Then she rehearsed the excuses she had offered for Ham's absence, and hoped he'd absent-mindedly contradict her the first time he deigned to speak for himself. That done, one must consider the latest addition to the seraglio.
Clarke detailed the story of the rug and its riddle.
"But who in the world would send you such a gift?" wondered Diane.
"Exactly no one, très chère."
"Unless," Diane pointed out, "it might be one of your lost loves in those Asiatic playgrounds you've never entirely left."
Clarke laughed, but his derision was unconvincing, and Diane knew that he had been deep in the blacknesses of Asian nights; knew that her arrival had been an intrusion, that he was but a friendly stranger, babbling to her, a friendly stranger, of loveliness whose intoxication forced him to speak of it to anyone, even her.
The others were bad enough, with their everlasting song of Bokhara, and Herat of the Hundred Gardens—an unheard song to which Clarke listened, and replied in unspoken syllables; they were bad enough, they, and those monstrous fancies which at times he smilingly expressed with deliberate vagueness, but this yellow witch from Samarcand
Diane knew that more than a rug had emerged from that bale whose burlap winding-sheet still littered the floor.
At last it seemed that she was intruding on a tête-à-tête, eavesdropping on a monologue; so that when Clarke would emerge from his reveries, Diane resented the inevitable thought that he was robbing himself to keep her company. But patience reaches its limit, finally. . . .
She saw it, one night, twinkle and smile through a lustrous haze that played over its surface, smile the slow, curved smile of a carmine-lipped woman through the veils of her mystery; saw Clarke sitting there, eyes shearing the veil and half smiling in return, a devotee in the ecstatic contemplation of a goddess shrouded in altar fumes. . . .
"Ham!"
"Yes," answered Clarke's lips. He had now perfected the trick of having his body act as his proxy.
"Are you taking me to that show tonight?"
"What show?" Clarke the simulacrum stirred lazily in the depths of the cushion-heaped lounge. "The truth of it is, my dear," he resumed after a pause during which some memory of the proposed entertainment must have returned, "truth of it is I'm awfully busy tonight"
"Busy sitting there staring at nothing and sipping Pernod!" flared Diane, the wrath of months flashing forth. Then, as she saw Clarke settle back into the depths: "Listen, once for all; this nonsense has lasted too long. I might as well have married a mummy! Either get that thing out of the house, or I'll leave you to your pious meditations indefinitely"
"What? Good Lord, Diane, what's this?"
"You heard me. You used to be half human, but now you're utterly impossible. And if you can't show me a little attention, I'm leaving here and now. For the past many weeks you've acted like a model for a petrified forest. Ever since that yellow beast"
"Yellow beast?"
"Exactly! That damned rug is driving me crazy"
"Is, or has driven?" suggested Clarke. "Lies there like a beast of prey just ready to wake. And you sit there, night after night, staring at it until you fall asleep in your chair. Does it go, or do I?"
