One by one,as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit,the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance.The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng.Tiny finger-prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air.A splattered stain,raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb,witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall.Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name ‘Marie.’It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury-perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness-and wreaked upon it their passions.The furniture was chipped and bruised;the couch,distorted by bursting springs,seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion.Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel.Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony.It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home;and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly,the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath.A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file,soft-shod,through his mind,while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents.He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent,slack laughter;in others the monologue of a scold,the rattling of dice,a lullaby,and one crying dully;above him a banjo tinkled with spirit.Doors banged somewhere;the elevated trains roared intermittently;a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence.And he breathed the breath of the house-a dank savour rather than a smell-a cold,musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then,suddenly,as he rested there,the room was filled with the strong,sweet odour of mignonette.It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant.And the man cried aloud,‘What,dear?’as if he had been called,and sprang up and faced about.The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about.He reached out his arms for it,all his senses for the time confused and commingled.How could one be peremptorily called by an odour?Surely it must have been a sound.But,was it not the sound that had touched,that had caressed him?
‘She has been in this room,’he cried,and he sprang to wrest from it a token,for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched.This enveloping scent of mignonette,the odour that she had loved and made her own-whence came it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order.Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins-those discreet,indistinguishable friends of womankind,feminine of gender,infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense.These he ignored,conscious of their triumphant lack of identity.Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded,tiny,ragged handkerchief.He pressed it to his face.It was racy and insolent with heliotrope;he hurled it to the floor.In another drawer he found odd buttons,a theatre programme,a pawnbroker's card,two lost marshmallows,a book on the divination of dreams.In the last was a woman's black satin hair-bow,which halted him,poised between ice and fire.But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity's demure,impersonal,common ornament,and tells no tales.
