Poet's Pub

by Eric Linklater

  While they discussed and confided so they heard, in snatches, Sir Philip Betts and Jacquetta Telfer talking of fear and their relations with it.

  “Driving at two hundred miles an hour is a sufficient test of courage, I should think.”

  “Not so searching as sailing a small boat across a large sea.”

  “The sea is a rational friendly thing,” she said. “It’s solid enough to support you and mobile enough to offer you a choice of direction when it begins to get up on end. Even the wind you can learn to know, if you’re not a fool. But people in a crowd are never rational and you can never tell what they will do. I’m frightened of crowds.”

  “And I’m frightened of the sea,” said Betts.

  “I should like to write a revue,” said the professor. “Do you think that London would be amused by a chorus of German pedants and jokes about textual criticism? I suppose not. And yet that is what I would inevitably fall into. Though I’m sick of scholarship and the graveyard way we go to work explaining what Shakespeare meant in places where all he meant, probably, was a billiard-room joke.”

  “Perhaps revues ought to be more serious. Fewer legs and more heads, I mean. Will you collaborate in our next one?”

  They heard Betts’s voice again, though it was pitched in an unfamiliar tone. “I was in a motorboat at Zeebrugge,” he said. “We got hit and it sank under us. I nearly drowned. Pure funk, because I swim rather well.”

  “And I went into hysterics in a crowd in one of the Tubes during an air raid,” Jacquetta answered, with an uneasy laugh.

  Mr. Wesson, sitting in a corner, read a book, a Brobdingnagian book a foot broad and a foot-and-a-half tall, which he held prominently before him in an uncomfortable position.

  Mr. van Buren had discovered that he knew Mrs. Mandeville’s first husband, Jean Forbes’s father.

  “Why, I met him two years ago in New York, in one of our business clubs. He’d been lecturing on Greco-Buddhist monuments at Taxila, in Northern India, and we invited him to have luncheon with us the following day. That was one of the most informative lectures I have ever heard. Scholarly and yet alive. I remember him perfectly. It was two years ago last February.”

  “It’s five years, I think, since I saw him.”

  “Well, now, I know him better than you do,” and van Buren chuckled wickedly.

  “It must be such fun making a revue,” said the professor.

  “It’s damned hard work,” said Jean Forbes.

  Diana Waterhouse, looking puzzled but defiant, proclaimed in a shrill young voice, “but I like Tennyson, Mr. Telfer. He makes such beautiful sounds. Like ‘The mellow ousel fluting in the elm.’”

  “Fluting in my back-garden!” roared Telfer in a sudden passion, and stamped out of the room.

  “Come and sit beside me, dear,” said Mrs. Waterhouse, and Diana, disconsolately flopping into a chair, answered, “I suppose he’s beastly clever, but I know what I like just as well as anybody else.”

  “Of course you do,” agreed Mrs. Waterhouse. “But be quiet now. Your father’s talking.”

  Colonel Waterhouse bit his lip. “A Turanian type,” he repeated.

  “Did you see their women?” Angela Scrabster asked. “Even I found it difficult to get sitters among the real aristocrats. There are some left in China, you know. The thousand—ancestors, exquisitely painted, perfectly artificial, utterly composed, human-flower ones. I got two or three. But I was lucky.”

  “So was I,” said the colonel, looking knowing and reminiscent.

  “When was that?” asked his wife. “Do tell us about it.”

  “It wouldn’t interest you,” replied the colonel.

  “Nothing can come of criticism,” said Professor Benbow. “The first critic was the eunuch.” And immediately he was annoyed with himself for saying that, for though he deprecated a mealy mouth in others he himself habitually refrained from discussing events connected with sex—even events so remotely connected as a eunuch—in the presence of young women.

  Mr. Wesson turned a page of the large-paper folio of Matthew Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions, and glanced round to see who noticed him.

  And meanwhile, in the reconstructed buttery, Lady Porlet talked with Holly the barman.

  It was one of Lady Porlet’s frailties that she could never remember her way about a strange house, and coming in from the bowling-green, where she had been dozing in a deck-chair, she took the wrong turning and found herself in a room which she had not seen before. A curiously furnished room, but one which struck her unfamiliar eyes as being strangely attractive. Something like an immense sideboard was the principal piece of furniture in it; a sideboard big enough to hold a man, scores of glasses, and ever so many quaintly shaped, multi-coloured bottles which were reflected dimly and grotesquely in polished wood, brightly and insistently in a background of mirror-glass.

  “Dear me,” said Lady Porlet.

  The man in the sideboard looked up; his attention had been fixed on two glasses which stood on the bar in front of him, one containing a light blue, the other a dark blue liquid.

  “Yes, madam,” he said a little absently.

  “What a prettily furnished room,” said Lady Porlet, and looked about her with a vague smile.

  “This is the American Bar,” Holly answered stolidly.

  “Really,” said Lady Porlet. “My nephew of course is a great traveller, but I know very little about foreign countries myself. Such curious chairs!”

  With some difficulty she balanced herself on one of the tall stools in front of the bar and tentatively, as if for feeling for stirrups, set her feet on a convenient brass rail.

  “So welcome a change from those relaxing bath-chairs beside the bowling green. Deck-chairs, I mean, though they’re both bad for your spine. This is quite bracing. When I was a girl we all sat with straight backs.”

  “Yes, madam,” said Holly. He stood as far away as he could and looked at Lady Porlet with some suspicion. His success with the blue cocktails had undermined his customary discretion and he had been tasting, first light blue, then dark blue, from early morning. All day the wonder of the artist had flooded his soul. He had invented, and the invention was greater than he. Like a poet whose tortured wit suddenly, inexplicably flowers; like a gardener when a crocus thrusts unheralded its golden spear above the snow; like a child who finds a sea-cave full of magic green—like everyone who has discovered somehow that life is more than living, Holly was slightly dazzled. He wanted to explain his feeling to himself and he could not. Only words could do that—perhaps not even words—and Holly, in spite of his cigarette pictures, knew so few words that would translate rapture. The cloudy matrix of a line like “Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” was in his brain. Perhaps another cocktail would clear away the fog and show his meaning crystal-clear. The lively smoothness of the one called Cambridge, the nobler vivacity of that named Oxford, flowed through his veins and shot into his mind. Then he would look out of the window at sunny trees and deep emerald grass and feel—though he did not make this clear to himself—that he wanted to write “Melodious birds sing madrigals” with a diamond on the glass.…

  But this mood was insecurely poised; he was easily upset and readily became suspicious. Earlier in the day he had been questioned, too closely he thought, about his secret formula, and the incident had left a legacy of general distrust. Moreover he had a feeling—again it was too hazy to put into words, for he had drunk a lot of cocktails since morning—that there was something strange about Lady Porlet. Never before had he seen anyone quite like her in his bar. She was out of place, and what is out of place is frightening if you think of it in a certain way. He was startled and yet curious, as an Esquimaux family might be who saw an ant-eater come into their igloo. And he backed to the farthest wall.

  “How very pretty,” said Lady Porlet, and picked up one of the cocktails. She held it to the light and a breath of its fragrance blew into her nostrils.

  “Are they for drin
king?” she asked.

  “Of course they are,” replied Holly indignantly.

  “I thought perhaps they were like those bottles which one used to see in chemists’ shops, that, although they made such a pleasant impression, were not really palatable.” Lady Porlet tasted her cocktail.

  “Dear me,” she said, “it reminds me of the elderberry wine which an old housekeeper of mine used to make. She died from heart-failure while she was looking at some pictures of King Edward’s coronation.”

  “That was the ninth of August, 1902,” said Holly.

  “So it was,” Lady Porlet confirmed, and finished her cocktail. “You seem to be a well-read man,” she said.

  “Ah!” said Holly. His suspicions of Lady Porlet had disappeared and he burned with a dark flame of pride. He wanted to show off. He knew a lot about English constitutional history, and what is the use of knowledge unless you can display it? He began: “William the Conqueror, 1066—he was crowned on Christmas Day—to the 9th September, 1087. William Rufus, or William the Second, 1087 to 1100.…”

  He frowned and taxed his memory.

  “William the Third,” prompted Lady Porlet kindly.

  “No ma’am,” said Holly loudly. “He wasn’t born. He wasn’t born for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

  “How very strange,” said Lady Porlet.

  Holly reached down into some recess behind the bar and brought from it a thick album on to whose dark green pages were pasted, obverse and reverse side by side, an immense number of cigarette pictures. He rapidly turned the leaves, giving a tantalizing glimpse of foreign flags, wild animals, household devices, famous footballers, and the English kings, until he came to what he wanted.

  “There you are, ma’am,” he proclaimed. “1689 to 1702, though rightly speaking he wasn’t William the Third so much as William and Mary.”

  “What a good idea,” said Lady Porlet, and read the account, necessarily brief, of William the Dutchman and his charitable, unhappy wife.

  “And where do you get all these pictures?” she asked.

  “There’s one in every packet of cigarettes that you buy, ma’am.”

  “I must ask my husband what he does with those out of his cigar-boxes.”

  Holly looked doubtful. He took away the empty glass and Lady Porlet, curiously examining a portrait gallery of celebrated criminals, picked up the remaining full one.

  “I must get the recipe for this,” she said, delicately sipping.

  “No ma’am,” said Holly, defiant in a moment. “It’s a secret process and I won’t part with it. There’s been others before you trying to get it and I said no to her as I say no to you. The red-haired hussy! Coming in here as bold as brass and putting her elbows on the bar and trying to seduce me like—like Cleopatra did to Antony.”

  “She reigned in Egypt in the century before Christ and is said to have been an expert poisoner, testing her decoctions on her household slaves,” said Lady Porlet, who happened to have turned the page to Notorious Women, a series of fifty. “You were quite right, of course, in your refusal. I have scant patience with girls of to-day. And now I must go.”

  She got down from her stool gravely and stood for a moment thinking. “My face feels quite warm. I believe I got sunburnt sitting beside the bowling-green this afternoon.”

  At the door she hesitated for a moment, and then turning asked, “I wonder if I might borrow that interesting album of yours to look at this evening? I tried to find something amusing in the library, but books are so long, and they all had such meaningless titles.”

  “Why, certainly, ma’am,” said Holly. “I’m glad you like them. They’ve done a lot for me, those pictures, and I wouldn’t lend them to anyone who asked. But you seem to appreciate them as much as I do myself.”

  He held the album across the bar, and Lady Porlet took it with a smile which, for all her stupidity, was entirely charming. She left the buttery humming a little tune to herself.

  CHAPTER VI

  Out of these several circumstances it came about that Quentin Cotton was not alone in a feeling of embarrassment when he came down to dinner. It was, he told himself, entirely foolish and quite wrong to be embarrassed by the recollection of his afternoon with Nelly Bly. Nothing had happened to incur the censure of even the most complex-ridden moralist. He had stopped his car two hundred yards from “The Pelican.” Nelly Bly had descended, calm and decorous. He, too, had got out, taken off his hat, hoped that he might see her again, watched her walk down the street. Everything to a spectator was calm and proper. And yet Nelly Bly was a maid in his friend’s pub—or his mother’s pub, it really didn’t matter—and he had stopped his car two hundred yards from its door. At Nelly Bly’s request, naturally. She was a charming girl—or woman; a charming woman with pleasant manners and an interesting history; a woman—no, a girl, damn it, a girl down on her luck and for want of any specialized ability a maid in his mother’s pub. Or Saturday’s pub. There was no reason for him to be embarrassed because he had been democratic—and cosmopolitan, of course—and yet when he met Saturday and some of his fellow-guests he did feel self-conscious; as any well brought-up young Englishman would who had lately been cosmopolitan and democratic.

  But he was not alone in his self-consciousness. Professor Benbow, under the harsh chastisement of shaving, remembered that in spite of one of his favourite self-denying ordinances he had spoken about sex to Miss Forbes; or at any rate on the principle of lucus a non lucendo he had reminded her of sex, to which he was well aware young women’s thoughts were already too warmly attached. And the professor was annoyed with himself.

  Sir Philip Betts, in the revealing warmth of his bath, and Jacquetta Telfer in hers, petulantly said to themselves, “Now, why the devil did I tell him—or her—that I once lost my head through fear of drowning—or of being crushed to death in a Tube—when I meant to forget it myself, and certainly never intended to speak of it to an almost utter stranger?” They were irate at their frailty. And Colonel Waterhouse remembered that, through wanting to talk about himself to Angela Scrabster, he had wakened an alert little suspicion in his wife’s brain. And Sigismund Telfer cursed himself for having lost his temper, which he was prone to do and which he had sworn a thousand times not to do; though Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites, he felt privately, were enough to rouse indignation in any man. And Diana Waterhouse was angry and sad because she had wanted to let Sigismund Telfer, whom she admired, know that she too had fine feelings for literature; an ambition in which, she realized, she had signally failed. And Mr. Æsop Wesson bit his lip because even with a work so heavy to hold—it weighed nine or ten pounds—as Matthew Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions, he had not noticeably imprinted himself on the general consciousness as an ardent book-collector.

  These little scratches and sorenesses, slight though they were, made a lot of fellow-sufferers for Quentin, and so during dinner there was more than the usual amount of vivacity and conscious gaiety. For as more than half the visitors under “The Pelican” had shown to their neighbours some tiny chink in their everyday armour of composure, so more than half of them determined to prove themselves full of a most happy assurance. And the others responded readily enough. Lady Porlet indeed—who was quite unconscious of any lapse, and looking forward to an unusually pleasant evening with Holly’s cigarette-picture album—repeated a favourite anecdote of her father’s which evoked more laughter than she had expected, for she was the only one who did not see the point of it. And later in the evening Mrs. Mandeville was persuaded to a piano, where she played many things in many manners. And her daughter sang. Jean Forbes’s voice had that peculiar quality of huskiness which is to some people more attractive than the perfect clarity of bell metal or a Wagner soprano. By-and-by other people sang, some of them badly, but all with spirit.

  Saturday, moving among his guests, saw all this, and realized the astonishing thing that was happening. In the warmth of “The Pelican” the cold rind of individual reserve was slowly thawing. E
nglish people were becoming friendly, simple and genial, with other English people whom they had known no more than a day, or two days, or three days. Somehow or other the social temperature had reached melting-point. And Saturday was filled with new confidence in a scheme which he had secretly entertained for a long time. But he wanted quietness in which to consider it.

  Joan Benbow looked up perhaps a little reproachfully as he passed her, but when she saw the expression on his face reproach left her mind and she understood. Or thought she understood. “He is going to write poetry,” she said to herself and felt, what she had so often felt as a child, that the purpose of God’s creatures was unnecessarily obscure.

  Saturday shut the door of his sitting-room, took a book from his shelves, and began to read. It was not a poetry-book.

  “To bake the best marrow-bone pie, after you have mixt the crusts of the best sort of pastes, and raised the coffin in such manner as you please,” he read. He went deeper into it and found “a layer of candied Eringo-root mixt very thicke with the slices of dates,” which was covered with “marrow, currants, great raisins, sugar, cynamon, and dates, with a few damaske prunes.” Into that coffin—a dozen other things were richly buried there—white wine, rose-water and cinnamon must be poured “as long as it will receive it.”

  “That might do,” said Saturday thoughtfully, and slowly turned the yellowish pages, considering in their turn an oyster-pie, sauce for a green goose, carbonadoes, a warden pie, a Florentine, Ipocras, Jumbals, Leach Lumbard, marchpane, suckets and kickshawses.

  He took a sheet of paper and began to sketch out a menu.

  Some of these dishes he had already tried. Once he had said to Lady Mercy, “We’re getting broader-minded but narrower-stomached. We read Chinese poetry side by side with American poetry, consider Hellenism and Industrialism in the same breath, appreciate Bach and negro spirituals, divide our enthusiasm between racehorses and aeroplanes—”