Slowly he passed his hands over the atrocious smoothness of his cranium in a long, shuddering movement. "Imagine that," he said, once more, in a broken whisper.
He raised his finger. He sipped. I gave up. Really, you know, the way he told it, it was rather convincing. I left him to his self-abasement. He lived on his harmless life:--by day the uncongenial task; the maudlin dissipation by night. And every evening he told me his story, his lugubrious story, till at times a whiff of his madness communicated itself to me, entered my blood, and, taking up my own particular wrongs, I descended with him into orgies of tremulous self-compassion.
Then occurred something which gave me a ray of hope.
It was at a fire. Cholera had broken out in the city and the health officials, with that brisk cruelty in which revels man, from medieval inquisitor to common policeman, when persuaded of the righteousness of his cause, were _cleaning out_ barrios. This particular barrio was a miserable assemblage of nipa huts in the Paco district. It was burning well when I arrived, in one large, clear flame that rose with a single, powerful twist toward a sky purple with sunset. It was quite a fine spectacle. Society had deserted the Luneta drive for the more flaring show; out on the rosy edge of the conflagration was an intricacy of victorias and calesins; a stamping of pony hoofs. Jusis shimmered; white suits gleamed; beneath the crackling of tortured nipa rose a low hum of polite conversation, musical laughter, melodious Ohs and Ahs at particularly brilliant pyrotechnics. All Society was there, reclining upon cushioned seats with a fine feeling of security before this proof of official energy. But in the shadow, on the other side, I could vaguely descry other spectators, unkempt men and women, standing up, stiff and motionless, with little bundles in their hands, on their heads, stupid before this magnificent destruction of their homes. Probably it had never occurred to them that these huts, these hearths, held such possibilities of splendour. The revelation paralysed them. They gazed with wide-open eyes, with open mouths, silent, dark, immovable.
Then suddenly, in the peace, the security of the moment, there rose a shrill, mad cry, right from the flames. The buzz of conversation halted brusquely. White handkerchiefs rose convulsively to whitening lips. The firemen, off on one side, began an inexplicable running to and fro. The nipa roared. And right from the flame, in maddening continuance, as if from a soul bodyless and in torture, came the high, shrill, quavering cry.