Mr. Wesson smiled in a superior manner and restarted the car. “You see,” he said, “that I have some qualifications for my self-invented profession. And I knew the country in which I practised. The small towns in the Middle Western States of America are remote from artistic reality and therefore incurably avid for it. They have the lecture habit as other people have the drug habit. They will listen to anything that is sponsored by a well-known name, just as they will drink out of any bottle that has a handsome label. They know that there are good things in the world, and they believe that most of them gravitate to America. That is why they saw nothing incongruous in Galsworthy taking Oshkosh into his confidence or opening his heart to Hicksville. Mr. G. B. Shaw says that he will never go to the United States. Say, listen: there’s a score of towns between Boonville, Missouri, and Little Rock in Arkansas which think that’s the best joke he ever made. Why? Because they’ve seen him as plain as you see me, and heard him lecture on such typical subjects as Woman and Super-woman, You Know Mrs. Warren! (For Men Only), and Marriage for Morons.”
“You mean—?”
“I do,” said Mr. Wesson, “and they were right good lectures which he himself would not be ashamed to deliver anywhere. I borrowed freely from his own prefaces and spiced them up with topical allusions, popular psychology, and some red-hot Revivalism. They were real smart lectures, though for domestic appeal and poignant heart-throbs—pure sentiment with a kick in every clause—I prefer my Galsworthy series.”
“It’s raining,” said Joan. “I knew it was going to.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Wesson.
He switched on the head-lights, which threw into the oncoming dusk dim pearly shafts slashed with diamond-bright arrows. Raindrops pattered on the weatherproof hood, and as he could find no side-curtains to put up rain drove steadily in at Mr. Wesson, who sat on the windward side. But such slight discomfort was not enough to check his narrative. For years he had been compelled to suppress the too-human instinct for confession and boasting and self-explanation. While half mankind took the other half into its confidence, spilling its gushes and overflow of sentiment, discovery, and loneliness, Mr. Wesson had stood silent and apart in the awful solitude of a dictator or a leper, friendless from his very manner of existence, of necessity self-contained. And now he had a confidante. A girl charming to the sight and gifted with understanding. Such a girl as most men would strive to impress with the individual strangeness of their character and destiny. A girl like a white tablet that is a perpetual temptation to autobiography.
Disregarding the rain, Mr. Wesson continued his story.
When Joan asked whether his impersonations had always been successful—with the exception of the George Moore episode—he admitted that at the height of his career a catastrophic failure had daunted him.
“Partly it was due to carelessness,” he said, “partly to a genuine artistic surrender to the art of Thomas Hardy. I took a holiday with my wife and daughter—an only child, Miss Benbow—and while on holiday I read all those great sages of Wessex, those epics of the untamed earth as I named them to myself, and I became convinced that out of them should be framed a message to the American people. I composed a lecture which was more of a pæan of nature than a lecture, and billed it ‘The Soil is Sacred,’ by the Seer of Wessex, England. It contained my best work. It had a voice of thunder and a voice of gentle streams, the mutter of clay, the tone of winter winds, and the accent of sudden Spring. It was the hell of a fine lecture, Miss Benbow. And the Rotary Club of a certain town in South Dakota was only too willing for me, in persona Thomas Hardy, to put it across.”
Mr. Wesson drove in silence for some minutes while Joan waited dumbly for the inevitable catastrophe.
“I sent a telegram to that town in South Dakota,” he continued, “to confirm the time of my arrival. When I stepped on to the platform there was a gasp from the audience. The sea of faces—for naturally the hall was full—visibly blanched. It seemed to recede. I assumed that they were impressed with my appearance. A strange muttering arose, a sibilant murmur, which quickly died away as I began to speak. Then the noise woke again, hissing and shouting, catcalls. It swelled into a storm. Things were thrown at me. The audience got up on end and rushed the platform. I was seized, my clothes pulled off me. I was ridden on a rail, Miss Benbow, through the streets of that town in South Dakota, in nothing but a torn shirt. How I escaped with my life I have never been able to figure out, except that the First National Bank happened to go on fire right at that time.”
“They knew that Hardy was dead?”
“He had just died, and wireless telegraphy has narrowed the earth to the width of a mean street so that you can shout across it from window to window. Everybody knew except me. I hadn’t even seen a newspaper for several days. Everybody except me who would have been the first to mourn him, for I thought more highly of Thomas Hardy than the whole darned state of South Dakota did. I meant to give that lecture far and wide.”
Joan said nothing, being touched by the clownish horror of Mr. Wesson’s downfall.
“It upset me more than you can think,” he said. “My confidence went. I saw that people were getting too wise to fool with safety. And anyway broadcasting was spoiling the field for me. Lecture tours were a losing game. So I quit. I had made enough with the help of a little speculation to retire on. I quit, Miss Benbow. But I quit without thinking enough about my daughter.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighteen. And she wants to go to Paris to study art. She says they can’t teach her to draw in America—which is perfectly true—and she thinks Paris would be more stimulating. Well, I consider that any man who is a father has his responsibilities, and her mother shares my opinion. But my bank account didn’t support the theory. So when a friend in New York said he was interested in van Buren’s oil business, and would be willing to pay handsomely for information, I got busy and transformed myself into book-collector, which was a disguise, I reckoned, sufficient to disarm suspicion in a rattlesnake. You know the rest of the story, or as much as you want to.”
“I scarcely know what to say,” Joan began.
“Romaine—that’s my daughter—will go to Paris now, I suppose,” said Mr. Wesson.
Behind the rain great gusts of wind came swooping off the moors. With the rain in their folds they flung themselves across the road, now this way, now that, as though an invisible giant dancer were leaping in a swirl of black tempestuous rapperies on a platform of the hills. Through the holes of her ragged skirts stars flickered. Whisssssh! went her skirts as she whirled on one toe, Wheee-ooo! as she turned on the other; and water flew off them as when a man shakes a sea-drenched oilskin. The headlights, like eyes on long white stalks, peered for the road. The road was lost in the hills. The hills were half lost in darkness. The wind and the rain danced a boisterous country dance. Through the open sides of the car rain leapt desperately, wind followed with a shout.
Joan hugged herself in her corner. Mr. Wesson shook his soaking sleeve.
Joan thought with dismay of being jettisoned on this wild hill-road. Mr. Wesson began to realize that one country seems as large as another when night and rain fall together and the wind gets up to greet them.
The headlights pointed a thin silver path into Scotland. The border hills were about them, and as they climbed the broad rampart the storm grew wilder, the moss-troopers’ wind hallooed.
“It may clear up,” said Mr. Wesson hopefully.
“It may,” said Joan dismally, knowing better.
CHAPTER XXIV
Saturday and Quentin struggled to put up the great rainproof top of their borrowed charabanc. The storm harried them as they worked, shrewdly beating their faces, getting with cold hands under their coats, spilling colder runnels of water down their arms as they toiled with the unwieldy hood.
No sooner had they unfurled the canvas from its snug casing than the wind with a whoop of joy, filled its slack belly alderman-full and tore it from their hands. They seized its flapping ed
ges, hauled it and swore at it, the wind slackened, they drew it down. Then with a howl the wind came back, and like a hobbledehoy in rut among farthingales, tossing and tumbling them, blew up the hood again to explore its vast concavity.
With bleeding fingers Saturday and Quentin fought the wind and the rowdy canvas. Save that their ship was stable it was like stowing topsails off Cape Horn. And the wind slapped their faces, their ties were whipped out, the rain ran down their sleeves to tickle their armpits. “Hell!” said Quentin.
“Hell and damnation!” said Saturday. “Heave!” said Quentin. “Heave and hold!” answered Saturday. And at last, braced and buckled trimly down, the canvas cover was in place and under it they found a measure of shelter.
Saturday wiped the rain off his spectacles and stared, myopic and grim, into the darkness. Joan’s fate seemed desperate in this décor of night. In daylight and fine weather her plight had angered him and worried him. Now it enraged and frightened him. The wind struck inward and his mind was full of the noise of the storm. Joan was somewhere in this border of wilderness. Joan and a white-faced, heavy-eyed folio-hunter. And somewhere with them— yielding to pulp, perhaps, in seeping rain—was the manuscript of “Tellus Will Proceed.” His girl and his work, both in danger of the night. He tried to forget about the poem, because to think of it argued unwhole love. Lost Joan, he thought, should fill his heart; as if Hamlet had written verse and Ophelia had taken his manuscript to drown in company with her under the water-weeds—but would not Hamlet have given a thought to the life-blood of good lively words washed away by the brook that filled Ophelia’s mouth?
Like a spate in March wind came off the hills and the taut canvas roof thundered beneath its charge. Anxiety for his poem vanished, blown into shreds, and poor Joan crowded his mind.
And Quentin thought about Nelly Bly, who was also lost. But Quentin’s anxiety was tempered by respect for Nelly’s resourcefulness. Moreover she was not a captive, or at any rate not a close captive, and her bondage to the Soviet was not likely to be aggravated by a storm in the Cheviots. So Quentin had more time to think about his own discomfort, which was considerable. He was wet and cold and hungry, and the empty charabanc under its spread of sail was almost unmanageable. It lurched against the wheel, tried to throw its head into the wind, swung cumbrously behind the swaying silver beam of its headlights.
“Do you know where we are?” shouted Quentin.
“Of course I do,” said Saturday. “This is my own country.”
Wheeee-ooh! yelled the wind, and the “Blue Bird” roared down hill.
“Your country?”
“Calf country.… Keith Hall… over the river… round the hill.”
“Then for God’s sake let’s go there… hungry as hell… soaked to the skin.”
“Leave Joan… night like this… Wesson?”
“Can’t find them… do no good… damned hungry.”
The wind blew words away like feathers and the noise of the “Blue Bird”—engine and straining structure—swallowed whole sentences.
“They may be quite near,” Saturday shouted.
“More likely a hundred miles away,” roared Quentin.
“Don’t like… give up search… comfort… Joan still out.”
“… damned hungry… hell… no bloody good.”
The road ran down hill to a bridge and a river that sang in its own way the drinking-song which all rivers sing when the rain comes slanting down. On the near side of the bridge a cattle-track led straight into the water, branching V-like off the road. The banks were low and this was a convenient drinking-place for homeward-driven animals. But in the darkness the cattle-track looked as much like road as the real road, and Quentin would have steered the charabanc into the river had not Saturday gripped the wheel and violently swung it inwards. The “Blue Bird” slid uncertainly, held the road, but crashed into the right-hand ramp of the bridge. A head-light went out, like a heavy-weight boxer’s eye closing suddenly under the impact of a left hook.
“There!” said Quentin triumphantly. “If it’s too dark to see a bridge, how the hell are you going to find Joan?”
“Well, keep calm,” said Saturday.
“Calm! I’m perfectly calm. It’s you who are excited. Now do be reasonable, old man, and admit that we’re doing no good and just making ourselves thoroughly uncomfortable here. How far away is Keith Hall?”
“A mile or two. By Crosier’s Edge and Cawfield.”
“That explains it perfectly, of course.”
“We can get dry clothes and something to eat there if you like,” said Saturday, “and then carry on.”
Quentin re-started without further discussion. The “Blue Bird” was not damaged except for a broken head-light, a crumpled mudguard, and a splintered running-board. In a few minutes after leaving the main road, some lights showed dimly over the black slant of a hill.
“That’s it,” said Saturday.
They passed a squat tree-hidden lodge, drove round the bulging flank of a hill—somewhere beneath them the river sank deeply and the wind harped wildly in the birches—and came at last to a big solid house that looked an ungainly shadow-mass with an ominous tower by night; but would by day appear comfortable, safe, spacious, wise and weatherbeaten.
“Her ladyship and the laird are in the library,” said the butler.
Lady Keith was a big gaunt woman with brown eyes, black eyebrows, and white hair. She had been a Matheson from about Lochalsh. Crossed with sturdy Lowland stock she had borne strong sons. Sir Colin, by grace of war the laird, walked clumsily, for he was heavy, on his artificial leg. Neither showed much surprise when Saturday and Quentin appeared all wet and tired, and not till they had bathed, changed their clothes, eaten and drunk, did Lady Keith ask why they came so late and so uncomfortably.
Saturday told the story while Quentin frankly stared round the room. It was nobly planned, pine-panelled, lighted with mellow light and red flicker from a fireplace at either end, and it had shelves on every wall designed for companies and cohorts of books in formal line. But the shelves were nearly empty. A few rows of volumes, clad in orthodox calf, stood stiffly like ancient defenders on one side; two rows or three of novels, some with their bright paper jackets still on them, were more at ease on the other. And elsewhere were a dozen badly stuffed birds: blackgame, plover, a cock grouse on a plaster rock, widgeon and pintail ducks, a couple of snipe, and a hen-harrier. On a large table were a pair of guns, a cartridge bag, and a number of cardboard targets peppered with holes. A pile of unmounted photographs lay on a stool beside Lady Keith. In front of one fireplace a Scots deerhound stretched, with a couple of West Highland terriers asleep between its stiffly outflung legs.
“And so the villain is a book-collector,” said Lady Keith when Saturday had told his adventures. “We don’t like book-buyers, do we, Colin?”
“They leave room for my birds,” Sir Colin answered.
“Colin had to sell the library to pay taxes on his non-existent income,” Saturday explained to Quentin, “and the fellow who bought it sold it at two hundred per cent. profit three weeks after carting it away. How are the birds, mother?”
“I got these photographs of black-cock this Spring,” said Lady Keith. “But you don’t want to see them now, do you?”
He sat down beside her and looked at photographs—taken with skill and infinite patience—of black-cock strutting and dancing before their unimpressed harems; here was one with swollen neck, trailing his magnificent wings and curved tail-feathers on the ground, there one charging a rival, and another erect, shouting and clapping his wings against his flanks.
Saturday praised them. His mother said softly, “Tell me about Joan.”
Sir Colin showed Quentin the birds he had tried to stuff. He had, perhaps, the manner of a father caught playing with his children’s toys.
“I haven’t the patience to get satisfactory photographs,” he explained.
“I think the hen-harrier is extremely good,” Quentin
said.
“It isn’t bad. I shot it on Crosier’s Edge, a mile or so from here. But you’re not really interested in birds, are you?”
Quentin considered that.
“I wasn’t either till a couple of years ago. And now—oh, well, a man’s got to do something. I play with birds.”
He sat down with his artificial leg thrust stiffly out.
“What perfect guns!” said Quentin.
“They’re old-fashioned Joe Mantons. I’ve been testing them. They’re as good as ever. A killing circle of thirty inches at thirty yards; forty yards from choke.”
In appearance Sir Colin was like his mother, with brown eyes under black brows. He had been a notable athlete till three machine-gun bullets smashed his left thigh and thirteen years had not sufficed to reconcile him to lameness. He found in the flight of birds an externalization of his desire for free movement.
Quentin did not feel at home beside this crippled giant who amused himself with stuffing snipe; and yet, in the presence of bird lovers Quentin was becoming sensitive to the charms of ornithology.
He tried to capture some bird memories of his own to talk about… chaffinches mobbing a—what was it they had mobbed? A rook? He couldn’t remember.… A peewit fighting a crow.…
“I remember,” he said, “once seeing a peewit attack a crow in the most spirited manner.…”
Lady Keith smiled at him.
“Another enthusiast?” she asked. “All the nicest people who come here seem to be fond of birds.”
“Mother once turned a man out of the house because he admitted having shot a red-necked phale-rope,” said Saturday.
“That isn’t quite true,” Lady Keith protested.
“Then it was a dotterel.”
“She was nearly lost in a blizzard last winter,” said Colin, “trying to find out whether grouse make snow-burrows.”
“Well, they do,” said Lady Keith. “They choose places where the heather is old and thick and wiry, so that the snow lies loosely, and they make great warrens before the surface snow has time to freeze.”
Poet's Pub Page 22
