Poet's Pub

by Eric Linklater

  “Good shooting?” Sir Colin asked.

  “He missed Wesson three times,” said Quentin, “but he nearly hit me.”

  Mr. Wesson looked depressed.

  Lady Keith suggested that they should go and find more dry clothes. “And get some for Mr. Wesson,” she added.

  “People who throw vitriol can stay wet,” growled Saturday.

  A triumphant smile creased Mr. Wesson’s face.

  “I fooled you there,” he said complacently. “Do you think I carry flasks of vitriol about with me as well as first editions? Boloney!—I beg your ladyship’s pardon. That is an American vulgarism indicative of scorn or contempt. But you will admit that it was justified if you read the label on this bottle.”

  He took the little brown bottle, now empty, from his pocket and showed it to Lady Keith.

  “Iodine?”

  “Tincture of iodine,” said Mr. Wesson with insufferable self-satisfaction.

  “Well, of all the cheek!” Joan exclaimed.

  “So that’s why Bran stopped howling so quickly,” said Colin; and Quentin looked at Mr. Wesson with open admiration.

  For fully a minute he kept the stage. Held at bay by a bottle of iodine, the others thought. Bluffed by a tenpenny antiseptic. Cozened, bilked, gulled, gammoned and hocus-pocus’d by two fluid ounces of germicide. The just comment was silence, they felt. And little smiles of pleasure that would not be suppressed crinkled Mr. Wesson’s mouth. He had filled the kitty roof-high, bluffed the four-ace-players, scared the full-house-holders, and seen faces pale behind a straight flush; while he himself carried no more than a broken straight and an empty gun. What though he had lost the game? The laugh was his.

  “You’ve earned dry clothes,” said Saturday.

  Bran the deerhound, unobserved, ate his bread poultice in spite of its sick-room flavour.

  By-and-by they re-appeared, all three in dressing-gowns, and Sir Colin proposed that they should decide immediately what was to be done with the prisoner.

  “I shall go to bed, I think,” said Lady Keith. “I am not very fond of courts of justice. Colin knows what rooms are ready for you when you feel sleepy. Joan, my dear, I am so very glad that you have come scatheless out of this trying ordeal, and I think it was extremely clever of you to find your way so quickly to my fireside. Are you sure that you are not too tired to stay up?”

  Lady Keith said good-night; hesitated; and added, “Good-night, Mr. Wesson. I’m glad it was only iodine.”

  “I’m very pleased to have met your ladyship,” said Mr. Wesson.

  “Now,” said Sir Colin cheerfully, “a small drink for the prisoner and very large drinks for the jury. Miss Benbow approves our port, and everybody else, I suppose, wants whisky. Saturday, you’re the worst shot in Scotland and I was never glad of it till now. By Gad, Bran’s eaten his poultice! Well, I’m—now isn’t he a fine old dog!”

  Sir Colin poured drinks, threw another log on the fire, patted Bran’s head, and then sat down beside Joan and patted her hand. He was enjoying himself. Over one half of the room the lamps were out and the stripped shelves covered their nakedness in shadow. The other half, amber-lighted and warm, had lost its moiety of long and lofty proportion with relief. It drew into the fire, hearing the wind outside. It relaxed. It became snug and informal. Prisoner and captor stretched themselves gratefully, having the echo of storm still in their ears and fatigue, half-beaten, tingling under their skin. Gratified by the speedy recovery of van Buren’s documents—they had been recovered before Saturday fully realized that they had been stolen—and amiably conscious of power, the captors forbore from expressing it by ropes, gyves, or countenances of iron. Under their dressing-gowns they had donned an evening habit of indulgence.

  Very solemnly Joan said, “If it weren’t for Bran’s sake I could wish that it really had been vitriol. It’s so silly to have been frightened by iodine.”

  Still more solemnly Mr. Wesson replied, “Not even for you, Miss Benbow, would I condescend to threaten a lady with genuine vitriol. I believe in certain standards of decency, and vitriol does not occur within the boundaries which they demarcate.”

  “Will you explain to us your connection with the Cheka?” said Quentin, bending forward impressively.

  “With the checker? I don’t get you,” answered Mr. Wesson.

  “I mean with Russia. Have you ever been interested in the Zik?”

  “I have a Christian man’s sympathy for those smitten with disease, but I must admit that I never felt any particular call to send grapes to a Russian hospital.”

  “I didn’t say the sick. I said the Zik. Are you wilfully misunderstanding me?”

  “Mr. Cotton has some reason to believe that you are concerned with a Russian plot to rob Mr. van Buren,” explained Saturday.

  “It’s the first I’ve heard of it,” said Mr. Wesson, who seemed completely mystified. His bewilderment was shared by Joan and Sir Colin, who looked at Quentin with some suspicion.

  “And you didn’t steal my poem along with van Buren’s papers?”

  “I did not. But I saw your poem, or a work answering to that description, in the possession of a red-haired chamber-maid with whom I—well, to whom my attention was drawn.”

  “Nelly!” exclaimed Quentin. “Now what was your connection with her?”

  “It was brief and not so secure as I imagined.”

  “But you know that she had my poem?”

  “She certainly had.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “I am no crystal-gazer, Mr. Keith.”

  “Was it she who followed us in Lady Mercy’s car?” asked Joan. “Because if so we lost her somewhere in Yorkshire.”

  “I thought I understood what all this was about,” Sir Colin said, “but I’m getting rather mixed. Who is Nelly? What has Russia to do with it? Why should anyone steal a poem?”

  Their explanation, which was more involved than the Athanasian Creed but not so authoritative, dulled Sir Colin’s curiosity without precisely answering his questions. He poured more drinks and the inexplicable lost significance.

  “We’ve recovered van Buren’s property,” said Saturday. “Now what are we going to do with Wesson?”

  “Consider me entirely at your disposal,” said Mr. Wesson comfortably, and stifled a yawn.

  “We do,” said Quentin.

  “The turret room has a strong door,” Sir Colin suggested, “and the window is a long way from the ground. I propose that we lock him up there for the night.”

  “And take away all his clothes?”

  “Take him away first,” said Saturday. “I want to talk to Joan.”

  Reluctantly Colin got up and looked down at his brother’s fiancée with a wistful idea that she was more interesting than a stuffed hen-harrier. He sighed, and limped to the door.

  “Come on, Wesson,” he said.

  Quentin followed readily because of a notion, which had just occurred to him, that Wesson might be persuaded to talk more freely of his undoubted connection with Russia under the influence of the Third Degree… if Sir Colin would collaborate, that is.

  “Joan!” said Saturday when they had gone.

  “Oh, Saturday!” she replied, simply but sufficiently.

  And in a little while, “I wonder if father is worrying very much about me?”

  “We can telephone to Downish in the morning.”

  “And ask for his blessing?”

  “There’s not much chance of getting that. I’ve lost my poem and his blessing depends on it. I’m farther from you than ever, Joan.”

  “You’ve never been so near… and your poem will turn up somewhere even if that girl has taken it.”

  “My dear,” said Saturday.

  “My dear,” she answered, Venus’s birds being parrots as often to doves.

  Then, reflectively, “I’m glad you didn’t shoot Mr. Wesson. I think he’s an interesting man.”

  “He’s a sportsman in his own way. Do you know, he never complained
about being shot at? He seemed to take it as quite an ordinary occurrence.”

  “Of course,” said Joan. “He’s an American.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  The storm, which had originated as an obscure depression over Iceland, gathered strength from every tide, wind and cloud between the Faroes and the Pentland Firth, exercised itself over Scotland and shaken braggart wings about Northumberland, continued to travel southwards. It met Holly and Professor Benbow in Yorkshire, slapped, buffeted, banged and blinded them, and surveyed the parching Midlands ahead of it with oceanic zest.

  Holly had one of those sensitive natures which react to variable weather, giving sunlight to sunlight and cold displeasure for hail. Now he turned sullen. The beer was finished. The professor, who had recited several thousand lines of Shakespeare, felt the tiresomeness of quoting Lear to a real storm. Essentially an honest man, he could not honestly say “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;” for he did. To find that the beer was done had also distressed him, not so much because he wanted more as because of the obvious inference that he had in the course of a few hours already drunk six bottles; which, at his age, was probably excessive.… Years, years grew around him like elm-trees, coffin-wood-trees, stopping his hand from this and that, darkening the fields, narrowing his world. A Birnam Wood of coffin-trees marching irresistibly to the stout heart of Dunsinane. Age may well have deeper thoughts than youth, for they are an earnest of the deepness of the grave. The beer lay cold in his belly.…

  But age comes quickest and most irremediable to mechanical things. The life of a sparking-plug is a fierce tropical existence of days only. No healing leucocytes rush to the aid of a cracked cylinder, nor anastomosing tributaries expand to carry the lifeblood of a choked feed-pipe. Old motor-cars grow asthmatic, systolic murmurs betray their weakened power, and carbon comes to poison them outright. And so the aged Morris staggered in its gait like an old lady in the rain, wheezing a little, anxious about her umbrella which the wind was bullying. It grew somewhat hysterical, feeling itself far from home, and began to run in an agitated manner, short bursts of speed striving to make up for more frequent laggarding.…

  Light showed ahead. The weary Morris sighed with relief and edged to the pavement in front of a red-curtained house with a swinging sign.

  “You can’t expect her to run on two cylinders,” said Holly, and got out. The professor followed him without a word.

  “The Fisherman’s Rest,” kept by George and Jemima Postlethwaite, was no better and no worse than hundreds more of its beneficent kind. It had a bar and a bar-parlour and a pike in a glass-case, and the landlord his proprietary jest; for when asked about the stream whose existence was implied in his title he could say, “The river’s a mile, or maybe a mile and a half away, so old William Warble, who caught that big ’un over there, needed his rest pretty badly by the time he got here. And so do other fishermen I find, mostly from thinking about what they might have had to carry. And now what can I do for you, gentlemen?”

  Mr. Postlethwaite was a little, paunchy, self-satisfied man with a round white face and grey bushy hair. While Holly and the professor waited for food to be cooked—Holly had shyly suggested going apart to eat and the professor had brusquely told him not to be a fool—there entered a young man, tall and thin, with heavy brownish hair that the sun had bleached here and there to the colour of tow. He had a jaw grimly moulded, a truculent chin, gloomy eyes, and a twisted mouth. Having politely said “Good evening,” he sat beside the fire, took a book from his pocket, and read. His hands were delicate and he wore defiantly shabby tweeds.

  Holly’s hands had already been stealing to an inside pocket, and when the young man took a book from his, Holly pulled out the largest flask that the professor had ever seen, and deferentially set it on the table. The professor unscrewed the top, and Holly fetched two tumblers from a dusty sideboard. Not knowing what he was to see, the professor poured. And out of the flask came a thin sapphire stream, indescribably attractive. Even before he tasted it Holly’s storm-sullened face grew glad, and manliness returned to the dejected father whose thoughts had been miserably between a fleeing Joan and age coming fast towards him with a coffin on his rounded back.

  “We have been defeated,” said the professor.

  “We have come far and done no good. We are stranded. But we are not the first who have been beaten one day, and slept, and waked again to win. I have had graveyard thoughts, Holly, but under blue skies I defy the grave. The world is a good place. God plants his healing leaves beside the nettle. There is always a remedy and the rainbow returns.”

  The professor swallowed his cocktail and Holly remarked, “The extra bit of shaking it’s had hasn’t done it no harm.”

  “The native thought of mankind is gratitude. The most significant noise of earth is the singing of birds,” said the professor with determination.

  “Fritinancy,” declared the young man beside the fire.

  “What’s that?” said the professor.

  “I said fritinancy. Which is the whimper of gnats and the buzzing of flies. You’re talking nonsense.”

  Intellectually the professor was not at his best. Emotion had harrowed his mind and rain had followed the harrow. Rain and beer. And even good cloth shrinks in the wetting.

  “Who are you?” he asked belligerently.

  “My name is Neale. I am a painter.”

  “A good painter?”

  “Very good,” said Neale.

  “Then why don’t you stick to your last?”

  “When I hear a man of your years and appearance of education twittering pernicious optimism it is my duty to protest. I object to the lying dogma of redemption and I detest, even above dogma, a suggestion of the Panglossian heresy. You, apparently, believe in both.”

  The professor scratched his chin, for at the moment he did; redemption being carried as a kind of stepney on the best of all possible worlds. Holly, without a thought of rudeness, offered Neale a cocktail which Neale refused.

  The landlord made his timely entrance with a tray and untidily set their meal on the table.

  “Getting acquainted, I see,” he said chattily. “Now if you can persuade Mr. Neale to show you his pictures you’ve got a promiscuous evening in front of you. Not that I appreciate them properly myself, for I’m not what you might call a criterion, and you need to be very well educated to understand the painting they go in for nowadays. But I’m willing to believe that an artist’s opinion is as liable to be correct as my own, and that his work may entitle him to obloquy when I am long forgotten. And a poet’s too. You go and bring your pictures down, Mr. Neale, and I’ll look after these gentlemen till you come back.”

  Neale obeyed willingly; Holly and the professor ate; the landlord regarded them contentedly; and continued.

  “You don’t see anything like ‘His Dead Master,’ or ‘Two Strings to her Bow,’ or ‘Christmas in the Baron’s Hall’ being painted nowadays. And why? The reason, I take it, is that we’re growing up. Pictures like that were the A B C of art, all very well for childhood, but not much good for the eye of adultery. Now the modern artist gives us something difficult so that we can realize how grown-up we are; a bit of mathematics, solid geology and the like, instead of a fairy-tale.”

  “I like fairy-tales,” said the professor with his mouth full.

  “Every man to his taste,” agreed the landlord. “I’m becoming more and more laxative as the years go on, for lots of artists come here to paint and stay to talk, and I listen to them, and they talk so convictedly, that I find it difficult to disbelieve any of them, so in the course of years my ideas have become completely ostracized, you see.”

  “Very pleasant and proper,” said the professor, and Holly picked his teeth suspiciously.

  Neale returned with a pile of canvases and set up two or three of them on chairs. They were landscapes, chocolate and dull green, and grey slab-sided houses with awkward angles stood uncompromisingly in the fields. Obviously the work of
a man who could draw and who knew his own mind, ruggedly composed, they somehow expressed disintegration rather than coalescence.

  “Cézanne with a difference,” said the professor.

  “You’re not so blind as I thought you were,” Neale answered.

  The landlord rubbed his hands and declared, “I do like a little good-humoured sodomy of an evening.”

  “Sodality, you fool,” said Neale. And the landlord, looking puzzled, repeated the two words under his breath, comparing their flavour.

  “Why does everything fall away like that?” asked the professor, pointing to a solid farm-house that threatened collapse and a solider hill that appeared unstable from its very weight.

  “Because that is the way I see things,” said Neale. “You look at the world as fixed and perdurable. You think of it as something big and important; something to be taken seriously. You respect the world. Well, I don’t, and that’s a difference between us. I don’t see it solid, but jerrybuilt without plan or foundation. To me it’s a shoddy contraption of deserts and barren seas and stinking towns. You think of the world as Oxford, and Green Park, and a Scotch grouse-moor. I see the Sahara and the North Atlantic and a London slum. Can you worship the creator of sterility and the passive observer of filth? You think the earth is a comfortable place, whereas not ten men in every million that crawl on its surface know what comfort is. Have you ever heard of Welsh miners? or of negroes in the lynching states of America? or slaves in Africa? or untouchables in India? or beggars in Moscow? or political prisoners in Central Europe? or peonage in Central and South America? Japanese cotton mills? or starvation in China? or brothels, poverty, prisoners, cruelty, disease, miners and dirty factories all over the world—clean factories, too, which are ten times worse, because they keep their slaves alive longer and persuade fools into thinking them good.”

  “He knows what he’s talking about,” said the landlord, impressed by so many words.