Poet's Pub

by Eric Linklater

  Oh, acting a story was much more amusing than writing one. Writing, after all, was a tedious affair. The hand moved so slowly and the brain wearied of making eternal bricks without straw. She wondered why so many people did write stories when, if they had only a scrap of initiative, it was so diverting to make them real.…

  Quentin’s horror when she told him about the drosky murder in Irkutsk. His impatience at Boris. She had almost convinced herself of Boris’s reality before she finished. He looked like one of the Russian Ballet, a handsome agile man with rhetorical eyes and a lyrical mouth. Poor Boris. There was something unsatisfactory about him in spite of his many good qualities. He lacked something, as fictional Russians so often do. And yet she saw herself waiting for him in Batum as clearly as she had ever seen anything in her life. It was quite by accident, too, that she had read the article in a monthly magazine which gave her sufficient local knowledge to furnish her story with Ziks and Chekas and snowy mountains. It might be amusing really to go to Russia some day.

  “Clever Helen,” she murmured. “Quentin will hate me when he knows how I have fooled him. But he won’t hate me for long. And it did serve him right. I wonder if he found out anything from van Buren. I must make that scoop. And I ought to find what Keith’s new poems are about.…

  She turned her back on the moonlight, crumpled her pillow into a more comfortable shape, and was about to go to sleep, when a thought suddenly stirred her to wakefulness. She got up and went to the window. On the seat where she and Quentin had sat were two figures whom she took to be Saturday and Joan.

  One does lose count of time, she thought, and since they have stayed there so long there’s no reason why they should come in for the next five minutes. This is an opportunity to look for the poems, I think.

  On several occasions she had—being there in the course of her duties—looked round Saturday’s study to see if his new book was apparent, but it had always been carefully locked away. To-day, however, he had lent it to Joan, and Nelly had seen Joan return it to him after dinner. He took it to his room and came down again in a few seconds, impatient of delay. Perhaps he had omitted to lock it up. While people were moving about there had been no opportunity for Nelly to investigate, but now, with Saturday sufficiently far away and everybody else asleep, there was a timely chance. A few minutes would give her all the information she wanted.

  She put on a dressing-gown and quietly opened her door.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Lights glowed dimly in the corridor of “The Pelican,” making the darkness in the corners which they could not reach more profound, more solemnly black than Nature had ever intended darkness to be. All Downish was asleep and dark except for pale yellow lamps which marked its streets as the corridor lights in “The Pelican” made evident—shadow-evident, twilight-obvious—the route from room to room. The houses were castles of sleep, the rooms were caves of slumber. The night lay closely on town and tavern as if the air were saturated with sleep, or as if the sky had crept down to the earth for loneliness and wrapt it warmly in moon-and-dusky veils. Sleep lay comfortable under this friendly coverlet of the night. Sleepers breathed slowly, snuggled beneath the sheets. Even the trees were still. All the dogs were kennelled and birds were no more than lifeless feather balls. A policeman yawned in the Square. A clock struck soft and drowsily. But over the roof-trees of Downish crept lean and lonely cats whose bright green eyes were alive with all the hunger and desire that the town had thrown off when the townsfolk turned their faces to the wall and gently snored nunc dimittis.

  Sleep, its oldest guest, had returned to “The Pelican,” for the ten thousandth time. Quentin and the professor slept, George the Boots and Maria and Veronica slept, Diana Waterhouse lay in her calm white-lidded virgin sleep. Lady Porlet slept with her accustomed ease, and many visitors whose daily life was full of restless thought, now as quiet as children or shepherds, slept in their appointed place. But here and there unease went slinking open-eyed, like the cats of Downish.

  Nelly Bly crept quietly to Saturday’s room.…

  Angela Scrabster woke from a dream in which a gigantic Chinese general over-strode a vast green landscape; emerald-green paddy-fields, rivers of jade, grassy hills, and pagodas smeared with verdigris. Only the Chinese general was yellow, and he was all gamboge and jaundice… on a pea-green, bottle-green, sea-green landscape. “A metre of green is greener than a centimetre of green,” she muttered (convinced, like St. Paul, by a vision) as with a shudder she woke to find verdant lights streaking the darkness.

  “Oh, damn his marrow pie and his kickshawses,” she groaned in her agony.

  Not far away Mr. van Buren lay and stared at his invisible ceiling. His forehead was damp and he cursed the natural greed of man which even age cannot wholly subdue. His head ached dismally, his eyeballs were too large for their sockets, and a painful war was being waged in his abdomen. He remembered—it was the curse of having many friends—what a doctor had told him about his intestines. There was, in his troubled belly, twenty-two feet of troubled gut and a tortured twisting canal six feet long. From his right arm-pit, it seemed, to his waist was a mountain of liver, a volcano in the throes of imminent eruption. Hostile fleets sailed upon his succus entericus, discharging their broadsides against his shrinking mesentery; and the appendices epiploicæ, those tattered shreds of membrane, waved helplessly in a flatulent gale like white flags of surrender that no one would see.

  He even thought of death; for he was past sixty, it was stark night, and his belly was a battlefield. Miserably he contemplated the grave and saw cemetery gates and a field of white stalagmytes that were tombstones. His throat was dry and his brow was wet.

  From these funeral visions he was roused by a sudden demand. The embattled hosts of dissension cried to him with one voice. Their bickering ceased, they were united and they bade him get up. As clearly as they could they urged him to rise. There was no time to lose, they said. Van Buren got up.

  He switched on the light, hurried to the door, and as he opened it he heard, not far off, the elemental sound of waters, abruptly released, that sought their own level. But he did not stay to put on a dressing-gown. The corridor turned right three yards from his door. Slip-slap, slip-slap, approaching him came the sound of slippered feet, and at the corner Mr. van Buren almost collided with Mr. Wesson. But Mr. van Buren did not stay to apologize.

  Mr. Wesson looked tired, as a man who has passed through a trying experience may look. But the experience was over and he was sufficiently master of himself to recognize his opportunity. Like van Buren and Miss Scrabster he had wakened in an agony of intestinal disturbance, and his agony had sent him straight (or almost straight) to the chance for which he had been waiting ever since his arrival at “The Pelican”—van Buren’s rooms deserted, the lights on, the doors wide open. He heard now, some distance away, another door close decisively. He was safe for at least a few minutes. He looked into the little study or sitting-room and saw through it a glimpse of the bedroom, a dressing-table with a variety of objects upon it, the corner of a disordered bed, a chair. Mr. Wesson stepped into van Buren’s sitting-room, closing the door behind him.…

  Nelly Bly listened in the darkness of Saturday’s room and heard her own heart as something louder than the slippered feet and the moving doors. Her right hand clutched a rough leather portfolio, the other rested on the electric-light switch. In the suddenly darkened unfamiliar room she felt as lost as if she had gone blind. She could scarcely remember the position of the furniture, except that some pieces stood between her and the window which was a possible though unpleasant avenue of escape. Her wish to become acquainted with low life did not include any curiosity about prisons, and she was definitely frightened at the idea of being caught in Keith’s study. She had found the portfolio lying on his table and had read the title of the poem and turned a few pages when the startling sound of a door roughly opened interrupted her. She fled to the switch and snapped out the light. There were footsteps, slip-slap, slip-s
lap, in the corridor. Puzzling footsteps that seemed to come nearer and yet die away. She listened perplexedly, feeling no more like a good conspirator than Quentin had felt on a previous occasion.

  Two minutes, three minutes passed. The darkness grew oppressive, crowding in on her from all sides as she stood still. And now there was quietness outside. There were no more footsteps. It might be safe to go now. Carefully she opened the door, and still carrying the portfolio of Saturday’s poem, stepped into the corridor. There was no one to be seen. Dim wall-lights spread a gentle glow, a yellow twilight broken by grotesque blotches of shadow. She looked one way and the other, and as she turned her head she saw a door—the next door to Saturday’s—slowly ever so slowly opening. With a gasp she sprang to a deep alcove of darkness.

  Keith’s study was between Mr. Wesson’s room and Mr. van Buren’s two-room suite. The other side of the corridor looked through a kind of clerestory into the central courtyard. In two places the wall thrust out over corbels into deep window-places, and in one of these Nelly hid herself. By this time she was thoroughly unhappy.

  The door she had seen opening was van Buren’s and as she watched, almost suffocated by nervous excitement, she saw, to her immense surprise, Mr. Wesson come out; Mr. Wesson with his white expressionless face and his curious eyeglasses. He wore a drab-green dressing-gown, and in one hand he carried a black leather portfolio. Nelly caught her breath almost audibly, for she herself held a portfolio of precisely the same kind. Mr. Wesson passed stealthily to his own room.

  He had been fortunate. On van Buren’s dressing-table lay a bunch of keys, and if Mr. Wesson was not an accomplished picklock or cracksman (his life had led him on more urbane paths) he could use normal keys as well as anybody else. And he knew what he wanted. It was not the first time that he had been in van Buren’s rooms, but it was the first time that he had had the means of opening the drawer which he particularly desired to open. He wasted no time and in a minute or so the portfolio which contained the formulæ, the plans, the drawings and all the other particulars of a revolutionary scheme for converting coal into petrol was in his hands. Mr. Wesson was of his own volition, no thief; but if he could get what he wanted only by stealing, it was necessary to become a thief. Or so he had decided. He relocked the drawer, replaced the keys on van Buren’s dressing-table, and went warily out into the corridor. There was no one in sight and thankfully he regained his own room.

  Nelly Bly tried to control her excitement by breathing very deeply and regularly, and at the same time she pondered the explanation of what she had seen. It was not really difficult, but to her disturbed mind the interpretation was complicated by the curiously identical appearance of the two portfolios (she had to hold Saturday’s very tightly to reassure herself that Mr. Wesson had not stolen the poem) and by the fact that Mr. Wesson had bewilderingly appeared as an unrehearsed dramatis persona in her own plot against the secret of the oil. Her brain, not long before, had been full of the figments of an absorbing Russian mystery, and it seemed almost as if Mr. Wesson had stepped out of the same cupboard in which Boris and the Zik had been grown. She remembered her foolish boast that it was easier and pleasanter to act stories than to write them, and she confessed to herself with the sobriety which accompanies a trite reflexion, that facts are stranger than fiction and strong enough to ruin the prettiest plot.

  It was clear that Mr. Wesson was a thief, and it was distressingly apparent that this actual thief had forestalled the more squeamish rifling to which she had incited Quentin. But the journalist in her rose and comforted her. Facts were facts and, what was more important, might become news. The secret of van Buren’s discovery would be interesting to only a small part of the community, but the story of a desperate thief who had followed him across the Atlantic to rob him in a romantic English inn could be turned into news which would enthral a whole country. Nelly began to feel elated, and as her self-confidence came back she sturdily decided that to summon the police (especially the rustic police of Downish) and simply indicate a thief for them to arrest would be an anti-climax to this midnight adventure. She would wait till the morning and re-capture the documents herself. She might, though it was difficult to invent immediately the precise modus operandi, even arrest the thief herself. But certainly she would watch him, perhaps find out something about him to give body to her story, and in the end arrange a suitable dénouement. She must get to her room and think it out… but before she could do that she ought to restore the now unimportant portfolio under her arm to Saturday’s table. There was no time for poetry with an international thief in the offing.

  Once again she looked this way and the other, up and down the dimly lit corridor, and as she prepared to creep back with the sheaf of poetry she heard some distance away the elemental sound of water escaping to find its own level… and heard, too, more footsteps approaching. All her fears returned. She shrank back into the darkness and scarcely dared to peer out and see van Buren re-enter his room. She had never thought of van Buren. She had unconsciously assumed that he was in his bedroom sound asleep while Wesson found what he wanted in his sitting-room. She dreaded more desperately than ever the danger of being discovered or the awful shock of being pounced on without warning: for now it seemed that people were everywhere night-walking, creeping in the shadows, opening doors, coming round corners, prowling, stalking, lurking, and listening. The night was full of movement and the darkness had eyes.

  Oh dear, she thought. I wish I had never left London. I daren’t go into Keith’s room again. There may have been someone there the whole time. Or someone will be sure to come in if I do go. I simply daren’t. I’m almost frightened to move.

  She gathered together what courage she could find, and still carrying the only copy of Saturday’s poem which the world possessed, ran to the narrow staircase which led to her own garret, and locked the door against the disturbed and terrifying world below.…

  Angela Scrabster’s room was some distance from this scene of adventure. But Angela Scrabster walked back to her room with the same look of one who had been at war with Nature as Mr. van Buren and Mr. Wesson had worn. She had to pass the main staircase that led down into the hall. It looked like a broad shaft to bottomless night. And as she was passing it she saw, to her horror, a white face in the darkness.

  Angela Scrabster, in spite of physical weakness, had a courageous spirit which intercourse with Chinese generals and the pirates of the Yang-tse-kiang had toughened, and she called stoutly, “Who are you?”

  “It’s me,” said an unhappy voice, and Holly come into the light.

  “What do you mean by prowling about at this time of night?”

  “I’m not prowling,” said Holly.

  “Well, why aren’t you in bed?”

  “Somebody’s stolen it,” said Holly.

  “Stolen your bed?”

  “My recipe. The recipe for the cocktails. It’s gone. It was in the drawer, and it isn’t there now. I had a dream that it had been stolen, and I got up to look for it, and the drawer’s empty. And then I heard noises upstairs, and I thought perhaps it was the thief.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll find your recipe in the morning. You’ve probably mislaid it. And now go back to your bed.” Angela Scrabster spoke in the masterful tone which she was accustomed to use when dealing with servants or the natives of a foreign country, and Holly listened sulkily.

  “It’s all very well for you,” he said. “You don’t know the number of times they’ve tried to get it from me. My life’s been a misery for the last few days. They’re after it day and night. ‘Come on, Holly,’ they say. ‘Let’s have a look at it, Holly.’ But I never thought they’d manage to get it. I’ve held ’em off—”

  “I don’t know who ‘they’ are and I can’t stand here any longer. I advise you to go to bed.” Angela Scrabster walked determinedly to her room.

  Holly sat on the stairs and muttered to the darkness. “It’s gone,” he said. “The only thing I ever did in my life wor
th talking about, except getting bayoneted by a Prussian Guard. And then the bloody newspapers said that he was only a bloody Saxon. But they were wrong. I ought to know if anybody knows. Getting bayoneted and inventing a blue cocktail. That’s all I’ve ever done to be proud of. And neither’s done me any good.”

  Tears trickled coldly down Holly’s nose, and he sniffed miserably. But his head began to nod, for he was very tired and not quite sober. He got to his feet, recognizing the advance of sleep, and stumbled downstairs.…

  Under the elms between the bowling-green and the tennis-court, Joan turned to Saturday and said, “It’s so late, my dear. We must go in.”

  The moon had travelled through space and the shadows crept lazily out on the grass. But neither Saturday nor Joan had been thinking about time, nor even of the moon, and certainly not of the shadows.

  “I suppose we must,” said Saturday.

  They stood up and looked at the dark bulk of “The Pelican,” the shadowy house with moon-glint in its windows.