Felix
Felix sobbed in the taxi: “Can’t you see we are all damned.” And that love and death were one.
They had considerably enlivened the cabaret, a sentimental infamy, its men and girls drunker than the clients. Among their slobbering, rapacious familiarity, the three appeared like drunk young gods. And Felix, a young king receiving his subjects, was courtly to the fawning, swarming band of both sexes in changed clothes. Proud of his companions, unconscious that he was paying for the party, he did not know that Boris owed money there, how he balanced the chance of being dunned with his worth as conductor of a rich client, and hoped that his debt would be put on to Felix’s bill. A thing he would not arrange. He had not yet come to that.
Round their table moved the herd of painted animals, Felix’s subjects, their tongues parting their lips for what they might get out of the flower-skinned, sapphire-eyed boy, who looked at nothing but Boris. Black briar-rose, he called him, who saw Felix an absurd young splendour. Felix noticed him strange, observant, a moon-baby. Not how the infant was putting two and two together. Nor would he have cared, lifted above any complex of the shopkeeper to be paid in any kind of thanks.
It was the American, later, who developed an intoxicated conscience about Felix when, in the taxi, romantic metaphysics and song gave way to hysteria. He cuffed him roughly into place. Unfortunately, Felix’s head broke a window, and all he did was lean out and cry: “I want to suffer as you have suffered, Boris—Police! police!”
The taxi slowed round a corner. He was bleeding from a cut. Boris alone kept his wits. Withdrew Felix’s head delicately from the hole in the glass, shouted in Russian at the chauffeur he had picked. Felix had become merely a thing to get home. They pulled up at the Foyot and got him out. Out but not up. The American retrieved the silk hat rolling on the stones: while Boris extracted three hundred francs, taxi, window money and useful change for the next day.
Then came the pilgrimage to which they were hardly equal, in the liftless, ancient barrack, their support to each other physical not moral, an age of social hatred lived through as they hoisted Felix upstairs and round corners, indifferent to his cries that he must faire pipi, followed by the concierge jangling the key. Ages of dissimilarity between the American, sudden flower of strength and looks, and the Russian-Tartar brat of family, to whom neurasthenia had become a habit.
They dumped Felix on the bed. Boris sponged away the blood, and got off the clothes that would hurt. The blood sickened the other and made him fretful. He gave an odd exhibition of nerves. Boris soothed him and they stumbled downstairs. In the street he said: “I have a little money. Let’s go on.” The American refused. Boris circled a little on the pavement, and, finding himself alone, drifted off to his little hotel, and slept face-downwards in his only convincing suit.