nocturnal and unholy magic, now seemed farther off and stranger than a dream. It was impossible to believe that these shabby places of garish light, and tarnished gold, and tawdry mirrors, were the same resorts that had glowed in all their hot and close perfumes just six weeks before, had burned there in the train of night like some evil, secret and unholy temple of desire. It was all worn off now: cheap as Coney Island, tawdry, tarnished as the last year’s trappings of a circus, bedraggled, shabby as a harlot’s painted face at noon. All of its sinister and intoxicating magic had turned dull and pitiably sordid: its people were pathetic, and its music dead—serving only to recall the splendid evil people and the haunting music of six weeks before.
And they saw now that this was just the way it was, the way it had always been. Places, people, music—they were just the same. All that had changed had been themselves. And all through the night they went from place to place, drinking, watching, dancing, doing just the things they had always done, but it was no good—it had all gone stale—it would never be any good again. They sat there sullenly, like people at a waning carnival, haunted by the ghosts of memory and departure. The memory of Elinor and Starwick—and particularly of Starwick—haunted each place they went to like a death’s-head at a feast. And again Eugene was filled with the old, choking, baffled, and inchoate anger, the sense of irretrievable and certain defeat: Starwick in absence was even more triumphantly alive than if he had been there—he alone, by the strange, rare quality in him, had been able to give magic to this sordid carnival, and now that he was gone, the magic had gone, too.
The night passed in a kaleidoscope of baffled fury, of frenzied search and frustrate desire. All night they hustled back and forth between the two blazing poles of Montmartre and Montparnasse: later he was to remember everything like the exploded fragments of a nightmare—a vision of dark, silent streets, old shuttered houses, the straight slant and downward plunge out of Montmartre—the sudden blaze of lights at crossings, boulevards, in cafés, night-clubs, bars and avenues, the cool plunge and shock of air along dark streets again, the taxi’s shrill horn tootling at space, empty reckless corners, the planted stems of light across the Seine, the bridges and the sounding arches and dark streets, the steep slant of the hill, the livid glare of night and all the night’s scarred faces over again.
They did not know why they stayed, why they hung on, why they continued grimly at this barren hunt. But something held them there together:
