CHAPTER X
Just before sunrise Barber was wakened by a large hand on his shoulder. For a few sleepy moments he stared uncomprehendingly upward at the side-whiskered face and the wall beyond, his body savoring the comfort of bed after many nights on the ground.
“Time to lay into the chores, mister,” said Fawcett cheerfully.
Barber stretched, yawned, and touched a prickly chin. The assumption that he had signed on as a farm hand struck him as pretty cool, but he contemplated the prospect without resentment. Perhaps Oberon had intended it that way. “Have you got an extra razor I could borrow?” he asked.
“Well, now that I think,” replied the farmer, “that’s one thing there be’nt in this hull place. They’s a virtoo in the water or suthin’ that makes a man’s hair stay put; mine ain’t growed a mite since I’been here.” He looked at Barber, pulling on his clothes, with his face carefully turned to keep the incipient wings at his back out of sight, and laughed. “Don’t know’s I’blame you, though, with a brindle bush like that. Let’s have suthin’ to ‘strengthen by the sperrit, the inner man’ as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians. I consider I’be lucky, without ary stock to feed before I’can have my breakfast.”
Barber’s eye caught the foodbag, where he had hung it on the back of a chair the night before, and, “I think I can help you out there,” he offered brightly. “Is there anything you’d specially like but haven’t been able to get lately?”
Fawcett’s whiskers moved in a grin. “Well, now you call it to mind, there is. I declare there’s times when I would give ’most all I own for a chunk of good Boston codfish. Ain’t got that, have you?”
“Watch me.” Barber concentrated on the thought of codfish and reached into the bag. It yielded a handful of crumbling leaves and the musty odor of decayed vegetation. Slightly dismayed, but remembering how it had failed on beer during the journey, he tried again, but made the request plain ham and eggs. Same results. Fawcett was surveying the proceeding disappointedly.
“What under the canopy be you tryin’ to do?” he demanded. “Bamboozle me?”
“It worked yesterday,” Barber protested. “Probably the sun got at it. Oberon’s chamberlain warned me it might go wrong if that happened. I’m sorry; I wasn’t trying to fool you.” He felt his face flushing; this was as bad as feeding horse meat to a Congressman.
The farmer emitted a snort and clumped heavily toward the stairs. “No call to take on,” he said. “When you git to know the heathen ’swell as I do, you’ll larn suthin’ about those conjurin’ tricks of theirn. They talk about them till you would think they could make the sun stand still, like Joshuar over Gibeon, but what’s it amount to? ‘Profane and vain babblin’s’ as the Good Book says in first Timothy. I call to mind the time I’planted some cukes in that little gusset of land down by the river. They come up measly little things with funny leaves. That upset the mountain heathen suthin’ scandalous. They’re almighty fond of cukes.”
He was laying out the breakfast with slouching efficiency. “What happened?” Barber encouraged him.
“Why, they come to me, and they said: ‘There has been a shapin’ and your cukes have turned into ivy plants. But never you mind,’ they said, ‘we shall undertake to conjure ’em back for you.’ I told ’em to go right ahead, long’s they didn’t step on the plants. Nathin’ much tenderer’n a young cuke. Well, the hull kit-’n-boodle of ’em come down from the mountain and pow-wowed round half one night, and sure enough, the cukes growed all right arter that.”
Fawcett seated himself at the table and began to eat, waving Barber to another chair. “Do you mean the conjuring really helped the cucumbers?” asked Barber.
The farmer chuckled through a mouthful of food. “Don’t you think I’be in my right senses? It wan’t the shapin’ that like to spoiled the cukes or the conjurin’ that saved ’em. Hoss manure is just no good for cukes; I knowed that when I’put ’em in, but it was all I had. But the day before the heathen did their fancy tricks I’found a salt lick back in the woods a piece and got some good deer manure that did the business. The heathen had the gall to ask for a reduction in the price of the crop. . . . Well, the way seasons run here, I guess mebbe we could get in a little buckwheat today.”
Barber was city-bred, and had never before experienced the contentments that rise from watching and producing the growth of the soil—seeing bare earth sprout delicate green hairs one day, so fine they were almost invisible except as a sheen; three days later returning to find them tiny but palpable plants, and in a week sturdily putting forth leaf and branch. Their growth seemed so swift that everything else was slowed to a timeless wheel of night and morning through which he moved in occupations that varied only by the width of a finger from each other. His own world and his Embassy job seemed too far away and long ago to be of more than academic interest. For that matter so had the question of returning to them.
During the day he worked in the fields, sometimes hoeing little mounds of earth around the stalks of the growing corn, sometimes picking early crops like peas and beans—for it was high summer and these were coming on ripe—and helping Fawcett arrange them in drying racks for preservation. He had tried to explain to the New Englander the better process of canning. But there were neither cans nor Mason jars with which to give a demonstration, and as always when he spoke of modern conveniences, Fawcett guffawed, treating the idea as one might the performance of an imaginative child. As early as the third day Barber had given up trying to tell him about such modernities as electric light and skyscrapers. The farmer received the information with the same amused skepticism he gave to the “heathen conjurin’s”—making it all seem unimportant, as indeed it was to the life of the place, and Barber lacked the information to beat down his objections.
“They was a professor down to Harvard proved a steamboat couldn’t hold enough wood to take it cross the ocean,” he would say with an air of finality, and getting out a very homemade banjo, chanted rather than sang, in a raucous nasal tenor:
“It was the brilliant autumn time
When the army of the north
With its cannon and dragoons
And its riflemen came forth.
“Through the country all abroad
There was spread a mighty fear
Of the Indians in the van
And the Hessians in the rear . . .”
Or they would sit above a board through a long evening, drinking berry wine and playing nine-man morris. It was a game combining features of checkers and tic-tac-toe, for which Fawcett had whittled out an elaborate set of pieces. Barber found himself a hopeless dub at it, but this did not seem to matter to Fawcett, who treated the game, and almost everything else, as a background for endless conversations on Jacksonian politics or experiences with the heathen. Life rolled smoothly; Oberon, the war, his former existence were lapped deep in the wave of the past, and it might not be too bad to slide forever through this region of perfect peace.
Or almost perfect. There was the incident of the broken hoe. Both men were engaged in what Fawcett called “cultivatin’ ” a field of potatoes, an operation that seemed singularly pointless to Barber, as it consisted in no more than digging vigorously with a hoe at the base of the young plants, piling the earth half an inch deeper around the stalks. “Make’s a neat field,” was Fawcett’s only answer to Barber’s protest that the few sprigs of grass rooted up in the process could be of no importance to the potatoes, which grew underground in any case. “Good farmers have neat fields.”
As he brought his hoe down in a particularly vigorous sweep to emphasize some conversational point he was making, the farmer struck a subsoil rock and the blade snapped off at the shank. He clucked annoyance over the small disaster. “Guess I’shall have to make another hoss trade with the mountain heathen,” he remarked, when he had replaced the instrument with another from the house. “Ain’t got but three hoes to the hull place. That’s funny, too, now I call it to mind. They ain’t been ’rou
nd for a right smart spell; usually you can’t keep ’em away, ’specially when they know I’been makin’ berry wine. They’d most trade their eyeteeth out for berry wine.”
He trailed off into an anecdote illustrative of the kobolds’ appetite for berry wine, and next morning after breakfast dug out a big blue-and-white flag on the end of a stick and affixed it to the roof of the house, explaining that this was the signal he wanted to trade with the kobolds. Barber wondered whether there would be any of the gang he had encountered among the traders, but he might have spared himself the worry. No kobolds came that day or the next. The second night Fawcett exhibited a trace of concern across the supper table.
“Dunno what’s come over ’em; maybe they’re waxed at me ’bout suthin’. They have mighty ungainly idears about what’s right, those mountain heathen, and when a man won’t go ’long with ’em, they set in the seats of the scornful. But I should hate to lose their trade; ain’t been any hardware peddler through this way since I’come. A man can’t farm without tools.”
“I could go look them up and find out what’s wrong,” offered Barber tentatively.
“By George, that’s right! Them mountain heathen is choosy as all gitout ’bout lettin’ people into their place, but I fergit you was a perfessional ambassador to increase perfumes afar off in the sight of the Lord, like it says in fifty-seven Isaiah. Tell you what, mister; I shall give you a jug of berry wine in the mornin’ and you mosey up there.”
Barber was already repenting his over-ready suggestion, but there was no decent method of withdrawing, and next day he set out across the little belt of upland rolling to the Kobold Hills. As he went he became more than ever regretful over having let himself in for this piece of foolishness. The day was already hot and the wine jug burdensome; he could not but contrast his present toiling gate with the easy light-footedness of his previous journey. As a matter of fact, it was even slower and more difficult than it should have been. Made thus, as a reversed experience, the journey underlined something of which he had been uncomfortably, but only vaguely, conscious for some time: that he felt definitely less well than he had before.
No, “felt” was the wrong verb, he assured himself, realizing with the other, critical half of his brain that the ceaseless flow of Fawcett’s chatter had kept him from introspection for weeks. And through it from localizing the trouble. He “felt” like a prize bull pup, now that he came to examine the question; his sensations with regard to the world about him were of extreme enjoyment. If he could have been translated back to the Embassy he would have plunged into the compilation of official reports with positive delight.
In short, he felt swell. It was the physical equipment which accompanied his feelings that seemed to be showing deterioration. He had not realized it till undertaking this long hike, but it was actually growing difficult for him to walk. His legs were stiff, and was it mere hypochondriac imagination or had they acquired a tendency to bow? No, he decided, pausing on the last rise but one to catch his breath and gaze at the offending limbs, it was not hypochondria. The other manifestation was real enough; his feet had spread, grossly and outrageously. The shoes made by the royal tailor he had been forced to discard at the end of the first week at Fawcett’s. Now he was wearing a pair of the farmer’s enormous boots, and even these, which had begun by fitting him like bedroom slippers, were now pinching him painfully.
There was something wrong with his eyes, too. When not consciously focused on something they had a tendency to roll outward—not painful, but noticeable when he discovered that he was seeing double. It must be some kind of allergy or vitamin deficiency, he decided. Diet might be responsible; it included a plenitude of fresh vegetables, but was lacking in the familiar dairy products and in any meat but the venison which Fawcett secured by trading with the heathen. Acromegaly, Barber presumed his ailment might be called, but the prescription for it he did not know. At all events it appeared to have the compensating benefit of causing those absurd shoulder-blade wings of his to stop growing. They had actually shrunk an inch or two.
. . . He was at the entrance of the caverns, the same, as near as he could judge, by which he had left. All dark inside, and now that he noticed it, all silent, too; not a sound of forge or hammer, in waltz time or any other. Very dark; he was reminded of a lecture in his college physics class: “The only complete black in nature is a hole in the ground.” It seemed absurd to plunge into that well of night, equally absurd to turn back without trying it. After a moment more of irresolution, he gathered force and took the step, feeling along the wall with one hand.
The wall was slightly damp, and the deeper he went the more he cursed himself for a fool—with no light or Ariadne’s clue to bring him out again. He started counting his steps, trying to keep them even in length, which would be at least some help. . . . Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—he paused, turned and looked back at the shield of light. Still there. . . . A hundred and forty-nine, a hundred and fifty—he turned again, saw the light spot smaller, and wished he had started counting at the very mouth of the tunnel. Somewhere ahead there was a small sound—tap, tap, tap, which, after a moment’s agonized attention, he identified as the dripping of water.
A hundred yards more—and the supporting wall at his right suddenly disappeared, so that he went sprawling. Branch in the tunnel. It brought him face to face with the problem of carrying on, through those blind, involuted galleries. No, certainly not worth it, without lights and no sign of life. He compromised by standing at the angle for a moment and shouting. There was no answer but the monotonous drip, drip, drip of the subterranean water. After waiting a few more hopeless moments he turned and groped his way back.
When he reached the mouth of the cavern, the morning’s faint overcast had turned to cloud and persistent, drizzling rain that felt delightful after the heat. Fawcett was nowhere visible as Barber trudged across the rises toward the homestead. Neither was the horse, Federalist, which probably meant that the farmer had ridden up the stream to indulge in his favorite rainy-day sport of conducting a trade with the forest natives.
Barber went into the house and upstairs to a room that was used relatively rarely. Fawcett had furnished it with unusual elaboration, even to window curtains of his own manufacture and in materials that had probably never been used for curtaining before. That brocade, for example, might have come from the upholstery of the Escorial. It was the sturdy Yank’s one touch of sentiment, the one indication that he might harbor the thought of a partnership in this wilderness. Barber had found him curiously reticent on the point except when the farmer delivered one of his occasional tirades on the habits of the heathen.
“Them women, now,” he would say, waving his mug of wine. “Some of ’em are purty as a pitcher; look like good workers, too. But they skrawk round like chick turkeys with the pip till a man could chaw the wall. They have a superstition; you say suthin’ to ’em, and accordin’ to their rules, they’s only two-three replies they can make. Blessed if I want a woman that has a law of the Medes and Persians to make her say ‘Good mornin’ every time I say ‘Howdedo’.”
. . . Barber jumped to his feet, with a sudden horror embracing him. When he had come into that room and seated himself in the homemade rocking chair, there had certainly been a pair of flies cruising about the ceiling. The door was closed, and the windows, but the flies were no longer there—
And Barber could remember distinctly that, while he had been meditating on Fawcett’s sentimental spot, he had once—twice—shot a hand out, with the ease of reflex action, and put it to his mouth.
The fear that he was going insane leaped on him again, enforced and redoubled. What else could make him do a thing like that? Perhaps it was even a part of the delusion that his legs were bowing and his hips seemed to have acquired a sudden “middle-aged squat”; perhaps—whoa, that wasn’t it, either. There was no reasonable doubt about the changed size of his feet; Fawcett himself had remarked on it when lending him the boots. Something had just
gone wrong, badly wrong with his whole physical makeup.
He began to pace the floor in agitation, hunting for the answer, then paused with a flash of recollection. It was his own fault. He had allowed himself to sink into the contentment of this farm. But it was not the discovery of the good life, it was old-fashioned shirking. The venture into the Kobold Caverns had been only half his task. However completely he had brought to an end their swordmaking—through no great address of his own—there remained the second duty of returning Titania’s wand. He had tried to forget it by escaping into Fawcett’s clocklike existence, but the responsibility remained. Whatever had gone wrong with him would probably, nay, certainly, grow worse till he finished his job. In fact, it might continue until he found his way back to England and sanity along the same route he had traveled to reach this place. It was the “misadventured piteous overthrow” the Queen had promised.
And how was he to finish that job? How find his way back through the caverns, across the desert and to the Plum who had taken that confounded stick? Damn it! He kicked at air in irritation over the unfairness of everything. Why did all these Fairyland people have to be so vague? Fawcett was the only one in the lot capable of a definite statement, and now Barber was being forced to leave him behind.
For that was what it amounted to. Wherever that needlelike wand was in this immense vague haystack of a country, whatever handicaps his splay-footed, bow-legged, wall-eyed condition imposed upon Barber, it was clear he would have to get away from that farm and go searching. The excuses he could make to himself were unlikely to be convincing to this case of galloping jimjams from which he was suffering.
A sound outside made him step to the window. Fawcett was riding into the yard, with rain dripping from his own hat and the horse’s mane, an expression of pleasure on his side-burned face. The trading expedition had evidently been a success; across his saddlebow was a large and bulging bag, incongruously made of cloth of gold, with the handle of something sticking out of it. It occurred to Barber that the last thing in the world he wanted was to explain his plight to that cold-eyed and skeptical New Englander. He took three quick steps across the room, flung open the door, and dashed into his own room. The sword he had brought was there; he snatched it up, went down the stairs three at a time, and gazed from the kitchen window. Fawcett had just dismounted, and was leading Federalist into the sod-house barn.
Land of Unreason Page 11
