Explore "Blackguard" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The winter bickered with spring; days gave their imaginary separation of time; Olga and Carl stooped to the task of conjuring myriads of fancifully plausible tongues from their dream of perished identities lost in one search. Then Olga left with a theater company that was about to tour the middle west, having managed to secure the small part of a garrulous chambermaid, and Carl glided into a riot of writing, waiting for the telegram that would send him to join her in a far western city where her company would stage its last performances. In the meantime, he resolved to visit a wealthy uncle who lived in the south and wanted to see this "queer nephew of mine, who scribbles poetry and doesn't care about making money."
As he sat one morning in an elevated railroad coach, with valises at his side, commencing the journey to the city in which his uncle lived, his mood was glittering and aimless. He danced with outlines of Olga's words; hummed briskly saccharine tunes; and trifled with the contours of people seated near him. Across the aisle a fatly rosy man was reading a newspaper and Carl's gaze idly struck the front page and absorbed the headlines. In a corner of the page he came to the words: "Actress Dies in M -- ."