not, and your projected Revolution only another symptom of it.'
'A decadence is a falling-away,' said Kholsky. 'We rise.'
'A decadence,' Itague put in, 'is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.'
The girl and the woman had moved away from the stage's one overhead light. They could hardly be seen. No sound came from up there. Itague finished the last of the ice water.
'Your beliefs are non-human,' he said. 'You talk of people as if they were point-clusters or curves on a graph.'
'So they are,' mused Kholsky, dreamy-eyed. 'I, Satin, Porcepic, may fall by the wayside. No matter. The Socialist Awareness grows, the tide is irresistible and irreversible. It is a bleak world we live in, M. Itague; atoms collide, brain cells fatigue, economies collapse and others rise to succeed them, all in accord with the basic rhythms of History. Perhaps she is a woman; women are a mystery to me. But her ways are at least measurable.'
'Rhythm,' snorted Itague, 'as if you listened to the jitterings and squeaks of a metaphysical bedspring.' The tailor laughed, delighted, like a great fierce child. Acoustics of the room gave his mirthfulness a sepulchral ring. The stage was empty.
'Come,' said Porcepic. 'To L'Ouganda,' Satin on a table danced absently to himself.
Outside they passed the woman, holding Melanie by the arm. They were headed toward the Metro station; neither spoke. Itague stopped at a kiosk to buy a copy of La Patrie, the closest one could get to an anti-Semitic newspaper in the evening. Soon they had vanished down the Boulevard Clichy.
As they descended the moving stairs, the woman said, 'You are afraid.' The girl didn't answer. She still wore the costume, covered now with a dolman wrap which looked expensive and was, and which the woman approved of. She bought them first-class tickets. Closeted in the suddenly-materialized train, the woman asked: 'Do you only lie passive then, like an object? Of course you do. It is what you are. Une fetiche .' She pronounced the silent e's, as if she were singing. Air in the Metro was close. The same as outside. Melanie studied the tail of the dragon on her calf.
After some time had passed the train climbed to ground level. Melanie may have noticed they were crossing the river. To her left she saw the Eiffel Tower, quite near. They were crossing the Pont de Passy. At the first stop on the Left Bank the woman arose. She'd not left off clutching Melanie's arm. Out on the street they began to walk, bearing southwest, into the district of Grenelle: a landscape of factories, chemical works, iron foundries. They were alone in the street. Melanie wondered if the woman indeed lived among factories.
They walked for what seemed a mile: arrived, finally, at a loft building, in which only the third floor was occupied, by a manufacturer of belts. They climbed narrow stairs, flight after flight. The woman lived on the top floor. Melanie, though a dancer and strong-legged, now showed signs of exhaustion. When they arrived at the woman's rooms, the girl lay down without invitation on a large pouf in the center of the room. The place was decorated African and oriental: black pieces of primitive sculpture, lamp in the shape of a dragon, silks, Chinese red. The bed was a great four-poster. Melanie's wrap had fallen away: her legs, blond and bedragoned, lay unmoving half on the pouf, half on the oriental rug. The woman sat down beside the girl, resting her hand lightly on Melanie's shoulder, and began to talk.
If you've not already guessed, 'the woman' is, again, the lady V. of Stencil's mad time-search. No one knew her name in Paris.
Not only was she V., however, but also V. in love. Herbert Stencil was willing to let the key to his conspiracy have a few of the human passions. Lesbianism, we are prone to think in this Freudian period of history, stems from self-love projected on to some other human object. If a girl gets to feeling narcissist, she will also sooner or later come upon the idea that women, the class she belongs to, are not so bad either. Such may have been the case with Melanie, though who could say: perhaps the spell of incest at Serre Chaude was an indication that her preferences merely lay outside the usual, exogamous- heterosexual pattern which prevailed in 1913.
But as for V. - V. in love - the hidden motives, if there were any, remained a mystery to all observers. Everyone connected with the production knew what was going on; but because intelligence of the affair remained inside a circle inclined toward sadism, sacrilege, endogamy and homosexuality anyway, there was little concern, and the two were let alone, like young lovers. Melanie showed up faithfully at all rehearsals and as long as the woman wasn't enticing her away from the production - which, apparently, she had no intention of doing, being a patroness - Itague for one couldn't have cared less.
One day the girl arrived at Le Nerf accompanied by the woman and wearing schoolboys' clothing: tight black trousers, a white shirt, a short black jacket. Moreover, her head - all her thick buttock-length hair - had been shorn. She was nearly bald; and but for the dancer's body no clothes could conceal, she might have been a young lad playing hooky. There was, fortunately, a long black wig in the costume box. Satin greeted the idea with enthusiasm. Su Feng would appear in the first act with hair, in the second without: having been tortured anyway by Mongolians. It would shock the audience, whose tastes, he felt, were jaded.
At every rehearsal, the woman sat at a rear table, watching, silent. All her attention was concentrated on the girl. Itague tried at first to engage her in conversation; but failed and went back to La Vie Heureuse, Le Rire, Le Charivari. When the company moved to the Theatre de Vincent Castor, she followed like a faithful lover. Melanie continued dressing transvestite for the street. Speculation among the company was that a peculiar inversion had taken place: since an affair of this sort generally involves one dominant and one submissive, and it was clear which one was which, the woman should have appeared in the clothing of an aggressive male. Porcepic, to the amusement of all, produced at L'Ouganda one evening a chart of the possible combinations the two could be practicing. It came out to 64 different sets of roles, using the subheadings 'dressed as,' 'social role,' 'sexual role.' They could both for example be dressed as males, both have dominant social roles and strive for dominance sexually. They could be dressed different-sexed and both be entirely passive, the game then being to trick the other into making an aggressive move. Or any of 62 other combinations. Perhaps, Satin suggested, there were also inanimate mechanical aids. This, it was agreed, would confuse the picture. At one point someone suggested that the woman might actually be a transvestite to begin with, which made things even more amusing.
But what actually was going on at the loft in Grenelle? Each mind at L'Ouganda and among the troupe at the Theatre Vincent Castor had conjured up a different scene; machines of exquisite torture, bizarre costuming, grotesque movements of muscle under flesh.
How disappointed they all would have been. Had they seen the skirt of the little sculptress-acolyte from Vaugirard, heard the pet-name the woman had for Melanie or read - as had Itague - in the new science of the mind, they would have known that certain fetishes never have to be touched or handled at all; only seen, for there to be
