I gave the number of Mike’s and when someone answered, I asked, “Is Lamb there?”
“Who did you say?”
“This is Wayne Gray,” I said patiently. “Is Lambeth Gray there?”
“Oh.” I recognized it now as Mike’s voice. “Didn’t get you at first. No, Mr. Gray, your wife hasn’t been here.”
I thanked him and hung up. When I went out of the booth, the Chandlers were gone. I heard a car starting outside.
I waved to Harry and went outside. The taillight of the Chandlers’ car was heading up the hill. In the direction they’d have gone if they were heading for Hans Wagner’s studio—to warn Lamb that I’d heard something I shouldn’t have heard, and that I might come there.
But it was too ridiculous to consider. Whatever gave Eve Chandler the wild idea that Lamb might be with Hans, it was wrong. Lamb wouldn’t do anything like that. Eve had probably seen her having a drink or so with Hans somewhere, sometime, and had got the thing wrong. Dead wrong. If nothing else, Lamb would have better taste than that. Hans was handsome, and he was a ladies’ man, which I’m not, but he’s stupid and he can’t paint. Lamb wouldn’t fall for a stuffed shirt like Hans Wagner.
But I might as well go home now, I decided. Unless I wanted to give people the impression that I was canvassing the town for my wife, I couldn’t very well look any farther or ask any more people if they’d seen her. And although I don’t care what people think about me either personally or as a painter, I wouldn’t want them to think I had any wrong ideas about Lamb.
I walked off in the wake of the Chandlers’ car, through the bright moonlight. I came in sight of Hans’s place again, and the Chandlers’ car wasn’t parked there; if they’d stopped, they’d gone right on. But, of course, they would have, under those circumstances. They wouldn’t have wanted me to see that they were parked there; it would have looked bad.
The lights were on there, but I walked on past, up the hill toward my own place. Maybe Lamb was home by now; I hoped so. At any rate, I wasn’t going to stop at Hans’s. Whether the Chandlers had or not.
Lamb wasn’t in sight along the road between Hans’s place and mine. But she could have made it before I got that far, even if—well, even if she had been there. If the Chandlers had stopped to warn her.
Three quarters of a mile from the inn to Hans’s. Only one quarter of a mile from Hans’s place to mine. And Lamb could have run; I had only walked.
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 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, when 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.