--Who could have thought that it would be
the sea itself to throw in his path the woman who had set this
blistering agony in his soul? There it lay like rolled glass; the black
piles under the footbridge were prolonged to twice their length by their
own shadows, so that the bridge seemed lifted enormously high out of
water. Beyond the bridge the seine pockets of the mackerel men hung on
the shrouds like black cobwebs, and the ships had a blighting look of
funeral ships.--
He had mistrusted the sea. It was life; it was death; flow, slack, and
ebb--and his pulse followed it.
Officials of the Customs House could testify that for better than a
year, if he mentioned women at all, it was in a tone to convey that his
fingers had been sorely burned in that flame and smarted still.
The second autumn, from that moment under the Preaching Tree, found him
of the same opinion still. He trod the dust a very phantom, while little
leaves of cardinal red spun past his nose like the ebbing heart's blood
of full-bodied summer. The long leaves of the sumach, too, were like
guilty fingers dipped in blood. But the little man paid no heed to the
analogies which the seasons presented to his conscience in their dying.
Though he thought often of his curse, he had not lifted it.
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