Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/125

Rh a cigarette was not to be denied. Also he was late for his appointment, and this annoyed him. He picked up the lamp when he had taken coat and cap off, and searched for the costume he was to wear.

A row of pegs upon the wall offered encouragement. With a certain awkwardness, which was the result of his shyness of touching unfamiliar garments, he knocked down two hats—women's hats: one a great scooped thing with red roses below the rim; the other like a dish, with green locusts, horribly lifelike (and no wonder, since they were the real insects), crawling over it. He hastily replaced these, and took up a white thing on another nail, which might have been the scant robe he was to wear.

It was a fine and soft to his hand; it exhaled an ineffable perfume of a sort of sweetness which belonged to no three-franc bottle, and had loose lace upon it and ribbons. He dropped this upon the ground, thinking shudderingly of the woman in the unbuttoned boots. At last he came upon the garment he was to wear; it seemed to him that he knew it at once when he touched it; it was of a thick, coarse, resistant woollen fabric, perhaps mohair, with a dull shine in the rather unwilling folds; there was very little stuff in it—just a narrow, poor garment, and of course white; wool-white. Wladislaw wondered vaguely where Dufour could have come by this wonderfully archaic material, ascetic even to the touch. Then he sat down upon a small disused stove and took off his boots and socks. Still hanging upon the nail was a rope cord, frayed rather, and of hemp, hand-twisted. That was the whole costume: the robe and the cord.

He was out of his shirt and ready to put on the Hebrew dress, when he was arrested again by some half-thought in his mind, and stood looking at it as it lay thrown across a heap of dusty toiles. It seemed so supremely real a thing—just what The Man