Roddy started to pout, but the lips kept right on bulging outward, the nose followed them, his ears enlarged and his head changed its whole shape. The hands shortened and thickened, going down to the floor, and in one minute flat Roddy had become a parlor version of the emblem of the Republican Party. As Finch watched, a flush of dazzling pink swept over the figure and the smell became one of hay.
"Do as you're told," said Dunninger (pseud.) sternly. "You have been assigned to this gentleman until he releases you." He turned to Finch. "You are travelling by boat? Very sensible; one never knows where a temperamental engineer will take one on a train these days. I'll have my car set you down at the dock."
Roddy sulkily returned to human form, waves of green that swept through his coloring expressing his feelings. He followed Finch out docilely enough. Just at the doorway something loglike lay in the path and Finch stumbled against the wall trying to avoid it. In the light as the door opened the impediment was revealed as a large blue alligator, which raised itself on four stumpy legs and hissed truculently.
" 'Lo, Panzer," remarked Roddy.
The alligator's snout became a singularly ill-conditioned human face. "Hullo," it grunted. "Why don't your suckers learn to watch their step?"
Finch remembered Dunninger's warning about seeing extra phantoms, but he was hardly prepared to have the ghostly picket outside the front door burst forth at Roddy with "Yaah, you stinking rum-pot!" Or for that matter, for the pterodactyl-like creature with the subhuman face and a prognathous jaw full of teeth that swooped from a rooftop toward the picket and chased it some distance up the block.
In the car Finch became aware that Roddy's smell had changed to the sour odor of a reptile house. Sure enough, he was changing into something like a monstrous snake, with long arms that ended in fingers like the tails of snakes.
"This is my favorite form," he said, wrapping his tail affectionately around Finch's knees. "Listen, maybe you and I could get together. I get the most wonderful ideas for books sometimes, but just can't seem to write them down. How would it be if I sort of gave you the ideas and you could maybe put them into the literary form, if you know what I mean?"
Finch was unhappily afraid he did know, but he said:
'Tm a poet. What you want for thats job is a novelist."
"I suppose so. Do you know Liam Tattingrodt, the novelist? I'm simply wild about his novels; I wish the boss would give me a job to do for him. The St. Louis Star said his last book marked a new era in social consciousness... ."
At the hotel Finch packed his bag in gloomy silence. He was beginning to repent of his bargain, for Roddy, now in the human form of a peculiarly obnoxious freshman from one of Finch's classes, continued to express the most effusive admiration of the literary life, varying this with appeals to be told just how a poem was written—which came first, the rhyme or the idea.
By time he had reached the boat, Finch was happy to make the bar his first point of call. But wine proved to be a mocker. There was another man with his foot already on the brass rail, a heavy-set man with what looked to be at least a double Scotch in front of him. He alternately took sips from it and cast suspicious glances., over one shoulder, and Finch, following the direction of his eye, saw a large blue octopus in one of the chairs.
"Hi, Squilch," said Roddy.
"Hi, yourself," observed the octopus, waving a blue tentacle.
"Guess who I'm working for," said Roddy, proudly. "Arthur Finch; he's a real poet."
"Gee," said the octopus, fixing Finch with his unwinking stare. "Could I meet him?"
"Sure. Mr. Finch, will you shake hands with a friend of mine, just once. Boy, oh, boy, working for you is sure going to make me. We're all of us nuts about poets and writers and people like that."
Finch obligingly sat down at the table and accepted the pressure of a cold blue object which flushed to purple at the contact, whereupon the octopus slid to the floor and squatted there, looking up with passionate adoration in its lidless eyes. The heavy-set man glanced once, then turned, had a long look, and ordered another triple Scotch.
So did Finch.
Sixteen:
" 'Lo, Arthur. How's the literary climate of St. Louis —dark as Egypt and smelling strangely of ham?" Harriman took his feet off the other chair and without turning his head, added: "Harem! The bottle."
"I wouldn't say that exactly." Out of the corner of his eye Finch was conscious of the protean Roddy investigating the files. His head had become that of an owl, and portions of his anatomy were cut off flatly by the front of the filing cabinet.
"Then I hope you'd say it in stronger terms. Now honest, did you meet one person in the lot with brains enough to power a cockroach?"
"Well, I admit most of them didn't impress, but I met a Dr. Joseph Dunninger—"
"Pseud. His real name's Carteret-Jones and he got that one by legal enactment to conceal the fact that the name before that was Dunkelhorst. He dyes his hair and he hangs around parties to catch souses he can charge piles of dough for curing them of the D.T.s. Yeh, I give you, he's bright, but what the hell does he do with it? You hang around him long and you'll get to seeing four-eyed camels over your breakfast table like the rest of them."
Something in the files seemed to have struck Roddy as exquisitely humorous. He was whooping and chuckling, shaking his head and slapping his knees. Finch wondered agonizingly how Harriman could help hearing him. But he said only:
"What I principally called on you for was to see whether you couldn't give the occasion a few lines. If I have to attend those dismal affairs, I may as well get whatever benefit I can in the form of publicity."
"Sure, home town boy makes good. You dictate it and I'll fix it up. Get out your pad, Harem."
Finch's eyes were wandering after Roddy, who was oozing through the wall into the press-room. " 'Atalanta's Brut,' " he said, "the novel volume of poetic montage by Arthur Cleveland Finch, member of the Pegasus Literary Society of this city, was launched Thursday at a literary tea given by Kretschmeyer and Kretschmeyer of St. Louis. A distinguished group of guests assembled to honor the new volume, including novelist Liam Tattingrodt— confound it, Harriman, stop snickering!"
"I was just thinking of Tattingrodt's library. Saw it once. It consists exclusively of the world's finest collection of his own first editions."
"All right, but this is business. Liam Tattingrodt, critic Cottonhed (I don't know his first name), and Smith Smith. You said Dunninger wouldn't mean much, and I can't remember anyone else who was there."
Harriman frowned. "What! Did Charles Sumter Lewis, for the first time in his life, pass up a chance to get a free binge and tell the story of how he took Bryanova the dancer home in a taxi?"
"Now that you mention it, I believe he was there." Over Harriman's shoulder Finch saw Roddy come through the wall. He was wearing an orangutan's face with a broad grin on it and shaking his own hands above his head.
"Okay," said Harriman. "I'll fix it up. Your style is insufficiently adjectival for newspaper readers—that is if you want them to buy copies of Atalanta's Brut' for wedding presents, which is the only reason they'd ever lay down that kind of money for it. Sure you don't want to stay for some corned beef and cabbage?"
Outside Finch started toward the Hall afoot, talking out of the side of his mouth and trying to pretend he was unaccompanied.
"It's there, all right," said Roddy. "In a safe in a corner of that back room."
"Can you get it?"
"Well, hmp, maybe I can. Look, Mr. Finch, you know I'd do most anything for a real author like you, but colportation is awfully difficult."
"Yes?"