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Goliath watched him in silence as he moved from pedestal to pedestal from which, like a company of inert monsters, arose figures in clay and bronze. The first of them was a man four feet in height but massive-seeming beyond its dimensions. Mallare had entitled it "The Lover." Its legs were planted obliquely on the pedestal top, their ligaments wrenched into bizarre muscular patterns.
Mallare regarded her blankly for a moment. A wildness slowly filled his eyes. He sprang up. Goliath crouching in a corner of the dim room watched his master raise the velveted figure in his hands and fling it with a cry against the wall. "Fool!" he shouted. "Intruder!" Goliath cringed as his master rushed past him to the door. He listened to his feet flying down the stairs toward the night.
Over his head, trees without leaves stamped their gnarled and intricate contours on the shadowed air. A pallor covered the roofs. It was afternoon but a moon-like loneliness haunted the autumn windows. Mallare lived in another world. Neither trees nor buildings conveyed themselves to his thought. Within his own world he was sane.
A little whisper will save me. You will say to me, 'Here is God. I will come back. "My words tire of him. He will not listen. His tears! dear God, are You so human that they silence You? He has come into my loneliness. And there is no use debating with him any longer. Since he followed me home in the snow his weeping has never wavered. I must talk not to him but to Mallare.
But I, Mallare yes, Mallare the Supreme One honor her assault with a shudder. "'Ah, who but Mallare could have invented so subtle a blasphemy, so accomplished an enemy. It is an old theological quibble, but I understand it now. God is the greatest atheist. He is proud of a disbelief in Himself. "'Yes, this phantom is the atheism of Mallare. And it is at last a true child.
And she had lived in the carnelian room that was colored like the inside of a Burgundy bottle ever since. Goliath was her slave. Mallare was her God. At first he had said little to her. She wanted him to talk but he neither talked nor paid other attention. He brought her ribbons and dresses, trinkets, jewels, and playthings.
Here was a trick that baffled Mallare. I winced with distaste. "'The consistency which I have hitherto admired in my madness seems rather dubious. I thought. 'The melodrama of illusions grows too improbable. This fine tragedy crumbles into the ludicrous. She forgets her hate. She is again Rita, the infatuated one. A lightning change that smacks of inferior vaudeville.
Let me dissolve into this. Let me sprawl before the door of enchantments. It is illusion. Let it be. She will come out. Rita, my vanished one, come back to me. It is I who ask. Not the Cold One, not the Indifferent One, not Mallare. But I ... I. "I will hold you in my arms. I will feed your mist with kisses. My body will warm you. I will be kind. I am not Mallare. He is gone. He hides.
Mallare recovers the strings to his Frankenstein. His puppet dances again to his will. See, my senses no longer leap to her. They tremble warily before the hate in her eyes. "I watched her as she watched me. And then an incredible thing happened. She arose from the couch and came slowly toward me and she held a knife in her hand. She came toward me with the knife at her side.
But she had waited motionless. Perhaps he had come back to kill her. She lay shivering. Then his voice called her name. Standing slowly, Rita waited. He was asleep but he had called her. She moved cautiously over the heavy carpet. Mallare opened his eyes. He looked at the burning-eyed figure of the girl his hands remembered having killed in the strange street.
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