"The one who was supposed to have discovered the philosopher's stone? Can't say I have. Why do you ask?"
"You seemed—that is, I thought you might have run across him in your wanderings among old books. I once owned a stone that was supposed to have descended from him—a little cube of red carnelian with an inscription on it, like a paperweight."
"Interesting. Maybe the philosopher's stone itself. If I had it I wouldn't mention it to anybody, though." Harriman turned toward his secretary: "Harem! Put this bottle away, and if ever I get to drinking before noon again, read me that editorial I wrote on temperance, will you?"
Finch had nearly reached Pegasus Hall before remembering that Tiridat had never mentioned having the cube, and he had discovered it only by accident.
Fourteen:
But there was no further clue to the possible location of the carnelian cube, or even to the identity of Theo. Harriman, editor. The man was friendly enough. As early as Finch's second visit, the editor led the way to an apartment above and behind the printshop, a place made fiercely gloomy by dark red hangings now faded, and filled with a singular assortment of curios, which ranged from a Circassian sabre and a strip-tease queen's G-string to a stained rope, which Harriman presented as the central feature of a bygone lynching. They discussed poetry with the energetic disagreement of men discovering each other's taste, and Finch found his host had a rather surprising liking for the works of Francis Thompson, Verlaine and the French mystics. As his own dislike of these writers was rooted in a poetically indefensible addiction to the work of Walter Scott, he was being badly defeated in the argument when "the Harem" came in to end things with a meal of pig's feet and hominy grits.
The plain food was good after the elaborate creations of the Colonel's temperamental chef, and the talk was better. For the first time since waking on the hillside above Muscle Shoals he felt at ease, free from the pressure of overpoweringly insistent personalities. It occurred to the back of his mind that if this were a world he had wished himself into, a projection of his own personality, his subconscious must be singularly sophomoric and unselective; and he was moved to wonder whether the discovery of the presumable owner of the carnelian cube were not an indication that he had better start imagining a more scientifically planned cosmos. What would it be like?
"... come from, Mr. Finch?" the Harem was asking to make conversation. "You don't talk like a native Tennesseean."
"I'm not," said Finch. "As a matter of fact, I sometimes think I dreamed myself here."
"Heh." Harriman emitted his short bark of a laugh. "Now you see, Harem, why I done tol' you not to ask questions like that of the Colonel's boys. They might turn out to be Jesse James or Herbert Hoover."
"But, my dear sir—" began Finch.
"Sssh! The Harem has to be disciplined. I picked her right out of a circus, where she was earning her keep cooking spinach for the elephants, and she learned her manners from then. Didn't you, Harem?"
"I'll bust a plate over your goddam head—"
Foiled again. Finch was similarly turned aside with a witticism every time he tried to approach the core of the mystery with Harriman, though the editor invited him again and again to the place when the pressure of events at Pegasus Hall became a little too much. Sonia was not as vigorous in her pursuit as before the race, Finch was glad to observe; perhaps he was no longer in line for the vacant office of lieutenant. But she undoubtedly did possess a form of physical attractiveness that he found it hard to resist, and every now and then she seemed to feel it her duty to turn on the heat, as though to keep her hand in. In fact, it was she who arranged the literary tea for the publication of his book.
When Harriman heard of it and that it was to be held under the auspices of Kretschmeyer & Kretschmeyer, the St. Louis book dealers, he gave his sharp, single laugh, but his only comment was that Finch would soon begin to understand why his own shelves were lined exclusively with the classics. "You know you're a phoney poet, and so do I, but most of those people think they've got something."
"Maybe they have if they can sell their books."
"Yeh. What they usually got is some backer like the Colonel or an old witch with more money than sense. But don't let me stop you. You can read aloud, everybody will clap and the drinks will be on the house."
Finch had no intention of letting it stop him. Kretschmeyer & Kretschmeyer were booksellers, after all; they had placed an order for his collection of poetic montage, and he believed he had enough pure scientific curiosity to wish to see the occasion for its own sake, as a visitor to New York might visit Grant's Tomb or some other object that had become commonplace to the natives.
He made the trip on a river steamer with a billiard-room ingeniously mounted on gimbals and gyroscopes which held it steady while the most delicate shots were being executed. But there was no hot water for shaving and the craft was so slow that it was more than fashionably late when he arrived at the Kretschmeyer & Kretschmeyer address. When he gave his name a uniformed negro of immense pomp marched before him past counters piled with cloth to the door of a big reception room, where he was greeted by a worried-looking young man in a tweed suit so fuzzy it looked as though it were being crawled on by caterpillars.
"The name?" he said. "Oh, you're Finch, the guest of honor! Do you know, you're a success already? Charles Sumter Lewis came to your party." He beamed, and Finch searched his memory frantically without being able to find any peg on which to hang the name. "Do you mind giving a reading?"
"Be glad to if you wish."
The young man took his arm. "J'm Kretschmeyer. Of course, they don't really want to hear you read, but it always impresses the reviewers. The first-three-drink-room is this way."
He steered Finch into a small room with a bar along one side, where two or three people gave him glances of cold hostility before rapidly downing the drinks they were working on and proceeding through the farther door into an inner room from which emerged a Niagaralike roar of conversation. A tall girl with a rose in her dark hair came over from a bench to join them at the bar. "Here," said Kretschmeyer, "I'll leave you with Miss Maeder, but I warn you she's a dangerous woman, ha, ha. Miss Maeder, Mr. Finch. The guest of honor. Excuse me."
"What's yours?" demanded the bartender.
"A Manhattan, I think," said Finch.
"No Manhattans," said the bartender. "I refuse to mix 'em; no expression of personality. How 'bout an Iron Maiden or a Cobra Milk?"
"Take the Cobra Milk," advised Miss Maeder. "I'm drinking them. What do you do, Mr. Finch?"
"I'm informed I've just written a book of poems. What do you do?"
"Me?" She laughed as the bartender arranged three glasses filled with a skim-milk colored liquid in a precise row in front of each of them. "Oh, I'm just one of the pickup girls for literary teas. I came down from Chicago for this one. But I'm very original; I just turned down Charles Sumter Lewis. He's here, you know."
"No, I didn't ..." Before he could display his ignorance by asking who Charles Sumter Lewis was, he chose to take a sip of the Cobra Milk. It made spots swim before his eyes.
"You must autograph some of your poems for me," said Miss Maeder. "Aren't these good?" and downed her second drink without drawing breath, "Oh, there's Smith Smith!"
She seized her third cocktail in one hand and Finch in the other, dragging him through the inner door toward a tall young man in a coonskin cap, whose evident effort to look like Abraham Lincoln had failed because his beard grew only in patches.