Page:The City of Masks (1918).djvu/89

Rh gazed pensively at the ceiling of her ugly storehouse, Waldemar de Bosky went shivering through the streets to his cold little backroom many blocks away. While, she was for the moment living in the dim but unforgotten past, a kindly memory leading her out of the maze of other people's poverty and her own avarice into broad marble halls and vaulted rooms, he was thinking only of the bitter present with its foodless noon and of pockets that were empty. While maudlin tears ran down her oily cheeks and spilled aimlessly upon a greasy sweater with the spur of memory behind them, tears wrought by the sharp winds of the street glistened in his squinting eyes.

Memory carried him back no farther than the week before and he was distressed only by its exceeding frailty. He could not, for the life of him, remember the address of J. Bramble, bookseller,—a most exasperating lapse in view of the fact that J. Bramble himself had urged him to come up some evening soon and have dinner with him, and to bring his Stradivarius along if he didn't mind. Mind? Why, he would have played his heart out for a good square meal. The more he tried to remember J. Bramble's address, the less he thought of the overcoat with the fur collar and the soft leather lining. He couldn't eat that, you know.

In his bleak little room in the hall of the whistling winds, he took from its case with cold-benumbed fingers the cherished violin. Presently, as he played, the shivering flesh of him grew warm with the heat of an inward fire; the stiff, red fingers became limp and pliable; the misty eyes grew bright and feverish. Fire,—the fires of love and genius and hope combined,—burnt