“Mr. Fitzstephan says to come right up,” the switchboard boy said.
His apartment was on the sixth floor. He was standing at its door when I got out of the elevator.
“By God,” he said, holding out a lean hand, “it _is_ you!”
“None other.”
He hadn’t changed any. We went into a room where half a dozen bookcases and four tables left little room for anything else. Magazines and books in various languages, papers, clippings, proof sheets, were scattered everywhere–all just as it used to be in his New York rooms.
We sat down, found places for our feet between table-legs, and accounted roughly for our lives since we had last seen one another. He had been in San Francisco for a little more than a year–except, he said, for week-ends, and two months hermiting in the country, finishing a novel. I had been there nearly five years. He liked San Francisco, he said, but wouldn’t oppose any movement to give the West back to the Indians.
“How’s the literary grift go?” I asked.
He looked at me sharply, demanding: “You haven’t been reading me?”
“No. Where’d you get that funny idea?”
“There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who has bought an author for a couple of dollars. I haven’t met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered you a set of my books as a present?” He had always liked to talk that way.
“Yeah. But I never blamed you. You were drunk.”
“On sherry–Elsa Donne’s sherry. Remember Elsa? She showed us a picture she had just finished, and you said it was pretty. Sweet God, wasn’t she furious! You said it so vapidly and sincerely and as if you were so sure that she would like your saying it. Remember? She put us out, but we’d both already got plastered on her sherry. But you weren’t tight enough to take the books.”
“I was afraid I’d read them and understand them,” I explained, “and then you’d have felt insulted,”
A Chinese boy brought us cold white wine.
Fitzstephan said: “I suppose you’re still hounding the unfortunate evil-doer?”
“Yeah. That’s how I happened to locate you. Halstead tells me you know Edgar Leggett.”
A gleam pushed through the sleepiness in his gray eyes, and he sat up a little in his chair, asking: “Leggett’s been up to something?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I didn’t say it. I asked it.” He made himself limp in the chair again, but the gleam didn’t go out of his eyes. “Come on, out with it. Don’t try to be subtle with me, my son; that’s not your style at all. Try it and you’re sunk. Out with it: what’s Leggett been up to?”
“We don’t do it that way,” I said. “You’re a storywriter. I can’t trust you not to build up on what I tell you. I’ll save mine till after you’ve spoken your piece, so yours won’t be twisted to fit mine. How long have you known him?”
“Since shortly after I came here. He’s always interested me. There’s something obscure in him, something dark and inviting. He is, for instance, physically ascetic–neither smoking or drinking, eating meagerly, sleeping, I’m told, only three or four hours a night–but mentally, or spiritually, sensual–does that mean anything to you?–to the point of decadence. You used to think I had an abnormal appetite for the fantastic. You should know him. His friends–no, he hasn’t any–his choice companions are those who have the most outlandish ideas to offer: Marquard and his insane figures that aren’t figures, but the boundaries of areas in space that are the figures; Denbar Curt and his algebraism; the Haldorns and their Holy Grail sect; crazy Laura Joines; Farnham–”
“And you,” I put in, “with explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing. I hope you don’t think any of what you’ve said means anything to me.”
“I remember you now: you were always like that.” He grinned at me, running thin fingers through his sorrel hair. “Tell me what’s up while I try to find one-syllable words for you.”
I asked him if he knew Eric Collinson. He said he did; there was nothing to know about him except that he was engaged to Gabrielle Leggett, that his father was the lumber Collinson, and that Eric was Princeton, stocks and bonds, and hand-ball, a nice boy.