“We’ll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,” said Kysh. “There’s a bit of good going hereabouts.”
He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.
“Whew! But you know your job,” said Hinchcliffe. “You’re wasted here. I’d give something to have you in my engine-room.”
“He’s steering with ‘is little hind-legs,” said Pyecroft. “Stand up and look at him, Robert. You’ll never see such a sight again!”
“Nor don’t want to,” was our guest’s reply. “Five ‘undred pounds wouldn’t begin to cover ‘is fines even since I’ve been with him.”
Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few remaining hairs much nearer the grave.
“We’re in Surrey now; better look out,” I said.
“Never mind. I’ll roll her into Kent for a bit. We’ve lots of time; it’s only three o’clock.”
“Won’t you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?” said
Hinchcliffe.
“We don’t use water, and she’s good for two hundred on one tank o’ petrol if she doesn’t break down.”
“Two hundred miles from ‘ome and mother and faithful Fido to-night,
Robert,” said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. “Cheer up! Why,
I’ve known a destroyer do less.”
We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the
Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.
“Now,” said Kysh, “we begin.”
“Previous service not reckoned towards pension,” said Pyecroft. “We are doin’ you lavish, Robert.”
“But when’s this silly game to finish, any’ow?” our guest snarled.
“Don’t worry about the when of it, Robert. The where’s the interestin’ point for you just now.”
I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on the keys — the snapping levers and quivering accelerators — marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I protested, all that he would say was: “I’ll hypnotise the fowl! I’ll dazzle the rooster!” or other words equally futile. And she — oh! that I could do her justice! — she turned her broad black bows to the westering light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation- roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since the King’s highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver, the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic as I remember that Judic long ago — Judic clad in bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.
We were silent — Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional appreciation; I with a layman’s delight in the expert; and our guest because of fear.
At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by martello towers.
“Ain’t that Eastbourne yonder?” said our guest, reviving. “I’ve a aunt there — she’s cook to a J.P. — could identify me.”
“Don’t worry her for a little thing like that,” said Pyecroft; and ere he had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.
“Trevington — up yonder — is a fairly isolated little dorp,” I said, for I was beginning to feel hungry.
“No,” said Kysh. “He’d get a lift to the railway in no time…. Besides, I’m enjoying myself…. Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal swindle!”
I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh’s brain; but he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.
About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. “Aren’t we goin’ to maroon our Robert? I’m hungry, too.”
“The commodore wants his money back,” I answered.
“If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump owin’ to him,” said Pyecroft. “Well, I’m agreeable.”
“I didn’t know it could be done. S’welp me, I didn’t,” our guest murmured.
“But you will,” said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he addressed the man.
We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.
“I used to shoot about here,” said Kysh, a few miles further on. “Open that gate, please,” and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes.
“Only cross-country car on the market,” he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. “Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up.”
“I’ve took a few risks in my time,” said Pyecroft as timbers cracked beneath us and we entered between thickets, “but I’m a babe to this man, Hinch.”
“Don’t talk to me. Watch him! It’s a liberal education, as Shakespeare says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir.”
“Right! That’s my mark. Sit tight!”
She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen- foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage.
“There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here.” Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
“Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o’ brushwood on the starboard beam, and — no road,” sang Pyecroft.
“Cr-r-ri-key!” said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. “If she only had two propellers, I believe she’d talk poetry. She can do everything else.”
“We’re rather on our port wheels now,” said Kysh; “but I don’t think she’ll capsize. This road isn’t used much by motors.”
“You don’t say so,” said Pyecroft. “What a pity!”
She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and association that clad the landscape.
“Does ‘unger produce ‘alluciations?” said Pyecroft in a whisper. “Because I’ve just seen a sacred ibis walkin’ arm in arm with a British cock- pheasant.”
“What are you panickin’ at?” said Hinchcliffe. “I’ve been seein’ zebra for the last two minutes, but I ‘aven’t complained.”
He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell’s, I think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped, and it fled away.
There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.
“Is it catching?” said Pyecroft.
“Yes. I’m seeing beaver,” I replied.
“It is here!” said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and half turned.
“No — no — no! For ‘Eaven’s sake — not ‘ere!” Our guest gasped like a sea- bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.
“Look! Look! It’s sorcery!” cried Hinchcliffe.
There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos — gigantic, erect, silhouetted against the light — four buck-kangaroos in the heart of Sussex!
And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, the “Grapnel Inn” at Horsham.
* * * * *
After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as part of its landscape.
When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with emotion.
“We owe it to you,” he said. “We owe it all to you. Didn’t I say we never met in pup-pup-puris naturalibus, if I may so put it, without a remarkably hectic day ahead of us?”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Mind the candle.” He was tracing smoke- patterns on the wall.
“But what I want to know is whether we’ll succeed in acclimatisin’ the blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner’s keepers ‘ll kill ‘im before ‘e gets accustomed to ‘is surroundin’s?”
Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.
“WIRELESS”
KASPAR’S SONG IN VARDA
(From the Swedish of Stagnelius.)
Eyes aloft, over dangerous places,
The children follow where Psyche flies,
And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,
Slash with a net at the empty skies.
So it goes they fall amid brambles,
And sting their toes on the nettle-tops,
Till after a thousand scratches and scrambles
They wipe their brows, and the hunting stops.
Then to quiet them comes their father
And stills the riot of pain and grief,
Saying, “Little ones, go and gather
Out of my garden a cabbage leaf.
”You will find on it whorls and clots of
Dull grey eggs that, properly fed,
Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of
Radiant Psyches raised from the dead.”
* * * * *
”Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,”
The three-dimensioned preacher saith,
So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie
For Psyche’s birth … And that is our death!
“WIRELESS” “It’s a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn’t it?” said Mr. Shaynor, coughing heavily. “Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell me — storms, hills, or anything; but if that’s true we shall know before morning.”
“Of course it’s true,” I answered, stepping behind the counter. “Where’s old Mr. Cashell?”
“He’s had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you’d very likely drop in.”
“Where’s his nephew?”
“Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here, and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and” — he giggled — ”the ladies got shocks when they took their baths.”
“I never heard of that.”
“The hotel wouldn’t exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr. Cashell tells me, they’re trying to signal from here to Poole, and they’re using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor’s nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn’t matter how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?”
“Very much. I’ve never seen this game. Aren’t you going to bed?”
“We don’t close till ten on Saturdays. There’s a good deal of influenza in town, too, and there’ll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning. I generally sleep in the chair here. It’s warmer than jumping out of bed every time. Bitter cold, isn’t it?”
“Freezing hard. I’m sorry your cough’s worse.”
“Thank you. I don’t mind cold so much. It’s this wind that fair cuts me to pieces.” He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for ammoniated quinine. “We’ve just run out of it in bottles, madam,” said Mr. Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, “but if you will wait two minutes, I’ll make it up for you, madam.”
I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the purpose and power of Apothecaries’ Hall what time a fellow-chemist had made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.
“A disgrace to our profession,” said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after studying the evidence. “You couldn’t do a better service to the profession than report him to Apothecaries’ Hall.”
I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I conceived great respect for Apothecaries’ Hall, and esteem for Mr. Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr. Cashell. “They forget,” said he, “that, first and foremost, the compounder is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician’s reputation. He holds it literally in the hollow of his hand, Sir.”
Mr. Shaynor’s manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the romance of drugs — their discovery, preparation packing, and export — but it led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of physicians, we met.
Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes — of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
“There’s a way you get into,” he told me, “of serving them carefully, and I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I’ve been reading Christie’s New Commercial Plants all this autumn, and that needs keeping your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn’t a prescription, of course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general run of ‘em in my sleep, almost.”
For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell’s unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electric
ian appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have said, invite me to see the result.
The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr. Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars — red, green, and blue — of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her shoes — blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond- cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our window-frame.
“They ought to take these poultry in — all knocked about like that,” said
Mr. Shaynor. “Doesn’t it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare!
The wind’s nearly blowing the fur off him.”
I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. “Bitter cold,” said Mr. Shaynor, shuddering. “Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here’s young Mr. Cashell.”
The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.
“I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor,” he said. “Good-evening. My uncle told me you might be coming.” This to me, as I began the first of a hundred questions.
“I’ve everything in order,” he replied. “We’re only waiting until Poole calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like — but I’d better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks.”
While we were talking, a girl — evidently no customer — had come into the shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned confidently across the counter.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 381