a phantom play
acted on that fiery stage, beneath those hideous brassy lamps, very
slowly swinging in a violent blast. As all the medley of outrageous
sights and sounds now fused themselves within his brain into one clear
impression, it seemed that he had indeed witnessed and acted in a drama,
that all the scene had been prepared and vested for him, and that
the choric songs he had heard were but preludes to a greater act. For in
that woman was the consummation and catastrophe of it all, and the whole
stage waited for their meeting. He fancied that after this the voices and
the lights died away, that the crowd sank swiftly into the darkness, and
that the street was at once denuded of the great lamps and of all its
awful scenic apparatus.

Again, he thought, the same mystery would be represented before him;
suddenly on some dark and gloomy night, as he wandered lonely on a
deserted road, the wind hurrying before him, suddenly a turn would
bring him again upon the fiery stage, and the antique drama would be
re-enacted. He would be drawn to the same place, to find that woman still
standing there; again he would watch the rose radiant and palpitating
upon her cheek, the argent gleam in her brown eyes, the bronze curls
gilding the white splendor of her neck. And for the second time she
would freely offer herself. He could hear the wail of the singers
swelling to a shriek, and see the dusky dancers whirling round in a
faster frenzy, and the naphtha flares tinged with red, as the woman and
he went away into the dark, into the cloistered court where every flower
was a flame, whence he would never come out.

His only escape was in the desk; he might find salvation if he could
again hide his heart in the heap and litter of papers, and again be rapt
by the cadence of a phrase. He threw open his window and looked out on
the dim world and the glimmering amber lights. He resolved that he would
rise early in the morning, and seek once more for his true life in the
work.

But there was a strange thing. There was a little bottle on the
mantelpiece, a bottle of dark blue glass, and he trembled and shuddered
before it, as if it were a fetish.

VII

It was very dark in the room. He seemed by slow degrees to awake from a
long and heavy torpor, from an utter forgetfulness, and as he raised his
eyes he could scarcely discern the pale whiteness of the paper on the
desk before him. He remembered something of a gloomy winter aftern