Rambling down to where Baldie stood and letting the bygones fall where they may, I offered a cheery, “What ho!”
He had been inspecting the water. I saw that he must have still been in a state of distress when he exited the premises because he had neglected to clothe himself against the elements. His suit was drenched, as was he. His narrow shoulders hunched and the rain ran down his collar. One would have to fare far and turn over many a rock to uncover a more morose specimen.
He gave my greeting no answer nor raised his eyes from the pond. Once more unto the breach, I counseled myself, and said, “I say, this looks a dashed fine locus in quo for the odd lizard or two, what?”
He turned his mournful gaze my way. The downturn of his mouth put me in mind of a croquet hoop. “Just the one,” he croaked, “but what a one, Bartie!” And then came a fresh flood of tears.
I again applied the consoling hand to the shoulder. “Come on, Baldie,” I said, “out with it, there’s the stout fellow. What’s it all about?”
He snuffled and shook his head, droplets flying unnoticed in the downpour. “Love, Bartie,” he said. “It’s about love.”
I looked about, like that fellow on that peak in Darien. “Do you mean to say Marilyn’s given you the cold mutton? Easily fixed, I should say. Fly to her side with a bouquet of the best and tell her she’s the apple’s eye. Throw in a sonnet or such like. Can’t miss. Girls like Marilyn are easy prey to a well-turned quatrain.”
“It’s not Marilyn, you oaf!” He drew himself up though he still reached no great heights. “I love another.”
“Another?” I goggled, or boggled, or whatever it is one does when confronted by life’s absurdities. “Another what?”
“A goddess!” he said. “She walks in beauty like the something something … I can’t remember the rest, but she’s the real McCoy, Bartie.”
I took an involuntary step back, then a voluntary one for good measure, and said, “I mean to say, old chum, it’s not on, is it? A broken engagement, that’s one thing, but a putting asunder? Besides which, an enraged Buffet is not a factor to be left out of one’s plans. Disemboweling’s not out of the question.”
“I don’t care, Bartie,” he said. “The heart has its imperatives.”
“Oh, it does, does it?” I said. “Well, Marilyn has the aspect of the tiger. Not the imitation, the real thing.”
He had deflated again. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “For though I love with a passion to shake the ages, the goddess does not smile on me.”
Light dawned—not the real thing, of course; the sun would have needed a trowel to penetrate the clouds that lowered over us—but the figurative glimmer of comprehension. “Hold on, there, Baldie. Are you saying that you love another, but she does not care to return the serve?”
“I am,” he said, brightening a little. “You always have the right phrase at your fingertips, don’t you, Bartie? That’s why I asked Slithy to bring you.”
“You want me to tell you what to say to win her heart?” It seemed a rum business. One doesn’t go around helping chums to overturn the marital applecart. Besides, there was the prospect of an unmarried Marilyn Buffet just over the horizon. When she and Baldie had been on the outs, during their tortuous courtship, the blue Buffet orbs had fixed on Bartholomew as her second string in the matrimonial target shoot. The idea of exposing myself once more to the predatory aims of the Buffet turned my knees to water and my bowels to jelly. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Either way, it was not a fate that invited a forward rush.
“I won’t advise you,” I said. “My lips are sealed.”
“I don’t want you to advise me,” he said.
“Oh, well, good.” I heaved a sigh of relief. Rather a heavy one.
“I want you,” he said, “to speak to her.”
“To her?” I said, water and jelly galloping back into the picture. “To Marilyn?”
“Not to Marilyn. Stop talking about Marilyn! She is past and forgotten, one with Nineveh and Tyre. I want you to speak to her.”
His pale fingers fluttered in the general direction of the dark pond. I turned in the direction indicated, peering through the curtain of rain to see if there was someone standing on the other side of the water. I could see nothing.
“Where is she?” I said. “And, a salient point, who is she?”
Instead of answering, he squatted by the edge of the water. Then he extended a hand and patted the surface of the pool with his fingertips, in what appeared to be a deliberate rhythm, though Baldie couldn’t have kept a beat in a jam jar. After a moment, apparently satisfied, he rose and stood back.
“I’m sorry, Baldie, but I don’t quite see—”
“Shh,” he said, gesturing toward the pond. “Look!”
Out in the center, a circular ripple appeared. Then it became a vee, making toward where we loitered on the shore. It seemed a very determined sort of vee, the kind one sees in films that feature brawny-chested types in loincloths who have nothing better to do with their afternoons than wrestle crocodiles that leap upon them from gray, greasy rivers. Gray and greasy, incidentally, made a pretty good description of the color and texture of Baldie’s pond.
I took a judicious step back, leaving Baldie to remain in status quo, drooped over the water’s edge like a willow mourning the loss of its will to live. The vee continued to close upon him.
“Baldie,” I said, meaning to add a warning. But, at that moment, the surface at the point of the vee broke. From it emerged a green triangular head, roughly the size and shape of a ditch digger’s spade, except that it had two large and golden eyes about where you’d expect to find them. As the head rose from the water, I saw that from under the lower jaw protruded branchlike organs. I had a vague memory of a much younger Baldie Spotts-Binkle pointing to some little lizard in a tank and inviting me to notice its gills—an invitation that I am glad to say I succinctly declined.
The head was now well clear of the surface. Below it were two narrow shoulders that sat above a slim and sinuous torso. As the apparition reached the shore and emerged from the water, it produced a pair of slender arms and a matching set of pins, both ending in webbed digits. A long, glistening tail, sporting a kind of fin that actually began at the nape of the creature’s longish neck, provided the denouement.
Words failed. I emitted a sound that began with a “guh” and ended in an “ack,” with a kind of hiccup to bridge the two. Baldie shot me the sort of look an aunt gives a fellow who’s just spilled tea on the best Persian, and said, “For God’s sake, Bartie! Stop gawking and say how do you do to Shilistrata.”
I closed my mouth, opened it, still found nothing of use in it, and closed it again. But then I managed to rally the routed remnants of my vocabulary. “How do you do?” I said. “Shilistrata, is it? Charming. Unusual.”
“Don’t be an ass, Bartie,” said Baldie. “I doubt it’s at all unusual on Venus.” He turned to the—and let’s not beat around the shrubbery; she was a newt—and said, “You’ll have to forgive my chum. He can be a touch provincial, don’t you know.”
That was a bit stiff coming from a fellow who’d spent most of his life messing about in rural puddles, and who, to my certain knowledge, had not shown his piscine phiz in London more than once in ten years. But I let it pass, because the creature from the pond had now turned her remarkable eyes—round, amber with flecks of silver—on me and at the same time a voice spoke in my head, saying, “You are the Bartie? The Gloster?”