Past Hans’s place, a beautiful studio with that skylight I envied him. Not the place, not the fancy furnishings, just that wonderful skylight. Oh, yes, you can get wonderful light outdoors, but there’s wind and dust just at the wrong time. And when, mostly, you paint out of your head instead of something you’re looking at, there’s no advantage to being outdoors at all. I don’t have to look at a hill while I’m painting it. I’ve seen a hill.
The light was on at my place, up ahead. But I’d left it on, so that didn’t prove Lamb was home. I plodded toward it, getting a little winded by the uphill climb, and I realized I’d been walking too fast. I turned around to look back and there was that composition again, with the gibbous moon a little higher, a little brighter. It had lightened the black of the near hills and the far ones were blacker. I thought, I can do that. Gray on black and black on gray. And, so it wouldn’t be a monochrome, the yellow lights. Like the lights at Hans’s place. Yellow lights like Hans’s yellow hair. Tall, Nordic-Teutonic type, handsome. Nice planes in his face. Yes, I could see why women liked him. Women, but not Lamb.
I had my breath back and started climbing again. I called out Lamb’s name when I got near the door, but she didn’t answer. I went inside, but she wasn’t there.
The place was very empty. I poured myself a glass of the wine and went over to look at the picture I’d blocked out. It was all wrong; it didn’t mean anything. The lines were nice but they didn’t mean anything at all. I’d have to scrape the canvas and start over. Well, I’d done that before. It’s the only way you get anything, to be ruthless when something’s wrong. But I couldn’t start it tonight.
The tin clock said it was a quarter to eleven, still that wasn’t late. But I didn’t want to think so I decided to read a while. Some poetry, possibly. I went over to the bookcase. I saw Blake and that made me think of one of his simplest and best poems, The Lamb. It had always made me think of Lamb—«Little lamb, who made thee?» It had always given me, personally, a funny twist to the line, a connotation that Blake, of course, hadn’t intended. But I didn’t want to read Blake tonight. T. S. Eliot: «Midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.» But it wasn’t midnight yet, and I wasn’t in the mood for Eliot. Not even Prufrock: «Let us go then, you and I, where the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table—» He could do things with words that I’d have liked to do with pigments, but they aren’t the same things, the same medium. Painting and poetry are as different as eating and sleeping. But both fields can be, and are, so wide. Painters can differ as greatly as Bonnard and Braque, yet both be great poets as great as Eliot and Blake. «Little lamb, who—» I didn’t want to read.
And enough of thinking. I opened the trunk and got my forty-five caliber automatic. The clip was full; I jacked a cartridge into the chamber and put the safety catch on. I put it into my pocket and went outside. I closed the door behind me and started down the hill toward Hans Wagner’s studio.
I wondered, had the Chandlers stopped there to warn them? Then either Lamb would have hurried home—or, possibly, she might have gone on with the Chandlers, to their place. She could have figured that to be less obvious than rushing home. So, even if she wasn’t there, it would prove nothing. If she was, it would show that the Chandlers hadn’t stopped there.
I walked down the road and I tried to look at the crouching black beast of the hills, the yellow of the lights. But they added up to nothing, they meant nothing. Unfeeling, ungiving-to-feel, like a patient etherized upon a table. Damn Eliot, I thought; the man saw too deeply. The useless striving of the wasteland for something a man can touch but never have, the shaking of a dead geranium. As a madman. Little Lamb. Her dark hair and her darker eyes in the whiteness of her face. And the slender, beautiful whiteness of her body. The softness of her voice and the touch of her hands running through my hair. And Hans Wagner’s hair, yellow as that mocking moon.
I knocked on the door. Not loudly, not softly, just a knock.
Was it too long before Hans came?
Did he look frightened? I didn’t know. The planes of his face were nice, but what was in them I didn’t know. I can see the lines and the planes of faces, but I can’t read them. Nor voices.
«Hi, Wayne. Come in,» Hans said.
I went inside. Lamb wasn’t there, not in the big room, the studio. There were other rooms, of course; a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. I wanted to go look in all of them right away, but that would have been crude. I wouldn’t leave until I’d looked in each.
«Getting a little worried about Lamb; she’s seldom out alone this late. Have you seen her?» I asked.
Hans shook his blond, handsome head.
«Thought she might have dropped in on her way home,» I said casually. I smiled at him. «Maybe I was just getting lonesome and restless. How about dropping back with me for a drink? I’ve got only wine, but there’s plenty of that.»
Of course he had to say, «Why not have a drink here?» He said it. He even asked me what I wanted, and I said a martini because he’d have to go out into the kitchen to make that and it would give me a chance to look around.
«Okay, Wayne, I’ll have one too,» Hans said. «Excuse me a moment.»
He went out into the kitchen. I took a quick look into the bathroom and then went into the bedroom and took a good look, even under the bed. Lamb wasn’t there. Then I went into the kitchen and said, «Forgot to tell you, make mine light. I might want to paint a bit after I get home.»
«Sure,» he said.
Lamb wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor had she left after I’d knocked or come in; I remember Hans’s kitchen door; it’s pretty noisy and I hadn’t heard it. And it’s the only door aside from the front one.
I’d been foolish.
Unless, of course, Lamb had been here and had gone away with the Chandlers when they’d dropped by to warn them, if they had dropped by.
I went back into the big studio with the skylight and wandered around for a minute looking at the things on the walls. They made me want to puke so I sat down and waited. I’d stay at least a few minutes to make it look all right. Hans came back.
He gave me my drink and I thanked him. I sipped it while he waited patronizingly. Not that I minded that. He made money and I didn’t. But I thought worse of him than he could possibly think of me.
«How’s your work going, Wayne?»
«Fine,» I said. I sipped my drink. He’d taken me at my word and made it weak, mostly vermouth. It tasted lousy that way. But the olive in it looked darker, more the color I’d had in mind. Maybe, just maybe, with the picture built around that color, it would work out.
«Nice place, Hans,» I said. «That skylight. I wish I had one.»
He shrugged. «You don’t work from models anyway, do you? And outdoors is outdoors.»
«Outdoors is in your mind,» I said. «There isn’t any difference.» And then I wondered why I was talking to somebody who wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I wandered over to the window—the one that faced toward my studio—and looked out of it. I hoped I’d see Lamb on the way there, but I didn’t. She wasn’t here. Where was she? Even if she’d been here and left when I’d knocked, she’d have been on the way now. I’d have seen her.
I turned. «Were the Chandlers here tonight?» I asked him.
«The Chandlers? No; haven’t seen them for a couple of days.» He’d finished his drink. «Have another?» he asked.
I started to say no. I didn’t. My eyes happened, just happened, to light on a closet door. I’d seen inside it once; it wasn’t deep, but it was deep enough for a man to stand inside it. Or a woman.