Free Insel by Mina Loy

would I wash it in glory—.”
    Rising for a moment from the fantastic shallows of his cerebral proximity to my normal level, “This man is
fearfully
banal,” I said to myself, discerning in his confidences the prim hypocrisy of a wastrel bamboozling the patroness of some charitable institution. Any such patroness would have cried for help should she receive him as he was at present plunged in the depths of a subverted exaltation, so awesomely he stressed his lonely agony, his long starvation, the incidentless introspection of that enjailed jewel, his artist spirit. As for me, the fundamental lacuna in my experience was being “stopped up” with his moral man. The pattern held out to my early ethical life. The man who stones. He who unsuspectingly lingers in the world subconscious.
    I did not care whom he bamboozled. Slipping back into his sensitized zone, I swallowed his platitudes gratefully. So seldom had I come across
anything
sufficiently
condensed
to satisfy my craving for “potted absolute.” This man sufficed me as representing all the hungry errantry of the human race.
    “What are you trying to be anyhow?” I asked bemused.
“La faim qui rode autour des palaces?”
    A sound of anguish was hovering above us but I scarcely registered it listening to his quiet soliloquy in reverence for the buried aspiration whence sprung the weedy heroism of his pretence.
    “Dolefully trite in his insincerity,” my common sense intervened.
    “Inflexible is his moral will,” countered the underside of my mentality which drawing comparisons to sociologists’ deceptions in criminal reform preferred to remain impressed.
    “
Der edler Mensch
,” it breathed devoutly, “The noble creature.”
    Still looking so extraordinarily distinguished, Insel was illustrating a society by means of an empty plate, a diaphragm reducing the world to a white spot.
    “There are
you
—” pointing the tip of his nose toward the center—a comical almost four-cornered tip of a nose with the sudden sharpness of a (square tool, the name of which I have forgotten), “and here am I—on the outside—peeping over the edge at you,” he said as he crept his fingers in their incipient movement up from under the rim.
    I was disappointed. One thing about Insel that had struck me was this sporadic distinction I had often been “accused” of which I had always been eager to discover in anyone else who, like myself, had “popped up” from nowhere at all—as if all my life I had lacked a crony of my “own class.”
    I could not point this out. It would upset Insel’s self-abasement which gave him some mysterious satisfaction—as of an Olympian in masquerade—
    That sound above, once it hooked up with perception, became a squirling wail—soaring over the driving racket of the street corner.
    “Do you hear?” asked Insel, “it’s been going on for quite a while—in an aerial invasion people would sit on at their cafe tables just as we have done. Air raids,” he shuddered, shrinking into himself, “and the French so proud of their Maginot Line. They have forgotten
their
Stavisky was mixed up with it—Sugar,” beamed Insel, a gentle delirium stealing into his eyes, “tons and tons of sugar poured into the foundations of the Maginot Line.”
    “Sugar’s rather expensive,” I ventured.
    “Nevertheless,” averred Insel, and I felt it might be perilous to contradict him.
    His chuckle petered out as the siren insinuating to his brain the menace of a war which would cut off any chuckling, transformed it to a shudder.
    Insel trembled with the cowardice of those whose instinct being to create even an iota, appear to slink into a corner before the heroic of destructive intent. This man, who, when he turned his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great intensity of the hypnotist but with a force of concentration reaching inward and outward as if he must first subject himself to his own mysterious influence, this man in his terror