Droozle | Page 3

us talking and you know we mean it. No more writing until we reach an agreement--or else!"
Droozle quit writing at once. While the girl and the young artist watched anxiously, Droozle first wandered about uncertainly for a few minutes and then curled up on a newspaper and went to sleep.
He slept all evening.
* * * * *
"He has beaten us again," Jean Lanni told Judy Stokes resignedly when she arrived at his studio the following evening. He watched Droozle fascinatedly as the snake moved his restless tail over the margins of newspapers spread on the floor. "He doesn't know yet that I know. I discovered the fraud only by the merest accident."
"He isn't writing?" she asked, perusing the newspapers for signs of Droozle's elegant script.
"He most certainly is."
"Where?"
"Look at him!" Jean exclaimed, ignoring her question. "He's doing it again!"
Droozle had ceased wriggling for the moment and lay there shaking violently, as though he had malaria. Then the paroxysm passed and he took up his restless movements again.
"The poor genius," mourned Judy. "He must be sick with frustration."
"Sick, my eye! That snake has learned to centrifuge part of his blood while it is in his body, so that the hemoglobin is separated out. The result is--invisible ink!"
"Why, I'll tell that Droozle off!" raved Judy. "Here I sat feeling sorry for the little crumb!"
Droozle did not mind. While she ranted, he brazenly began writing in visible ink once more.
"How did you catch him at it?" she asked.
"I used a piece of his newspaper to pick up a hot saw blade. The heat turned the invisible ink brown."
"Droozle," said the girl passionately, looking down at the writer, "you know your master is in great need of funds. Where is your sense of loyalty and self-sacrifice for the one who has cared for you?"
Droozle wrote poetically, "Is there Joy or any other good thing in Abnegation? Is there Beauty in Sacrifice? What Handsome purpose do these serve a being in his race with Time? His Days will soon be spent and they will come no more; thus my Criterion: Is This the most Joy gathering, Awareness touching, Beauty sensing act of which he is capable? None other is worthy of his time!"
"Men are not so selfish," objected Jean.
"I am not a man," wrote Droozle simply.
Jean turned staunchly to the girl. "Judy, he has convinced me. I have been wrong about him. From now on he can write whatever he likes!"
"Good-by to our hopes then?"
"For the present, yes," assented Jean stoically, as he brought fresh sheets of paper from his desk for Droozle. "My landscapes might begin to sell after a while," he added without conviction.
"Rotten little crumb," Judy fumed, glaring balefully at the snake. But Droozle wrote serenely on, his ruby eyes glowing enigmatically.
Jean interposed magnanimously, "I see now that I have been inexcusably selfish with Droozle. I've kept him cooped up here, not wanting to bother with him while I was out on my painting trips. True, he was busy writing. But most of his knowledge of Earth has come from books; he can't write classics about living things unless he sees living things."
* * * * *
As she picked up his trend of thought, Judy's face lost its resentful expression, and something like seraphic righteousness spread over it. "I see what you mean. Just how did you plan to make up for this shut-in feeling that poor Droozle must have been suffering so much from for all these years?"
"Oh, Judy, I'm so glad you asked me!" He threw wide his arms to the world. "Out into the wind and the rain we shall go, and there I will draw my pictures while he observes; then into the roaring, brawling taverns we shall go, where life thrives in all its abundance. I've been robbing him by shutting him up here."
"Jean, look at Droozle," the girl exclaimed, pointing. "He has stopped in the middle of a page and is starting on a fresh one."
Droozle wrote, "Please not out into the wind and the rain. Please not into the roaring, brawling taverns where life thrives in all its abundance. I loathe shudder and tilt."
"Loathing is no reason to turn away from reality, Droozle," admonished the artist. "Things are not nearly so bad as they used to be anyway. In all justice, shudder and tilt requires far less body-English than its ancestor, rock and roll."
Droozle argued carefully, "You will recall I heard some of it once when you took me into a particularly dirty bar over in the west end of town. I feel, as a result, that I have observed this type of data to the extent that I can write of it competently without further study."
"Oh, but that was months ago," enthused Jean. "The tunes have all changed by now. New pows appear on