Poet's Pub Read online

  His feet were still sore. Each little toe, flattened between shoe and neighbour toe, was puffy with a half-broken blister. He sat up and rubbed them softly. He was wearing the shirt he had bought at the end of the first day, a vulgar thing with broad purple stripes. There was a picture of “The Retreat from Moscow” on one wall, and “The Broken Square”—mop-headed Sudanese hurling themselves at heroic bayonets—decorated another. Through the window he saw a red and white cow and the corner of a haystack. Were these significant? he thought. Here, perhaps, if he could express it with personal emotion, was a microcosm that reflected the macrocosm; individual, raw poetry of the twentieth century; with his ego as the nucleus here was the necessary yolk of experience. Could he state it, arhythmically, tonelessly, flatly but significantly, so that it would be recognized as poetry? He thought not, and lay down again, pulling the sheet to his chin.

  He was awakened for the second time by louder knocking.

  “All right,” he said.

  The door opened and a man who looked curiously like Sir Peter Lely’s portrait of Wycherley came in—Wycherley without his curls, Wycherley dressed in a smooth-fitting, powder-grey suit, powder-grey shirt, collar, and tie, that is.

  “Hullo, Quentin,” said Keith, “you’re early.”

  “You lazy dog,” said Quentin, and sat down on the bed.

  Quentin Cotton was the son of Sewald Cotton of Cotton’s Beer, and Lady Mercy Cotton, the second daughter of the late Marquis of Bealne. Cotton’s Beer, when old Sewald married, had slaked the thirst of a county and two modest market towns. But Lady Mercy had changed that. Now it was poured, in a glittering amber stream, from gigantic bottle to gigantic glass high over Piccadilly at night. “Is Ninepence Dear for Cotton’s Beer?” said the white-and-amber sky-sign. And promptly another glass was poured, golden-full and silver-topped with electric foam. Now Cotton’s Beer was drunk in every county in England, in mining villages and seaside towns and industrial capitals, in Birmingham and Rhyl and Tunbridge Wells and Newcastle and Stoke-on-Trent and above all in London, the heart of the Empire. Now it was exported—with chemical preservatives, though these were not advertised—to India and Kenya and Malay and other places as thirsty. It was advertised on hoardings, in the air, in penny papers and Sunday papers, and always in Punch. It was securely established as Britain’s Best Beer; or at any rate as One of Britain’s Best Beers. And all this was due to Lady Mercy whose aristocratic blood was inspired with an almost divine energy. Old Sewald Cotton was a quiet man, content to live on two or three thousand a year, happy enough to be known with respect in two small towns and their not-important neighbourhood. But the business mind and the aptitude for commerce which have become so pronounced a feature of England’s peerage found their sturdiest, loftiest-reaching flower in Lady Mercy, and Lady Mercy, marrying Sewald Cotton because she liked him, gave Cotton’s Beer a place beside the nation’s daily bread.

  Quentin Cotton’s first novel, A Nettle Against May, was to some extent re-action against this activity, though he and his mother remained very good friends.

  “You lazy dog,” he repeated, and straightened the crumpled pages of The Times Literary Supplement.

  “They’ve picked out the worst lines in the book to write about,” said Keith.

  “They always do. A reviewer must amuse his public, and good poetry’s dull stuff. I like the bit about bucketing.”

  “Damn you,” said Keith, and got up.

  He was tall and broad, six feet and thirteen stones, and his purple-striped shirt came down no farther than was strictly necessary.

  “I’m going to look for a bath.”

  “You can’t go out like that.”

  “I’m not as naked as I feel in The Times,” he answered and shut the door behind him.

  “And no more naked than your Highland ancestors when they walked abroad,” said Quentin agreeably.

  Saturday Keith’s family history was, in some of its aspects, almost common knowledge. Gossip-writers of two generations had been fond of it and historians had mentioned its remoter stages with respect. His father, Sir Colin Keith, had been famous for four things. As a young man he had insulted, amusingly and dramatically, an Austrian archduke. As a grown man he had drunk his two bottles a day when all Scotland was becoming sober and serious. As the father of seven sons he had insisted on the youngest being christened Saturday. And at the age of sixty-one he had taken a battalion of the Royal Scots to France and been killed, beside one of his sons, at the second battle of Ypres.

  The archduke had been insulted, because Sir Colin found him, a guest of the family, trying—and very nearly succeeding, for an archduke is, or was, an archduke—to seduce one of Sir Colin’s sisters. Hapsburg savoir-faire saved the immediate situation and later Hapsburg magnificence suggested that Sir Colin’s anger might be appeased by the gift of two polo ponies. The ponies were sent with an admirably worded expression of the archduke’s gratitude for such charming hospitality. Sir Colin shot them, quite humanely, and ordered the carcases to be sent back. As the archduke had by that time returned to Vienna the ponies had a long way to go, and their conveyance excited wide-spread interest. The story of their killing and the reason for it got about, at first discreetly, afterwards amplified and penetrating to more vulgar ears, and nearly caused a diplomatic incident.

  The birth of a seventh son is a notable event in any family, and it was more notable in Sir Colin’s because Colin, the eldest, had been born on a Sunday, Ranald on a Monday, Iain on a Tuesday, Patrick on a Wednesday, Malcolm on a Thursday, and Alasdair on a Friday. When Lady Keith became pregnant for the seventh time Sir Colin’s excitement grew with every month.

  “He’ll be born on a Saturday,” he said, “and that will make a good deed for every day in the week. I’ve worked harder than God, for He rested on the seventh. If the boy’s dropped on a Saturday I’ll call him Saturday, By God I will!”

  His agitation became pitiable when Lady Keith’s pains set in on a Friday afternoon, and it was said that he stood outside her door and called to her, once or twice, “Hold him, my love, hold him! There’s an hour to go yet. Be brave, my dear, this is the last one, I swear.”

  It was ten minutes past twelve when the boy was born, a strong baby with black hair on his head, and Sir Colin had a dozen of the oldest Château Margaux brought up. He christened the child, still wet from the bath, sprinkling his forehead with claret and solemnly saying, “In the names of your mother and myself and God the Father I call you Saturday Keith.” Another glass he gave to his wife, and to the remainder he and the doctor, as soon as the latter had finished his work, sat down in the library. They finished the dozen by breakfast-time and went out, Sir Colin with a gun, for it was September, and the doctor with his stethoscope ready for the next patient.

  When War broke out Sir Colin bullied and cajoled, intrigued and read his drill-books, shouted here and flattered, there, until he was given command of a Kitchener battalion of his old regiment. He drank a last bottle, toasting the king, his wife, and the prospect of wilder fighting than the world had known for a long time, and sent the remainder of his cellar to a newly-opened War hospital in Edinburgh. He and three of his sons were killed, one on land, one in the air, and the second eldest at Jutland. Colin, except for a leg that he left on the Somme, became Sir Colin and sat at home contentedly enough. Malcolm and Alasdair were farming in East Africa. Saturday, too young for the war, impractical and a natural athlete though hampered by astigmatism, went to Oxford.

  He had inherited his gift, or fancy, for poetry-writing from his mother who, poor woman, had occupied the inactive months of her repeated pregnancies with composing verses, some of which were published in gift books for her friends. When Saturday was a little boy she became more active, and walked over high hills with field glasses through which she observed, carefully and cleverly, the habits of nesting birds and migrating birds and birds that were comparatively idle.

  “I have always been so fond of them,” she said. “But I coul
d never reach them. I so rarely had the time or the figure for much walking.”

  She began to contribute articles to the Scottish Field and other periodicals interested in wild, though not human, life, and her pen found a strength that it had not known in verse. Her occupation with nature, which is intentionally beautiful and deliberately cruel, had protected her a little against the shock of losing her husband and three sons. Or perhaps she had taken her sorrow to the hills where no one could see it. She appeared to be happy.

  Saturday re-entered the bedroom with a towel round his middle instead of the purple-striped shirt.

  “I’m useless as a shipper, exporter or broker,” he said, “and not much good as a poet. What shall I do?”

  “Have a drink,” Quentin suggested.

  “I can’t make a profession of that.”

  “Why not? You boast about your palate. You can tell the difference between a tenpenny Médoc and a Lafite. Be a wine-shipper.”

  “I haven’t a ship.”

  “Then keep a pub.”

  “I would, if I had one.”

  “Keep my mother’s newest one. She’s just bought ‘The Pelican’ in Downish. It’s going to be the most expensive pub in Britain. Come in as her manager.”

  “Do you think she would like me to?”

  “I’m sure she would. She wants someone like you. She has romantic ideas, though she’s business-like, and the idea of a poet permanently in her pub would delight her. And you’re a Blue as well—”

  “Does she collect them too? Butterworth and Lackaday did.”

  “But mother’s discriminating. She refuses to hear of lacrosse, for instance. Now be serious. This is the seventh old inn she’s bought, and the best. It’s going to be the best pub in the world. England’s glory, an echo of coaching days, tantara, tantara, mine host in a red waistcoat—you’re getting fat enough for a red waistcoat—and thirteen private suites for rich Americans.”

  “I know the recipe for lamb’s wool. They’d like that.”

  “You’re the man my mother is looking for. Have you heard about ‘The Pelican’?”

  Quentin, irresistibly captured by any idea that came to him swiftly and spontaneously, was enthusiastic over his maturing suggestion.

  Saturday shook his head.

  “It’s four hundred years old with a bear-pit and a central courtyard where strolling players used to act. They call it ‘The Downy Pelican’ now, but that isn’t its original name. It started as ‘The Tabard.’ Then the three dullest poets of the seventeenth century happened to live in Downish—Fabian Metcalf, Philip Goode, and Martin Stout—and they drank in ‘The Tabard’ and recited their ridiculous mock-metaphysical verses to each other and to the landlord, who had literary aspirations. He thought well of them, for they spent their money there and they wrote verses of a kind which he couldn’t, though he wanted to, and in their honour he re-christened his inn ‘The Downish Helicon,’ which so far as I know was his one literary excursion. But Philip Goode died, and Martin Stout and Metcalf and the landlord died, and no one remembered them, and the inn sign grew battered, and the villagers thought nothing of so strange a name and could never learn to pronounce it. So when the eighteenth century was nearly finished a new landlord had the sign repainted and lettered with what he took to be its proper name, ‘The Downy Pelican.’ And that’s what it is called to-day.”

  Keith had heard something of Lady Mercy’s inns, as every newspaper reader had. “The Prince in the Sun” at Bromley, “The George” at Molton, and three or four others had become famous again since she bought them, tactfully re-conditioned them (preserving what was good and building new bathrooms) and re-created their reputation for serving honest English food—which meant Scotch beef and French sauces—and honest English drink—which meant Cotton’s Strong Ale, Cotton’s March Beer, and Cotton’s noble Audit Ale. She put wine in the cellar—wine bought from dispersed and nobler cellars—and a discreet American Bar in the buttery of such inns as had a buttery, so that in three or four years what had been a hobby, an amusing pendant to the brewery, became a highly profitable concern and Lady Mercy was elected a Vice-President of the Hotel-keepers’ Association.

  Keith walked about the room absent-mindedly dressing himself. The idea attracted him. He was interested in food. Its names were to him like the names of far countries to passionate travellers, and minestrone, macédoine, caviare, bortsch, sucking-pig, celery and goulasch sounded in his ears as sonorously as Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. He had thought, more than once, of writing a Gargantuan epic of food, of inventing a young Gargantua who should eat his way through France and Eastern Europe to Russia, and thence to enormous feasting in Central Asia where whole sheep were stewed in a massive pot, scenting the mountain winds with unimagined sweetness and savoury strength.… A gastronomic Tamburlaine, flinging bawdy wisdom about him as he tossed aside the bones, cracking jests as loudly as marrow-bones, catching at Truth and floating dumplings with greasy fingers. And regretfully he had put the thought away, feeling incompetent to undertake so huge a task without a Marlowe’s vigour; feeling, too, a little ashamed of even vicarious greed. He had so often been hungry—for training diet is Spartan-simple though sufficient in calories and such—that his dreams turned naturally to exotic and mountainous meals.

  Though Gargantua-Tamburlaine were too great a figure to draw he might cut a fair enough landlord, he thought. He might even be a good landlord, and a good landlord is a good citizen of any state except the forty-eight west of the Atlantic.

  “‘For malt does more than Milton can

  To justify God’s ways to man,’”

  he said aloud. “I’ll do it, Quentin, if your mother will take a risk. But I know nothing about the business side of it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’ll have a chartered accountant or somebody like that to arrange the profit and loss. You’re the landlord, and all you have to do is to look hearty and remember the recipe for lamb’s wool. I shall probably live with you for a time. I came down here, as a matter of fact, to propose a holiday together. I want a more vulgar environment for my next novel. They tell me that A Nettle Against May is a little precious. I may find a coarse enough note at ‘The Pelican.’”

  “When it’s going to be the most expensive pub in England?”

  “You always find human nature near to the surface in a pub, however expensive, and human nature is coarse enough for the most modern novelist.”

  A feeling of unreality took possession of Keith. A hundred and eight miles in four days had tired him; he had been bitterly disillusioned by The Times review, for he had hoped foolishly, building great castles of optimistic stone and beams of spacious imagining—so well had his publishers done their work; and now the whimsical proposal to manage a pub for Lady Mercy Cotton elated him the more because of the weariness and smarting disgust which it had banished. He sat down and laughed tremendously, so that the bed creaked beneath him and the red and white cow under his window looked up and said “Mooooo,” in a voice that was mildly interrogative.

  “Come and have breakfast,” said Quentin.

  CHAPTER II

  “The Downy Pelican” stood in the main thoroughfare of Downish, a little past the square. What it showed to the street was small in comparison with that which lay behind. Two steep roofs, one a yellowish grey and the other a yellowish red; in a pointed stone doorway an oak door grimly embossed with ninety-six large iron nails and two iron hinges designed to represent fleurs-de-lys; a row of diamond-paned windows; the enormous sign, white and green with antique lettering in gold, that slowly creaked below a ponderous iron bracket; and at one end—unobtrusive but sufficient, for common folk have a keener nose than their betters—a little sign that said “Bar.” Most important of all was the spacious archway that led into the courtyard, for “The Pelican” like a true philosopher looked inward rather than outward, and its courtyard was cool and comforting, with shadows broken prettily by pink roses, with an oak gallery running round it so that guests could
look across at other guests, or downwards to see the Boots chatting pleasantly with a maid, and reflect that here even the servants had leisure to live as human beings should be allowed to live.

  Comfort and dignity—strange bedfellows—slept together as if in the Great Bed of Ware, and thought drowsily of ancient history. Once there had been a monastery here. Henry VI, a wretched fugitive from someone or other, had found refuge in it and repaid the hospitality of the monks by taking a mad fit and babbling of hell, the English constitution, and the marrow-bone pie which he had had for his supper. An alchemist in Henry VIII’s time, after the monks had been disestablished, hanged himself here and left a paper saying that he had hidden the recipe for the philosopher’s stone in the cellar; which, although it was manifestly improbable, had resulted in half the building being pulled down and three townsfolk killed by a falling beam before it was decided that the alchemist had been joking; though indeed they did discover directions for “apparelling Malmsey” beginning, “If you have a good But of Malmsey and a But or two of Sacke that will not be drunke,” to which the whimsical scholar may have referred.

  There was an excellent scandal about Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, who had been indiscreet enough to stay a night here; the same night, though, it was protested, on opposite sides of the courtyard. Later, much later, Sheridan got notably drunk here after having left London to recuperate from a drinking bout. A highwayman or two had business with the place, but the Vicar of St. Saviour’s in his history of Downish, is unimpressed by this connexion. And Mr. Gladstone after speaking in Downish gave a signed photograph of himself to the landlord, which the landlord, after Mr. Gladstone had gone, very spiritedly burnt in the middle of the courtyard.

  As to the appointments of the inn, they were in keeping with its history; mixed but interesting. There was an oak room with a Gothic timbered roof and hammer beams; and there were delightful but unobtrusive plumbing arrangements which Lady Mercy had caused to be installed. Sanitation had modestly compromised with the splendid past and “The Downy Pelican” was a bird to be proud of.