“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
He appeared to find this an especially appetizing detail, and repeated the couplet, laying his hot fingers on Royal’s wrist.
The boy’s second sight had been caught napping during that recitation, but at the touch, sprang up, alert.
“Royal child,” she whispered, “quick, quick! Whatever are you about? Can’t you see that this wretched actor-man is far uncleaner and viler than anything you observed, with fearful curiosity, in the Polish boarding-house?”
And when Royal saw those fat fingers on his wrist, they looked to him like worms, and he wanted to be gone. But he wanted to be a man of the world, too, if a poet may; one who would needlessly insult no passer-by.
“Hot stuff, eh,” he remarked carelessly as he rose from the pine leaves. It seemed to him an appropriate thing to say about a funeral pyre found in the classics. The man had dropped the book; the boy swooped easily down, Discobolus-like, and swept it to safety within his pocket. “Well, I’m off! Date down below. Afraid I’m late, as it is.” His eyes were appalled by the ferocious hunger of the eyes they met; the hunger, the anger, the fatigue, the despair. Had he but known in his own young body and soul just what these things meant, and just how horribly they were gnawing that man’s vitals, he would have stayed, in common human kindness. But he could not know. Besides, his second sight had him cannily in her grip, and with all her might and main was pushing him straight home. Curiously enough, unaware as he was of “my uncle the psychiatrist’s” worm’s-eye prophecies, he said to himself, using Uncle Tom’s very words, “I started out with the leprecauns, and now perhaps I’m winding up with the lepers!” It gave him a pleased sense of his own individuality, that Fate had arranged it so. It was the sort of thing that didn’t happen to most boys, he thought. Without knowing why, he added to himself, “Just as well, perhaps.” Yet he felt sorry for the tweed-clad flesh down there at his feet. “Whatever’s the matter with the poor fish? Sure there’s something bothering his bean. The Ford, perhaps.”
Whatever it was, he knew he could not stop to set it right. But at any rate, he could offer a sandwich. The law of the road’s hospitality was in his heart. He opened his tin box, and with his inimitable rippling puppy-dog grace, emptied out its contents beside the stranger. The articles thus disclosed had by now attained a composite flavor through close contact within the sun-warmed tin. Royal suddenly knew this, and was sorry. There were the three thick railway sandwiches, the two black cigars, and several bars of chocolate he had bought the day before at the Charlemont five-and-ten, from a radiant, chiffon-clad girl whom he had secretly christened Lalage; for his next poem, of course, after the Amaryllis one was done, oh, quite, quite done. He kept for himself one bar of the chocolate. Its cover had the color of the girl’s warm dark eyes, and so would be a material witness, during his inspiration for the Lalage stanzas.
“Excuse me, but you seem to be a traveller, like myself. I’d be awfully glad if you can use these things.” From his jacket pocket he drew out two ripe peaches, oozing, and these he added to the store. “Cheero!” He loped down the hill, with long, uneasy strides, not really happy until he was far away. His thoughts were confused. “What a dreadful old beast! Actor, of course, probably screen. Face seemed familiar, too familiar. Some villain, what? Needed the car to make a getaway from something or other.”