Ashlyme stared at him speechlessly for a moment, then walked off.
The rain fell.
Buffo called, “What about the handcart? Ashlyme?”
The screams and shouts which continued to come from the house soon drew the attention of the plague police. Buffo saw them in the distance. He gave a start of surprise, grabbed the handles of the cart, and ran erratically down the Rue Serpolet with it until one of its wheels came off. It mounted the kerb and fell onto its side. Buffo looked round in panic, as if he had lost his bearings, then made off with long strides into the gathering darkness between two buildings, calling, “Ashlyme? Ashlyme?”
The plague police went up into the house, two at a time. Shortly afterwards there was silence. Fat Mam Etteilla the fortune-teller then trudged into sight from the direction of the market. The rain had plastered her yellow cotton dress to her billowing breasts and hams. Her eyes were phlegmatic, her arms full of greengrocery. She entered the house. A great wail went up as she discovered Audsley King on the stairs. Doors were banged, the lights came on in Audsley King’s studio, there was a great deal of coming and going between floors.
Ashlyme, who had been hiding from Buffo in a wet doorway, waited until the commotion had died down and then went home, soaked.
Later, he stared into the mirror above his washstand, hardly seeing the lugubrious, blubbery-lipped totem that stared back out at him, its eyes popping solemnly and its loose scales dropping into the sink. All the way back he had dreaded trying to remove it, but it came off quite easily in the end.
THE THIRD CARD
You will mix with important people without artistic appreciation. Their tastes differ widely from yours. Beware “the Small Man” coming after this card.
“Angels, it is said, often do not know whether they walk among the living or the dead.”
The period that followed was quiet and nerve-racking. He woke guiltily from every sleep. In the middle of stretching a canvas or doing his house-work he would recall some incident of the debacle and be overwhelmed by a wave of revulsion and shame. He could not turn his clients away when they came to pose, yet dreaded every knock on the door in case it was the quarantine police or-worse still-some message full of contempt from Audsley King, delivered by the avenging fortune-teller. But no summons came from either quarter.
I hear nothing from Emmet Buffo, he wrote in his diary. And went on, perhaps unfairly, Why should I seek him out? The whole farrago was his fault. He reminded himself in the same breath, I must avoid Rack and his clique. How can I face them now, with their sneers and insinuations?
In fact he had no difficulty. Ironically enough his encounter with them on the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves had only served to increase his standing in the High City. Rumours of the failed rescue attempt-which, when they filtered up to Mynned from the exiles in the Bistro Californium and the Luitpold Cafe, were mercifully vague-merely added to his new romantic stature. He was popular in the salons. The Marchioness “L” called on him, with a new novelist. He was forced for the first time in his career to turn away commissions. The two or three portraits he completed at this time tended to be kinder than usual. This embarrassed him, and rather disappointed his clients. For once no one wanted an Ashlyme they could live with. They craved his bad opinion. He was their conscience. Not that he could compete with the plague, or the Barley brothers: and of the latter he was soon writing,
In the salons we hear nothing but what clothes they wear, what wineshop they frequent this week, how they have got pregnant some silly young brodeuse from the Piazza of Inherited Tendencies. “Will the Barley brothers dine at home tonight?” the women ask each other. “Or will they dine abroad?” They will dine, as everyone knows, like pigs, in some pie shop behind the Margarethestrasse and then fall down insensible in the gutters. “The Barley brothers have invented Egg Foo Yung!”
When he thought about the Grand Cairo, Ashlyme was filled with a kind of violent disgust which extended to himself. He dreamed about the woman with the gaping mouth and the bulging eyes as if he had been responsible for thrusting the knife into the back of her throat. Nothing like this event had ever happened in his life before; even awake, he could see it over and over again just by closing his eyes. He could also see the dwarf’s expression when he had said, “That’s that, then.” It was one of satisfaction, the ordinary satisfaction of an ordinary need, as if one had just finished breakfast. Ashlyme dreaded another meeting with him if only because the shadow of this expression would lie-as it had always done, but now visible-just under his skin, alongside his vanity or his belief that he understood the language of cats.
Nevertheless a meeting was unavoidable. Ashlyme stayed away from the tower at Montrouge, but one night after his meal at the Vivien he came back to find the front door of his house banging open in the wind and the dwarf waiting for him in the darkened studio.
The dwarf looked tired. He complained, as usual, that the Barley brothers were plotting his downfall. “I do not take them seriously yet-things have not gone that far-but soon I must.” He complained of boredom. To alleviate it, he said, he had spent all week with prostitutes in Line Mass. They had called him “my little chancellor” and “my pet cock,” but he had got no enjoyment out of it, only migraines and a dry cough. As he told Ashlyme this he was watching him carefully. He sat on a windowsill, kicking his legs. He picked up Ashlyme’s lay figure and twisted its limbs into uncomfortable, not-quite-human positions. He laughed. “Come on, Ashlyme, what’s the matter? How’s old Emmley Burwash? He always looked the feeble type to me!”
Ashlyme stared at him across the studio.
“Well, if you won’t talk, you won’t,” said the dwarf. “I can’t make you.” He poked about among Ashlyme’s things until a rough portrait of Audsley King caught his eye. “What’s happened here?”
Ashlyme often saved the money he would have spent on a new canvas by reusing an old one. In this case he had done the painting over a group portrait of the Baroness de B- and her family which had never been collected from the studio. As the wet summer advanced and the new paint began to fade, the image of the Baroness was beginning to reemerge in the form of a very old woman holding a flower, slowly absorbing and distorting the figure of Audsley King. There was something deliberate and eerie about this act of replacement. It was as if the Baroness, prohibited by her own vanity from collecting the original picture, nevertheless intended to claim the canvas. Ashlyme had followed the process with a sort of fascinated horror.
“It is some failure of the pigments,” he said. “The weather. I don’t know. It wasn’t a very successful portrait anyway.” He cleared his throat; swallowed. “It sometimes happens.”
Now that he found himself able to speak, he could wait no longer.
“How did you escape the police?” he heard himself ask anxiously. “What did you tell them? I watched from the Rue Serpolet, but you did not come down again. What happened after I went?”
The dwarf, who had been waiting for this, winked cruelly.
“In the Rue Serpolet,” he said, in a parody of an official voice, “I surprised two men in the act of smuggling a poor woman out of the quarantine zone against her will. I attempted to arrest them, but they stunned me, stabbed another unfortunate woman in a particularly horrible manner, and made their escape. I cannot describe them. They were wearing the most grotesque disguises. They were obviously very experienced criminals. Oh, don’t look so wretched, man! Can’t you take a joke?”