Thunder and Roses (18 page)

She sat above him and turned her head. She gave him an unfathomable half-smile, and as she drew her breath the golden glow from behind her crept around her cheek and tinted the arched flesh of her nostrils. It was an exquisite gesture; she saw in his eyes that she had pleased him and thought, He stinks of grease and ammonia.

He put out his hand and touched her. He was actually afraid that she would slip back into a swelling of symphonic sound, sweep over him and be gone past all remembering.

“Are you a real woman who will be alive?” he faltered.

Stupid questions are not always stupid to stupid people. “Of course,” she said.

Then he asked her to marry him.

She looked at his craggy face and boniness and his hollow chest and mad-looking eyes and shook her head. He backed away from her, turned and ran. He looked once over his shoulder, and caught the picture of her that lighted his brain until the day he died. For there, in light and shade, in warm flesh and cool colors, was the Largo; and he would have to live until he turned her back into music. He could not command her as she was; but if he could duplicate her in sharps and flats and heart-stopping syncopation, then she would be his. As he ran, staring back, his head
thwacked
on the doorpost, and he staggered on, all blood and tears.

Gretel looked pensively at her fingernails. “Good God,” she said, “what a dope.” And she went back to her cow-like mental vacancy.

A couple of nights later Gretel and Pascal Wylie were in a canoe on the hilltop lake, blandly violating the sacredness Drecksall had invested in her, when they heard music.

“What’s that?” said Wylie sharply.

“Vi’lin,” said Gretel. For her the subject closed with an almost
audible snap, but Wylie’s peering mind was diverted; and seeing this, she accepted it without protest, as she accepted all things. “Wonder who it is?” said Wylie. He touched a lever, and the silent solenoid-impulse motor in the stern of the canoe wafted them toward the sound.

“It’s that kitchen-boy!” whispered Wylie a moment later.

Gretel roused herself enough to look. “He’s crazy,” she said coldly. She wished vaguely that Wylie would take her away from the sound of the violin, or that Drecksall would stop playing. Or—play something else. She had never heard these notes before, which was not surprising considering the kind of music Drecksall played. But such music had never bothered her until now. Very little ever bothered her. She made an almost recognizable effort to understand why she didn’t like it, realized that it made her feel ashamed, assumed that she was ashamed because she was out with Wylie, and dropped the matter. Having reasoned past the music itself, she was no longer interested. She might have been had she realized that it was her own portrait in someone else’s eyes that she had listened to.

Wylie felt himself stirred too, but differently. It didn’t matter to him why this scullery lad was scraping a fiddle on the lakeshore when he should have been asleep. The thing that struck him was that the man could make that violin talk. He made it get inside you—inside people who didn’t give a damn, like Wylie. Wylie began to wonder why the hands that performed that way had taken on a duty of washing pots. He had learned early that the best way to get along (to him that meant to get rich) was to find your best talent and exploit it. Here was a man wasting a talent on trees and fish.

Music is a science as well as an art, and it is a shocking thing to those who think that musicians are by nature incompetent and impractical, to discover that more often than not a musician has a strong mechanical flair. Conversely, a person who is unmechanical is seldom musical. Drecksall’s playing on this particular night was careful, thoughtful, precise. He was building something quite as tangible to him as a bridge is to an engineer. The future whole was awe-inspiring, beautiful, but, like the bridge, it was composed of quite
unromantic essentials—tonal nuts, bolts and rivets. It was the skillful machining of these that intrigued Wylie, possibly far more than would the completed work.

Drecksall paused at the end of a bewildering arpeggio, and stood with his violin in his hand, staring puzzledly across the water. He had just realized the enormity of his task, and was completely wrapped up in it, so was totally unprepared for Wylie’s sudden burst of clapping. It was not applause, exactly; Wylie was gladhanding, following the birth of a bright idea. He had an idea he would butter up the violinist, befriend him, get him to someone who would know if he was really any good or not from a commercial point of view. If he was, Wylie could take a cut, maybe. Ten percent—forty—seventy-five? Drecksall was young. He would last a long time, and he looked like a dope.

So he cracked his lean hands together and whistled shrilly, like a grandfather at a burlesque house. Surely the ape would appreciate enthusiasm!

Drecksall leapt like a startled moose, nearly lost his footing, and then froze, peering toward the dark canoe, a hot smoke of anger curling into his brain. He felt stripped, imposed upon. He felt kicked. His night playing demanded infinitely more privacy than his body, and it was being rudely stared at. He suddenly broke the violin over his knee, hurled the pieces at the canoe, and ran into the dark woods.

“I told you he was crazy,” said Gretel complacently.

It was a long time before Pascal Wylie could puff the wind back into his sails.

Two days later Drecksall was returning from a copse a hundred yards from the resort’s main building, carrying a couple of large garbage pails. There was an incinerator back there, and as he left it he heard the whirring of rotary wings. He looked up and saw a cab descending, and would have ignored it altogether had he not noticed that the man who climbed out and paid the driver had a violin-case under his arm. Drecksall looked at it the way a prep-school boy looks at a soft-drink calendar.

“Hi,” said Pascal Wylie. Drecksall nodded.

“I want to talk to you,” said Wylie.

“Me?” Drecksall couldn’t take his eyes off the violin.

“Yeh. Heard you lost your fiddle.”

Drecksall just stared. Wylie grinned and handed over the instrument. Drecksall dropped his garbage cans, clasped the case and clawed it open. The violin was a good one, complete with three bows, spare strings, and a pitch pipe. Drecksall stood helplessly, his wide mouth trying fruitlessly to say the same thing his eyes were saying.

“You want that violin?” asked Wylie briskly. The question needed no answer. “It’s yours if you’ll do me a favor.”

“What?”

Wylie gestured toward the cab. “Just hop in there with me. We’ll run into the city, and you’ll play that thing for a friend of mine. Chances are that after he hears you you can go right on playing as long as you want to, and you’ll never wash another pot. How’s it strike you?”

Drecksall looked at the tumbled garbage cans. “I can’t leave here,” he said. “I’d lose my job.”

Wylie was not thinking about that. If the violinist failed the audition, he would starve—and he could, for all Wylie cared. But he thought the man had a chance. He snatched the violin and walked toward the cab. “Okay, then.”

Drecksall picked up the cans and stared after Wylie. His would-be manager climbed in, giving not a backward glance. With elaborate carelessness, however, he did manage to have a great deal of difficulty in getting the violin-case in after him. It hung, black and shining and desirable, for seconds; and suddenly Drecksall realized just how badly those cans smelled. He ran to the cab and climbed in.

“Good boy,” said Wylie.

Drecksall took the violin-case from him and opened it. “I never had a violin as nice as this before,” he said simply.

The audition went off smoothly. Drecksall was led into a soundproof room containing a novachord and an unpleasing female organist. He was handed a sheaf of sheet music which, but for the individual titles, he thereafter ignored. A red light flashed, a speaker baffle said
boredly, “Go ahead, please,” and Drecksall played. He played for an hour, stopping twice in the middle of selections to tune his violin, which was new and springy, and once to upbraid the organist, who, after the first few bars, had never played better in her life.

Afterward, in another room, Wylie was called in to speak to an official. He crossed the room and, with his hat on, perched easily on the edge of the man’s desk and looked at his fingernails until the man spoke.

“You’re this fellow’s manager?”

“Mmm.”

“Eight hundred for thirty minutes five times weekly, thirteen weeks.” He dragged a contract form out of the desk, filled in some spaces, and shoved it over to Wylie. Wylie looked at it gingerly as if it was one of Drecksall’s garbage pails, took the pen, crossed out the $800 and wrote in $5000. Then he yawned and looked out of the window.

“Don’t be silly,” said the radio executive. He looked keenly at Wylie, sighed, and drew up another contract. It was for two thousand. Wylie signed with alacrity. “Make that out in two checks, payable to cash,” he said. “One eighteen hundred, and one two hundred.”

The man behind the desk made out the checks. “Yours is the ten percent check?” he asked. Wylie smiled.

“I think you’re a heel,” said the exec, and handed the papers over.

At the door, Wylie tipped his hat and grinned. “Thank you very much, sir,” he said. He went and found Drecksall and gave him his check. “Go buy yourself some clothes,” he said. Drecksall looked at it and gasped.

“Two hundred dollars?”

Wylie nodded. “You’re hired. Let’s get out of here.”

That was only the beginning. Wylie knew an amazing number of people, and before the year was out, Drecksall was nationally known. Money poured in, and, as Wylie was shrewd as well as slick, he saw to it that Drecksall got plenty. Since there was so much always on hand, Drecksall never questioned the cut that Wylie took, and Wylie was remarkably secretive about where he put his own money.

And one other thing of importance happened.

One afternoon Drecksall hurried home to the apartment he shared with Wylie in Safrisco. It was a quietly elaborate place, and it included the one thing Drecksall demanded—a totally soundproofed practice room. Flinging open the door, Drecksall was halfway across the sumptuous living room before he quite realized that on entering he had seen someone else in the room. He swung around, staring.

“Hello,” said Gretel. She set down her drink and swung her feet off the couch. “Remember me?”

Drecksall nodded silently, watching her, stripping gloves off his hands.

“You’re changed,” he said after a bit, looking at her clothes, her hair.

“I should be.” She smiled vapidly. “I’m married.”

“Oh.” It penetrated slowly. “Who to?”

“Pascal.”

“He—he changed you?”

Gretel’s bird-brain manufactured a bird’s laugh. “Sure.”

“Good God,” whispered Drecksall in disgust. He went into his room and closed the door. He had just begun to hate Wylie.

Gretel picked up her drink again. “He’s still crazy,” she said.

In nearly all things Vernon Drecksall was as reasonably sane as the rest of us; but he was a monomaniac, and he could hardly be blamed for assuming the things he did. He and his odd conception of Gretel were made for each other. He was the form-fitting husk for his vision of her, and she had filled it completely. She could never do so again, because so much of that vision was composed of sunset gold and purple shadow and that unforgettable tinge of pink when the light shone through her nostril. He could not be expected to understand that. He only knew that the vision didn’t fit any more; that something had happened to change her from that utter perfection. And he had her own word for it that Pascal Wylie was that thing. He slumped into the most driving kind of misery. He couldn’t see that there was anything he could do about it except to go ahead with his building. Some day he would have her back. Some day she would emerge from his
violin in a great bubble of melody which would settle before him, open up and reveal her there as she had been on that summer evening. And she would be his. Toward that iridescent ideal, he strove. Hour upon hour, alone in his soundproofed cell, he wrought the Largo. Sometimes he was rewarded by sustained flashes of completion. He had a phrase for her hair, a swift run for her strange eyes as she turned her head, a dazzling contrapuntal passage for the sound of her voice. Each little detail that was mastered was carefully scored, and he would play them jealously now and again, seeing his visions, spurring himself on to represent the duller notes which represented the more prosaic part of the picture—the window frame behind her, the scratched surface of the old Hammond organ, the crack at the side of her shoe.

During the war, and the ruinous period afterward, he was glad that there was no longer any time for concerts or broadcasts or public appearances, for it left him time to work. Deep in the heart of a half-ruined hotel he labored by candlelight, while the three great counter-revolutions rolled and swirled around his little citadel of silence. Twice he saw Pascal Wylie in a gibbering state of fear; both times he had thrown him bodily out of his practice-room, ignoring his pleading and his warning that they were all going to be shot. Wylie was in politics up to his ears and over, though fortunately for him he had stayed in the background and let dollars speak for him. When it was all over and the exhausted world began to build again, Drecksall was possibly the only man alive who neither knew nor cared what had happened. He had been touched by it too; his investments were completely wiped out, but that meant nothing to him. He was certain that there would be more, and he was right. The Great Change was on, and with the nation’s rebirth there was plenty for such as he.

And so the years swept by him as had the violence of war and revolution and renascence. Time left him alone, and it was with something of a shock that Wylie, during that rocky period, realized that the strange creature was the only solid, unchanging thing in the universe. Gretel changed by the day, for hers was the scintillant peasant beauty that fades early. She gave every promise of finally occupying some chimney-corner until she grew into a gargoyle and became
part of the mantel. Wylie cared for her casually from force of habit, and bent his efforts to rebuilding his fortune. And Drecksall played.