De Meister said menacingly, 'It would be better for you if the de Meister mysteries continue. Do you understand?'
Graham recovered and summoned a feeble indignation. 'Now, wait a while. You're getting out of hand. Remember: in a way, I'm your father. That's right. Your mental father. You can't hand me ultimatums or make threats. It isn't filial. It's lacking in the proper respect and love.'
'And another thing.' said de Meister, unmoved. 'We've got to straighten out this business of Letitia Reynolds. It's gettin' deucedly borin', y'know.'
'Now you're getting silly. My love scenes have been widely heralded as miracles of tenderness and sentiment not found in one murder mystery out of a thousand. - Wait, I'll get you a few reviews. I don't mind your attempts to dictate my actions so much, but I'm damned if you'll criticize my writing.'
'Forget the reviews. Tenderness and all that rot is what I don't want. I've been driftin' after the fair lady for five volumes now, and behavin' the most insufferable ass. This has got to stop.'
'In what way?'
'I've got to marry her in your present story. Either that, or make her a good, respectable mistress. And you'll have to stop making me so damned Victorian and gentlemanly towards ladies. I'm only human, old man.'
'Impossible!' said Graham, 'and that includes your last remark.'
De Meister grew severe. 'Really, old chap, for an author, you display the most appallio' lack of concern for the well-bein' of a character who has supported you for a good many years.'
Graham choked eloquently. 'Supported me? In other words, you think I couldn't sell real novels, hey? Well, I'll show you. I wouldn't write another de Meister story for a million dollars. Not even for a fifty percent royalty and all television rights. How's that?'
De Meister frowned and uttered those words that had been the sound of doom to so many criminals: 'We shall see, but yon are not yet done with me.'
With firmly jutting jaw, he vanished.
Graham's twisted face straightened out, and slowly - very slowly - he brought his hands up to his cranium and felt carefully.
For the first time in a long and reasonably ribald mental life, he felt that his enemies were right and that a good dry cleaning would not hurt his mind at all.
The things that existed in it!
Graham Dorn shoved the doorbell with his elbow a second time. He distinctly remembered her saying she would be home at eight.
The peep-hole shoved open. 'Hello!'
'Hello!'
Silence!
Graham said plaintively, 'It's raining outside. Can't I come in to dry?'
'I don't know. Are we engaged, Mr. Dorn?'
'If I'm not,' was the stiff reply, 'then I've been turning down the frenzied advances of a hundred passion-stricken girls -beautiful ones, all of them - for no apparent reason.'
'Yesterday, you said -'
'Ah, but who listens to what I say? I'm just quaint that way. Look, I brought you posies.' He flourished roses before the peep-hole.
June opened the door. 'Roses! How plebeian. Come in, cookie, and sully the sofa. Whoa, whoa, before you move a step, what have you got under the other arm? Not the manuscript of Death on the Third Deck?'
'Correct. Not that excrescence of a manuscript. This is something different.'
June's tone chilled. 'That isn't your precious novel, is it?'
Graham flung his head up, 'How did you know about it?'
'You slobbered the plot all over me at MacDunlap's silver anniversary party.'
'I did not. I couldn't unless I were drunk.'
'Oh, but you were. Stinking is the term. And on two cocktails too.'
'Well, if I was drunk, I couldn't have told you the right plot.'
'Is the setting a coal-mine district?'
'-Uh-yes.'
'And are the people concerned real, earthy, unartificial, down-to-earth characters, speaking and thinking just like you and me? Is it a story of basic economic forces? Are the human characters lifted up and thrown down and whirled around, all at the mercy of the coal mine and mechanized industry of today?'
'-Uh-yes.'
She nodded her head retrospectively. 'I remember distinctly. First, you got drunk and were sick. Then you got better, and told me the first few chapters. Then I got sick.'
She approached the glowering author. 'Graham.' She leant her golden head upon his shoulder and cooed softly. 'Why don't you continue with the de Meister stories? You get such pretty checks out of them.'
Graham writhed out of her grasp. 'You are a mercenary wretch, incapable of understanding an author's soul. You may consider our engagement broken.'
He sat down hard on the sofa, and folded his arms. 'Unless you will consent to read the script of my novel and give me the usual story analysis.'
'May I give you my analysis of Death on the Third Deck first?'
'No.'
'Good! In the first place, your love interest is becoming sickening.'
'It is not.' Graham pointed his finger indignantly. 'It breathes a sweet and sentimental fragrance, as of an older day. I've got the review here that says it.' He fumbled in his wallet.
'Oh, bullfeathers. Are you going to start quoting that guy in the Pillsboro (Okla.) Clarion? He's probably your second cousin. You know that your last two novels were completely below par in royalties. And Third Deck isn't even being sold.'
'So much the better - Ow!' He rubbed his head violently. 'What did you do that for?'
'Because the only place I could hit as hard as I wanted to, without disabling you, was your head. Listen! The public is tired of your corny Letitia Reynolds. Why don't you let her soak her "gleaming golden crown of hair" in kerosene and get familiar with a match?'
'But June, that character is drawn from life. From you!'
'Graham Dorn! I am not here to listen to insults. The mystery market today is swinging toward action and hot, honest love and you're still in the sweet, sentimental stickiness of five years ago.'
'But that's Reginald de Meister's character.'
'Well, change his character. Listen! You introduce Sancha Rodriguez. That's fine. I approve of her. She's Mexican, flaming, passionate, sultry and in love with him. So what do you do? First he behaves the impeccable gentleman, and then you kill her off in the middle of the story.'
'Hmm, I see - You really think it would improve things to have de Meister forget himself. A kiss or so -'
June clenched her lovely teeth and her lovely fists. 'Oh, darling, how glad I am love is blind! If it ever peeked one tiny little bit, I couldn't stand it. Look, you squirrel's blue plate special, you're going to have de Meister and Rodriguez fall in love. They're going to have an affair through the entire book and you can put your horrible Letitia into a nunnery. She would probably be happier there from the way you make her sound.'
'That's all you know about it, my sweet. It so happens that Reginald de Meister is in love wifh Letitia Reynolds and wants her, not this Rodriguez person.'
'And what makes you think that?'
'He told me so.'
'Who told you so?'
'Reginald de Meister.'
'What Reginald de Meister?'
'My Reginald de Meister.'
'What do you mean, your Reginald de Meister?'
'My character, Reginald de Meister.'
June got up, indulged in some deep-breathing and then said in a very calm voice, 'Let's start all over.'
She disappeared for a moment and returned with an aspirin. 'Your Reginald de Meister, from your books, told you, in person, he was in love with Letitia Reynolds?'
'That's right.'
June swallowed the aspirin.
'Well, I'll explain, June, the way he explained it to me. All characters really exist - at least, in the minds of the authors. But when people really begin to believe in them, they begin to exist in reality, because what people believe in, is, so far as they're concerned, and what is existence anyway?'
June's lips trembled. 'Oh, Gramie, please don't. Mother will never let me marry you if they put you in an asylum.'
'Don't call me Gramie, June, for God's sake. I tell you he was there, trying to tell me what to write and how to write it. He was almost as bad as you. Aw, come on, Baby, don't cry.'
'I can't help it. I always thought you were crazy, but I never thought you were crazy!'
'All right, what's the difference? Let's not talk about it any more. I'm never going to write another mystery novel. After all' - (he indulged in a bit of indignation) - 'when it gets so that my own character - my own character - tries to tell me what to do, it's going too far.'
June looked over her handkerchief. 'How do you know it was really de Meister?'
'Oh, golly. As soon as he tapped his Turkish cigarette on the back of his hand and started dropping g's like snowflakes in a blizzard, I knew the worst had come.'
The telephone rang. June leaped up. 'Don't answer, Graham. It's probably from the asylum. I'll tell them you're not here. Hello. Hello. Oh, Mr. MacDunlap.' She heaved a sigh of relief, then covered the mouthpiece and whispered hoarsely, 'It might be a trap.'
'Hello, Mr. MacDunlap!... No, he's not here...Yes, I
think I can get in touch with him...At Martin's tomorrow,
noon... I'll tell him... With who?... With who???' She hung up suddenly.
'Graham, you're to lunch with MacDunlap tomorrow,'
'At his expense! Only at his expense! '
Her great blue eyes got greater and bluer, 'And Reginald de Meister is to dine with you."
'What Reginald de Meister?'
'Your Reginald de Meister.'
'My Reg-'
'Oh, Gramie, don't.' Her eyes misted, 'Don't you see, Gramie, now they'll put us both in an insane asylum - and Mr. MacDunlap, too. And they'll probably put us all in the same padded cell. Oh, Gramie, three is such a dreadful crowd.'
And her face crumpled into tears.
Grew S. MacDunlap (that the S. stands for 'Some' is a vile untruth spread by his enemies) was alone at the table when Graham Dorn entered. Out of this fact, Graham extracted a few fleeting drops of pleasure.
It was not so much, you understand, the presence of MacDunlap that did it, as the absence of de Meister.
MacDunlap looked at him over his spectacles and swallowed a liver pill, his favorite sweetmeat.
'Aha. You're here. What is this corny joke you're putting over on me? You had no right to mix me up with a person like de Meister without warning me he was real. I might have taken precautions. I could have hired a bodyguard. I could have bought a revolver.'
'He's not real. God damn it! Half of him was your idea.'
That,' returned MacDunlap with heat, 'is libel. And what do you mean, he's not real? When he introduced himself, I took three liver pills at once and he didn't disappear. Do you know what three pills are? Three pills, the kind I've got (the doctor should only drop dead), could make an elephant disappear - if he weren't real. I know.'
Graham said wearily, 'Just the same, he exists only in my mind.'
'In your mind, I know he exists. Your mind should be investigated by the Pure Food and Drugs Act.'
The several polite rejoinders that occurred simultaneously to Graham were dismissed almost immediately as containing too great a proportion of pithy Anglo-Saxon expletives. After all -ha, ha - a publisher is a publisher however Anglo-Saxony he may be.
Graham said, 'The question arises, then, how we're to get rid of de Meister.'
'Get rid of de Meister?' MacDunlap jerked the glasses off his nose in his sudden start, and caught them in one hand. His voice thickened with emotion. 'Who wants to get rid of him?'