One night the dwarf spoke of a city built by this race in the North (or perhaps in the sky, although he did not explain how this was possible):
“The people in their black overcoats seemed to drift along a few inches above the pavements. Now and then the wind pulled shadows over them so that the scene trembled like water. Their faces were white with conspiracy. Their eyes were wide open, passive; they had abandoned themselves to the wind between the blocks which pushed them gently along. Now and then there was a laugh, quickly stifled. We had them weighed up. Each one would do anything for you if he believed he had been let into some secret unknown to the rest. In the evenings a new wind howled and screamed in off the waste, bringing with it enormous lizards and insects. Handfuls of ash and ice were thrown down the streets like glass marbles. On Sundays the wet streets were carpeted with dead locusts. The Barley brothers have invented many towns, but this was the worst. I found them in the gutters there, and they soon dragged me down with them!”
He was silent for five minutes. Then he asked to see the knife he had given Ashlyme before the kidnap attempt. He always asked to see it: perhaps it was in his eyes the reaffirmation of a bond.
“I got that knife up there in the North,” he said, “and I had to do some quick work to keep it. Quick work! Do you know what we mean when we say that? Quick work is when you have to move your feet or go to the wall!” And he danced round the studio, showing his stained teeth and making clumsy passes with the knife until he was out of breath. “Oh, yes, there was blood on this knife from the moment I had it. I’ve lived in some queer spots, I can tell you. That knife and I have been in some queer spots!” His eyes took on a distant, romantic look, and he rubbed his thumb up and down the curiously flawed blade before handing it back.
“That knife will serve you well one day,” he said portentously. “I can tell you that.”
Ashlyme was impressed by his powers of invention. In the end, though, he recorded, I listen without believing. He tires, mumbles, allows his head to fall on his chest, snores. Suddenly he wakes up with a start and goes home biting his nails, afraid that he has contracted a syphilis in the Rue des Horlogers, and forgets everything he has said. By tomorrow he will have invented somethingelse to place the Barleys in a bad light.
Each night before leaving he gave Ashlyme some new gift for the fortune-teller. He would not hear of abandoning his suit. The longer she resisted him, the more inappropriate his presents became: a hank of hair, signet rings with obscene designs, a rusty flint picked up in some desert long ago. She accepted them expressionlessly, repeating, “What your friend suggests is not yet possible. My responsibilities are here.” He lost his temper with Ashlyme. He had reason to believe, he said, that his expensive flowers had been given to Audsley King instead of Fat Mam Etteilla; some of his gifts had been found in a dustbin; his letters were not being delivered. He brushed aside all Ashlyme’s explanations. “Bring her to me or it’ll be the worse for you,” he said.
Unnerved, Ashlyme put this to the Fat Mam the next time he was in the Rue Serpolet. She looked at him sharply, then said,
“Very well.”
That morning, Audsley King had suffered a small haemorrhage and was resting with open mouth and bluish lips on the studio fauteuil, turning over restively now and again to murmur in some language Ashlyme didn’t know. So as not to wake her, they were standing in the passage just the other side of the curtain, talking in low voices.
Ashlyme was surprised. “Do you mean to go and see him in his own house?”
“Yes,” said the fortune-teller. “Why not?” Suddenly she blushed, and smoothed her hair with one big, chapped hand. “A strong man will always have his own way in the end,” she said complacently.
Ashlyme stared at her.
The meeting took place one evening a week later, in the dwarf’s salle.
He had worked feverishly to prepare it for the occasion. All week, the teams of carpenters and interior decorators had gone to and fro, working to his precise instructions.
The floor had been stained black and polished. His collection of paintings had been taken down carefully and stored. The walls were covered with white linen dustcloth up to a height of about twenty feet. This had been stretched tight and pinned to make a background for a profusion of objects made from straw, hair, and metal, and also many tools such as pliers, hammers, pincers, and chisels, which hung from coppered nails or braided silk cords or specially made brackets of the dwarf’s own devising. There were old sheaves of corn, full of dust and shrivelled mice; samplers woven out of the hair of girls; two or three mantraps black with rust; and a monkey made of twisted jute fibres on a soft wire armature. All these things had been decked with loose spirals of yellow and green ribbon. A greyish light fell on them. Above them lurked the smoky umber void of the original room, a space the colour of time and decay.
The furniture had been dressed similarly. Draped with white cloth, wound about with coloured ribbon, the armchairs, armoires, and cupboards took on the air of huge, vaguely threatening parcels.
It wasn’t clear how many people the dwarf was expecting. A long trestle table in the centre of the room was loaded with food, mostly game birds still in their feathers, glazed pies, custards, and large joints of meat decorated with paper frills. Crudely plaited “corn dollies,” such as a child may make from raffia or straw on a wet afternoon in the midland levels, had been placed among the baskets of fruit, the bottles of genever, and the thick white plates. In the middle of the table was a full-sized sheep’s head, stripped and varnished, with oranges for eyes. On each side of this stood a vase of late hawthorn blossom, filling the room with the thick, soporific scent of the may.
Fat Mam Etteilla eyed these preparations nervously. She had given nothing away as she swept through the Haadenbosk, looking neither right nor left. But the queer environs of Montrouge had puzzled her, and the attentions of the dwarf’s police, though friendly, had weakened her resolve. She stared up into the vault of the old room and toyed with the floral trimmings of her hat. She is already wishing she hadn’t come, thought Ashlyme, and in an effort to make her feel more at home he said cheerfully,
“Well, he’s put on quite a show for you. Look at all this food! Do you think anyone would mind if I had one of these plums?”
When the dwarf arrived he took Ashlyme aside and said in a low voice, “I’ve dreamed the name of a street two nights in succession, Ashlyme. A street in the North.” He slopped some genever into a glass and drank it off. “What do you think of that? It’s made me damnably nervous, I don’t mind telling you.”
He noticed the fortune-teller. Immediately he was all charm. “My dear woman!” he cried, smiling up at her with all his blackened teeth. “Are you well? Are you fully recovered from those appalling events in the Rue Serpolet?” He looked slyly over his shoulder at Ashlyme, who turned away and pretended to be interested in something else. “You must tell us as soon as you feel in the slightest bit tired!” The fat woman, holding her hat with both hands in front of her, blushed modestly at the shiny floor and allowed herself to be ushered past the curious collection on the walls.
The Grand Cairo lost no chance to impress her. He turned this way and that to display his best profile. He stood with his spine arched and his chest thrust out and his hands tucked into the small of his back, looking up at her sideways to judge the effect he was having. He had dressed for the occasion in green velvet trousers tied up below the knee with red string, boots whose polished steel toecaps gave back a curved, bemusing reflection of the room at large, and a collarless shirt over which he wore unfastened a shiny black waistcoat. Round his neck he had a bit of green rag; and his hair had been slicked down with repeated applications of Altaean Balm, the powerful smell of which filled the room and mingled oddly with the scent of the may.