«Perhaps he takes it a little more slowly,» I ventured to suggest.
Bob did not deign so much as to glance at me. The car rattled on at undiminished speed. I tried to concentrate on the view.
Out there, on the floor of the desert, there had been a noiseless, but almost explosive transformation. The clouds had shifted and the sun was now shining on the nearest of those abrupt and jagged buttes, which rose so inexplicably, like islands, out of the enormous plain. A moment before they had been black and dead. Now suddenly they had come to life between a shadowed foreground and a background of cloudy darkness. They shone as if with their own incandescence.
I touched Bob’s arm and pointed.
«Now do you understand why Tallis chooses to live at the end of this road?»
He took a quick look, swerved round a fallen Joshua tree, looked again for a fraction of a second and brought his eyes back to the road.
«It reminds me of that etching by Goya — you know the one. The woman riding a stallion, and the animal’s turning its head and has her dress between its teeth — trying to pull her down, trying to tear the clothes off her. And she’s laughing like a maniac, in a frenzy of pleasure. And in the background there’s a plain, with buttes sticking out of it, just like here. Only if you look carefully at Goya’s buttes, you see that they’re really crouching animals, half rats, half lizards — as big as mountains. I bought a reproduction of it for Elaine.»
But Elaine, I reflected in the ensuing silence, hadn’t taken the hint.
She had allowed the stallion to drag her to the ground; she had lain there, laughing and laughing, uncontrollably, while the big teeth ripped at her bodice, tore the skirt to shreds, grazing the soft skin beneath with a fearful but delicious threat, with the tingling imminence of pain. And then, at Acapulco, those huge rat-lizards had stirred out of their stony sleep, and suddenly poor old Bob had found himself surrounded, not by deliciously swooning Graces, not by the laughing troop of rosy-bottomed Cupids, but by monsters.
But meanwhile we had reached our destination. Between the trees along the ditch I saw a white frame house under an enormous cottonwood, with a windmill to one side of it, a corrugated iron barn to the other. The gate was closed. Bob stopped the car and we got out. A white board had been nailed to the gatepost. On it an unskilled hand had painted a long inscription in vermilion.
The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.
THIS MEANS YOU, KEEP OUT.
«Well, we’ve evidently come to the right place,» I said.
Bob nodded. We opened the gate, walked across a wide expanse of beaten earth and knocked at the door of the house. It was opened almost immediately by a stout elderly woman in spectacles, wearing a flowered blue cotton dress and a very old red jacket. She gave us a friendly smile.
«Car broken down?» she enquired.
We shook our heads and Bob explained that we had come to see Mr. Tallis.
«Mr. Tallis?»
The smile faded from her face; she looked grave and shook her head. «Didn’t you know?» she said. «Mr. Tallis passed on six weeks ago.»
«Do you mean, he’s dead?»
«Passed on,» she insisted, then launched out into her story.
Mr. Tallis had rented the house for a year. She and her husband went to live in the little old cabin behind the barn. It only had an outside toilet but they had been used to that back in North Dakota, and luckily it had been a warm winter. Anyhow they were glad of the money, what with prices the way they were nowadays; and Mr. Tallis couldn’t have been pleasanter, once you understood that he liked his privacy.
«I suppose it was he who put up that sign on the gate?»
The old lady nodded and said that it was kind of cute; she meant to leave it there.
«Had he been sick for a long time?» I asked.
«Not sick at all,» she answered. «Though he always did say he had heart trouble.»
And that was why he had passed on. In the bathroom. She found him there one morning, when she came to bring him his quart of milk and a dozen eggs from the store. Stone cold. He must have laid there all night. She had never had such a shock in all her life. And then what a commotion on account of there not being any relatives that anybody knew about! The doctor was called and then the sheriff, and there had to be a court order before the poor man could even be buried, much less embalmed. And then all the books and papers and clothes had to be packed up and seals put on the boxes, and everything stored somewhere in Los Angeles, just in case there should be an heir somewhere. Well, now she and her husband were back in the house, and she felt rather badly about it, because poor Mr. Tallis still had four months of his lease to run and he’d paid everything in advance. But of course in one way she was thankful, now that the rain and snow had come at last — on account of the toilet being inside the house, not outside, like when they were living in the cabin. She paused for breath. Bob and I exchanged glances. «Well, in the circumstances,» I said, «I think we’d better be going.»
But the old lady wouldn’t hear of it. «Come in,» she insisted, «come in.» We hesitated; then, accepting her invitation, followed her through a tiny entrance lobby into the living room. An oil stove was burning in a corner of the room; the air was hot and an almost tangible smell of fried food and nappies filled the house. A little old man like a leprechaun was seated in a rocking chair near the window, reading the Sunday comics. Near him a pale, preoccupied-looking young girl — she couldn’t have been more than seventeen — was holding a baby in one arm and, with the other hand, buttoning her pink blouse. The child belched; a bubble of milk appeared at the corner of its mouth. The young mother left the final button undone and tenderly wiped the pouting lips. Through the open door of another room came the sound of a fresh soprano voice singing, «Now is the Hour,» to the accompaniment of a guitar.
«This is my husband,» said the old lady. «Mr. Coulton.»
«Pleased to meet you,» said the leprechaun, without looking up from his comics.
«And this is our granddaughter, Katie. She got married last year.»
«So I see,» said Bob. He bowed to the girl and gave her one of those fascinating smiles, for which he was so famous.
Katie looked at him as though he were merely a piece of furniture; then, fastening that final button, she turned without a word and started to climb the steep stairs that led to the upper floor.
«And these,» Mrs. Coulton went on, indicating Bob and myself, «are two friends of Mr. Tallis.»
We had to explain that we weren’t precisely friends. All we knew of Mr. Tallis was his work; but that had interested us so much that we had come here, hoping to make his acquaintance — only to learn the tragic news of his death.
Mr. Coulton looked up from his paper.
«Sixty-six,» he said. «That’s all he was. I’m seventy-two myself. Seventy-two last October.»
He uttered the triumphant little laugh of one who has scored a victory, then returned to Flash Gordon — Flash the invulnerable, Flash the immortal, Flash the perpetual knight errant to girls, not as they lamentably are, but as the idealists of the brassiere industry proclaim that they ought to be.
«I happened to see what Mr. Tallis had sent in to our Studio,» said Bob.
Again the leprechaun looked up.
«You’re in the movies?» he enquired.
Bob admitted that he was.
In the next room the music broke off suddenly in the middle of a phrase.
«One of those big shots?» Mr. Coulton enquired.
With the most charming false modesty, Bob assured him that he was only a writer who occasionally dabbled in directing.
The leprechaun nodded slowly.
«I see in the paper where that guy Goldwyn says all the big shots got to take a fifty per cent cut in their salary.»
His eyes twinkled gleefully, once again he uttered his triumphant little laugh. Then abruptly disinteresting himself from reality, he returned to his myths.
Christ before Lublin! I tried to change the painful subject by asking Mrs. Coulton whether she had known that Tallis was interested in the movies. But as I spoke a sound of footsteps in the inner room distracted her attention.
I turned my head. In the doorway, dressed in a black sweater and a tartan skirt there stood — who? Lady Hamilton at sixteen, Ninon de Lenclos when she lost her virginity to Coligny, la petite Morphil, Anna Karenina in the schoolroom.
«This is Rosie,» said Mrs. Coulton proudly, «our other granddaughter. Rosie’s studying singing,» she confided to Bob. «She wants to get into the movies.»
«But how interesting!» cried Bob enthusiastically, as he rose and shook hands with the future Lady Hamilton.
«Maybe you could give her some advice,» said the doting grandmother.
«I’d be only too happy. . .»
«Fetch another chair, Rosie.»
The girl raised her eyelids and gave Bob a brief but intense look. «Unless you don’t mind sitting in the
