Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust [30]
Somewhere farther up the hill a bird began to sing. He listened. At first the low rich music sounded like water dripping on something hollow, the bottom of a silver pot perhaps, then like a stick dragged slowly over the strings of a harp. He lay quietly, listening.
When the bird grew silent, he made an effort to put Faye out of his mind and began to think about the series of cartoons he was making for his canvas of Los Angeles on fire. He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.
The bird began to sing again. When it stopped, Faye was forgotten and he only wondered if he weren’t exaggerating the importance of the people who come to California to die. Maybe they weren’t really desperate enough to set ‘a single city on fire, let alone the whole country. Maybe they were only the pick of America’s madmen and not at all typical of the rest of the land.
He told himself that it didn’t make any difference because he was an artist, not a prophet. His work would not be judged by the accuracy with which it foretold a future event but by its merit as painting. Nevertheless, he refused to give up the role of Jeremiah. He changed “pick of America’s madmen” to “cream” and felt almost certain that the milk from which it had been skimmed was just as rich in violence. The Angelenos would be first, but their comrades all over the country would follow. There would be civil war.
He was amused by the strong feeling of satisfaction this dire conclusion gave him. Were all prophets of doom and destruction such happy men?
He stood up without trying to answer. When he reached the dirt road at the top of the canyon Faye and the car were gone.
15
“She went to the pictures with that Simpson guy,” Harry told him when he called to see her the next night.
He sat down to wait for her. The old man was very ill and lay on the bed with extreme care as though it were a narrow shelf from which he might fall if he moved.
“What are they making on your lot?” he asked slowly, rolling his eyes toward Tod without budging his head.
“‘Manifest Destiny,’ ‘Sweet and Low Down,’ ‘Waterloo,’ The Great Divide,’ Begging Your…”
“‘The Great Divide’—” Harry said, interrupting eagerly. “I remember that vehicle.”
Tod realized he shouldn’t have got him started, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He had to let him run down like a clock.
“When it opened I was playing the Irving in a little number called ‘Enter Two Gents,’ a trifle, but entertainment, real entertainment. I played a Jew comic, a Ben Welch effect, derby and big pants—’Pat, dey hollered me a chob in de Heagle Laundreh’…’Faith now, Ikey, and did you take it?’…’No, who vants to vash heagles?’ Joe Parvos played straight for me in a cop’s suit. Well, the night ‘The Great Divide’ opened, Joe was laying up with a whisker in the old Fifth Avenue when the stove exploded. It was the broad’s husband who blew the whistle. He was…”
He hadn’t run down. He had stopped and was squeezing his left side with both hands.
Tod leaned over anxiously.
“Some water?”
Harry framed the word “no” with his lips, then groaned skillfully. It was a second-act curtain groan, so phony that Tod had to hide a smile. And yet, the old man’s pallor hadn’t come from a box.
Harry groaned again, modulating from pain to exhaustion, then closed his eyes. Tod saw how skillfully he got the maximum effect out of his agonized profile by using the pillow to set it off. He also noticed that Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly.