Insel by Mina Loy Page B

of
my
underworld—its
laws
. The rights of such women extend only to the level of the tabletop.
    “It’s like this—I am sitting at the Dôme—she comes along—”
    “She dropped on you,” I corrected— It was fun teasing him. Like tickling a dazed gnome with a spider’s silk.
    Ignoring my interruption, he continued, “She may take
anything
under the table—she can grab a thousand francs from my pocket—it is hers. But to lift anything
off
the t
able—ausgeschlossen!
— impermissible!”
    So exactly the logic on behalf of woman in the normal world that I squeaked, “You haven’t got a thousand francs in your pocket.”
    What matter if we were trivial. We must find some excuse for our unending hazy laughter. Speech was an afterthought to that humorous peace as it fused with our incomparable exaltation. It was ridiculous to find ourselves, alone, in well-being so wide there was room for innumerable populations.
    Insel harped back to
not
having beaten the negress.
    “Well,” I temporized, relenting, “you thumped her—You did like this,” clinching every nerve in my body I tried to imitate that excruciation which in him took the place of a sense of touch— But my fingers closed on an absence—incipience of all volume, Insel’s volume. “Didn’t you know?”
    All he could remember was her stealing my cigarettes.
    “Stealing,” I exclaimed, “the waiter told me they support you—.”
    “Everybody,” Insel reflected drearily, “thinks I am such an awful
maquereau
. I only had three meals with them.”
    “You don’t have to exonerate yourself,” I said dryly, overcome with compassion. “It’s quite a feat—being a pimp and starving to death.” Then laughing, “Whoever heard of a
maquereau
without any money!” It made such a gorgeous sound when they were shouting—almost
macrusallo
. Like crucified mackerel—
    “They stole my sheets,” Insel interrupted sternly, “my six white sheets.”
    “Six sheets against three meals or three embraces! Whichever way you put it your honor is clear,” I consoled him, “All the same, I shall not call you
clochard
any more, but
macrusallo
.”
    Insel’s luminous duality peculiar to this one night seemed to be forming a more domestic hallucination, an elfin attempt at flirtation, miraculously coy, which played all to itself against the greater glow and measure of his basic disarray—a tacit assumption of our having mutually renounced an inferior world in spite of his repulsiveness being, as he wailed, greater than I could bear.
    I had once, to get a simple opinion, asked my dressmaker to take a look at him.
    “Well, do you think he’s mad?” I asked her.
    “He looks so funny,” she giggled. “He looks ‘in love.’ ”
    She was right, he had the air of being amorous of anything or everything in general which left him so rapt and gentle, or, taking an “inner” view, his astral Venus flowed in his veins. This was why, when he met a woman, MmeFeirlein or any other, he had an approach of continent rape, as if he were persuading her bemused, “See! It must be the more lovely for being already consummate.”
    For a moment I wondered if his unstaid mind had re-conceived in some unguessable aspect I assumed for him, its eerie durable passion in general—for myself. But apart from the likelihood of his having no idea as to whom he alternately bewailed and beamed upon, I remembered the only emotion I aroused in creative men was an impulse of “knock-out” (that any intuited opposition of the future stirs in the subconscious) which of course was
impossible
with this delicate soul swimming so docilely along his astral stream under the thunder and lightnings of his distraction like a confiding duck as I scattered crumbs.
    At the same time a worn down record of old-fashioned inflection clattered out of Insel’s head:
    “In spite of all—”
    A lesson? A suggestion? A refrain to be taken up?
    Instantly I knew this to be a touch-word on which some