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It took Mr. Fremley a moment to ungum his eyelids and make out the shape of the woman bending down to place the tray by his rumpled bed.
“What you all talking about down there just now?”
“I’ll come back later and tell you word for word,” said Miss Hillgood. “Eat now. The salad’s fine.” She moved to leave the room.
He said, quickly, “You goin’ to stay?”
She stopped half out the door and tried to trace the expression on his sweating face in the dark. He, in turn, could not see her mouth or eyes. She stood a moment longer, silently, then went on down the stairs.
“She must not’ve heard me,” said Mr. Fremley.
But he knew she had heard.
Miss Hillgood crossed the downstairs lobby to fumble with the locks on the upright leather case.
“I must pay you for my supper.”
“On the house,” said Mr. Terle.
“I must pay,” she said, and opened the case.
There was a sudden flash of gold.
The two men quickened in their chairs. They squinted at the little old woman standing beside the tremendous heart-shaped object which towered above her with its shining columbined pedestal atop which a calm Grecian face with antelope eyes looked serenely at them even as Miss Hillgood looked now.
The two men shot each other the quickest and most startled of glances, as if each had guessed what might happen next. They hurried across the lobby, breathing hard, to sit on the very edge of the hot velvet lounge, wiping their faces with damp handkerchiefs.
Miss Hillgood drew a chair under her, rested the golden harp gently back on her shoulder, and put her hands to the strings.
Mr. Terle took a breath of fiery air and waited.
A desert wind came suddenly along the porch outside, tilting the chairs so they rocked this way and that like boats on a pond at night.
Mr. Fremley’s voice protested from above. “What’s goin’ on down there?”
And then Miss Hillgood moved her hands.
Starting at the arch near her shoulder, she played her fingers out along the simple tapestry of wires toward the blind and beautiful stare of the Greek goddess on her column, and then back. Then for a moment she paused and let the sounds drift up through the baked lobby air and into all the empty rooms.
If Mr. Fremley shouted
, above, no one heard. For Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith were so busy jumping up to stand riven in the shadows, they heard nothing save the storming of their own hearts and the shocked rush of all the air in their lungs. Eyes wide, mouths dropped, in a kind of pure insanity, they stared at the two women there, the blind Muse proud on her golden pillar, and the seated one, gentle eyes closed, her small hands stretched forth on the air.
Like a girl, they both thought wildly, like a little girl putting her hands out a window to feel what? Why, of course, of course!
To feel the rain.
The echo of the first shower vanished down remote causeways and roof drains, away.
Mr. Fremley, above, rose from his bed as if pulled round by his ears.
Miss Hillgood played.
She played and it wasn’t a tune they knew at all, but it was a tune they had heard a thousand times in their long lives, words or not, melody or not. She played and each time her fingers moved, the rain fell pattering through the dark hotel. The rain fell cool at the open windows and the rain rinsed down the baked floor boards of the porch. The rain fell on the roof top and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rusted car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard. It washed the windows and laid the dust and filled the rain barrels and curtained the doors with beaded threads that might part and whisper as you walked through. But more than anything the soft touch and coolness of it fell on Mr. Smith and Mr. Terle. Its gentle weight and pressure moved them down and down until it had seated them again. By its continuous budding and prickling on their faces it made them shut up their eyes and mouths and raise their hands to shield it away. Seated there, they felt their heads tilt slowly back to let the rain fall where it would.
The flash flood lasted a minute, then faded away as the fingers trailed down the loom, let drop a few last bursts and squalls and then stopped.
The last chord hung in the air like a picture taken when lightning strikes and freezes a billion drops of water on their downward flight. Then the lightning went out. The last drops fell through darkness in silence.
