“Well, yes,” I said. “So to speak. And you are the Shilistrata, I believe. How do you do?”
“It is what the Archibald calls me,” the voice said.
“It’s a perfectly good name,” said Baldie. I had a passing recollection that Shilistrata might have been the moniker he had bestowed on one of his tank denizens, back in our school days.
“Would you like to call me something else?” said the voice, which, now that I focused on it, I realized was rich and warm, calling up an image of honey being stirred into cream.
“No, no,” I said. “Shilistrata’s just the ticket.”
She smiled at that. I should clarify that assertion on two points. Point the first: although Shilistrata showed none of the anatomical bits and pieces associated with the divine female form, still less any fripperies of feminine fashion, being clad only in her mottled green skin, every aspect of her bespoke the fairer sex. Not least the voice, which had the sort of mellifluosity, if that’s the word I want, that would have set a troubadour to swooning.
Point the second: when she opened her mouth, exhibiting more pearlies than one is used to—indeed two needlish ranks of them, above and below—along with a tongue that put me in mind of a pink bonnet ribbon, the only gentlemanly response was to receive the action as a smile and to send one back across the net.
“Well,” I said, then “well” again. I realized that I was rocking back and forth on toe and heel, something I’m prone to do when conversation sails into the doldrums. As one does when a rear tire becomes surrounded by mud, a gentle rocking eases the old two-seater up and out and back to cruising the byways.
On the heels of that realization came another. Someone was hissing. At first, I thought it might be Shilistrata. Then, realizations now coming thick and fast, I grasped that the sound was coming out of Baldie. He was saying, “Hist,” in a stage whisper, obviously to get my attention.
I turned to him, and he said, “For goodness sake, Bartie, speak up!”
At first I thought that he was trying to tell me that the talking newt was a little hard of hearing—no shell-like ears were in evidence—but then he made the back of the fingers gesture in her direction, and the final realization of the occasion now made its entrance: Baldie wanted me to speak up—for him, and to her.
A Gloster is always willing to come to the aid of an old school pal. It’s what we’re bred for, after all. But in this instance, a clear path to the goal was lacking. I turned Baldie’s way, put up a hand to shield my lips, and said, “About what, exactly?”
I was rewarded with the sight of Baldie impersonating an exasperated fish. “About me, of course!”
“About you?” I said, then the penny hit the bottom of the chute. “You don’t mean as a suitor?”
“I mean nothing else!”
“But, Baldie, she’s a …” I threw an apologetic glance Shilistrata’s way and lowered my voice to a whisper. “A newt! Or at least a newtess!”
“I am aware of that, Bartie,” he said.
“Well, then,” I said, “how exactly would you expect matters to work themselves out? I mean to say, what is your goal?”
Now I saw an exasperated fish dealing with an obtuse interlocutor. “Matrimony, of course!”
“But, Baldie, she’s a newt!”
“Stop saying that!” he said. “There is nothing wrong with my organs of perception! And I should think that if either one of us is likely to recognize a newt on sight, it would be I!”
There was clearly something wrong with at least one of Archibald Spotts-Binkle’s organs, and I would have taken odds on its being the one stewing behind his fish eyes. I made one last attempt. “A newt, Baldie! You’re not even the same order, or genius, or whatever it is!”
“Oh, that,” he said, with a roll of the eyes, “we’re above all that. This is a marriage of souls, a union of essences. We will conjoin on a spiritual plane, in an exalted merger of the spirit.” He fluttered those dismissive fingers again. “It’s beyond your comprehension, Bartie.”
It certainly was. I found myself blinking, at a loss as to how to make further headway. It came to me that now would be a suitable moment to enlist the cerebral powers of Greeves. If ever there was a fellow who could think his way—or mine, for that matter—out of a tight spot, Greeves topped the list. I turned and looked about, hoping that that well-stocked head might be somewhere in view. But that recourse was not on offer. And now Baldie seized my arm and hissed, or histed, at me once more.
“Tell her, Bartie!”
“Tell her what?”
“About me, you fathead! About my … qualities.”
“Oh,” I said. “Rather. Right ho, Baldie.” I turned to the sinuous green form, which had been swaying before me like one of those cobras summoned from baskets by near-naked flautists on the subcontinent. “Um,” I began, then followed with a “well” and a “here’s how it is,” but then the spring ran dry.
I turned to Baldie, and said, “I say, Spotts-Binkle, it would be a dashed sight easier to praise you in your absence. One feels constrained when the subject of the paean is hanging about, snagging every word.”
Now it was his turn to blink. “Really?” he said. “It hadn’t occurred.”
More likely, he’d had so little experience of being lionized, in his absence or presence, that the ins and outs eluded him. But now he nodded, and said, “Right ho, Bartie. I’ll leave you to get on with it.” And with a nod and a bow to the newtess, he shuffled off toward the house.
Shilistrata gave no sign of having noticed his departure. Instead, her lambent eyes remained fixed on yours truly and her swaying became even more pronounced. There certainly didn’t seem to be much wrong with her backbone, assuming she had one. She would have won the first-in-class ribbon for limberness. I had an odd passing thought: Baldie had used to go one about how newts courted each other by wriggling and tail-shaking. I suppressed the query as non-germane.
“Well, Shilistrata,” I said, “you’ve caught yourself a first-rater in our Archibald. Why, when it comes to knowledge of the ways of pond-dwellers, you couldn’t have struck more lucky. Backed a sure winner, so you have.”
Her motions now became alarmingly fluid. There was something almost hypnotic about the side-to-siding, and it seemed as if a song was humming in my brain—and not to any toe-tapping Charleston or Black Bottom rhythm, but more on the louche and languid side of the dance floor.
Nonetheless, there was a job to be done. “I doubt,” I pressed on, “that there’s a better newt man in all of England than Archibald Spotts-Binkle. My advice is to snap him up, and sharply, before some other newtess tosses a lasso around his angular form.”
I paused there, expecting some kind of rejoinder. Instead, all I got was more swaying and humming. I found that my own head was moving in concert with her motions, and that the song she was humming was growing more and more entrancing. I was thinking that that was just the song I’d always wanted to hear though I hadn’t known it until now.
And now her voice was speaking. I thought it was quite a good trick, to be able to speak and hum at the same time. It beat the pants off Flinders Bunchup’s celebrated turn at the Inertia Club Christmas saturnalia, two years back, when he sang “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” while juggling an entire set of condiment dishes.
“Come to me,” she was saying. “You are the one.”
“The one what?” I managed. But now it was not just my head that was moving in a mysterious way. My whole body was in syncopation with hers.
“Come,” she said, “it is the time. You are chosen.”