IV
A dawn of gusts, with spurts of disingenuous rain, revived James Femms; dressing, he avoided the candor of his glass, harried now by a recurrent thought of Sonoff.
He seemed, indeed, to see the old sonneur, abroad in this malicious weather, his battered parapluie, its proper service forgotten, serving him but as a staff, his garments maculate with party-colored inlays, his glorious hair unhatted.
Distantly, elusively, James Femms sensed, now, a relationship between his inchoate mental gropings and that whimsy of Mikail Sonoff. He knew that the old musician, his ears envenomed by the clack of telephone bells, suffered hideously from headache, but did he, James Femms demanded of himself, walk bareheaded in the rains to cool that throbbing capital, or was it, perhaps, because of some sentiment less practical—because of some profound attachment to a hat, too deeply loved, which, lost at last, had moved Sonoff to vow, in this respect, perpetual celibacy? Or was it...?
James Femms, percipient though he was, must have failed to draw that gossamer inference; it was an inspiration worthy of the finesse of Jambes des Femmes himself! He saw, now, with a sudden utter certitude, that Sonoff bared his splendid finial to the elements because a hat, any hat, must have revived and deepened his yearning for the porte-chapeaux, the porte-chapeaux of noisette à cheval that symbolized all the grace and splendor of Sonoff’s ravished youth!
“HE KNEW THE OLD MUSICIAN SUFFERED FROM HEADACHES, BUT DID HE WALK BAREHEADED IN THE RAIN TO COOL HIS HEAD OR PERHAPS BECAUSE OF SOME PROFOUND ATTACHMENT TO A HAT HE HAD ONCE OWNED? HAD HE LOST IT, PERHAPS, AND VOWED NEVER TO HAVE ANOTHER?”
And, as if the ghostly emanations of the porte-chapeaux had sought him out in whatever beggar’s den now harbored his decay, had called him forth and guided him hereward, Sonoff himself passed before James Femms’s window, a figure of compassion, a spectacle as insidiously saddening as that Wagner Palace Car which James Femms had once beheld degraded to the indignity of a nocturnal, nickel restaurant.
James Femms cried out to him, the sacrifice already made. Sonoff should have it for his own again, without money and without price!