Poet's Pub

by Eric Linklater

  “And mine were too small to speak for themselves.”

  “Then speak for them.”

  “They’ve gone to bed again. They just woke up because everything was so quiet, and thought they would like to come downstairs. But they were really much too young.”

  “It’s a pity not to encourage them.”

  “But we’re supposed to be playing golf, aren’t we?”

  “I’ve already told you that golf includes so many things.”

  “But you must use your clubs occasionally.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It’s very quiet, isn’t it?”

  “Come on.” Joan got to her feet, walked resolutely for five yards, stopped and turned. Saturday had also risen. They walked to the next tee.

  The fairway ran for four hundred yards along a belt of woodland. Saturday drove and watched his ball rise on a long straight slant; then in mid-flight an impish bias took it curling ever so prettily, smoothly and leisurely it seemed, towards the wood. It curved still more, and drooped, and fell with a tiny crash among the trees. It was a perfect slice.

  “Bad luck,” said Joan.

  She teed her ball, looked towards the distant flag, swung strongly, and hit. Her driving was generally accurate. From the tee and other fair places she played well. Only in difficulties did she grow savage and unskilful. But this time, by carelessness, by freak of fortune, by some magnetic tremor, by the sudden perversity of a well-behaved driver, who knows?—she took a line grossly divergent from the main axis of the hole and her ball flew straight for the point to which Saturday’s boomerang shot had returned.

  “Too bad,” said Saturday.

  They plunged into the wood together.

  “We’ll never find them,” said Joan.

  They searched, not arduously, here and there; prodding and poking beneath a fallen branch, gently laying back a flower or two, slashing reasonably at a nettle. The leaf-reflected light was pleasant and cooler than the unmitigated sunlight of the fairway; as if they had stepped off a pearling schooner and gently dropped into a clear green lagoon where stones looked different and weeds grew splendidly and tall. And then, when they least expected them, there were the pearls, one with a little red spot, the other with a black, lying close to each other beside an uprooted tree.

  “How funny to find them together like that,” said Joan.

  Saturday carefully hung his clubs on a projecting branch, put his hands in his pockets, and considered the balls that lay side by side. Then he said slowly, “I wonder if you would care to marry me?”

  “Yes,” answered Joan, “—no, I mean no. I’m sure I wouldn’t. That is—. Why do you ask me?”

  “For the ordinary reason, I suppose,” said Saturday.

  “I don’t think that’s very nice of you.”

  “It used to be considered a compliment.”

  Joan felt a nervous impulse to laugh and an impulse, almost equally strong, to be entirely serious and throw her arms round Saturday’s neck. But this, she decided, would be both stupid and forward. She also felt an elemental desire to run away and an equally elemental desire to stay where she was. She thought how pleasant and simple it would be if she could faint; but she had never felt less like fainting in her life. Allowing for certain obvious discrepancies her emotions were not unlike those she generally experienced during the third act of a drama by Mr. Edgar Wallace. So, playing for time, half hoping for the curtain and half dreading it, she sat on the trunk of the conveniently fallen tree and said, “I hardly know you yet.”

  “But think what a chance to get acquainted I am offering you,” said Saturday, brightening a little.

  “It’s rather like going inside the cage to get a good view of the lions.”

  “Joan,” said Saturday, pleading. Before she could move, if she had made up her mind to move, he was beside her and had taken her hands. Like an advancing billow, as Meredith puts it, the gulf of a caress hove in view.

  “No,” said Joan, struggling. “I’m not going to kiss you. I’m not going to. I haven’t had time to think. And besides, it’s so early. It isn’t four o’clock.…”

  She flushed and began to giggle. Saturday looked at her with some astonishment, and also laughed. He saw a kind of inspired foolishness in her last remark. Joan, laughing helplessly and very embarrassed, tried to get up, but Saturday held her.

  “Do you start at four o’clock?” he asked.

  “No,” she snapped, “I don’t start at all.”

  “Then let me—”

  She pushed him away and said in a tone of remarkable decision, “I’m not going to marry you. I haven’t the faintest intention of marrying you. I shall never marry you. Is that perfectly clear?”

  “But even if you don’t marry me.…” Again the billow heaved aloft.

  “I suppose you’re not used to opposition?”

  The billow sank dejectedly without engulfing anything at all, and Saturday asked, “What do you mean?”

  “It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think this is an occasion for quarrelling.”

  Joan was uncertain whether Saturday was offended or not. Saturday was not very sure himself. He had an idea that something unpleasant was on the horizon and he thought it might be as well to play for safety, though Joan’s proximity was an increasing temptation to go straight ahead and risk the storm.

  Joan stripped a piece of bark off the tree-trunk and tried to polish her nails with the smooth inner surface. “I saw all three Boat Races that you rowed in,” she said.

  “Enjoy them?”

  “I might have enjoyed them more.”

  Saturday looked cheerful.

  “There’s always such a crowd. I’m not very fond of crowds. Are you?”

  “Yes,” said Saturday glumly.

  Joan laughed, and reaching forward pulled off the horn-rimmed spectacles he wore.

  “Here, what are you doing?” Saturday protested.

  “You looked so silly, sulking behind these things. You looked like your photograph in the Daily Day the morning after the race. Dying in the last ditch. Though you couldn’t row in a ditch, could you? You look quite nice now. You’re like a portrait I’ve seen somewhere. I can’t remember where.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be stupid. Do give me my spectacles. I can’t see you without them. And I’m not a bit like any picture anywhere.”

  “You are. It’s in the British Museum.”

  “A mummy, I suppose, or an Aztec, or a Solomon Islander. I don’t think you’re being funny at all.”

  “I was thinking of a very handsome portrait; Goya’s drawing of Wellington, when Wellington was a young man. You haven’t so much nose, of course, but you’ve got his ingenuous arched eyebrows and rather surprised eyes, and his indignant chin—”

  “Do be quiet and give me back my spectacles.”

  Joan leapt up, still holding his glasses. Saturday’s pursuit was delayed by tripping over one branch and running his head into another.

  “And your hair is just like his. He looks as though he had been in prison not long before,” Joan mocked. But her mocking was her undoing, for she halted to complete her sentence, and Saturday’s hand, which was unnecessarily large, shot out and caught her.

  “Now,” he said, and first adjusting his spectacles, kissed her soundly.

  “Let me go,” she gasped.

  “Then will you marry me?”

  “No!”

  “But why?”

  “For a dozen reasons. And one of them is Mrs. Travers and another is Priscilla Littlejohn.”

  “Good God,” said Saturday, and limply loosed his hold. “Who the hell—. I’m sorry. Who the devil told you about them?”

  “Then it is true? I thought perhaps, when Mrs. Waterhouse mentioned them—”

  “That old trout.”

  “I like her. I think she’s a dear. Anyway she seems to speak the truth!”

  “What does it matter even if she does?”

  “It matters a l
ot, as you’ve asked me to marry you.”

  “But it doesn’t matter a jot, since you’ve refused to.” Saturday stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled triumphantly down at Joan. Joan turned red and pale again, her eyes sparkled, her mouth half-opened and shut again, and she mastered her inclination to say “You utter pig!”

  Instead she remarked coldly, “Of course if you’re content to accept my refusal, so much the better. Shall we go now?”

  Saturday frowned. His momentary triumph turned into disaster. Then, like a guerilla general, he decided to ignore the repulse.

  “Not yet,” he answered. “I want to know when you’re going to marry me.”

  “Mrs. Travers might forbid the banns.”

  “Confound Mrs. Travers.”

  “Then Priscilla Littlejohn might.”

  “Oh, damn it, Joan, won’t you believe me when I say that neither of them matters one jot or tittle or scrap or penn’orth of dried corn?”

  “Then why did you make love to them? For the same reason you make love to me? Is it a habit of yours to ask people to marry you?”

  “Good Lord, I never asked them—her—any of them to marry me!”

  “But you should have asked them—her—all of them, probably.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Does that make any difference?”

  “It makes all the difference in the world. I never dreamt of marrying them, any of them, and I’ve never dreamt of doing anything else but marry you.”

  “You’ve only know me for two days,” Joan said. “Anyone can dream for two days.”

  Saturday looked at her unhappily. Joan considered the mess she had made on her finger-nails with the piece of bark.

  “Look at my nails,” she said. “Aren’t they dreadful? All green.”

  Saturday took her hands.

  “But they do matter,” Joan repeated. “Mrs. Travers and all those other women.”

  “How do they matter? Be honest and tell me how they matter.”

  “I don’t quite know,” Joan admitted weakly. “But I’m not going to let you kiss me again,” she added as Saturday once more began to look triumphant, “and I may never let you.”

  “Not even when we’re married?”

  “You won’t want to then.”

  “So we are going to be married?”

  “Certainly not, if you’ll never want to kiss me afterwards.”

  “But I didn’t say—”

  “You did. Or at any rate you tacitly admitted it.”

  Keith sat down and took his head between his hands “It’s going round and round,” he said.

  “That serves you right for losing it so often.” Joan caught up her clubs, and before Saturday could stop her walked out of the wood to the sunny fairway.

  Saturday retrieved the two balls which lay forgotten and followed her. He threw the balls on to the grass, and when Joan had hit hers straight and true with a brassie, he followed with an iron, so that again they lay together. Then he said amicably, “I shall speak to your father to-night.”

  Joan made no answer, mis-hit her next shot abominably, and began to cry.

  “Oh, damn,” said Saturday, dropping everything and hugging her unhandily, clubs and all. “Joan,” he added miserably, “oh, hell, don’t cry, Joan. Damn it, I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to swear. Joan! I’m a clumsy brute but I do love you.”

  “I’m not crying,” said Joan, sniffing against the breast of his coat. “I—I—inff!—I’m not crying really.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Saturday confirmed, kissing what he could reach.

  “And father won’t know what on earth to say.”

  “Of course he won’t.”

  “And, and—inff!—I believe there’s someone behind us!”

  A stentorian shout of “Fore!” a brazen voice expelled from titanic lungs through the throat, it seemed, of a sergeant-major, made them spring apart, Joan to dab her eyes, Saturday to glare defiantly at the approaching golfers.

  They played the next two holes at a feverish pace, conscious of a too-knowing audience pressing towards them, and at the tenth decided that it was time to return to “The Pelican.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Mr. van Buren looked round his sitting-room with a vague feeling of apprehension. He walked heavily to the writing-table—a solid unimaginative piece of furniture—and tried one of its six drawers. It was locked. Van Buren took a bunch of keys out of his pocket, unlocked it, and looked thoughtfully at the black leather portfolio which lay inside. He lifted the portfolio and examined it: pages of close-written notes, pages of formulae, neatly drawn diagrams. It seemed intact. He put it back in the drawer and looked round the room.

  It was a small room, furnished with a couple of leather-covered arm-chairs, a little table in front of the fire-place, a book-case along one wall of which half the shelves were empty and the other half full of bound volumes of Punch, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Bell’s Life, Jorrockses, and so on; and at the window a massive desk or writing-table with three drawers at either side of the space left for the writer’s legs. A picture or two, a bowl of flowers, looped-up dull yellow curtains, some magazines on the table, a brass pen-tray and a few letters on the desk. Mr. van Buren looked from one to the other and felt uneasy that someone had been in the room since he left it.

  There was no apparent disorder. No robustious burglar had scattered his belongings like a whirlwind. But a dog knows when another dog has been in its kennel, and Mr. van Buren had a nose. He sniffed the tainted air.

  “It wasn’t a maid,” he said to himself, “for a maid leaves a room looking as though it hadn’t been lived in for a month. Someone has been looking at those letters. They’re not lying naturally, and they’re not stacked up as a maid would have left them. The drawer, now.…”

  He felt the undercut finger-hold on the important drawer. It moved a little as he pulled it. The drawer was loose and slid, though locked, in and out perhaps a quarter of an inch. It was an old lock. He remembered that he had pushed it in with a little jerk before unlocking it a moment ago. It looked as though someone had tried it, pulled it to see if it was fastened. He himself, the last time he locked it, had probably pushed it home. Probably, he thought; but he could not be certain.

  He examined the other drawers. Most of them were empty. None was locked. One or two contained unimportant letters, a file of business press-cuttings, some company prospectuses. It was difficult to say if they had been tampered with.

  Perhaps I’m getting fidgety, he thought. I ought to get rid of these papers. But I can’t very well till next week when Hayward comes back. He’s got to see them first. Hell, they’re all right here. This is as safe a place as there is in England, and all England’s pretty safe.

  He looked out of the window that opened on to the bowling-green he had just left. Elms untouched by age and green turf nourished by it. Tennis-courts. And a glimpse of farm-house roofs in the distance. Cattle and a man walking slowly through a field.

  Old van Buren scratched his leathery wrinkled cheek and muttered, “Safe! It’s dreaming-safe. It hasn’t woken up yet. And I’ve carried a gun in a he-country and felt pretty good. Packed a gun wherever tailors put pockets or men could think of. Safe? Good God, I must be getting old.”

  He went down to dinner comfortably enough, having assured himself that there was no cause for alarm, and after dinner settled himself beside Professor Benbow in a corner of the smoking-room. Wesson sat a little distance away, still behind his enormous folio. Wesson had talked old books to Sir Philip Betts, who hated reading; to Jean Forbes, who disliked Wesson; to Sigismund Telfer, who believed only in new books; to Jacquetta Telfer, who preferred maps; to Colonel Waterhouse, who wasn’t interested; and to Lady Porlet, who thought it a sin and a shame to pay hundreds of pounds for dusty volumes that nobody read when the ceilings of the London hospitals were all falling down on top of poor patients with cancer and tumours of one kind or another—perfectly enormous tumours; her cook’s sis
ter-in-law had had one and a piece of the ceiling had fallen and hit her exactly on the place out of which the surgeons had just removed it—all because they couldn’t afford to plaster them properly.

  Mr. Wesson was widely regarded as a bore then, and his facile remarks on first editions were earnestly avoided. But he seemed happy enough behind his Prior. Or he might have been sleeping.

  Van Buren and the professor, with sixty years, sixteen stones, and a liberal habit of mind in common, had become sound friends.

  Old Benbow talked about books and men and submarines; old van Buren talked of everything between the Missouri and the Shatt-el-Arab, going either way. For years he had been interested in oil. Half-a-dozen of his inventions had expedited its passage from holes in the ground to the petrol pumps which give motorists their idea of scenery. He had known mining camps in his youth, and old Benbow groaned when he spoke of brazen days in the sun and wilder nights lit fantastically by pistol-flashes.

  “And I have given my nights and days to books!” he said. “Gone whoring after strange women on paper and fought rogues in buckram.”

  “Well,” said van Burem, “so long as they were good books I don’t see what you have to regret. A good book’s better than a desert to work in and gunplay is no more manly than writing a life of Shakespeare. Not to mention Wordsworth. I’ll say it takes a real man to read Wordsworth and keep awake. There was a boy in Arizona once who tamed a whole camp by reading Peter Bell to them. They were tough, too. But one night he got his book and he just read, and read, and read. Nothing could stop him. He just went on, and strong men were crying before he’d half finished. Crying for him to stop. They shot up the ground about his feet, but nobody liked to shoot right at him when he only had a book in his hand. And he just read on. There was no spunk left in the whole camp when he’d finished, and after that there wasn’t a soul who wouldn’t rather see a two-gun man-killer ride into camp, than that boy pulling his Wordsworth.”

  “You’re a Job’s comforter, van Buren.”

  “I wonder if there was oil in Job’s country? When he says ‘My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and are spent without hope,’ he sounds mighty like a prospector who’s coming to the end of his coffee and beans.”