“You may find that the dwarf is subject to… enthusiasms,” he said, after some thought. “I mean that he may not be as dependable as you would like.”
He saw immediately that he had said both too much and too little. Perhaps the moment was past for him to say anything about the dwarf’s behaviour anyway: he had already condoned it by keeping quiet. The fortune-teller eyed him heavily. Then she smiled. For a second her eyes seemed to become a very pure and limpid blue. It was like a signal from the intelligence within, which had disengaged itself briefly to attend to him before returning to the eternal task of sifting sense from the random fall of some internal pack of cards. “I’m sure he is a man of great resource,” she said, “and a good man. Thank him for his invitation. But what he suggests is not yet possible.”
“I see,” said Ashlyme, who did not.
Rather than wait to see her eyes fade again, he gave her a vague nod and went out. When he looked back from the door she was down on her hands and knees by the bucket, scrubbing hard at something on the floor.
He reported this meeting to the dwarf in the tower at Montrouge.
“Good,” said the dwarf, rubbing his hands. “Excellent. Better than I expected. But we must press our advantage, eh? She must come here and see me as I am, a man who has organised his life on comfortable lines but who is willing to share it!”
He was in a high good humour. He blinked and winked with contemplative conceit and contentment. He ate a pear with relish, polished his spectacles vigorously. He had a bottle of bessen genever brought in and made Ashlyme toast what he called his “romantic success.” Once or twice his gaiety seemed a little tired: he ran his hands continually through his hair, and when he wasn’t speaking his eyes had an unfocused look. He got up without warning and threw the door open as if he hoped to catch someone listening outside. Once he said, “Half my men were themselves arrested yesterday morning, due to some administrative blunder up at Uriage and Montdore.” He gave a strained laugh. “Can you imagine that?” But generally he was pleased.
“Give these to her next,” he ordered. “What flowers are in season? Never mind. Remember, no more ‘not yet possible’! No more coyness! Come and tell me her answer.” He thought for a moment. “The next time you come we will have a sitting for my portrait.” But it was plain that he had lost interest. Ashlyme left the tower carrying a parcel which proved to contain nothing but two freshly killed young rabbits, each with a green paper ribbon tied carefully round its neck. These the fat woman refused to touch, and though the dwarf claimed later that they were a traditional wedding gift in the Mingulay peninsula, Ashlyme had his doubts.
Soon he was back and forth between them once or twice a week.
This was not an onerous duty at first; and though he was conscious that it made him look a fool to play the dwarf’s romantic proxy, it suited him well enough in that it enabled him to resume his visits to Audsley King on a regular basis. Recklessly he began using the Gabelline Stairs again to get in and out of the Low City, reasoning that while he was abroad on the dwarf’s business he would not be arrested by the dwarf’s police. He began the portrait of Audsley King all over again, watching her helplessly as every day another layer of flesh melted away, deepening the bluish hollows underneath her cheekbones. Her face was constantly refining itself, seeking the exact expression of the underlying bone structure to be found in death. She did not seem to be interested in the picture. She stared listlessly at what he had done and urged him to “seek out the forms of things.” To entertain her in the long cold hours while he was painting, he told her lies about Paulinus Rack and invented scandalous love affairs for the Marchioness “L”; Livio Fognet he bankrupted. He lied without mercy, and she was eager to believe anything.
For the first time, he sensed, her courage had faltered, and she was sustained in her determination to remain in the Low City only by her ready self-contempt, her appalling strength of will. This disappointed him obscurely where, before the kidnap attempt, it would have given him heart.
Outside the studio the Low City deteriorated daily, its meaningless commerce and periods of stunned lethargy mimicking the dull decline of Audsley King’s spirit. Shredded political posters flapped from the iron railings. Rain blew across the muddy grass. The horse chestnut flowers guttered like grey wax candles. The plague cut off first Moon Street, then Uranium Square, making peninsulas then archipelagos out of them-finally it engulfed each little island while its unsuspecting inhabitants were asleep. In the sodden churchyards and empty squares the police of the Barley brothers stood about in small groups, jeering at the police of the Grand Cairo. Poets droned from the abandoned estaminets.
Audsley King seems to observe all this from a dream, Ashlyme wrote, beginning a new page in his journal. Her expression is terrible: hungry, despairing, hopeful, all at once.
He could not release himself from a sense of guilt. A self-portrait painted at about this time, “Kneeling with raised arms,” shows him, his eyes squeezed closed, apparently crawling and groping his way about his own studio, a whitish empty space. He seems to have come up against some sort of invisible barrier, against which he is pressing one side of his face so that it is distorted and whitened into a mask of frustration and despair. (This obstacle was probably the full-length mirror he had brought with him to the city some years before, as a student. In spite of its size and weight he always took it with him when he moved from studio to studio.) The original oil of the painting has been lost, but a watercolour study shows it to have been one of his most powerful pieces. He disliked it markedly, and wrote, I have drawn a rather unpleasant thing today after seeing the Grand Cairo. It is because of the outrage he has done my freedom.
The dwarf’s relations with the Barley brothers now underwent a further deterioration. It was not made clear what plots and counterplots were involved. But Ashlyme noted: He has let himself go. His boots are dirty and he reeks of hair oil. I return home late at night to find him waiting for me. If the Barley brothers are mentioned he flies into a rage, denouncing them for their latest betrayal and shouting, “They were down in the gutters until I dragged them out!” and “What thanks have I ever got for that?” Raving like this seems to tire him out, and then he spends most of his time slumped in a chair rememberingthe good times he has had in some brothel or other on the Rue des Horlogers.
Beneath his obliquity and his vile temper he is a child. Though they have done him no harm as far as I can see, he goes in such hatred of his masters that he has even made up a sort of embroidered mythological slander to account for them. The details of the myth vary from day to day, but its basis is always much the same.
The Barley brothers, he claims, are all that remain of a race of magicians or demiurges driven out of Viriconium hundreds or thousands of years ago in a war with “giant beetles.” Finding themselves exiled in the inhospitable sumps and deserts to the north, these creatures first built cities of stone cubes “with gaps between them through which the wind rumbles,” then set about projecting themselves backwards in time to a remoter, happier period of the world. By now most of them have achieved this aim, and their cities are derelict, inhabited only by mirages, simulacra, or ordinary human beings trying to mimic their culture. The Barley brothers were left behind as a punishment for some moral flaw in their natures, and in their attempts to follow where they are not wanted they have somehow become stuck in our city.
This story shows the complexity and force of the dwarf’s feelings. All he has he owes to the Barleys, though he wishes he did not. When he tells it his eyes are glazed and inturned, as if the events were still there in front of him but can only be discerned by a great effort. He makes broad yet hesitant gestures. He is very clever at details, especially architectural ones, and he dwells with considerableingenuity on the sin of the Barley brothers which has kept them from following their peers into the past. If he did not fully believe his own tale to beginwith, he has now left himself no choice.