Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Oliver nodded. “But—”

  “Let me finish. If Omerie can be forced to vacate before next week, you will accept our offer. Right? Very well. Kara!” She nodded to the young man beside her. He jumped to instant attention, bowed slightly, said, “Yes, Hollia,” and slipped a gloved hand into his coat.

  Madame Hollia took the little object offered on his palm, her gesture as she reached for it almost imperial, as if royal robes swept from her outstretched arm.

  “Here,” she said, “is something that may help us. My dear”—she held it out to Sue—“if you can hide this somewhere about the house, I believe your unwelcome tenants will not trouble you much longer.”

  Sue took the thing curiously. It looked like a tiny silver box, no more than an inch square, indented at the top and with no line to show it could be opened.

  “Wait a minute,” Oliver broke in uneasily. “What is it?”

  “Nothing that will harm anyone, I assure you.”

  “Then what—”

  Madame Hollia’s imperious gesture at one sweep silenced him and commanded Sue forward. “Go on, my dear. Hurry, before Omerie comes back. I can assure you there is no danger to anyone.” Oliver broke in determinedly. “Madame Hollia, I’ll have to know what your plans are. I—”

  “Oh, Oliver, please!” Sue’s fingers closed over the silver cube. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure Madame Hollia knows best. Don’t you want to get those people out?”

  “Of course I do. But I don’t want the house blown up or—Madame Hollia’s deep laughter was indulgent. “Nothing so crude, I promise you, Mr. Wilson. Remember, we want the house! Hurry, my dear.”

  Sue nodded and slipped hastily past Oliver into the hall. Outnumbered, he subsided uneasily. The young man, Hara, tapped a negligent foot and admired the sunlight as they waited. It was an afternoon as perfect as all of May had been, translucent gold, balmy with an edge of chill lingering in the air to point up a perfect contrast with the summer to come. Hara looked around him confidently, like a man paying just tribute to a stage-set provided wholly for himself. He even glanced up at a drone from above and followed the course of a big transcontinental plane half dissolved in golden haze high in the sun. “Quaint,” he murmured in a gratified voice.

  Sue came back and slipped her hand through Oliver’s arm, squeezing excitedly. “There,” she said. “How long will it take, Madame Hollia?”

  “That will depend, my dear. Not very long. Now, Mr. Wilson, one word with you. You live here also, I understand? For your own comfort, take my advice and—”

  Somewhere within the house a door slammed and a clear, high voice rang wordlessly up a rippling scale. Then there was the sound of feet on the stairs, and a single line of song. “Come hider, love, to me—”

  Hara started, almost dropping the red leather box he held.

  “Kleph!” he said in a whisper. “Or Klia. I know they both just came on from Canterbury. But I thought—”

  “Hush.” Madame Hollia’s features composed themselves into an imperious blank. She breathed triumphantly through her nose, drew back upon herself and turned an imposing facade to the door.

  Kleph wore the same softly downy robe Oliver had seen before, except that today it was not white, but a pale, clear blue that gave her tan an apricot flush. She was smiling.

  “Why, Hollia!” Her tone was at its most musical. “I thought I recognized voices from home. How nice to see you. No one knew you were coming to the—” She broke off and glanced at Oliver and then away again. “Hara, too,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  Sue said flatly, “When did you get back?”

  Kleph smiled at her. “You must be the little Miss Johnson. Why, I did not go out at all. I was tired of sight-seeing. I have been napping in my room.”

  Sue drew in her breath in something that just escaped being a disbelieving sniff. A look flashed between the two women, and for an instant held—and that instant was timeless. It was an extraordinary pause in which a great deal of wordless interplay took place in the space of a second.

  Oliver saw the quality of Kleph’s smile at Sue, that same look of quiet confidence he had noticed so often about all of these strange people. He saw Sue’s quick inventory of the other woman, and he saw how Sue squared her shoulders and stood up straight, smoothing down her summer frock over her flat hips so that for an instant she stood posed consciously, looking down on Kleph. It was deliberate. Bewildered, he glanced again at Kleph.

  Kleph’s shoulders sloped softly, her robe was belted to a tiny waist and hung in deep folds over frankly rounded hips. Sue’s was the fashionable figure—but Sue was the first to surrender.

  Kleph’s smile did not falter. But in the silence there was an abrupt reversal of values, based on no more than the measureless quality of Kleph’s confidence in herself, the quiet, assured smile. It was suddenly made very clear that fashion is not a constant. Kleph’s curious, out-of-mode curves without warning became the norm, and Sue was a queer, angular, half-masculine creature beside her.

  Oliver had no idea how it was done. Somehow the authority passed in a breath from one woman to the other. Beauty is almost wholly a matter of fashion; what is beautiful today would have been grotesque a couple of generations ago and will be grotesque a hundred years ahead. It will be worse than grotesque; it will be outmoded and therefore faintly ridiculous.

  Sue was that. Kleph had only to exert her authority to make it clear to everyone on the porch. Kleph was a beauty, suddenly and very convincingly, beautiful in the accepted mode, and Sue was amusingly old-fashioned, an anachronism in her lithe, square-shouldered slimness. She did not belong. She was grotesque among these strangely immaculate people.

  Sue’s collapse was complete. But pride sustained her, and bewilderment. Probably she never did grasp entirely what was wrong. She gave Kleph one glance of burning resentment and when her eyes came back to Oliver there was suspicion in them, and mistrust.

  Looking backward later, Oliver thought that in that moment, for the first time clearly, he began to suspect the truth. But he had no time to ponder it, for after the brief instant of enmity the three people from—elsewhere—began to speak all at once, as if in a belated attempt to cover something they did not want noticed.

  Kleph said, “This beautiful weather—” and Madame Hollia said, “So fortunate to have this house—” and Hara, holding up the red-leather box, said loudest of all, “Cenbe sent you this, Kleph. His latest.”

  Kleph put out both hands for it eagerly, the eiderdown sleeves falling back from her rounded arms. Oliver had a quick glimpse of that mysterious scar before the sleeve fell back, and it seemed to him that there was the faintest trace of a similar scar vanishing into Hara’s cuff as he let his own arm drop.

  “Cenbe!” Kleph cried, her voice high and sweet and delighted. “How wonderful! What period?”

  “From November 1664,” Hara said. “London, of course, though I think there may be some counterpoint from the 1347 November. He hasn’t finished—of course.” He glanced almost nervously at Oliver and Sue. “A wonderful example,” he said quickly. “Marvelous. If you have the taste for it, of course.”

  Madame Hollia shuddered with ponderous delicacy, “That man!” she said. “Fascinating, of course—a great man. But—so advanced!”

  “It takes a connoisseur to appreciate Cenbe’s work fully,” Kleph said in a slightly tart voice. “We all admit that.”

  “Oh yes, we all bow to Cenbe,” Hollia conceded. “I confess the man terrifies me a little, my dear. Do we expect him to join us?”

  “I suppose so,” Kleph said. “If his—work—is not yet finished, then of course. You know Cenbe’s tastes.”

  Hollia and Hara laughed together. “I know when to look for him, then,” Hollia said. She glanced at the staring Oliver and the subdued but angry Sue, and with a commanding effort brought the subject back into line.

  “So fortunate, my dear Kleph, to have this house,” she declared heavily. “I saw a tridi
mensional of it—afterward—and it was still quite perfect. Such a fortunate coincidence. Would you consider parting with your lease, for a consideration? Say, a coronation seat at—”

  “Nothing could buy us, Hollia,” Kleph told her gaily, clasping the red box to her bosom.

  Hollia gave her a cool stare. “You may change your mind, my dear Kleph,” she said pontifically. “There is still time. You can always reach us through Mr. Wilson here. We have rooms up the street in the Montgomery House—nothing like yours, of course, but they will do. For us, they will do.”

  Oliver blinked. The Montgomery House was the most expensive hotel in town. Compared to this collapsing old ruin, it was a palace. There was no understanding these people. Their values seemed to have suffered a complete reversal.

  Madame Hollia moved majestically toward the steps.

  “Very pleasant to see you, my dear,” she said over one well-padded shoulder. “Enjoy your stay. My regards to Omerie and Klia. Mr. Wilson—” she nodded toward the walk. “A word with you.”

  Oliver followed her down toward the street. Madame Hollia paused halfway there and touched his arm.

  “One word of advice,” she said huskily. “You say you sleep here? Move out, young man. Move out before tonight.”

  Oliver was searching in a half-desultory fashion for the hiding place Sue had found for the mysterious silver cube, when the first sounds from above began to drift down the stairwell toward him. Kleph had closed her door, but the house was old and strange qualities in the noise overhead seemed to seep through the woodwork like an almost visible stain.

  It was music, in a way. But much more than music. And it was a terrible sound, the sounds of calamity and of all human reaction to calamity, everything from hysteria to heartbreak, from irrational joy to rationalized acceptance.

  The calamity was—single. The music did not attempt to correlate all human sorrows; it focused sharply upon one and followed the ramifications out and out. Oliver recognized these basics to the sounds in a very brief moment. They were essentials, and they seemed to beat into his brain with the first strains of the music which was so much more than music.

  But when he lifted his head to listen he lost all grasp upon the meaning of the noise and it was sheer medley and confusion. To think of it was to blur it hopelessly in the mind, and he could not recapture that first instant of unreasoning acceptance.

  He went upstairs almost in a daze, hardly knowing what he was doing. He pushed Kleph’s door open. He looked inside—

  What he saw there he could not afterward remember except in a blurring as vague as the blurred ideas the music roused in his brain. Half the room had vanished behind a mist, and the mist was a three-dimensional screen upon which were projected—He had no words for them. He was not even sure if the projections were visual. The mist was spinning with motion and sound, but essentially it was neither sound nor motion that Oliver saw.

  This was a work of art. Oliver knew no name for it. It transcended all art-forms he knew, blended them, and out of the blend produced subtleties his mind could not begin to grasp. Basically, this was the attempt of a master-composer to correlate every essential aspect of a vast human experience into something that could be conveyed in a few moments to every sense at once.

  The shifting visions on the screen were not pictures in themselves, but hints of pictures, subtly selected outlines that plucked at the mind and with one deft touch set whole chords ringing through the memory. Perhaps each beholder reacted differently, since it was in the eye and the mind of the beholder that the truth of the picture lay. No two would be aware of the same symphonic panorama, but each would see essentially the same terrible story unfold.

  Every sense was touched by that deft and merciless genius. Color and shape and motion flickered in the screen, hinting much, evoking unbearable memories deep in the mind; odors floated from the screen and touched the heart of the beholder more poignantly than anything visual could do. The skin crawled sometimes as if to a tangible cold hand laid upon it. The tongue curled with remembered bitterness and remembered sweet.

  It was outrageous. It violated the innermost privacies of a man’s mind, called up secret things long ago walled off behind mental scar tissue, forced its terrible message upon the beholder relentlessly though the mind might threaten to crack beneath the stress of it.

  And yet, in spite of all this vivid awareness, Oliver did not know what calamity the screen portrayed. That it was real, vast, overwhelmingly dreadful he could not doubt. That it had once happened was unmistakable. He caught flashing glimpses of human faces distorted with grief and disease and death—real faces, faces that had once lived and were seen now in the instant of dying. He saw men and women in rich clothing superimposed in panorama upon reeling thousands of ragged folk, great throngs of them swept past the sight in an instant, and he saw that death made no distinction among them.

  He saw lovely women laugh and shake their curls, and the laughter shriek into hysteria and the hysteria into music. He saw one man’s face, over and over—a long, dark, saturnine face, deeply lined, sorrowful, the face of a powerful man wise in worldliness, urbane—and helpless. That face was for awhile a recurring motif, always more tortured, more helpless than before.

  The music broke off in the midst of a rising glide. The mist vanished and the room reappeared before him. The anguished dark face for an instant seemed to Oliver printed everywhere he looked, like after-vision on the eyelids. He knew that face. He had seen it before, not often, but he should know its name—

  “Oliver, Oliver—” Kleph’s sweet voice came out of a fog at him. He was leaning dizzily against the doorpost looking down into her eyes. She, too, had that dazed blankness he must show on his own face. The power of the dreadful symphony still held them both. But even in this confused moment Oliver saw that Kleph had been enjoying the experience.

  He felt sickened to the depths of his mind, dizzy with sickness and revulsion because of the super-imposing of human miseries he had just beheld. But Kleph—only appreciation showed upon her face. To her it had been magnificence, and magnificence only.

  Irrelevantly Oliver remembered the nauseating candies she had enjoyed, the nauseating odors of strange food that drifted sometimes through the hall from her room.

  What was it she had said downstairs a little while ago? Connoisseur, that was it. Only a connoisseur could appreciate work as—as advanced—as the work of someone called Cenbe.

  A whiff of intoxicating sweetness curled past Oliver’s face. Something cool and smooth was pressed into his hand.

  “Oh, Oliver, I am so sorry,” Kleph’s voice murmured contritely.

  “Here, drink the euphoriac and you will feel better. Please drink!”

  The familiar fragrance of the hot sweet tea was on his tongue before he knew he had complied. Its relaxing fumes floated up through his brain and in a moment or two the world felt stable around him again. The room was as it had always been. And Kleph—

  Her eyes were very bright. Sympathy showed in them for him, but for herself she was still brimmed with the high elation of what she had just been experiencing.

  “Come and sit down,” she said gently, tugging at his arm. “I am so sorry—I should not have played that over, where you could hear it. I have no excuse, really. It was only that I forgot what the effect might be on one who had never heard Cenbe’s symphonies before. I was so impatient to see what he had done with . . . with his new subject. I am so very sorry, Oliver!”

  “What was it?” His voice sounded steadier than he had expected. The tea was responsible for that. He sipped again, glad of the consoling euphoria its fragrance brought.

  “A . . . a composite interpretation of . . . oh, Oliver, you know I must not answer questions!”

  “But—”

  “No—drink your tea and forget what it was you saw. Think of other things. Here, we will have music—another kind of music, something gay—”

  She reached for the wall beside the window, and as bef
ore, Oliver saw the broad framed picture of blue water above the bed ripple and grow pale. Through it another scene began to dawn like shapes rising beneath the surface of the sea.

  He had a glimpse of a dark-curtained stage upon which a man in a tight dark tunic and hose moved with a restless, sidelong pace, his hands and face startlingly pale against the black about him. He limped; he had a crooked back and he spoke familiar lines. Oliver had seen John Barrymore once as the Crook-Backed Richard, and it seemed vaguely outrageous to him that any other actor should essay that difficult part. This one he had never seen before, but the man had a fascinatingly smooth manner and his interpretation of the Plantagenet king was quite new and something Shakespeare probably never dreamed of.

  “No,” Kleph said, “not this. Nothing gloomy.” And she put out her hand again. The nameless new Richard faded and there was a swirl of changing pictures and changing voices, all blurred together, before the scene steadied upon a stage-full of dancers in pastel ballet skirts, drifting effortlessly through some complicated pattern of motion. The music that went with it was light and effortless too. The room filled up with the clear, floating melody.

  Oliver set down his cup. He felt much surer of himself now, and he thought the euphoriac had done all it could for him. He didn’t want to blur again mentally. There were things he meant to learn about. Now. He considered how to begin.

  Kleph was watching him, “That Hollia,” she said suddenly. “She wants to buy, the house?”

  Oliver nodded. “She’s offering a lot of money. Sue’s going to be awfully disappointed if—” He hesitated. Perhaps, after all, Sue would not be disappointed. He remembered the little silver cube with the enigmatic function and he wondered if he should mention it to Kleph. But the euphoriac had not reached that level of his brain, and he remembered his duty to Sue and was silent.

  Kleph shook her head, her eyes upon In’s warm with—was it sympathy?

  “Believe me,” she said, “you will not find that—important—after all. I promise you, Oliver.”

  He stared at her. “I wish you’d explain.”