in the 2nd Class compartment crowded with sprawling sleepers, their faces drawn in the pain of unrest. His thoughts had run as twin engines racing each other, one automatically noting the problem of translating into the reality of line or paint the unreality of the sleep-gasping travelers, the gaping mouth-opened faces cruelly painted by the macabre light of feeble bulbs, swaying and shuddering to the churning wheels as in a kind of Keystone Comedy dance of death treadmill chase, and the other counterpoint thought a flicking sequence of scene images with Simone.
All this the result of having strolled, at that twilight hour when the Seine begins to reek, over the Pont des Arts, across the cobbled courtyard of the Louvre, up the rue de Richelieu to the Grands Boulevards, where it occurred to him to take in the revue at the A.B.C. He had thought the show dull until Simone Calvette appeared.
She had walked slowly, almost negligently, from the farthest back entrance down to the footlights, a narrow column wrapped in a tube of black velvet from her small high breasts to her knees where it broke into a giant trailing lily. She had stood, reposed, hands clasped arms' length, her triangle face slightly tilted as though balancing the henna-tinged swirl of hair over her left eyebrow, and sang in a thin moderate voice, exquisitely, a Basque folksong "Ma Douce Annette."
He had returned to Daudin's that night to record her image on stone. Then the accidental encounter again with Figente and through him, because of the drawing, the meeting with Simone.
But two and a half years out of three were enough to spend convincing a human being against self-destruction and the denial of a little solitude to work by himself.
Curtain!
Darkness rolled over him and, with a start, he realized that the drone of the train wheels to Paris in his reverie was the rumble of traffic over nearby Queensborough Bridge. A constellation of lights began to glimmer one by one in the last dull sanguine glow across the river on whose ebbtide flow moved long shadowy barges around which dodged fussing tugboats.
