Poet's Pub

by Eric Linklater

  “But?” suggested Lady Mercy.

  “But,” repeated Saturday, “as our minds grow more receptive our stomachs grow less. Our dinner tables are an insult to history. The Elizabethans were magnificent eaters. We’re not. Their menus were triumphs of imagination. We count our calories before they’re cooked.”

  “I give you carte blanche, Mr. Keith,” Lady Mercy replied. “But use your discretion. Remember that the gastric juices of a Rowing Blue might easily overcome what would oppress a tired millionaire. And women no longer eat. Appetites went out with contours and crinolines.”

  “Americans are fond of food.”

  “Ah! but they retain the dear childhood notion that eating too much is part of the ritual of a holiday. Try your Elizabethan dishes on them by all means. They may suffer, but they are idealists, and they will not complain if you tell them that Sir Philip Sidney also suffered from heartburn, and Sir Walter Raleigh was troubled by griping pains after food similar to theirs. But our own countrymen, Mr. Keith, are unimaginative. Do not tax their digestions too rashly.”

  Most of Saturday’s experiments had succeeded, for he had found an unexpected ally in his cook, Ignatius O’Higgins, sometime a petty officer in His Majesty’s Navy, a devout Catholic with the spacious and imperturbable faith of his creed, and a natural genius whose soul had too long been shackled by the res angusta of an ordinary kitchen. When Saturday encouraged him to use wine instead of water for stewing apples in, his mind put forth new strength and he cooked as if for gods. He conjured magnificently with unimpressive eggs, wrought miracles with beef, and preserved as if in a limbeck the savour of Highland scenery in a grouse. “Ah!” he would say, slipping his knife into a duckling, “Michael Angelo never carved anything as good as this!” And if Saturday took him an old recipe beginning in some such way as “To make Jumbals more fine and curious than the former,” Ignatius O’Higgins would go to it like a scholar to a palimpsest or a girl to a letter from her lover overseas.

  But only in single dishes had Saturday so far ventured to reintroduce the stronger flavours, the whimsical mixtures, and the more imaginative juxtapositions of ancient culinary methods. Now he meditated a bolder thing, a dinner that from start to finish should be Elizabethan in temper, quality, and, so far as modern appetites were able, in quantity. There were two reasons for this.

  The first was that his guests, for the only time in his landlordship, were becoming a homogeneous household. They were mixing. They might be expected to respond together to the suggestion he proposed to make. And the second reason was that in two days’ time would fall the most important anniversary in the history of “The Pelican”: the anniversary of the day on which Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, with much shouting of grooms, stamping of horses, perspiration and oaths—“God’s death,” said the queen, “is a queen’s leg different to all other legs that you gape so?”—rode into its courtyard. The earl’s boot, in a glass case, still stood in the hall to prove the truth of the story and give scandal a leg to stand on; for the boot had been found in the queen’s room, it was said, and the earl had ridden away in his stockings swearing, like an honest knight, that it was no boot of his and he had never seen it before.

  Saturday, then, struggled to compose a menu that would honour “The Pelican” and please his guests. He worked on it as if it had been a sonnet, polishing, cutting, dove-tailing, striving for significance in every line.…

  And downstairs Joan Benbow thought perhaps he was chiselling imagination into a real pen-and-ink sonnet, and wondered why there was so little love poetry written nowadays, and concluded sadly that as men were no longer simple enough in their faith to write a “Paradise Lost,” so even their love was too insecure to write anyhow but lightly of it.…

  Saturday considered “an excellent sauce for a roast capon,” and decided that a “cupful of claret-wine, the juyce of an orange, and three or four slices of a lemon pill,” would flavour it pleasantly.…

  Joan tried to remember what they had been saying to each other earlier in the evening. They must have said quite a lot in three-quarters of an hour, but she could recollect nothing in particular except an arrangement to play golf the following afternoon. Now this was funny; Jean Forbes was singing a song out of her revue, a Cockney song that went:

  “And ’e said to me

  ‘Well, you might ’a come earlier

  You would of for Fred, or even for Ted,

  Oh, I wish I was dead!’—

  Poor little me, tryin’ to keep three,

  An’ as ’e got surly and surlier,

  O’ course I grew girly and girlier.…”

  Some people apparently could remember everything that they and their—everything they and other people said, word for word, emotion for emotion. But what she said to Saturday and what Saturday said to her had vanished entirely. She concluded that no definite utterance had been made. Neither had said “Liar!” or “I love you,” or “Never speak to me again,” or “I hate the way you walk.” They had spoken inconsequential things that slipped unobtrusively into a pleasant little stream of talk; an idle-running little stream that turned no windmills nor wore tenaciously at solid rock. They had, of course, agreed to play golf together the following afternoon.…

  Saturday read his completed menu with satisfaction. “Rich, not gaudy,” he said, “no dormice or camels’ heels, but honest fruit and meat; sufficiently elaborate to impress, without reminding you of Heliogabalus.”

  He leaned back, filled a pipe, and contemplated life. “Tellus Will Proceed” lay on a table, half neatly typed, half in frantic manuscript, all held tightly in a black leather portfolio that clipped the sheets together with an air of purpose. He might, perhaps, type a little more. But there was no hurry. He thought instead of Joan Benbow. How very pleasant was such a position as his, where you met people without having actively to seek their acquaintance. Such delightful people. Joan, when she talked, had the most engaging trick of suddenly looking up so that you became instantly aware, without warning, of two clear wide-open eyes, eager and alight; it was like pulling up the blinds with a jerk on a summer morning, and seeing the earth below so full of translucent shimmering delight that you wanted to dive into it. She was—it was idle to deny it—quite unlike any other girl he had ever known; quite unlike; how exactly it was difficult to say—unless by the measure of her superiority. She was more… well, he was more completely attracted by her than he had been by Mrs. Travers, for instance (whose husband had got lost somewhere at the back of Brazil and who didn’t know whether she was a widow or not) or by the Littlejohn girl (whose father wrote books about sociology and was the only man in England who still believed in Bentham). Not that Joan was so glitteringly handsome as Mrs. Travers—Saturday conceded that and was pleased to think that he could be level-headed in such a matter—nor had she the sleek incongruously Puritan allure of Priscilla Littlejohn. She was—oh, it was difficult to analyse anyone so completely satisfactory. He was playing golf with her tomorrow.…

  Joan, talking to Mrs. Waterhouse, wondered at the back of her mind what she should wear when she played golf with Saturday. She made pictures of herself dressed in various syntheses of cream, grey, fawn, tan, copper, jade, and what-not; posed against a background of green turf with a little red flag at her elbow; or a fringe of trees; or a large sandy bunker… a good colour scheme might turn a golfing catastrophe into an artistic triumph. “No, Mrs. Waterhouse,” she said, “I’ve never been to Bournemouth.”

  “We met such interesting people there,” said Mrs. Waterhouse. “A Mrs. Silberstein and her sister. It was they who recommended us to come here. They simply raved about ‘The Pelican,’ and about Mr. Keith in particular, though of course they agreed with me that it was just a little bit dangerous—‘dangerous’ was the word Mrs. Silberstein used—for such a young and attractive man to be in a position like this. So many opportunities as Mrs.—now what was her name? Mr. Silberstein’s sister, I mean. Oh, Mrs. Macpherson, of course. There were so many
opportunities, she said.”

  “I suppose so,” Joan replied vaguely, and wondered what sort of opportunities Mrs. Macpherson meant. Opportunities to become Poet Laureate, or a Member of Parliament, or a director of Cotton’s Breweries?

  Mrs. Waterhouse purred. “There was quite a scandal, Mrs. Silberstein said, about the attentions which he paid to Mrs.—tut, tut! Her husband went up the Amazon to go somewhere or other, and never came back. A rather flashy-looking woman, I believe. It was probably her fault, they thought; as a matter of fact they agreed that she had deliberately laid herself out to captivate him, and if I hadn’t been able to tell them about—Diana! what was the name of the girl you were at school with who came here and went about so much with Mr. Keith? Her father wrote books; political books. I never read any of them myself—Littlejohn, of course. Priscilla Littlejohn. Well, when Mrs. Silberstein and her sister were inclined to defend Mr. Keith in his affaire with Mrs.—tch! quite a common name too—I was fortunately able to tell them about Priscilla, who was quite young, and we came to the conclusion that perhaps Mr. Keith was as much to blame himself. Neither became public scandals, of course; just little house scandals.”

  “And probably quite untrue,” said Joan coldly.

  “People do exaggerate, don’t they? Diana always said that the Littlejohn girl was an habitual liar. She is one of those prim, secret-looking girls. And as to Mrs.—you know who I mean; Mrs. Travers, of course, that was it—as for her, neither Mrs. Silberstein nor myself could condemn Mr. Keith. Indeed, Mrs. Macpherson, who was one of the most cynical women I have ever met, but quite pleasant about it, said that that sort of thing was the best advertisement ‘The Pelican’ could have. Dear me, do you think Miss Forbes is going to sing again?”

  “I hope so,” said Joan. She felt foolish and uncomfortable; a little blank or deflated, as pricked foolishness does make one feel. Perhaps she should have stood up and said, “I am not interested in scandal, Mrs. Waterhouse,” and walked away. But of course she was interested. And one couldn’t give public expression to a purely private emotion. An emotion, too, built on such a humorous little basis as pretending to be excited about playing golf with Saturday Keith. But when you are unhappy it is the unhappiness that matters, not the cause of it. Damn, damn, damn, she said voicelessly; a sniffing damn; a trinity of damns; three damns divisible but not divided, one for Mrs. Waterhouse, one for herself, and one for Saturday.

  Jean Forbes was singing another of the songs which her revue had made popular, a song which suited her husky voice and her expression—the description was Angela Scrabster’s—of “an excommunicated nun who had walked the streets and discovered that life was a good joke if you were fond of that sort of thing.” Part of the chorus ran:

  “Peace in our time, but no time to be bored,

  Peace to be strenuous,

  Lesbian, horsey,

  Yet look ingenuous.

  Though a divorcée,

  Peace in our time, O Lord!”

  Joan laughed. Nearly everybody laughed and felt they belonged to an amusing generation. Joan was scornful of her own silliness. To think that she had thought of Saturday as living his life in Victorian innocence!

  The time changed. Jean Forbes’s voice grew a little harder—mere whimsicality, people felt—as she began the next verse:

  “We are the nephews and nieces of War,

  As wise as our uncles were bold—

  Too wise to go out in the cold,

  Too witty and wise to complain and feel sore

  That all the best fruit has been handled before

  And all the good stories been told.”

  It might be a little bit disappointing till you got used to it, Joan suspected, but she told herself that undoubtedly the best way to enjoy life was to be bright and hard; not to cherish silly ideals; to be sceptical of other people and not think too highly of oneself.

  “I’m playing golf with Mr. Keith to-morrow,” she told Mrs. Waterhouse.

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Waterhouse with a knowing smile.

  “He’s so amusing, don’t you think?” she said coolly; and privately thought, “I don’t remember him making many jokes.”

  Professor Benbow, when the song was over, said to Mr. van Buren, “We’re developing a tendency to be unkind to ourselves. I think it’s a healthy sign.”

  “I’ve touched my toes twenty times every morning for the last twelve years,” said van Buren, “but I don’t like the look of them any better.…”

  Saturday in his room, tapped steadily at letters which fell into orderly lines. Some very splendid lines, he thought, and some that bit like acid into the soft substance of our times. The latter pleased him even better than the proud sonorous ones.

  CHAPTER VII

  Ignatius O’Higgins said “Shoo!” and with a long-handled spoon hit at the blue fly which buzzed exasperatingly over a sirloin of beef. He missed it. “Buzz!” said the fly, and circled viciously round his head. Again O’Higgins hit—“Swung from his brand a windy buffet out,” as Tennyson would have said—and the fly sped singing harshly to the bare wall high out of reach.

  “Drive him out,” commanded O’Higgins, and a little kitchen-maid, climbing on a chair, made frantic dabs with a cloth.

  “Zzzz,” said the fly contemptuously, and sailed like a raiding Fokker round the harassed kitchen.

  “Now,” said O’Higgins.

  The fly was in front of him, the kitchen-maid on his left hand, a kitchen-boy on his right. With dish-clout, spoon, and bread-knife they slashed in the air and the fly, yielding to numbers, fled swiftly to the open window.

  They had defeated it just in time, for as the fly went out the door opened and Saturday came in on his morning rounds. Ignatius O’Higgins looked about him. His kitchen was ready for inspection.

  “Dismiss!” he said to the kitchen-maid and the kitchen-boy. “Good morning, sir!” He saluted Keith Navy-fashion, hand flat and palm down, index finger to the edge of his white cap.

  “Good morning, O’Higgins. I’ve got a difficult job for you,” replied Saturday.

  Ignatius leaned forward eagerly, contracting his mouth and sucking in his lips with respectful anticipation. His eyes gleamed and his face, red except where he shaved and there it was navy-blue, shone like an east window when the sun catches a lozenge of gules and the shoulder of a saint’s blue cloak. His enormous body in its white clothes dominated the room. Steel glittered, cooking-pots caught the light, frying-pans hung in comely order, enamel shone like snow—hummock and berg and floe, snow-white and ice-hard—and a red nest of flames, snoring in a gentle draught, was sunk in solid black iron. Ignatius O’Higgins, sometime a petty officer in His Majesty’s Navy, was accustomed to think of his kitchen as the heart and brain, the conning-tower, of “The Downy Pelican.”

  Saturday showed him the Elizabethan menu, explaining this and glossing that, here suggesting a sauce, there reciting a recipe. O’Higgins followed him almost breathlessly.

  “Damn my eyes, sir,” he said at last, slowly and reverently, “it’s a poem, Mr. Keith. A node. That’s what it is, sir. A node to the stomach, and I wouldn’t swop it for the Lord Mayor’s banquet. But, if I may make a suggestion—”

  He made half-a-dozen, technical details of supply, matters of culinary convention, professional addenda to Keith’s gifted amateurism. They debated a sauce, considered a gravy, settled a salad. “Get to hell out of this, you accidental offspring of a Marine sentry,” said O’Higgins abstractedly when the kitchen-boy made an inopportune entrance. “Now this marrow-bone pie, sir.…”

  Plans were at last completed, battle-orders arranged, and Saturday left O’Higgins with a feeling of confidence. He had spoken to the professor, to van Buren, and to half-a-dozen more. They were all enthusiastic and would be his apostles if necessary. He had put up a notice that the ordinary service, except for grills and such-like simplicities—there was only one vegetarian in “The Pelican”—would be suspended on Saturday night. A polite air of excitement attend
ed on the news. Lady Porlet had offered him a recipe for elderberry wine and was grieved when he reminded her that there was scarcely time to make it. “Then rose-water?” she suggested. “My grandmother’s recipe.”

  “I should like to have that very much indeed,” said Keith tactfully.

  “I must see if I can remember it,” said Lady Porlet, and went away nodding brightly. She felt that she was coming into her own among these tiresomely active, inventive people. She found a chair beside the bowling-green and, closing her eyes, repeated happily: “Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702 and died in 1714. She had fifteen children, most of which were born dead. George the First. 1702 to 1727. George the Second, 1727 to 1760, George the Third, or Farmer George; in his reign the continent of America was discovered. He was a devoted husband and was widely known as The Father of his Family. Then there was either George the Fourth or William the Fourth. I can never remember. Though I suppose it didn’t matter much to anyone except Queen Victoria. The Diamond Jubilee.…”

  Lady Porlet let her fancy wander a little. A thrush, hopping cheerfully on the lawn, took her out of her reverie.

  “The Cornish Chough,” she murmured. “A corvoid bird with black plumage and red legs. Formerly a denizen of the precipitous cliffs of the south coast of England, of Wales, and of the west coast of Ireland, but it is now greatly reduced in numbers.”

  Her natural history reminiscences were interrupted by a pink and white duster which, escaping from an upper window, fell into the clutches of the breeze and was softly carried to her lap where it lay like a decorous napkin.

  “Dear me,” said Lady Porlet, and looked up.

  Two heads projected from a window, one that of a pretty red-haired maid, the other—Lady Porlet was sure of it—that of Mr. Keith’s friend, young Mr. Cotton. The latter, meeting for an instant the startled eyes of Lady Porlet, quickly withdrew. The maid spoke in a clear, pleasant voice.