Still she would not look at him. Much later he understood that shame and knew she had reason for it. Now he listened blankly as she said:
“Nothing…nothing at all. A…an inoculation. All of us…oh, never mind. Listen to the music.”
This time she reached out with the other arm. She touched nothing, but when she had held her hand near the wall a sound breathed through the room, it was the sound of water, the sighing of waves receding upon long, sloped beaches. Oliver followed Kleph’s gaze toward the picture of the blue water above the bed.
The waves there were moving. More than that, the point of vision moved. Slowly the seascape drifted past, moving with the waves, following them toward shore. Oliver watched, half-hypnotized by a motion that seemed at the time quite acceptable and not in the least surprising.
The waves lifted and broke in creaming foam and ran seething up a sandy beach. Then through the sound of the water music began to breathe, and through the water itself a man’s face dawned in the frame, smiling intimately into the room. He held an oddly archaic musical instrument, lute-shaped, its body striped light and dark like a melon and its long neck bent back over his shoulder. He was singing, and Oliver felt mildly astonished at the song. It was very familiar and very odd indeed. He groped through the unfamiliar rhythms and found at last a thread to catch the tune by—it was “Make-Believe,” from “Showboat,” but certainly a showboat that had never steamed up the Mississippi.
“What’s he doing to it?” he demanded after a few moments of outraged listening. “I never heard anything like it!”
Kleph laughed and stretched out her arm again. Enigmatically she said, “We call it kyling. Never mind. How do you like this?”
It was a comedian, a man in semi-clown make-up, his eyes exaggerated so that they seemed to cover half his face. He stood by a broad glass pillar before a dark curtain and sang a gay, staccato song interspersed with patter that sounded impromptu, and all the while his left hand did an intricate, musical tattoo of the nailtips on the glass of the column. He strolled around and around it as he sang. The rhythms of his fingernails blended with the song and swung widely away into patterns of their own, and blended again without a break.
It was confusing to follow. The song made even less sense than the monologue, which had something to do with a lost slipper and was full of allusions which made Kleph smile, but were utterly unintelligible to Oliver. The man had a dry, brittle style that was not very amusing, though Kleph seemed fascinated. Oliver was interested to see in him an extension and a variation of that extreme smooth confidence which marked all three of the Sanciscos. Clearly a racial trait, he thought.
Other performances followed, some of them fragmentary as if lifted out of a completer version. One he knew. The obvious, stirring melody struck his recognition before the figures—marching men against a haze, a great banner rolling backward above them in the smoke, foreground figures striding gigantically and shouting in rhythm, “Forward, forward the lily banners go!”
The music was tinny, the images blurred and poorly colored, but there was a gusto about the performance that caught at Oliver’s imagination. He stared, remembering the old film from long ago. Dennis King and a ragged chorus, singing “The Song of the Vagabonds” from—was it “Vagabond King?”
“A very old one,” Kleph said apologetically. “But I like it.”
The steam of the intoxicating tea swirled between Oliver and the picture. Music swelled and sank through the room and the fragrant fumes and his own euphoric brain. Nothing seemed strange. He had discovered how to drink the tea. Like nitrous oxide, the effect was not cumulative. When you reached a peak of euphoria, you could not increase the peak. It was best to wait for a slight dip in the effect of the stimulant before taking more.
Otherwise it had most of the effects of alcohol—everything after awhile dissolved into a delightful fog through which all he saw was uniformly enchanting and partook of the qualities of a dream. He questioned nothing. Afterward he was not certain how much of it he really had dreamed.
There was the dancing doll, for instance. He remembered it quite clearly, in sharp focus—a tiny, slender woman with a long-nosed, dark-eyed face and a pointed chin. She moved delicately across the white rug—knee-high, exquisite. Her features were as mobile as her body, and she danced lightly, with resounding strokes of her toes, each echoing like a bell. It was a formalized sort of dance, and she sang breathlessly in accompaniment, making amusing little grimaces. Certainly it was a portrait-doll, animated to mimic the original perfectly in voice and motion. Afterward, Oliver knew he must have dreamed it.
What else happened he was quite unable to remember later. He knew Kleph had said some curious things, but they all made sense at the time, and afterward he couldn’t remember a word. He knew he had been offered little glittering candies in a transparent dish, and that some of them had been delicious and one or two so bitter his tongue still curled the next day when he recalled them, and one—Kleph sucked luxuriantly on the same kind—of a taste that was actively nauseating.
As for Kleph herself—he was frantically uncertain the next day what had really happened. He thought he could remember the softness of her white-downed arms clasped at the back of his neck, while she laughed up at him and exhaled into his face the flowery fragrance of the tea. But beyond that he was totally unable to recall anything, for a while.
There was a brief interlude later, before the oblivion of sleep. He was almost sure he remembered a moment when the other two San-ciscos stood looking down at him, the man scowling, the smoky-eyed woman smiling a derisive smile.
The man said, from a vast distance, “Kleph, you know this is against every rule—” His voice began in a thin hum and soared in fantastic flight beyond the range of hearing. Oliver, thought he remembered the dark woman’s laughter, thin and distant too, and the hum of her voice like bees in flight.
“Kleph, Kleph, you silly little fool, can we never trust you out of sight?”
Kleph’s voice then said something that seemed to make no sense. “What does it matter, here?”
The man answered in that buzzing, faraway hum. “The matter of giving your bond before you leave, not to interfere. You know you signed the rules—”
Kleph’s voice, nearer and more intelligible: “But here the difference is…it does not matter here! You both know that. How could it matter?”
Oliver felt the downy brush of her sleeve against his cheek, but he saw nothing except the slow, smokelike ebb and flow of darkness past his eyes. He heard the voices wrangle musically from far away, and he heard them cease.
When he woke the next morning, alone in his own room, he woke with the memory of Kleph’s eyes upon him very sorrowfully, her lovely tanned face looking down on him with the red hair falling fragrantly on each side of it and sadness and compassion in her eyes. He thought he had probably dreamed that. There was no reason why anyone should look at him with such sadness.
Sue telephoned that day.
“Oliver, the people who want to buy the house are here. That madwoman and her husband. Shall I bring them over?”
Oliver’s mind all day had been hazy with the vague, bewildering memories of yesterday. Kleph’s face kept floating before him, blotting out the room. He said, “What? I…oh, well, bring them if you want to. I don’t see what good it’ll do.”
“Oliver, what’s wrong with you? We agreed we needed the money, didn’t we? I don’t see how you can think of passing up such a wonderful bargain without even a struggle. We could get married and buy our own house right away, and you know we’ll never get such an offer again for that old trash-heap. Wake up, Oliver!”
Oliver made an effort. “I know, Sue—I know. But—”
“Oliver, you’ve got to think of something!” Her voice was imperious.
He knew she was right. Kleph or no Kleph, the bargain shouldn’t be ignored if there was any way at all of getting the tenants out. He wondered again what made the place so suddenly priceless to so many people. And what the last week in May had to do with the value of the house.
A sudden sharp curiosity pierced even the vagueness of his mind today. May’s last week was so important that the whole sale of the house stood or fell upon occupancy by then. Why? Why?
“What’s going to happen next week?” he asked rhetorically of the telephone. “Why can’t they wait till these people leave? I’d knock a couple of thousand off the price if they’d—”
“You would not, Oliver Wilson! I can buy all our refrigeration units with that extra money. You’ll just have to work out some way to give possession by next week, and that’s that. You hear me?”
“Keep your shirt on,” Oliver said practically. “I’m only human, but I’ll try.”
“I’m bringing the people over right away,” Sue told him. “While the Sanciscos are still out. Now you put your mind to work and think of something, Oliver.” She paused, and her voice was reflective when she spoke again. “They’re…awfully odd people, darling.”
“Odd?”
“You’ll see.”
It was an elderly woman and a very young man who trailed Sue up the walk. Oliver knew immediately what had struck Sue about them. He was somehow not at all surprised to see that both wore their clothing with the familiar air of elegant self-consciousness he had come to know so well. They, too, looked around them at the beautiful, sunny afternoon with conscious enjoyment and an air of faint condescension. He knew before he heard them speak how musical their voices would be and how meticulously they would pronounce each word.
