WANTED : THESE SCENTS, DEAD OR ALIVE
Part II Chapter IV —
“The room was filled with the odor of destruction: as though there might arise on the smoke a difference, when a storehouse of chemicals burned: here in the squat fireplace were chemicals, some of them inorganic, and the organic transmutations suffering oxidation with the immediacy of a chain reaction on the on the page of a chemistry text; but where, in this consummation, the law of the conservation of energy? Could brush strokes make the difference, then? Science in magnitude, biology and chemistry as triumphantly articulate as subordinates are always, offer no choice but abjure it in frantic effort to perfect a system without alternatives, the very fact of their science based on measurement; and measurement, designed to predicate finalities, refusing the truth which shelters in possibility: in the weight of the smell of the smoke there was more than the death of the body, the cellular sucking construction, hunger of tissues unconscious of any end but identical reproduction. But if strokes of creation fed the flames, strokes in whose every instant possibility had been explored for the finality which is perfection, torn apart in the attempt to free it into the delineation of that baffled enclosure of its own medium, here were brush strokes whose future had been dictated by the thwarting enclosure of the past, a past whose future was struck dying with every instant of the delineation of its everlasting life.”
Part II Chapter IV —
“The fire had died under the steady censure of the electric glare, and its emanations contended bitterly until, one by one, their poisonous violence was exhausted by such severe emergency, and left only lavender to rise and spread in a diffusion which penetrated without edge, which cut without sharpness, impetuous without haste, filling without distending as a color deepens in saturation and exalts in brilliance at once.
—Oh yes . . . she whispered fiercely, —Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes . . .
As the fire died even the lavender became indistinct, and lay in with the smell of Venice turpentine, and stand oil, burnt photographic prints, burnt canvas and tortured gesso until, when she woke, there was neither triumph nor dissension in the air she breathed, standing, looking round here, back to the bed suddenly, and round her again.”
Part II Chapter VII —
“The heat, and the numbers of people, seemed to have heightened the scent of lavender which came from the dark doorway and pervaded the well-lighted room, except for the fragrant shade left by the tall woman, the trace of My Sin still clinging to the chair Agnes Deigh had left empty, and a sweet pungence rising in one corner where someone said to the Boston girl, —Don’t smoke that stuff here, for Christ sake.”
Part III Chapter II —
“The hotel room itself proved so rewarding that the newspaper photographer telephoned for more flashbulbs, and asked the city desk to send over somebody with shorthand. He said the reporter with him had just been taken sick by the fumes. Then he hurried back down the hall, took a deep breath, and entered that mélange of smoke, whisky, and roses, where he paused only to sweep some of the letters into a pile with his foot as graphic witness to the story which would say that they were ankle-deep all over the room. The bottles he did not have to rearrange at all, their hollow necks protruded everywhere. As for the roses, he could not have done a better job if he’d taken a month to it. They were festooned dead, dying, and two or three dozens still in bloom, wherever that desperate ingenuity could contrive, and the hand reach. —Roses . . . he would say later (when someone was trying to recall a line of poetry that contained “Roses, roses . . .” to use in the caption), —Roses till hell wouldn’t have them. The bathroom, especially, was entirely transformed. There was no place to sit down at all.”