Phillip went into the tiny cubicle where Rowley Meek daily struggled to be humorous for his ‘Sundowner’ column. At the other end of the writing table sat Bevan Swann, struggling to write his daily column, ‘Round and About’, in the company of Rowley Meek. Both welcomed the visitor with relief. Rowley Meek began to dance.
“The Pyrénées, boy? Why that is no place for an internally-combusted machine man and his synthetic thunder! Are you able to face the lightning around the peaks, and the roar of torrents? Are you trained to dig in the earth for roots, like the wild boar of Thangintwunka, who——”
Wearily Bevan Swann waved a hand at Rowley Meek for silence. “D-don’t take any notice of this rhizophagic f-fellow,” he said, with a slight stutter. “This m-mad p-performer of r-ridotto nonsense escaping from n-newsprint. He’s quite harmless. It’s a characteristic of m-metropolitan poets that they go mad at the sight of healthy h-human faces in the streets, a-alley-ways, offices, and salons that are the p-purlieus of p-poetry—so called!”
Phillip was invited to Bevan Swann’s studio in St. John’s Wood that evening. When he arrived, Rowley Meek was still apparently escaping from the effects of enforced humour.
“We shall sleep on glaciers!” cried Rowley. “We shall hear Roland’s ghostly horn in the Pass of Roncesvalles! We shall stand under torrents, and watch sunrise on the peaks of the eagles! We shall drink deep draughts of Schlammergei, and pour bottle after bottle of the rare Igharra, which is distilled in only one small valley, down our throats of leather, singing songs which will start the thunder of avalanches! Igharra! Drink of heroes!” He flung the swipes of his glass of pale ale violently into the fire.
“I’m sorry you don’t like Wildbrook’s Sussex ale, Rowley,” said Bevan in high good humour.
“Pah! Chemical poison! Filth of little human hogs with timid eyes and long furry ears, who whinny with excitement and cry Progress! because gasometers are now to be admitted to the League of Nations, and field mice fitted with little oilskin hats under the Education Acts!”
“Do you refer to the brewery itself, or to the surrounding countryside where the malting barley is grown, I wonder?” enquiried Bevan. “And did you actually see the mice in little hats? What colour were they, pink or puce?”
“Bah, you can make your tinned Fleet Street jokes, but wait until we are drinking Igharra under the Pic de Ger, where Rogomontoules slew the dragon of Rastigouche!”
“Hurray,” said Phillip.
“Exactly,” said Bevan. “Now sing, you fop you, give us ‘And I Ride’.”
Rowley Meek then sang a song which may have been written by Belloc or Chesterton, it was a very fine song. Rowley shouted, he bawled about being turned out of doors more than twenty years ago, when his feet were set on stony ways, etc., but Phillip could not catch the words since Rowley was a sort of frantic singer. The climax to every verse was a triumphant And I ride, and I ride! giving the impression that he had been riding for over twenty years in a certain condition. Phillip wondered if the ride had anything to do with Rowley’s joke, effected by taking into a taxicab in Fleet Street a large parcel, looking like an immense musical instrument in a cloth; which appeared as a horse’s head looking out of the taxicab window, a most astonishing sight to those the cab passed, since the illusion was that an entire horse was inside the taxi and turning its head this way and that as though to look at the strange sights to be soon in the Strand. The horse was called Donnegar, and of course was descended from one originally owned by Pantagruel, according to Rowley.
The song ended abruptly, and Rowley turned to Phillip and said in a polite social voice, “You won’t forget your morning coat and top hat and white spats, will you, because we shall of course be received by the Mayor. Also they will be useful when we sleep in ice and snow, and on glaciers pouring with moonlight, while wolves, bears and bandits stalk us. We may be weeks among the peaks, so bring your ration card with you.”
Phillip said that he would go in the morning to Cook’s in Ludgate Circus and buy his tourist tickets.
“What for?” roared Rowley Meek. “And don’t forget your Rolls-Royce, will you? We may need it.”
“I certainly will, because, you see, the front tyre of my tricycle will be flat.”
“Cuckoo,” said Bevan. “Have some more beer, my dear fellow.”
That night Phillip slept in the studio with Rowley; there were several couches around the walls.
After a merry breakfast they set out for Fleet Street. Rowley Meek walked ahead, singing lustily and whirling his staff. They took a taxicab down Regent Street, while Rowley, who had not Donnegar the Horse with him, looked out of the window. Suddenly surprise and delight came over his face as he stared at a strange man, and raising his broken hat he half got up and bowed. He continued to do this all the way down Regent Street, and the expressions on the faces of most men so accosted were amusing. But the face of one man set instantly in a ferocious scowl, the points of his canine teeth showed under his moustache, and he started running after the taxicab. Leaning out of the window, Rowley beckoned him on violently, while Bevan told the driver to go faster. When the fellow had turned back, Rowley stopped the taxi by a red pillar box on a street corner; and stooped beside it, ear pressed to the red cylinder as he pretended to be listening intently. Soon several people were standing and staring at the box. Rowley listened the more intently. Others listened, too. A crowd collected. Rowley then moved away and got back into the taxi, which drove off as a policeman walked across the road to find the reason why various puzzled people were listening and peering at the letter box.
“He’s quite mad,” said Bevan. “A mad wart-hog of a fellow.”
*
Phillip got his ticket and passport, stayed for the week-end at his Uncle Joseph’s house in Surrey, playing tennis and walking with his cousin Arthur, before returning on the Norton to Devon. His cat and dog, well looked after by the Crangs and the landlord of the Ring of Bells respectively, greeted him happily, and within five minutes of opening the cottage door the old cattle dog had removed a pound of sausages from the table, pursued by the furious but incompetent Rusty. What did it matter? He bought some more. A delightful sense of adventure possessed him. Life was wonderful. Very soon he would be meeting his new friends at Victoria station in London, for the mountains of Spain! He wrote to Irene at Laruns, telling her what he was going to do, saying he had no idea where they would be going, and doubted if they would be anywhere near civilisation: it was a party of very tough fellows, who were used to sleeping on ice and snow.
*
At last he was standing on Victoria station, feeling suitably dressed to cross mountains. Thick nailed shooting boots, leather anklets, thick stockings, tweed plus fours nearly down to his ankles—the latest fashion—tweed jacket and cap. His pack held, beside sleeping and washing things, a thick sweater and a heavy moorland hunt coat made of layers of cotton and rubber, with a full skirt reaching between knee and ankle. This ought to give some protection from the snow and ice on which, according to Rowley Meek, they might have to sleep.
Bevan turned up with the fourth man of the party, a cousin of Meek who was as quiet as Meek was noisy. With them was a sallow-faced bony man, Mr. Manley Meek an uncle who was a commercial playwright and feuilleton writer. To Phillip’s surprise Bevan and the fourth man were dressed in ordinary town suits with thin-soled pavement shoes. Bevan had no luggage except tooth-brush and shaving kit; his companion carried a small haversack, half-filled. Rowley, who had gone on, was to meet them at the Spanish frontier the following morning, which was Good Friday.
It was a placid Channel crossing. He looked for the Selby-Lloyds, hoping against hope; and was relieved that they were not in the boat. The three men drank bottled beer downstairs in the saloon while the sun shone through level port-holes.
It was great fun, thought Phillip; he was living! The war was over! Everything in France was of tremendous interest. Onwards from Boulogne it was dykes and polders; corn fields; and occasional
weed-grown spaces, wide and level in the chalk, where once dumps of shells and wounded men and bales of wire and boxes of boots and plum-and-apple jam had stood. Seeing the sites of old encampments, Phillip felt as though part of him were crying out to bring back the scenes and faces. One day—one day, he would: at the moment it was too vast, too involved, even to think about.
The train jolted and jerked around Paris, from the Gare du Nord to the Gare du Midi, in twilight. He felt elated that this was Paris, the city of beauty and light and laughter: the houses and roofs of the suburbs were the Paris of Charpentier’s Louise and Julian, operas conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Covent Garden in that wonderful year of 1920—the Doves Nest! And Arnold Bennett was in this very train, going down to Madrid, paying his expenses by writing articles for The Daily Crusader, which had widely advertised their imminent appearance (at one hundred pounds an article, according to Bevan). He was on the same train as the author of The Old Wives’ Tale, and Clayhanger!
After some delays the train was off in earnest, and it was time to think about dinner. They shared a bottle of wine, and then another bottle, and after that café, cognac, and cigars. Phillip’s boots and tweed plus-fours were hot, but when they got to the glaciers, and slept on ice…. That night he lay upon the floor, selecting that place as two girls were in their second-class compartment, and he gave up his corner seat to one of them, apparently in a chivalrous moment, but really because it was anyway inevitable; and if he took to the floor first, he would be able to lie stretched out, and at ease all night, while others dozed fitfully with bent backbones. He was soon used to the noise of wheels directly under his ear; and no one trod on him, as he knew they would not. The oldest soldier had the best sleeping place!
*
The night sped away; and at last the train was slowing up at Bayonne. Bevan opened the window, and the cold air of a Pyrenean morning greeted them. And there on the platform stood Rowley, several days’ unshaven, old kerchief knotted round neck, pack on back, his great staff and companion—named after Roland’s sword—in his hand. He said he had walked continuously through the night, the day before, and the night before that.
“Why in heaven’s name are you fops getting out?” he cried irritably.
“We want to get breakfast, you p-perambulator, you,” replied Bevan.
“Haven’t you cretins stuffed yourselves sufficiently on this Midas Express? Don’t you want to go to Spain? Why didn’t you stop at the Savoy? Where are your silk hats, your white spats and gold-plated walking sticks? I came here to walk, not to loaf!” After some argument they took a taxi to a white and gold hotel in the town and drank coffee and ate rolls and butter. There they discovered that the train they should have taken to Pamplona in Spain was the one from which they had alighted. The only other train that day was a local to Hendaye, where there would be a wait of some hours.
“I do not say, ‘I told you so’,” yelled Rowley. “But merely mention in passing that with enormous reluctance I find myself in the disgusting company of utterly beastly British fops. Why didn’t you go your whole bacon-factory ways and go by Cook’s Tour? Where are your umbrellas and stinking bowler hats?”
There was a long wait at Hendaye in the sun of Spain, under which they lay hour after hour on the empty platform. Everything was strange to Phillip—the Customs officers with their cloaks and carbines and queer flat tarpaulin hats turned up at right angles at the corners—the crude and filthy vault of the “lavatory”—strange foods in the railway buffet—even Rowley’s conversation with the waiter in Spanish, his knowledge of the language being limited, it seemed, by the use of two words—quando tiempo?—for when the train would arrive for Pamplona.
As the heat of the day increased with the height of the sun he made a parcel of his hunt coat and jersey and posted it to Devon. They walked into the town, having two further hours to wait, seeing pasty-faced Spanish women in black shawls, swallows already nesting under the wide eaves of houses, a white-faced mother suckling her infant while selling oranges in a shop. Phillip felt the general quiescence of the place, the apathy of poverty and lack of hope or endeavour: Spain, neither old nor new, but stagnant. In the late afternoon a train of ancient appearance and slowness arrived: its performance further displeased the imaginative admirer of ancient days and leisure, Rowley Meek. But this was a superficial concept, for the former grandeur and vitality of Spain was gone, it seemed to be between two worlds. Rowley was by now almost silent.
The train stopped at every station. At one halt the narrow wooden carriages were besieged by hundreds of women and girls in black clothes and shawls. With them entered some of the Customs officers, or soldiers, wearing capes and those curious hats covered by patent leather. The train clanked on. The engine had been puffing harsh invisible steam for a few minutes when a fusillade of shots came from in front. People began to shout, the train shuddered to a standstill.
“Bandits?” suggested Phillip. “Seeking ransom from Rowley Meek, the famous wit of the ‘Sundowner’ column——”
“Hush, boy!” roared Rowley. “No shop, if you please!” as he got up and bowed to every woman in turn. It transpired that a drunk man had fallen off the train, and the shots were part of the signalling system.
The train emptied itself at the next stop and they had the carriage to themselves again. Rowley began to tear at a long fish-shaped loaf with hands and teeth while holding a black bottle of raw red wine between his knees. The journey went on and on, between rocky wooded hills over which burned the hues of sunset. Then they were sitting in twilight, dozing or looking out of the window, and sometimes talking about the dinner they would eat at Pamplona—except Rowley, who was once more objecting to everything.
Phillip could see that his vision of Spain, inspired by filial love of Belloc who had wandered there in a past age, was being wrecked by reality. Also he seemed to have no liking at all for his cousin, who often spoke of the famous people he had met at the Bath Club, to which he had recently been elected.
At last Pamplona. Arguments about where they should go. Rowley scoffed at the idea of eating in an hotel. “Why didn’t you stay in London if you wanted the Carlton or the Ritz?”
“Dammit, we only want to wash and eat!”
They went into the railway restaurant. It was closed. A guide took them up a dark street to the town’s centre, and left them. All was strangely dark. People passed like wingless bats. In the distance a torchlight procession moved. The murmuring black-dressed crowd moved nearer, in its centre men carrying a platform on which was a blood-stained corpse illuminated by scores of agitated candle-flames. Of course, it was Good Friday, and this was a waxen effigy of Jesus immediately after criminal execution for blasphemy. When it had passed the velvet blackness of a quiet town enclosed them. They went down a narrow street, coming to a square in darkness except for the lighted windows of a restaurant. They entered to the protests of Rowley Meek, who with his three days’ beard, tangled hair, neckerchief, dusty shoes and grease-stained breeches, created a mild stir among the diners. Seated at a table, he took one sip of the soup and dashed the spoon into the plate.
“Utter filth!” he shouted. “Out of an American can, of course! How long are you fellows going to remain in this accursed hole?”
It was plain to Phillip by this time that Rowley Meek was completely exhausted, having driven himself beyond the limits of ordinary living. Even the genial Bevan’s patience was at an end. “Shut up, Rowley! You’re becoming an unbearable bore.”
“Of course I’m a bore! You niminypiminy little hogs, why didn’t you go on a conducted tour with sun-glasses and sterilised paper pocket handkerchiefs?”
The waiter brought a dish of grey stringy stuff. Rowley gazed at it with assumed horror. “Poison!” he roared. “Trash! The guts of goats slopped down before me! Bloody beastliness; unutterable, unspeakable loathsomeness! Is this a Christian meal? Was this once the Holy Roman Empire? Am I to continue sitting here and watching you absorb that abominable frapponbulière
?”
“D-don’t behave like a n-n-nincompoop,” replied Bevan, now stuttering with discomposure. “Other p-p-people here can hear you!”
“Of course they can hear me, unless they’re deaf!” retorted Rowley. “I wish they understood English, they don’t unfortunately, being a gang of bellycramming dagos! Look at their pale and beastly faces!” He swung his arm. “Degenerates! Modernity! Pah!” Another dish arrived. “What’s this poison, this fungus, this filth?” He shoved back his chair, seized pack and staff, and went out of the room. The other three tried to eat the food, which certainly wasn’t exactly appetising.
“He’s quite m-m-mad, of course,” stuttered Bevan. “A m-mumbling m-malkin of a f-f-fellow.”
In the quietness of the room they heard an English voice from the next table. Then another English voice. The pale-faced diners were all English people, on an Easter Cook’s Tour. Someone said that the dish rejected by “your friend” was stewed celery, “possibly imported from England for our benefit.”
They saw Rowley Meek outside. Raspingly he declared they must walk: only degenerates slept in hotels. Also the moon was rising. His voice became happier as he spoke of Roncesvalles, and pointed to the mountains to the north. It lay twelve hours’ walk away. Phillip hitched up his pack, and felt the bite of his nailed boots on the dusty road. By all means he would walk through the night. But Bevan and Rowley’s cousin were for motoring to the highest point and then walking down into France, reaching St. Jean Pied-de-Port for breakfast.
“Breakfast!” cried Rowley. “What is that? Only beastly bourgeois have breakfast! And what fast are you gluttons going to break, may I ask?”
The driver of the black Hispano-Suiza had been in the tavern that night. He drove off with a jerk and scream of gears. They were thrown against one another. They began to laugh, and then to sing. Bevan banged on the glass, and Rowley yelled for the driver to go slower. The driver waved his hand, yelled Pronto! and the car went faster. Uphill now, and the second gear threatening to rip out of its box. They were thrown against first one door then the other door as the vehicle skidded round hairpin bends. Deciding it would be wiser to leave a drunken driver alone they sat silent while it seemed inevitable that the car must plunge over the curving lip of the next corner into the precipice below.
The Innocent Moon Page 44
