Page:Strange Tales Volume 02 Number 03 (1932-10).djvu/90

 quick laugh, looked at her, and shrugged his shoulders, as if he felt obliged to excuse her behavior.

I was nauseated by him. He had peculiar epidermic scars on his neck, as broad as a hand, but all around and of a pale color, giving an effect of ruffles—like the neck of a pheasant.

And his tricot of pale flesh color hung loosely on him from neck to toe, because he was narrow-chested and thin. On his head he wore a flat, greenish lid with white dots and buttons. He had got up and was dancing with a girl around whose neck there was a chain of speckled berries.

"Have new women dropped in?" I asked Lord Hopeless with my eyes.

"That's only Ignatia—my sister," said Albina Veratrina, and while she said the word "sister," she winked at me from the corner of her eye and laughed hysterically.

Suddenly she stuck her tongue out at me, and I noticed that it had a dry, long, reddish streak down its middle; and I was horrified.

It's like a symptom of poisoning, I thought. Why has she that reddish streak? It's like a symptom of poisoning!

And again I heard the music coming from afar:

"I took the whitest flow-ower To cheer my darkest hou-our,"

and, although I kept my eyes closed, I knew how they all wagged their heads to the music in crazy rhythm

It is like a symptom of poisoning, I dreamed—and woke up with a chill.

The hunchback in his green, spotted jacket had a wench on his lap and jerked off her clothes in a sort of St. Vitus' dance, seemingly to the rhythm of inaudible music. Doctor Zitterbein arose awkwardly and unbuttoned her shoulderstraps.

BETWEEN second and second there is a brief interval, which does not belong to time, which belongs only to the imagination. Like the meshes of a net"—I heard the hunchback orating insinuatingly—"these intervals are. You can add them together, and they will still not result in actual time, but we think them nevertheless—once, twice, once again, and a fourth time

"And if we live only within these limits and forget the actual minutes and seconds, never to remember them—why, then we are dead, then we live only in death.

"You live, let us say, fifty years. Of that your schooling takes away ten: leaves forty.

"And sleep steals twenty: leaves twenty.

"And ten are filled with cares: remains ten.

"Of those you spend nine years in fear of to-morrow; thus you may live one year—perhaps!

"Why wouldn't you rather die?

"Death is beautiful.

"There is rest, eternal rest.

"And no worry about to-morrow.

"There is the eternal, silent Present, which you do not know; there is no Before and no Afterwards.

"There lies the silent Present, which you do not know! These are the hidden meshes 'twixt second and second in the net of time."

HE words of the hunchback were still singing in my heart. I looked up and saw that the chemise of the wench had dropped to her waist and she sat on his lap, naked. She had no breasts and no body-only a phosphorescent nebula from neck to hip.

And he reached into that nebula with his fingers, and it sounded