The Carnelian Cube

Sixteen:

" 'Lo, Arthur. How's the literary climate of St. Louis —dark as Egypt and smelling strangely of ham?" Harriman took his feet off the other chair and without turning his head, added: "Harem! The bottle."

"I wouldn't say that exactly." Out of the corner of his eye Finch was conscious of the protean Roddy investigating the files. His head had become that of an owl, and portions of his anatomy were cut off flatly by the front of the filing cabinet.

"Then I hope you'd say it in stronger terms. Now honest, did you meet one person in the lot with brains enough to power a cockroach?"

"Well, I admit most of them didn't impress, but I met a Dr. Joseph Dunninger—"

"Pseud. His real name's Carteret-Jones and he got that one by legal enactment to conceal the fact that the name before that was Dunkelhorst. He dyes his hair and he hangs around parties to catch souses he can charge piles of dough for curing them of the D.T.s. Yeh, I give you, he's bright, but what the hell does he do with it? You hang around him long and you'll get to seeing four-eyed camels over your breakfast table like the rest of them."

Something in the files seemed to have struck Roddy as exquisitely humorous. He was whooping and chuckling, shaking his head and slapping his knees. Finch wondered agonizingly how Harriman could help hearing him. But he said only:

"What I principally called on you for was to see whether you couldn't give the occasion a few lines. If I have to attend those dismal affairs, I may as well get whatever benefit I can in the form of publicity."

"Sure, home town boy makes good. You dictate it and I'll fix it up. Get out your pad, Harem."

Finch's eyes were wandering after Roddy, who was oozing through the wall into the press-room. " 'Atalanta's Brut,' " he said, "the novel volume of poetic montage by Arthur Cleveland Finch, member of the Pegasus Literary Society of this city, was launched Thursday at a literary tea given by Kretschmeyer and Kretschmeyer of St. Louis. A distinguished group of guests assembled to honor the new volume, including novelist Liam Tattingrodt— confound it, Harriman, stop snickering!"

"I was just thinking of Tattingrodt's library. Saw it once. It consists exclusively of the world's finest collection of his own first editions."

"All right, but this is business. Liam Tattingrodt, critic Cottonhed (I don't know his first name), and Smith Smith. You said Dunninger wouldn't mean much, and I can't remember anyone else who was there."

Harriman frowned. "What! Did Charles Sumter Lewis, for the first time in his life, pass up a chance to get a free binge and tell the story of how he took Bryanova the dancer home in a taxi?"

"Now that you mention it, I believe he was there." Over Harriman's shoulder Finch saw Roddy come through the wall. He was wearing an orangutan's face with a broad grin on it and shaking his own hands above his head.

"Okay," said Harriman. "I'll fix it up. Your style is insufficiently adjectival for newspaper readers—that is if you want them to buy copies of Atalanta's Brut' for wedding presents, which is the only reason they'd ever lay down that kind of money for it. Sure you don't want to stay for some corned beef and cabbage?"

Outside Finch started toward the Hall afoot, talking out of the side of his mouth and trying to pretend he was unaccompanied.

"It's there, all right," said Roddy. "In a safe in a corner of that back room."

"Can you get it?"

"Well, hmp, maybe I can. Look, Mr. Finch, you know I'd do most anything for a real author like you, but colportation is awfully difficult."

"Yes?"

"You see, Mr. Finch—can I call you Arthur, now I'm really working for you?"

"If it makes you any happier."

"Oh, thank you, so much. You see, Arthur, that safe is iron. I have to throw part of myself into the fourth dimension, and sometimes I can't almost hardly manage it. Dangerous, too. But I might take a chance if there was something in it for me."

"See here," said Finch, exasperated. "I'm going to have to pay Dunninger, and pretty well, if I'm any judge, for your time. What do you mean by trying to hold me up that way?"

Roddy pouted, and in his pout began to turn into a miniature elephant again, with tears streaming down its face. "All right," he sobbed, "you—you just send me back to Mr. Dunninger and see what he'll do. He'll charge you fifty dollars a day for me anyway, and send you one of those sappy spirits, and they can't work in the fourth dimension any more than you' can. And I didn't mean it that way really, Arthur, honest I didn't. All I want is the first copy of your book, and—"

"Oh," Finch was relieved. "If a first edition is all you want, it's a deal."

"I don't mean just a first edition. Anybody can have first editions. I collect first copies off the press. And—" the Rhodelephas added darkly, "—I know how to tell which is the first copy."

"I don't see why you can't even have that. As it happens I know where that first copy is. Colonel Lee, my boss, was standing beside the binders when it came through, and he has it."

Roddy gave what was probably intended for a shrug, but which turned into an elephantine shimmy that began to shake him rather appallingly into the form of Lloyd Owens.

"Don't you see?" said Finch. "I've got several copies in my own room. It ought to be easy enough for you to substitute one of them for the Colonel's first copy."

"Oh, Arthur, forgive me," said the apparition. "I'm so sorry to have been rude.-I might have known you'd find a way."

But after dinner, Finch returned to his room to discover the hallucination sprawled morosely on his couch. A copy of "Atalanta's Brut" lay on the floor.

"What's the matter?" asked Finch. "Wasn't it as good as you expected?"

"Didn't get it," said Roddy, glumly. "That's the copy I was going to leave in exchange. I guess maybe I'm just no good. The first chance I have to work for an author, and I fall down on it."

"I guess maybe," agreed Finch. "What was the trouble?"

"He's got one of those clocks right on the bookcase— you know a statue of Venus with the clock in its stomach. The eyes of the Venus are jewels, and they're amethysts. Oh, Arthur, I'm so miserable!"

"Well, what's the matter? I don't see—"

Roddy's eyes widened in surprise, and almost as an afterthought, became the multi-facetted eyes of an insect. "Why, don't you know? Amethyst is the drinker's stone. It's just poison to us; we can't go near it. I don't see how we're going to manage unless you get the book for me yourself."

"I might have known you'd think up something like that. It seems to me, my aromatic Dionysios, that that book is pretty much your own responsibility."

"But Arthur, I couldn't go on without it now, really I couldn't. We made a contract, even if we didn't put it in writing and it wouldn't be honest to break it. We must all live up to our obligations or there wouldn't be any security in promises, Dr. Dunninger says."

Finch groaned. "All right, I'll get the confounded thing for you myself. Now you chase down there to the Nonpareil office and bring back that stone right away. I'll meet you either here or in the Colonel's suite."

The Colonel did not normally allow members of the society in his own suite, but since he depended only upon his orders to enforce the prohibition and the sound of post-prandial drinking rose loud from the dining room below, the first act of Finch's burglary offered no difficulties. The bookcase held more volumes than Finch had imagined, but the Venus clock pointed the way.

It took only a moment to exchange the two books; but in that moment there came the sound of steps outside the door, with voices rising over the steps and the Colonel's fruity plantation accent among the voices. He had come up at just the wrong moment.

Finch looked wildly round. There was a door to the left, partly open. No—bedroom. Another in the wall beyond, closed. Whatever it led to, it could be no worse than staying here. He dived for it, made it just as the knob of the one he had entered by rattled with the pressure of a hand. Fortunately, it closed silently on well-oiled hinges.

"So. You 'ave come. Enfin"

Finch stood stock-still, staring goggle-eyed around a boudoir lavishly decorated in ruffles of a passion pink hue, with Sonia Kirsch standing in the center of it, fetchingly arrayed in a negligee that showed her to the best advantage. "I—I —" stammered Finch.

She looked at the floor and fluttered her eyelids.

"But you are—too bold. Wat if I call the Colonel?"

So she was going to be coy. The way to keep her in retreat was to pursue.

"But you will not," said Finch. "Could you have any belief in yourself afterward if you betrayed the finest thing in both our lives?"

She laughed in her tinkling soprano. "So you rather I am betraying him?"

"Betray him? You imply that you are in love with him, or it would not be—"

A bell tinkled. Sonia's eyes went wide and a hand flew to her mouth. "He comest" she cried in a choked voice. "No—it is the only door!"

"Where's the hiding place?"

"Here—" She snatched at his arm, pushed, and he almost fell on his face into a deep clothes closet with an overpowering odor of that scent he had sa much disliked.

Behind he heard the door to Sonia's apartment open, and the Colonel's voice: "My deah—" trail off into a momentary silence, then come back again, booming and stern: "Madam! Stand still here and look me in the eye. You are concealing something. Ha, I have it; you are cherishing a poisonous serpent in the bosom of our relations. Where is he?"

Again the momentary silence. Then click!

There was a slight metallic scrape as the key was withdrawn from the lock of the closet. Then the Colonel's voice again, in Rhadamanthine sternness: "Madam, the pure honor of Pegasus Hall has been sullied by you for the last time. You will remain in your apartment while I take under advisement the question of whether to send you to the establishment of Madam Maye Longue at New Orleans, or to visit upon you the more condign punishment your conduct so richly merits. As for that low, cunning hound in the closet—Ah, you would!"

A sound of a scuffle, a sobbing breath from Sonia and a thud. Beyond, the outer door slammed and Finch heard the grate of another key. Silence.

"Sonia!" he called.

No answer.

"Sonia!" he said again, louder.

"What will you?" (Sob.) "I would keel myself, but he has taken my dagger."

"Oh, cheer up. With your singing and your figure, you'll be the hit of New Orleans in no time," said Finch, brutally.

"It is no matter. I have lose you, the only man I ever lof." For a woman- suffering tragic sorrow, her voice had taken on an appreciably cheerful tone.

"Never mind, I'll be out in a minute." Finch backed to the limit of the closet and hurled himself against the door, but the only result was a bruised shoulder.

"There ,is no escape. You die for air," came Sonia's voice, hollowly. "I have been seeing this thing before."

Finch pawed among the garments. The wall was thoroughly solid on all sides. Was it imagination or was the air in there already becoming a little thick?

He adjured himself to stop thinking about the black Hole of Calcutta and the medieval gentlemen who walled his wife's lover into the structure of the castle. It would take hours to lower the oxygen content below the tolerance point, if he refrained from useless effort. By that rime the Colonel would be in the room again and might be convinced that Finch's presence was innocent. Sonia sobbed again outside.

Finch sniffed; there was no slightest doubt, the air was already becoming foul.

"Hey, Arthur?"

It was a mere whisper, but it sent Finch crawling into a corner of the closet.

"It's just me," said Roddy. Finch could not see him, which was perhaps a good idea. "I got your tiling. Did you get my book?"

"Here you are," said Finch, reaching out the book and feeling the cold glassy pressure of the carnelian cube in his hand.

"Gee, thanks," said Roddy's voice. "You don't know how I'll treasure this. They'll say, 'Where did you get this?' and I can say, 'I know the author, he's a real friend of mine.' Is it all right? Am I through with the assignment, or do you want me to do something else?"

"Not unless you can put me through a solid wall, the way you go."

"Oh, you'll be able to do that soon, Arthur. It isn't hard. Only I do hope you get a good rapport."

The smell slowly gave place to that of Sonia's closet. Finch had the cube and now faced only the problem of going to sleep—in a crowded clothes-closet while awaiting the exhaustion of the air, with Sonia, now thoroughly enchanted with the role she was playing, sobbing like Niobe outside.

He called: "Sonia?"

"Yes, Arthur. My belofed."

"Could you sing to me? One last song."

"But yes! How beautiful; you have the artist-soul. Now I know how much I lose. I will sing to you the final aria from Aida, so beautiful and appropriate. Can you take the tenor part?"

"I'm afraid not. I'm not even a fiver when it comes to singing."

He turned and took a double armful of dresses off the hooks, disposing them to make as neat a bed as possible. Removing his own coat gave both freedom and a pillow. He stuffed the carnelian cube into the latter and lay down, obsessed with a sense of pattern for which there was no justification—a sense that there was somewhere a central threat running through this series of dream-experiences, the clue of which he could not find. But if his determined wish had any influence he would gratefully return to historical research in his ordered scientific world; and he would be glad of it. The bed of dresses was not too uncomfortable, now that he had curled up on it.

Beyond the door, softly enough to be a lullaby, Sonia burst into song: