Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/317

Rh Quick steps. He must discover the truth. He had lived upon the crater of a lie. He must flee down the volcanic slopes to the valley.

At the chair he tossed aside the robe. Through the open door he saw the bedroom of cream and green, the low white lamp.

She had moved the lamp so that it played white upon her body. She lay naked, an unimaginably pure living statue. Flesh of pink and white, cherry-tinted invitations to kisses, a somber patch of shadow where the roots lay.

He stared. Love is beauty. And beauty is divine.

But love of a woman is dank unwholesome terror, her shrine fit only for the worship of Satan, the sobbing syllable of her prayer an incantation said by the devil's priest at a black mass.

The door of the bedroom closed softly. Adrift on a gentle sea of sensuous thoughts, Connie waited for him.

"Sweet," she called at last, "where are you?"

He heard her words as he was leaving the apartment, like a thief who has escaped the terror of arrest.

On the way to the hotel, he stopped at an all-night drug store. He bought a bottle of gin.

He drank all of it.

When the cab stopped before the Yorkshire Hotel, he was drunk.

The cab driver cried: "One ten, mister."

"Get it from the clerk," Ken said. "I'm broke."

The night clerk was asleep. Ken straddled the tapestry rope across the dining room entrance. Chairs and tables in his way, he staggered to a side door; thence to the kitchen stairs.