Summary
A cerebral flâneur named Mind, all ink-stained fingers and Keats-quoting eyelashes, enrolls at a provincial college where gaslights hiss like serpents of doubt. One winter dusk he slips inside a tavern whose mahogany counter gleams like a promise; behind it stands Body—shoulders of alabaster, laugh of clinking coins—pouring ale with the languid precision of a sculptor. Their collision is less courtship than combustion: lectures skipped for nocturnal waltzes, textbooks swapped for champagne flutes, examinations replaced by the salt of skin. Soul, elder brother, ascetic as a candle, warns in hushed catacombs that intellect untethered becomes a kite in a hurricane. Yet Mind, drunk on carnal symphonies, scrawls poems on napkins until creditors hurl them like shuriken. At the cliff of expulsion he glimpses his reflection in a cracked mirror—a Giacometti figure hollowed by appetite—and pivots. Dawn finds him chaining himself to a desk, ink flowing like penance; years later his treatise on the ethics of desire adorns shop-windows from Boston to Vienna. Soul, meanwhile, dons a clerical collar, trading syllabi for sermons, while Body sails outward, a schooner without flag. She collects lovers the way aesthetes collect blue-period Picassos: a prizefighter whose knuckles are cathedral bells, a violinist whose vibrato could melt iron, an actor whose thousand masks conceal no face, a banker whose ledgers bleed slaves. One by one she drains them—purse, pulse, pride—then tosses the husks into alleyways. Yet every bacchanal leaves an aftertaste of ash; in a cathedral nave smelling of lilies and guilt she confronts Soul’s crucifix, its bronze Christ staring with Mind’s old eyes. Revelation slashes like a guillotine: pleasure without compass is merely deferred sorrow. She storms the city’s underbelly to liberate Frail Sister, a porcelain girl traded between pimps like a chipped teacup. In a cobblestone tunnel Slimy Thing’s revolver coughs lead; Body crumples, blood blooming like poppies across her white dress, dying not for redemption but for the right to die trying.
Synopsis
Mind, in the form of a college student, becomes infatuated with Body, a local barmaid, and neglects his studies, despite the warnings of his brother, Soul. Finally, however, he heeds Soul's advice and graduates to become a noted writer. Meanwhile, Soul becomes a minister and Body an adventuress. Body acquires four more lovers: a Champion Pugilist, a Musician, an Actor and a Banker, ruining and then discarding each one in turn. Eventually she enters Soul's church, where she realizes that her sinful mode of living can only lead to unhappiness. In trying to rescue Frail Sister, a white slave in the power of Slimy Thing, Body is shot and killed.
