Poet's Pub

by Eric Linklater

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’ll come down and get it.”

  In a minute she appeared. “It blew out of my fingers,” she explained: and held out her hand for the duster which Lady Porlet was examining closely.

  “What a very good duster,” remarked Lady Porlet. “I wonder where Mr. Keith bought it.”

  “I think the housekeeper buys them,” said Nelly Bly.

  “My housekeeper simply won’t buy dusters.” She looked at it enviously, and gave it up with a sigh.

  “Oh,” said Lady Porlet suddenly as Nelly Bly turned to go, “was that Mr. Cotton who looked out of the window?”

  “Yes. It was his room that it fell from. At least his and Mr. Keith’s. They share a room in fact.” Nelly Bly spoke rapidly and smiled with the air of one giving an unnecessarily full explanation out of mere politeness. “Good-bye,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” replied Lady Porlet mechanically, and vaguely suspected that she had somehow been cheated of the pertinent facts. Her mind slipped back to the Cornish Chough. “They pair in early Spring and line their nest with pink and white dusters—what nonsense!” she exclaimed indignantly, and sat up very straight and severe.

  “Well, you’re a fool, aren’t you?” said Nelly Bly to Quentin Cotton.

  “What did she say?” asked Quentin.

  “Nothing much. I told her you slept with Mr. Keith and she seemed to take that as a sign of virtue.”

  “What a corrupt old woman; she ought to be ashamed of herself.”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “For trying to take advantage of an innocent red-haired girl in his friend’s bedroom? In fact for taking advantage.” And Quentin, suddenly darting forward, kissed Nelly Bly on her cheek, a corner of her mouth, and an inconsequent segment of her nose.

  “That was only a sighting shot,” he explained, and prepared to consolidate his position.

  During the early part of the previous night he had slept badly, dozing, waking to stare into the darkness and fretfully endeavour to rationalize his relations with Nelly. The attraction of pure-minded chivalry had begun to wane. A Cossack’s relict, it somehow seemed, was not so likely to appreciate Arthurian detachment as an unsophisticated orphan would be. Of course she had appealed for it. But then women—nice women—always said, “I’d just as soon have Graves” when they really wanted champagne. She would probably prefer something more exciting than still chivalry. A sparkling chivalry? It was difficult to think of the behaviour appropriate to a mood of sparkling chivalry. When did the knight cease to be a knight and become a cavalier? Quentin wondered. A sophisticated cavalier might follow a temperamental Cossack very acceptably. “Out upon it, I have loved three whole days together!” said the cavalier. “Sonia Soniabitch,” said the Cossack, and wept hopelessly. Then he went away to live with Ileana. Nelly Bly would probably appreciate someone who gave his reasons and didn’t cry. And to be a cavalier was certainly the more practical thing. He could retain the social graces of the knight and yet have the material pleasures accruing to one of Nature’s Cossacks. Quentin sat up in bed and repeated:

  “Some bays, perchance, or myrtle bough

  For difference crowns the brow

  Of those kind souls that were

  The noble martyrs here.

  And if that be the only odds,

  (As who can tell?) ye kinder gods,

  Give me the woman here.”

  Then he fell asleep. Now holding a very stiff and unfriendly Nelly Bly in his arms, he was ready to be the laughing, careless—yet accomplished and gracious—cavalier lover.

  Nelly, when he kissed her and grappled, flushed stormy-red and her eyes sparkled frostily. Anyone but a cavalier would have been frightened and let go. But Quentin had the reward of those who follow Suckling. For Nelly, suddenly relaxing, pressed forward, flung her arms round his neck, and clung to him. This was a little unexpected, but Quentin concealed his surprise.

  “You have the most beautiful back in the world,” he said, peeping darkly down her spine as her dress lifted away from it. He kissed the upper border of her left trapezius muscle.

  “Quentin,” she whispered. “Quentin. Oh, you have made things so much easier for me. Now I can trust you perfectly and tell you everything.”

  She kept her face hidden from him but her body trembled as if with an emotion that might be near to sobs. The clear-cut outline of the cavalier began to fade in Quentin’s mind beneath an insidious tide of sentiment. She was amazingly desirable; but she seemed smaller than he had thought; and he was beginning to feel protective again. Over her shoulder he caught sight of himself in a mirror. He really did look like Lely’s portrait of Wycherley (except for the hair); couldn’t he do it justice? With an effort he sent his right hand off pilgrim to Cythera.

  Nelly Bly pushed him back and looked at him searchingly, deeply. He found a strangely spiritual quality in her eyes and in her firm and delicate mouth which abashed the cavalier.

  “I can trust you?” she asked gravely.

  “Of course,” Quentin said.

  “You want to hear? And you will help me?”

  He seemed to see the shadow of that damned Cossack in her eyes, but again he said “Of course.”

  “Without reward?”

  Quentin looked uncomfortable. He was fundamentally honest and he hesitated to assert an altruism which he did not entirely feel.

  “I may declare a bonus,” she said demurely. “No, not now. Someone may come at any moment. Besides, you haven’t heard my story yet.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Not here. Will you meet me at eleven o’clock under the trees beside the tennis courts?”

  “I will,” said Quentin eagerly. Here was mystery and romance, a hundred times better than cold-blooded cavaliering.

  With a smile that was radiant kindness, beauty and kindness under a nimbus of red-gold hair, Nelly Bly repeated, “To-night, then,” and left him swiftly alone.

  Quentin, having read The Times for half-an-hour, found that there was nothing in it and decided to have a drink. He discovered Holly alone in the converted buttery staring out of the narrow window that gave a narrow glimpse of the bowling-green, a tree or two, and Lady Porlet. Holly turned round. His eyes were dark and brooding. His thin face was pale. He had the appearance of one persecuted.

  “Hullo, Holly. You’re looking a bit under the weather this morning,” Quentin said to him.

  “I have my anxieties, Mr. Cotton,” Holly answered in a far-away voice. He jumped, as the door which Quentin had left open suddenly closed with a bang.

  “I’d like one of your new cocktails—the light one.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  Mournfully Holly prepared it. Quentin sipped it thoughtfully. The silence in the little room grew oppressive. It seemed to contract and draw in the walls. A yellow cat leapt from nowhere on to the outer window-ledge and stared into the buttery. Holly looked at it with a kind of horror. He dabbed his moist forehead with a handkerchief.

  “I think I’ll have one myself, sir,” he said.

  “By all means,” said Quentin affably. “Have it with me.”

  “That’s Lady Porlet, isn’t it?” Holly pointed through the window.

  “It is.”

  Holly considered awhile. Then, “I suppose she’s all right, sir?” he asked doubtfully. “I mean trustworthy. She’s not one of those fly-by-nights without respect for truth or property or a man’s feelings, is she?”

  “I should say that she was perfectly trustworthy, Holly.” Quentin thought of Lady Porlet smiling placidly, taking a simple pleasure in her food, puzzled by her neighbours but pleased to have neighbours; Lady Porlet in her expensive old-fashioned clothes, silk and a gold locket; inclined to think—or to feel, for she abstained from conscious cerebration—that all the pother and fuss and activity in the world were like nursery noises when the nurse has her afternoon out; Lady Porlet, whom even strangers called “poor dear Lady Porlet,” was decidedly n
ot a fly-by-night. Holly must be going off his head.

  “What are you worried about?” said Quentin in a kindly voice.

  “I’m not exactly worried, sir. Not if she’s trustworthy, so to speak. But I lent her a book yesterday which I’m not accustomed to lend to people. It’s never been out of my hands before, and you know what it is, sir, when something like that’s at stake. You’re apt to fret, sir, aren’t you? And then there’s this matter of the cocktails. They come up to me and say, ‘What’s in ’em, Holly? How d’you keep ’em blue?’ they say. ‘Come on, tell us your recipe, Holly!’ It’s a responsibility you wouldn’t believe, sir, unless you had it. I’m the repository of one of ‘The Pelican’s’ dearest secrets. I’m a safe, that’s what I am, and they’re trying to pick me.”

  “Surely Lady Porlet isn’t trying to get your secret, is she?” Quentin was amused and yet impressed by the evident anxiety which Holly felt. He really looked like a man with a secret, Quentin thought. Or a political minority man in hiding; a fugitive; like a Russian, perhaps, in fear of the Red Terror.

  “She did ask me how I made ’em,” said Holly slowly. “But I said, ‘No ma’am, not to the Queen of England would I tell what’s a secret between me and Mr. Keith.’ And then the gentlemen come in and say, ‘Why, Holly, you’re quite an inventor! How did you do it?’ Of course I’m an inventor! Don’t I know that as well as them? But an inventor doesn’t tell his secrets to anyone who asks him, does he? Edison didn’t, and Mrs. Curie didn’t, and Mr. van Buren doesn’t—he’s an inventor too, they say.”

  Holly wiped his damp forehead and shook two more cocktails.

  “Like wildflowers, aren’t they?” he said. “Don’t they smell like the Spring? I’ll tell you this, Mr. Cotton, I was so frightened I’d forget the ingredients myself—like Ruskin, sir, with his forgetting to say ‘Open, Sesame,’—that I had to write them down. All the exact proportions and that. Of course it adds to the risk. But we mortals, we suck in danger with our mother’s milk, so where’s the odds?”

  Holly took a sheet of much-folded notepaper from his waistcoat pocket, read it, considered a moment or two, and then locked it away in a drawer beneath the bar.

  “Sometimes I keep it in one place, sometimes in another,” he explained, “according as I’m in a mood to think about pickpockets or safebreakers. And now what’ll I do with the key of the drawer?”

  “Well, I’m not surprised that people want to see your recipe,” said Quentin.

  “Ah, they all want to. Her, out there, and the gentlemen, and the Boots comes in and says, ‘Give you ten bob for the missing word, Holly.’ Ten bob! And he’s not the worst. Nor the gentlemen isn’t. It’s that red-haired Cleopatrer, Ninong de Lengclose, Madame Pompadore. In she comes and leans across the bar and looks into my face, seductive like, and ‘Be a sport,’ she says. ‘Tell me the truth,’ she says. ‘Spill the beans, Holly old man!’ Her with her red hair and her baby eyes! Do you know what I said to her?”

  “Said to whom? Who’s been trying to lead you astray like this?”

  “You may well say ‘lead me astray,’ sir. But I wasn’t having any. I stood up and I looked her in her eyes—green as French beans they are. Twice she’s been at me, Mr. Cotton. But I didn’t yield, no not an inch. And do you know what I said to her? ‘No, Messaliner!’ That’s what I said to her. ‘Messaliner!’”

  “But who is she, Holly? I should like to see her.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know her, sir. She’s got red hair.”

  “That, surely, isn’t a serious barrier—”

  Colonel Waterhouse and Sir Philip Betts came in and Quentin’s curiosity remained unsatisfied. Holly made no more revelations. But as Quentin finished his drink he whispered hoarsely, “She’s a holy terror, sir,” and nodded with much significance.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Nature, the thief, had crept once again into the province of art. She does it so often, as if a dancing trollop who had posed for Degas should pose for herself as a bunch of luminous frills; as if an orchard should crowd into delicate sunlight and smile “This is just like Monet”; as if a priest should starve, rack himself, get jaundice, squint round a corner, dress in yellow satin, and put a label across his belly, “After El Greco.” Nature has no conscience. You may walk at night by a river-bank towards a dim-seen bridge; shadows converge to a distant point, broken a little by streaks of grey; but a dull, lop-sided mass hangs dismally on your right hand; and then suddenly a cottage window is lighted up, the mass is broken, and harmonious composition is detestably revealed. Or you climb a hill that looks from the bottom nothing but a pointed hill, and half-way up a fir tree creeps into the sky. The sides of the hill point upwards, the spear-blade fir tree soars, and finally the clouds split significantly to repeat the climbing lines of the hill and, dismayed, you see in front of you not Nature but a patterned, pyramidal thing that only wants a gold frame to take it to the Academy. Even sheep abhor an artistic vacuum and file instinctively to that corner of a field where an artist would have them. And geese flying across the moon fly as a Chinese painter has taught them. There is nothing natural in Nature. She in her own way paints, powders, hangs a jewel in her ear, and puts a rose between her sophisticated lips.

  She had just done it again.

  Joan Benbow, driving ambitiously, had watched her ball land, leap forward in a series of diminishing arcs, and come to rest in Hibbett’s Hole. (Hibbett was a Victorian golfer, one of John Company’s colonels, who died in harness, his enlarged spleen bursting almost simultaneously with a good niblick in the bunker now called after him.) And now Joan was the centre of one of Nature’s artistic supplements.

  The opposing edge of the bunker rose in a steep crescent, sand lipped with green turf. To her left were two smallish, slender trees, the inner one taller than the outer. Beyond the bunker grew an oak whose leafy branches showed like a crown above the centre of the crescent. To the right and farther away a poplar gracefully soared. Behind the trees was blue sky. A white diagonal slant of cloud pointed upwards, towards the poplar, and roughly in the direction of the seventh green. Between Joan and Saturday—he stood behind and to her right—a rising slope repeated the left-hand side of the crescent, while the far slant of cloud, resting like an inclined plane on the two smaller trees and the top of the oak, held his eyes to the obtuse-angled triangle of which it was the longest side. A tilted triangle, Joan its focus of interest, lines that pointed to the open apex, and Joan also intent on that direction since it was there that the seventh green lay.

  Once, twice, and again she swung with savage grace. Her ball sank deeper, moved a sluggish inch, leapt like a trout into the air and returned to its snug hole. Saturday felt that he could stand and watch her all day trying to get out of this magnificent picture. Her club traced lines of transient beauty in the air. Those graceful arcs—if they had not been blocked by the dense and impenetrable sand—would have released their shafts of energy in the precise direction of the apex of the triangle. Statically and dynamically the picture was right.

  “Try again,” he encouraged. “There’s very fine sand in that bunker. The Romans thought a lot of it when they were building round about here.”

  “The Romans didn’t play golf,” said Joan shortly. The colours were good too, though he had thought Joan’s dress a little bright at first; a kind of silk jersey with a skirt of the same stuff, a yellow jersey scored with a multitude of thin, short, broken, parallel red lines very close to each other, like basket-work, so that the whole impression was that of a splendid orange. Light grew to her as the lines of the picture sprang away. Green trees and turf, blue sky, the white slant of cloud, and on the foreground of convenient sand a glittering orange Joan.

  “Splendid!” he said, as she hit her ball to the hard face of the bunker, from where it returned to its original position.

  “Your hole,” said Joan, and stooped to pick up.

  “No, don’t go,” Saturday pleaded.

  “Why not?”

  “You
’ll spoil the picture. You’re just right where you are.”

  “In a bunker? That isn’t a compliment to my golf.”

  “There’s more in golf than hitting a good ball. That sort of golf is only the reflection of one narrow facet of essential golfishness. Behind golf there is a wonderful abstraction, Golf, which shows itself in gulleys, gulches, wild flowers in the rough, lost balls forgotten and dying in impenetrable jungle, rain, wind, cirrus clouds and cumuli, Constable landscapes, orange ladies in sandy bunkers, a significant tree, the lyrical prose of a Times golfing correspondent, all the history of St. Andrews, turf growing into a magic carpet, craning spectators and intrusive worm-casts, the worms themselves—there’s a constant underground pilgrimage from the subterrene desert of a fairway to the rich Mecca of the greens—and think of hickory forests growing to their conscious destiny in the shaft of a club, or iron-ore bursting the rock in its eagerness to be smelted and forged into a trim putter. And many other things.”

  “It’s a good thing the course is almost empty today.”

  Joan sat down on the green slope beside Saturday and examined a cruel scar on her ball.

  Neither of them spoke. Saturday’s freshet of talk mysteriously died as Joan came within touching distance. Joan, with her head bent, looked at her wounded ball. Saturday filled his pipe and lit it. White clouds sailed slowly over a calm sky. The trees stood still. There was no one in sight.

  “By the way,” said Saturday, and Joan at the same moment said, “Do you think—”

  “Yes?” they said together, each waiting for the other.

  “Your honour,” said Keith.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything in particular.”

  “I wasn’t either. Thoughts that do lie.”

  “Too deep for tears?”

  “No, just thoughts that do lie. They lied when they made me feel I was going to say something.”