«Of course not!»
They vanished together into the inner room. Looking out of the window, I saw that the buttes were again in shadow. The rat-lizards had closed their eyes and were shamming death — but only to lull their victim into a sense of false security.
«It’s more than luck,» Mrs. Coulton was saying, «it’s Providence. A big shot in the movies coming here, just when Rosie needs a helping hand.»
«Just when movies are going to fold up like vaudeville,» said the leprechaun without raising his eyes from the page before him.
«What makes you say those things?»
«It’s not me that says them,» the old man answered. «It’s that Goldwyn guy.»
From the kitchen came the sound of a startlingly childish laugh. Bob was evidently making headway. I foresaw another trip to Acapulco, with consequences even more disastrous than the first.
Innocently the procuress, Mrs. Coulton smiled with pleasure.
«I like your friend,» she said. «Gets on well with kids. None of that stuffed shirt business.»
I accepted the implied rebuke without comment and asked her again if she had known that Mr. Tallis was interested in movies.
She nodded. Yes, he’d told her that he was sending something to one of the Studios. He wanted to make some money. Not for himself; for though he’d lost most of what he once had, there was still enough to live on. No, he wanted some extra money to send to Europe. He’d been married to a German girl, way back, before the First World War. Then they’d been divorced and she had stayed on in Germany with the baby. And now there wasn’t anybody left but a granddaughter. Mr. Tallis wanted to bring her over here; but the people at Washington wouldn’t let him. So the next best thing was to send her a lot of money so she could eat properly and finish her education. That was why he’d written that thing for the movies.
Her words suddenly reminded me of something in Tallis’s script — something about children in postwar Europe prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate. The granddaughter — had she perhaps been one of those children? «Ich give you Schokolade, du give me Liebe. Understand?» They understood only too well. One Hershey bar now; two more afterward.
«What happened to the wife?» I asked. «And the granddaughter’s parents?»
«They passed on,» said Mrs. Coulton. «I guess they were Jewish, or something.»
«Mind you,» said the leprechaun suddenly, «I don’t have anything against Jews. But all the same. . .» He paused. «Maybe Hitler wasn’t so dumb after all.»
This time, I could see, it was to the Katzenjammer Kids that he returned.
Another peal of childish laughter broke out in the kitchen. Lady Hamilton at sixteen sounded as though she were about eleven. And yet how mature, how technically perfect had been the look with which she greeted Bob! Obviously, the most disquieting fact about Rosie was that she was simultaneously innocent and knowing, a calculating adventuress and a pigtailed schoolgirl.
«He married again,» the old lady went on, ignoring both the giggle and the anti-Semitism. «Someone on the stage. He told me the name, but I’ve forgotten it. Anyhow it didn’t last long. She went off with some other fellow. I say it served him right for going off with her when he had a wife back there in Germany. I don’t think it’s right, all this divorcing and marrying somebody else’s husband.»
In the ensuing silence I fabricated a whole biography for this man I had never seen. The young New Englander of good family. Carefully educated, but not to the point of pedantry. Naturally gifted, but not so overwhelmingly as to make him wish to exchange a life of leisure for the fatigues of professional authorship. From Harvard he had gone on to Europe, had lived gracefully, had known the best people everywhere.
And then — in Munich, I felt sure — he had fallen in love. I visualised the girl, wearing the German equivalent of Liberty dresses — the daughter of some successful artist or patron of the arts. One of those almost disembodied, those as it were floating products of Wilhelmine wealth and culture; a being at once vague and intense, fascinatingly unpredictable and maddeningly idealistic, tief and German. Tallis had fallen in love, had married, had fathered a child in spite of his wife’s frigidity, had been almost asphyxiated by the oppressive soulfulness of the domestic atmosphere. How fresh and healthy, by comparison, had seemed the air of Paris and the personal ambience of that young Broadway actress whom he had met vacationing there!
La belle Americaine,
Qui rend les hommes fous,
Dans deux ou trois semaines
Partira pour Corfou.
But this one didn’t leave for Corfu — or if she did, it was in Tallis’s company. And she wasn’t frigid, she didn’t float, she was neither vague, nor intense, neither deep, nor soulful, nor an art snob. What she was, unfortunately, was a bit of a bitch. And that bit had grown larger with the passage of the years. By the time he divorced her, it had become the entire animal.
Looking back from the vantage point of 1947, the Tallis of my imagination could see precisely what he had done: for the sake of a physical pleasure and the simultaneous excitement and satisfaction of an erotic imagination, he had condemned a wife and a daughter to death at the hands of maniacs, and a granddaughter to the caresses of any soldier or black marketeer with a pocketful of sweetmeats or the price of a decent meal.
Romantic fancies! I turned to Mrs. Coulton.
«Well, I wish I’d known him,» I said.
«You’d have liked him,» she assured me. «We all liked Mr. Tallis. I’ll tell you something,» she confided. «Every time I make the trip to Lancaster for the Ladies’ Bridge Club, I go to the cemetery, just to visit with him.»
«And I bet he hates it,» said the leprechaun.
«Now, Elmer,» his wife protested.
«But I heard him say it,» Mr. Coulton insisted. «Time and again. ‘If I die here,’ he says, ‘I want to be buried out in the desert.’ «
«He wrote as much in that script he sent to the Studio,» I said.
«He did?» Mrs. Coulton’s tone was one of incredulity.
«Yes, he even describes the grave he meant to be buried in. All by itself, under a Joshua tree.»
«I could have told him it wasn’t legal,» said the leprechaun. «Not since the morticians lobbied that bill through the legislature at Sacramento. I knew a man that had to be dug up twenty years after he was buried-way out there behind the buttes.» He waved a hand in the direction of Goya’s saurian rats. «It cost his nephew three hundred dollars by the time he was all through.»
He chuckled at the recollection.
«I wouldn’t want to be buried in the desert,» said his wife emphatically.
«Why not?»
«Too lonely,» she answered. «I’d hate it.»
While I was wondering what to say next, the pale young mother came down the stairs carrying a nappy. She stopped for a moment to look in at the kitchen.
«Listen, Rosie,» she said in a low, angry voice, «It’s time you did some work for a change.»
Then she turned and walked towards the entrance lobby, where an open door revealed the modern conveniences of that indoor bathroom.
«He’s got diarrhoea again,» she said bitterly, as she passed her grandmother.
Flushed, her eyes bright with excitement, the future Lady Hamilton emerged from the kitchen. Behind her, in the doorway, stood the future Hamilton, busily imagining that he was going to be Lord Nelson.
«Grandma,» the girl announced, «Mr. Briggs thinks he can arrange for me to have a screen test.»
The idiot! I got up.
«Time we were going, Bob,» I said, knowing that it was already too late.
From the half-open door of the bathroom came the squelchy sound of nappies being rinsed in the toilet bowl.
«Listen!» I whispered to Bob as we passed.
«Listen to what?» he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. Ears have they, neither do they hear.
Well, that was the nearest we ever got to Tallis in the flesh. In what follows the reader can discover the reflection of his mind. I print the text of «Ape and Essence» as I found it, without change and without comment.
II — The Script
TITLES, credits and finally, to the accompaniment of trumpets and a chorus of triumphant angels, the name of the PRODUCER.
The music changes its character, and if Debussy were alive to write it, how delicate it would be, how aristocratic, how flawlessly pure of all Wagnerian lubricity and bumptiousness, all Straussian vulgarity! For here on the screen, in something better than Technicolour, it is the hour before sunrise. Night seems to linger in the darkness of an almost unruffled sea; but from the fringes of the sky a transparent pallor mounts from green through deepening blue to the zenith. In the east the morning star is still visible.
NARRATOR
Beauty inexpressible, peace beyond understanding. . .
But, alas, on our screen
This emblem of an emblem
Will probably look like
Mrs. Somebody’s illustration
To a poem by Ella
Wheeler Wilcox.
Out of the sublime in Nature
Art all too often manufactures
Only the ludicrous.
But the risk must be run;
For you there, you in the audience,
Somehow and at any price,
Wilcox or worse,
Somehow you must be reminded
Be induced to remember,
Be implored to be willing to
Understand what’s What.
As the Narrator speaks, we fade out of our emblem of an emblem of Eternity into the interior of a picture palace filled to capacity. The light grows a little less dim and suddenly we become aware that the audience is composed entirely of well-dressed baboons of both sexes and of all ages from first to second childhood.
NARRATOR
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief
