The Carnelian Cube

Nine:

The cars swept round a curve and the crest of Chickasaw Bluffs came in sight, covered with a park whose impressiveness depreciated the rest of Memphis. A gateway carried them into a winding drive, with alternate wide vistas and clumps of close-set trees, amid which low concrete structures gleamed whitely, showing round corners in a style of architecture with which Finch felt vaguely that he ought to be familiar. Negroes at work looked up, then halted to salute as the cavalcade went past.

The run through this parkland was a good five minutes long. They emerged from it to roll through wide green lawns toward a stone structure that might have been that famous Crusaders' castle of Krak des Chevaliers, except that it was very much larger. A gleam from one of the towers caught Finch's eye—light on metal. He leaned for a better look and perceived that it was a highly functional gun-turret, with a piece of at least three-inch calibre; and his memory, thus jogged, recalled the origin of the white structures. They were machine-gun nests.

Janus in the front seat leaned over to push a control; a set of chimes on the lavender machine struck up "Hail, the Conquering Hero Comes", and both cars slid to a stop, with gaudily-clad servants swarming round to open doors and snatch at baggage. The porte-cochere before which they had stopped was abnormally high, with a set of stone steps rising to iron-bound oaken doors over which a huge carved Pegasus pranced in stone. As Colonel Richard Fitzhugh Lee strode to the foot of the steps, the doors flung open to reveal a woman in a trailing medieval-type gown. Lee halted and swept off his Congressman's hat with a gesture so grandiose it would have over-balanced a lesser man, and the woman burst into song:

"Ritorna vincitor! E dal mio labbro usci 1'empia parola! Vincitor del pardre mio—di lui che impugna Farmi per me—"

Aïda. The Colonel ascended the steps with dramatic slowness, timing it nicely to arrive just as she finished the aria on a magnificently sustained high note. He kissed her hand, and as the others came up behind him, inquired: "How has you-all been, honey chile?"

"I have been s-splendid, my lover. Like a horse—the wild horse of the steppes, ha, ha!" The last two notes were not a laugh, but musical tones and the woman smote herself on the sternum to illustrate the splendor of the wild horse of the steppes. "The expedition—it was a success, no?"

"We convinced those weasling scoundrels that it is dangerous to interfere with the development of Southern lit'rature. Cleanthus Odum is destroyed, with three of his hireling minions, and I think another visit will persuade the Bummingham grocers to sell our books, instead of those from the carpetbagging Arcadians. Standwood is no more, alas! The brave, the true." The Colonel bowed his head for a moment, then turned to where Finch stood gaping:

"We have gained a recruit 'ough. Miss Sonia Kirsch, permit me to present Mr. Finch. Miss Kirsch is rightly known as the Nightingale of Old Memphis. Mr. Finch is a talker; a table conversationalist who will illumine our festive board. A true original—actually wandering crosscountry by hisself when we discovered him."

Sonia extended a hand. "You shall make conversation to me. I lof those sayings—but no pun." She had hair on the borderline between red and brown and a figure that ran to luscious curves, which she did not seem to mind exhibiting. Some one had done a good Duco job on her face.

Finch did his best, mind working desperately: "I'm afraid there isn't much I could say after hearing you sing. After all, what would one expect Ulysses to say to a siren he met socially?"

The Colonel beamed, stroking his goatee, and his nightingale clapped her hands. "But you arrre wo-o-onderful!" she cried, rolling her eyes slightly. "And so adventure looking, like the Chevalier de Seingault. We mus' be friends, no?"

"Madame," said Finch, "I assure you that beneath this Paul Bunyan costume beats the heart of one like Paul the Apostle—of all men most miserable, because that which I would do, I cannot do." He gave her a glance which he hoped she would find sufficiently languishing, and the Colonel rescued him with the announcement that dinner was at seven-thirty.

"The hospitality of Pegasus Hall, suh, is yours to command. Gumfoot! Attend this gentleman; show him to one of the member-rooms; provide him with a tall glass of nectar and a dinner outfit." He extended an arm to the voluptuous Sonia.

Gumfoot detached himself from the first shadows of coming twilight-^-an ancient, almost paralytic negro, with a fringe of white hair around his skull. He led the way upstairs to a room the size of a small cathedral, around which he puttered, arranging doilies and moving ashtrays half an inch, clucking gently over his own activity. After a moment Finch said: "Where can I get a bath around here, Gumfoot? I need one."

The old man turned, chuckling. "Reckon de nearest place is de Mississipp' in puhson, suh. Hot watah system in dis house done blowed up dis mornin'."

"Oh. Well, what about that drink and those dinner-clothes?"

"One de common boys bring dem. Ah's a fambly retainah."

"What does a family retrainer do?"

"Ah give my boss good advice, an' pick out his clo's for him, an' steal his liquor so he'll have somebody to kick roun' when he feels mean. An' ah carry messages to de gals; ah worked for Mist' Randy till he done got shooted for messin' roun' Miss Sonia."

The family retainer chuckled again, and it occurred to Finch, with a slight contraction of the valvular muscles, that he could easily overplay his hand with the Nightingale of Memphis. She had compared him to the Chevalier de Seingault, whose family name was Casanova, and Colonel Lee did not behave Mice a man who would accept rivalry in the spirit of complacent understanding displayed by Orange William Banker.

A tap at the door was the boy with the clothes and a perfectly genuine mint julep, past which Gumfoot bowed himself out. Before giving himself to the task of dressing Finch sat down to sip and take stock. If he were still in the land of dream or nightmare—the coolness in his hand and the pleasant sensation along his gullet seemed to demonstrate that he was not—it was at least an improvement on the preceding manifestation. Certainly there would be no crime of Advertising here. This was a dream of a paradise of uninhibited individualism, even beyond what he had hoped for when he went to sleep on the carnelian cube, and it was pleasant. There were—he frowned and sipped his julep—certain aspects not altogether pleasant, a good deal of gun-play, for example. Could one die in a dream? One could probably die without coming out of it, if it reflected some somatic stimulus. No matter; he had always wanted to adventure, and here he was. He felt suddenly free and light, a boy released from school. If there were cocktails on top of the julep he ought to do all right with his unexpected profession on making bright remarks.

The dining-room was of the expected proportions, with thirty or forty people, among whom Finch found himself searching faces in vain for a likeness to that of Terry-Tiridat. He was paired off with Mrs. Hyperion Weems, one of those small plump blondes who are forever in such a state of excited mental disorganization as to be unable to complete any sentence before beginning the next.

"Have you joined the Pegasus?" she asked him over the soup. "We are all so happy here, but it is uncivilized to make remarks about people you don't know, in spite of what Aïda says."

Finch raised his voice a trifle. "Oh, I assure you I would rather not know people too well before talking about them. The closer the acquaintance with most people, the less civilized the remarks one makes about them."

"Oh, Mister Finch! No one would want to say anything uncivilized about Marmaduke." She indicated a darkly handsome individual across the table, who looked rather as though he had been made up to play the part of a movie actor. "He's always so handsome and clever, though I do always say she shouldn't have poisoned her husband, even if they couldn't prove it and let her off anyway because putting it in his shaving cream was so original."

"Women always consider good looks the highest effort of the mind," said Finch without paying any attention to the last part of her statement.

The handsome Marmaduke looked up. "And so it is, for them," he said. "Nothing Sonia can say, for example, is half as eloquent as her shoulders." He glanced toward the chatalaine.

So there was competition. Finch looked at Sonia. "A poor compliment. Such shoulders are a natural gift, like her voice, not an achievement, like her singing."

There was a patter of laughter, words were repeated and the Colonel beamed from his end of the table as waiters poured an excellent Moselle and replaced the soup with a filet of whitefish, which gave off the fascinating aroma of good cookery.

"On guard, Chevalier," said the singer, leaning toward him. "Richard, he will t'ink you flirt with me."

Finch sampled his wine. "Oh, I shan't worry. He is wise enough to know that the men women flirt with in public are never dangerous." This was going well, he told himself.

"You mean," said a tall girl opposite, with black bands of hair drawn down from the brows to give her a resemblance to the Mona Lisa, "that none of us have a chance with a man unless we can get him in a corner? You talk like that newspaper editor, Ted Harriman; he's always saying things about women."

"Not at all," said Finch, trying to recall his Oscar Wilde. "I only mean that when a clever woman is in a dangerous situation, the first thing she does is create a scandal about herself with the wrong man in order to keep the truth at a distance; and if it deceives her lover as well as her husband, she is so much the happier."

"Isn't it easy to be cynical? If I ever decide to have an affair with anyone, I shall certainly ask you to be my— phoney."

"Glad to help you stoop to folly, I'm sure. Perhaps by that time I'll have something I wish to conceal, myself." Finch recklessly threw another glance toward Sonia, then at the Colonel, and was surprised to see the latter, with his eyes widened till the whites showed, staring at the Mona Lisa girl. The head of the Pegasus Literary Society started like a man coming out of a daydream, looked down and saw that his filet of whitefish had cooled, and beckoned the butler.

"Dromio," he said, "take this away and supply us with the roast. A fish like this should be eaten at once or never."

In the interval Finch turned to his partner: "Who is she?"

"Elise? Oh, she and Marmaduke always claimed it was a morganatic marriage, you know, after that scandal over the estate, but the judge couldn't very well say anything else, could he? She used to be so good-looking as a young woman. I remember at the Carnival Ball—"

She stopped abruptly and Finch followed her eyes to the door where, instead of the roast, there had appeared an obese, aproned, short-legged man with the grandfather of all chef's caps failing to diminish his resemblance to a hippopotamus. In his right hand he carried a carving knife the size of a machete, and he was shaken with sobs.

He waved the implement accusingly at Lee. "You spurned it!" he burst out. "My marsterpiece! Aouw, the shyme! Wot is there left when you 'ave broke my bleeding 'eart? Farewell, cruel marster; good-bye, 'arsh world ..."

He raised the knife, gripped the hilt firmly in both hands and directed its point toward his solar plexus. The contact was never made; at the word "world" an. open Moselle bottle, turning end over end to throw its contents out in a golden spiral, took the cook fairly on the side of the head, bounced and shattered on the floor. The knife clattered down; the cook's body followed it with a soft, elephantine impact.

Finch turned toward the source of the missile. Colonel Lee was imperturbably wiping a drop of wine from his white coat. "Doc," he said calmly, "s'pose you jest take care o' that pore little boy. When he comes to, maybe he ought to have something so he'll carve up his meats instead of himself."

A pudgy man, his fingers gleaming with gold rings, left the table with alacrity, to bend over the recumbent cook and a group of servants gathered round. The Colonel's eyes swept the table. "I'm right sorry that this occurrence interrupted our dinner-party, folks. Bert Atkinson sure does get temperamental—"

"No artist who believes himself unappreciated can give his best performance," interrupted Finch.

"Right you are, suh; but no appreciation is as much as an artist thinks he deserves—even an artist in conversation." The Colonel looked past and raised his glass. "Let us do honor to that noble creature, Bert Atkinson, and the remainder of his composition. To the best damn cook south of the Mason-Dixon line, ladies and gentlemen. If you-all will have patience, the flow of victuals will continue."

It did continue, and Finch was glad of the opportunity offered by the slight rebuke to devote himself to the composition of the unhappy Atkinson. He reflected wryly that peaceful enjoyment of anything was about the last achievement that could be hoped for here. If he could locate the counterpart of Tiridat-Terry in this dream, he would almost certainly have the carnelian cube—

"I'll give you a whole nickel for your thoughts, Mr. Finch," said Mrs. Weems by his side. "When you work on them as hard as that, they're plumb worth more than a penny."

"My apologies. If I told you they were about you, you wouldn't believe me, and if I told you about Sonia, it might be dangerous, so I'll tell the truth and say it was about a friend of mine, who ought to be here, but isn't."

Mrs. Weems tittered. "Is she nice? What's her name? Or is that one of your secrets?"

"It isn't she, it's he; and he changes his name. I'd have to describe him for you."

"That's really individual. Hyperion only did it once, at the time of the trial, but I had all my linen marked C.K., for Charles Kuntzberger, you know, the old name, and I wouldn't let him do it again, but what business is your friend in?"

"He might be a professional athlete ..." and Finch gave a description that came as near as possible to a composite portrait of Terry and Tiridat.

It was evidently not much of a success, for the plump little woman frowned. "You can't really tell what a man looks like just from words, can you? I don't know many athletes except that team of rowers the Colonel is—"

A spoon was rapped sharply against a glass and Colonel Lee rose majestically to his feet:

"Ladies and gentlemen! The gallant active members of the Pegasus Lit'ry Society once more return to the arms of their loved ones, aureoled in immortal glory after exerting their might in the defence of the right. Let us shed a tear to the memory of that good friend and noble character, Hyacinth Standwood, who fell on the field of honor, defending the pursuit of literature from those scoundrels, the Bummingham Arcadians. Let us rejoice that the low, cunning carpetbagger, Cleanthus Odum, has ceased to inflict on the world his skunk-like aroma. And now, as president of this society, it is my pleasure to announce that the following—"

He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening into the same fixed stare with which he had regarded the Mona Lisa girl. His mouth moved wordlessly once, and his forefinger shot out. "Impy, shoot Marmaduke, quick!"

There was one instant of tense silence, in which Finch's eyes had just time to travel to Marmaduke; when the roar of a shot seemed to push him bodily backward so that his chair crashed to the floor. Others were up, too, amid a chorus of cries; glasses toppled and wine spilled across the tablecloth.

Impy alone sat still, two paces from the Colonel, his outstretched hand on the table holding a pistol from which a tiny feather of smoke drifted up past the candles. Across the table, the darkly handsome Marmaduke had been in the act of pushing back his chair. As Finch's eyes fell on him, he pushed it still farther back and slunped gently down out of sight between chair and table.

"Return to yo' seats, folks," said the Colonel companionably. "Dromio, have a couple of yo' boys throw that carrion out where the buzzards can get at it. Gumfoot! Gumfoot! Jest have a couple of yo' boys pe'suade Elise Mallory to step off the grounds of Pegasus Hall, and if she comes back, throw her out again."

The girl with the Mona Lisa hair had one. hand over her mouth, staring toward the Colonel with wide agonized eyes. As two of the liveried negroes advanced to take her arms, she shook herself from their grasp long enough to cry:

"You old gelding! I'll go and gladly—anywhere to get away from you now. Yes, and I'll come back to eat your liver with salt and pepper. But I want my clothes and things."

The Colonel made a half bow and sat down. "Madam, clothes are the legitimate means by which a good woman enhances her ch'ms, but the poisoned weapons of a bad one. Take her away, boys." He looked up and down a table where no one spoke. "I deeply regret, folks, that this untowa'd incident has marred the fair surface of our festive merriment. That snake in sheep's clothing, Marmaduke Mallory, set his wife on to vampire me, so that he might be free to attempt the seduction of Miss Kirsch, and failing in this dasta'dly plot, he was going to plug me in the back as I left the table ... Dromio, you may serve the dessert."

Finch sat before an untasted Bert Atkinson creation in ice cream and fruit, wondering how much appetite the guests of the Borgias had for their desserts, while beside him the fluttery Mrs. Weems, like everyone else, was chattering rapidly:

"... think they'd be more careful when they know perfectly well the Colonel is an ESP mind-reader, but I s'pose that little spat she got into with you made her forget to control what she was thinking for a while, only I can't understand how Marmaduke—"

The spoon tapped again, and the Colonel announced urbanely: "Now we will have the treat for which you-all have been waiting. Sonia, honey, will you sing us something?"

The red-head undulated to the side of the room, where everyone could see her, draped herself on the edge of a side-table and without prelude or accompaniment swung into Michaele's aria from "Carmen." Her pose was well calculated to reveal the fact that she was a mammal, and Finch found the picture not unpleasant.

"That dress used to be so loose on her, too," murmured Mrs. Weems by his side. Finch shushed her gently, for the aria was distinctly worth hearing, though the expressions on some of the other guests indicated they did not think so. Miss Sonia Kirsch was certainly what his colleague Lloyd Owens would have described as an attractive piece of goods—combining curves, good features, and that Continental outlook which opens negotiations with every member of the other sex, and either lets them drop or develop, according as the affair promises or fails to be interesting. He could hardly blame Marmaduke Mallory—

He snatched his eyes away in sudden panic. It must have been just some such chain of thoughts that touched off the downfall of the unfortunate Adonis across the table, of whom nothing now remained but a damp spot where the servants had wiped up the blood. If the Colonel were really an extra-sensory mind-reader, there were certain subjects on which even the vaguest speculation was hardly advisable. For a moment his mind groped wildly through various strata of thought for an innocuous subject; then, as the singer waited only for a little pattering of hands before plunging into "Mon coeur s'eleve a ta voix," he snatched at the mystery,of Terry-Tiridat, the carnelian cube, and how he might escape from this dream of a world of which he had already seen about enough, in spite of its individualist freedoms.

If this were an analogy of the previous experience, Tiridat with the cube, ought to be related in some way to the others. Lee was quite clearly replacing Orange, though with immensely more talent and vigor and no facial resemblance. Sonia would be the counterpart of Eulalie. Terry ought to be some abandoned husband of hers if there were any thread of logic in the structure of this experience. If the present phase were part and parcel of the last, he and Sonia ought to—No! Stop it!

Archaeology. It was possible that they had been conducting the dig too far to the north and east to throw light on what they really wished—the fascinating problem of what happened at the court of Assyria to cause the collapse of that great and bloody empire so soon after the death of Tiglath-Pileser. Why had the last of the Shalmanesars, surely an able man, given way to the foreigner, Sargon? It was as though he himself, Arthur Finch, were to enter Pegasus Hall, possess himself of the Colonel's authority and mistress—for Heaven's sake, cut it out!

He woke up to find Mrs. Weems tugging at his sleeve and the song over. "The boss wants to say something to you, honey."

Finch's heart turned over. The redoubtable Colonel was beckoning, his chair pushed back a little from the table, while Impy had moved up into a position by his side. Ladies were rising and the boys passing trays of tall drinks and port wine.

Rubber legs dragged leaden feet across the interval. "Sit down, suh," said Lee, indicating the chair on the opposite side from Impy. "Mr. Finch, maybe you can rigger why I want to have a special little talk between me 'n you;" He leaned forward and Finch carefully thought that 11 x 13 Was 143, while 12 x 13 would be 156. "The Pegasus Lit'ry Society, suh, is an organization that believes in the talent of its members, and seeks to encourage them. We know you as a conve'sationalist of great ability, an o'nament to the profession. But we spend less one-fifth of ouah waking hours at table, and there must be other talents you have that could be used to our mutual encouragement. Now is the time to state them." He beamed past the crooked nose.

"Why—I don't know—" said Finch, caught off balance.

The Colonel held up a hand, and Finch observed that the whites of the pale eyes were bloodshot, at the same time making note how the accent seemed to come and go. "Save yo' modesty, suh. It does you credit, yes indeedy it does, but it is a houn' dog's virtue. Have some po't. Liquor loosens the tongue and expands the ego."

Finch drank, and pulled an ear-lobe, considering. An ability to make verses would hardly help him in a literary society whose active members used guns with the skill of Hyperion Weems and Impy. Would archaeology or the ability to teach college students be any better? Or a speaking knowledge of Armenian?

"I am—I used to be—good in some kinds of athletics," he ventured.

The Colonel glanced at Impy, and both men frowned, but Lee asked: "What kind of athaletics?"

"I was a coxswain. One of the ladies said something about you having a crew. Perhaps I could coach them."

"Yo' could," cried Lee. "By God, suh, if you can coach that lazy bunch of whelps you wouldn't be an athalete, you'd be a magician, sho' 'nuf! You go right ahead. This is the lucky day of the Pegasus."

As he was undressing it occurred to Finch that not only the background, but even the events of this experience corresponded almost too exactly with his desires. In bed it also occurred to him to wonder whether the Colonel really could read minds. If he could, he ought to have known what was coming in Brian MacPherson's beanery.