Poet's Pub Read online

  It was six months since Saturday Keith had been summoned to interview Lady Mercy Cotton; six months since she had said to him, without preamble: “So you’re going to manage my new pub for me Mr. Keith? That’s delightful of you. Mr. Owens—Grieve Owens, you know—asked me for it, but he’s only a Soccer Blue and I was very doubtful about giving it to him. I have one other Rowing Blue, a Rugger International, two Hockey Blues, and an exceedingly good Hurdler at the ‘Prince in the Sun.’ They’re all doing ever so much better than ‘The George’ which is managed by Mr. Salmson. He was President of the Union, wasn’t he, Quentin? I thought so. People don’t take to him as they do to a man with a public record. But sit down, Mr. Keith, and we’ll talk it over.”

  Lady Mercy was a tall, very charming, slightly untidy woman with a greyish, horsey face. One eyebrow rose higher than the other and her lips moved in such a way that it was difficult to tell whether she was laughing at herself, at the world in general, or being entirely serious and sensitive to the exact meaning of her words. Her hair, a streaky black and white, was artistically cut, and an episcopal-looking ring ornamented her right forefinger.

  “I know your poems, of course,” she went on. “There are two in February Fill-dyke which delighted me. So many people look in ponds nowadays and write graceful biological verses about small things in them that one is a little tired of aquarium poetry. But your water glittered and your weeds honestly grew. I think you are a poet, Mr. Keith. Your mother writes too, doesn’t she? And your father had one of the only five palates in Scotland. I bought the remainder of his cellar after the war. Yes, I know he gave it to a hospital, but the Superintendent told me that he simply hadn’t the heart to use it. So very Scotch, I thought. And of course the soldiers did like beer better than Clos Vougeot. So there it was on his hands, practically intact, and I bought it quite cheaply. I’m glad that I didn’t pay much for it, because the money went into a most tasteless War Memorial. A drinking fountain, Mr. Keith. Rather insignificant, don’t you think?”

  Lady Mercy’s right eyebrow rose to a dizzy height and her mouth set forbiddingly.

  Keith laughed and said, “I’m glad that you think I can be trusted to look after ‘The Pelican.’ I have a lot of ideas about food and several about drink—”

  “I knew you would. Poets are really the most practical people on earth so long as they are allowed to do what they like. It’s only when they’re driven along uncongenial paths that they become woolly and distrait. I wish Quentin could write verse, but he persists in experimenting with the most shapeless kind of novel.”

  “My dear mother,” Quentin protested, “my novel was at least different from every other modern novel. They assume that all the world is hard and put their heroes in the middle like a soft core in a green apple. My hero was hard, and his trouble was that the world about him was soft. I had nothing about timid virginity, the trials of adolescence, or the rupture of innocence in the whole ninety thousand words.”

  “But you didn’t know what to do with your hero at the end, did you?”

  “I left him with dignity.”

  “In an impossible situation, Quentin. Now let me talk business to Mr. Keith.”

  Gradually, in the following months, Keith became aware of Lady Mercy’s ability. He and “The Pelican” were advertised together, tactfully, pleasantly, in social paragraphs and semi-literary journals. His Blue was remembered without the circumstances attending it and he grew to understand its commercial value. His poems were frequently mentioned and often his publishers reported that another copy of February Fill-dyke had been bought. Even his first volume, the pretentiously named Micomicon, reappeared and sold a dozen or two. People agreed that he was a poet, though they did not know his poetry. And one day a journalist who had dined—or said he had dined—with Lady Mercy, wrote charmingly of her poet and her “Pelican” and called it, laughingly, “Poet’s Pub”; scarcely realizing as he did so the adhesive quality of happy alliteration. For the new name began to dispossess that on the swinging white and green sign, and passing motorists would say to the wives, “‘Poet’s Pub,’ my dear,” when they saw “The Pelican” on the board; and charabanc parties on their way to the Roman baths at the north end of Downish would stand up in their chariot and peer curiously at the inn ruled by one who wrote verses. “Poet’s Pub” grew famous and its thirteen suites were full; or about to be full.

  Saturday, sitting in his office, read the list of his guests. Mrs., Miss Diana and Colonel Waterhouse, whose exciting travel story, A Hunter in Turkestan, had been so well received—an autographed copy lay on Saturday’s desk; Angela Scrabster, who had been in China painting the portraits of Chiang-Kai-shek and Feng Yu-hsiang; Sigismund Telfer, who wrote Polyphobion, which was called the “New Poets’ Bible”; his wife Jacquetta, who had sailed a fourteen-foot boat single-handed round the Baltic; Sir Philip Betts, the racing motorist who had been forced to go to the Iraq desert to find a level stretch long enough to let his car have its head; Jean Forbes and her mother Tommy Mandeville, whose joint revue, Peace in Our Time, was in its sixth month; Lady Porlet, who had never written anything (for she had rheumatic finger-joints) and never read anything (for she had no brains) and never been out of England, for she had no interest in foreign parts.

  Thank God for Lady Porlet, thought Saturday. Does all the world write—except Lady Porlet? Does everyone go to Central Asia or Pekin? Old Waterhouse’s book is the twenty-fourth autographed copy I’ve been given in six months. You read mine and I’ll read yours. They might at least cut their pages first. And listening to them is like a geography lesson. I believe I have the only sensible job in the country, for I stay where I’m wanted and I haven’t written a word for a week.

  He pulled out a drawer and lifted from it a pile of untidy manuscript, reading a line or two here and there.

  “It’s damned good. I swear it is,” he said aloud. “I’ll start typing it to-morrow.”

  He went back to the visitors’ list. The last comers were Mr. Aesop R. Wesson and Mr. Theodore van Buren, both Americans. Professor William Benbow and his daughter would arrive that afternoon.

  Mr. van Buren was a man in the middle sixties, a man with a battered-looking face, heavy and humorous and deeply lined. From the inner ends of his eyebrows creases ran diagonally upwards and outwards on his forehead, so that he seemed to have two pairs of eyebrows. A gash like a sword-cut—but it was wry laughter that had made it—seamed his cheek. He had a pendulous lower lip and he wore a bowler hat a little too small for his head. He was a bulky man and his overcoat hung shapelessly from his shoulders as he walked.

  His compatriot, Mr. Wesson, was a mild gentleman with curious eye-glasses and a placid white face. He looked like a professor, but he had told Saturday that he was a book-collector, which few professors can afford to be.

  Professor Benbow, on the other hand, looked—as Saturday knew, for he had heard him lecture on Hakluyt—more like an admiral than a professor. A kind of eponymous admiral, perhaps, for his name had probably moulded his character, his character dictated his habits, and his habits exerted their influence on his appearance. He was famous in academic circles for his vigorous championship of the eighteenth century—“a gentleman’s century,” he declared—and he had been offered a knighthood for his official War History of the submarines, offending a few by his refusal of it and insulting most of his University friends by his dedication, which read: “To the officers and men of the British Navy who served us in the depths of the sea. I like them better than dons.”

  A maid tapped at the door, opened it, and announced “Professor Benbow, sir.”

  Keith went down to meet him.

  “So you’re Mr. Keith, are you? Let me congratulate you.”

  “Why?” asked Keith.

  Professor Benbow’s voice rose from a rumbling bass to a tone of stentorian clarity.

  “Because you have found a useful job. If every pub in England were run by a man of character and education, this would be a country to be
proud of—prouder, I mean. Joan, my dear, this is Mr. Keith.”

  Joan Benbow said, “I’ve seen you before, of course.”

  To a casual glance she was one of those attractive young women who are so common in Great Britain; moderately athletic, with excellent complexion, the appearance of perfect health, good legs, and features just sufficiently different from type to give a semblance of individuality. The more curious eye found other things of interest in her. Her features were better than a passing glance suggested—delicately better, not obtrusively excellent—and her temper was an alternation of shyness and scepticism, momentarily composed, perhaps more often ingenuous. She looked slimmer than she actually was, standing in front of the enormous bowed shoulders of her father.

  Saturday Keith had been unable to acquire, in six months, a proper manner of professional reception.

  He said, “I’m glad you’ve come. I always wanted to meet you,” and looked with some embarrassment from one to the other.

  “Don’t ask me about your poetry,” said the professor. “No good ever came of discussing poetry.”

  Joan, on the verge of a remark, thought better of it and kept silent.

  “Come and talk to us after dinner if you have time,” suggested the professor.

  The three hours till dinner-time seemed curiously long to Saturday, and it occurred to him that he had told, unintentionally and without even noticing it at the time, a mild untruth when he stated that he had always wanted to meet Benbow. He had never felt such a wish, he decided, and certainly he had not entertained it as a permanency. Nor had he lately pretended to it out of wanton politeness. He sighed, for he was intelligent and the obvious reason presented itself. And he admitted that Joan Benbow was not commonly but uncommonly attractive.

  There was the wife of the man who was exploring in Brazil, and the daughter of the man who wrote about Jeremy Bentham, he thought. Each of them put me off my work for a week. But I wrote a good sonnet about one, and I could have written a better about the other if it hadn’t seemed so cold-blooded. Therefore I’m a bad publican and a bad poet too, for a good publican ought to be a little above life, a little bit enthroned, and a good poet ought, I think, to be just a step or two below life; polite life, I mean.… It’s a quarter to nine.

  The Elizabethan hall was full of his guests, and though no one sat on the oak settee the logs crackled most successfully in the huge hearth and two of the pictures looked remarkably like Holbeins. Talk, distributed over two or three little groups, made a soft conversational symphony in which it was possible to make out occasionally the individual themes. Now and again there was a little too much brass when Jean Forbes’s voice became animated, and once or twice Sigismund Telfer beat loudly on the drum of his criticism.

  Mr. van Buren, it seemed, had met Professor Benbow in America during the war, when the former was inventing new engines of destruction for Allied use and the latter was lecturing on the righteousness of the Allied cause. They were now renewing these bonds of sympathy.

  “Come and sit down, Mr. Keith,” said van Buren. “The professor and I are old friends. We met in the Yale Club in New York just after he had made the best speech I have ever heard.”

  “And possibly the most untruthful. The war was a blessed time for us older men in that we could tell more lies with more assurance of telling the truth than at any other period since—”

  “Since the war before the last,” suggested Keith.

  “I suppose so. It’s only in years of national peril that we’re able to feel really confident.”

  “Peace is too exciting to be sure about anything,” said Joan.

  “You’ve said it, Miss Benbow. Peace is exciting, because when the country’s at peace its citizens can think for themselves, think selfishly, and have adventures of their own. When there’s a war no one has time for anything but the national adventure.”

  Mr. van Buren looked solemn, and when solemnity settled on his face it looked like badly carved oak. In the lull that followed his sententiousness they heard occasional phrases and motifs from other parts of the room.

  “Feng was the most fascinating person I’ve ever painted,” Miss Scrabster was remarking. “He made improper proposals to me through an interpreter. They call him the Christian general.…”

  “There was a Chinese governor in Kashgar”—this was Colonel Waterhouse—“who lived in mediæval state and had executions every morning. I saw the heads.…”

  “She’s a good actress of course, but she sleeps with her understudy. I’m not old-fashioned but I do believe in being natural.…”

  “Mrs. Mandeville—forgive me interrupting you again—but did you say this was Wednesday or Thursday?” Lady Porlet had been expecting a letter all day and was a little restless.

  “He was a picturesque old ruffian with a bodyguard dressed in rags, mounted on scrubby ponies.…”

  “No, I didn’t have much rest. Nasty, steep little waves you get in the Baltic.…”

  “We ought to learn from the pointillistes. Put, your colour on pure, in spots, and you get a luminous spectrum in verse as well as in painting.…”

  “I was going to do Chang Tso-lin as well, only of course he got murdered.…”

  “Perhaps Chang would have seduced her without an interpreter,” said the professor thoughtfully, and Mr. van Buren laughed heavily and wheezily. Then he said, “I beg your pardon, Miss Benbow.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I suppose we were being coarse for a moment.”

  “Father has taught me to think of coarseness as a characteristic of good writing.”

  “I’ve taught you to recognize mealy-mouthing as one of the signs of bad writing, you ungrateful rig. I’ve taught you to be suspicious of girls’ school enthusiasm for pure-minded, thin-lipped, lady-like editions of the great authors. I’ve taught you—no, I’m on holiday and I refuse to think of literature as a task. It ought to be an adventure. Either the adventure of sailing your own ship or the adventure of exploring the islands that greater minds have discovered for us.”

  “But no-one would remember poor dead authors if people like you weren’t paid to talk about them.”

  “She’s calling you a vocal gravestone, professor.”

  “A perpetual injunction to ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile,’” said Keith.

  The professor’s bushy eyebrows leapt up like white flaps. “You’re in the majority,” he said, “till I’m dead too. What have you been writing?”

  “Satire,” said Keith.

  “Satire in a pub? Merciful God!”

  “Have you ever drunk lamb’s wool?”

  “Can you make it?”

  “Yes. I owe you an apology. Come and share a bowl of lamb’s wool instead.”

  They went, all four of them, to the American Bar which was in the buttery. It was deserted except for a white-faced, white-coated little man who stood behind the gleaming counter, with eyes that shone more brightly than silver or polished mahogany or crystal beakers, and stared with a wild surmise at two glasses on the board. One shone with a liquid palely blue as April skies, the other more nobly glowed with a darker hue, the colour of darkest blue-bells in a wood.

  “I’ve done it, sir,” said the little man in a hoarse, self-wondering voice. “Oh, Mr. Keith, I’ve done it. I’ve done it twice, both of them different.”

  “Done what?” asked Keith.

  “Blue cocktails,” said the little man. “Nobody’s ever made one before, not proper blue, like these. Mr. Keith, I’m an inventor!”

  Mr. van Buren solemnly shook hands with him. “I know the feeling,” he said, “it’s worth living for.”

  “Congratulations, Holly,” said Keith. “I’ll raise your salary from to-night.”

  “Thank you, sir, but it isn’t that so much—though I thought you would—it’s just the feeling of having done it, if you understand me.”

  “They’re like butterflies,” said Joan, holding one up in either hand. “Can I taste them?”

&
nbsp; “A cocktail after dinner? Certainly not.” Professor Benbow was indignant at the suggestion.

  “Please, sir, just this once,” pleaded the inventor. “It isn’t likely the lady will form a habit, as it were, and this is the only notable thing that’s happened to me since I was bayoneted by a Prussian Guard on the 25th of September, 1918, sir. I’d like to celebrate it, if you don’t mind.”

  Joan sipped first one, then the other. “I feel as though I could eat another dinner,” she said. “I think you ought to call the light one Heaven.”

  “I thought of calling them Butterfly and Bluebell,” said Holly diffidently, “but perhaps you think that a little bit too sentimental, sir.”

  “How did you discover the secret?” Saturday asked.

  “It was like this, Mr. Keith. All my life I’ve collected cigarette-pictures, and you’d scarcely believe what I’ve learnt from them. British Birds, and Birds’ Eggs, and Railway Engines, and How to Mend a Burst Pipe, and Aeroplanes, and Regimental Crests, and all kinds of things. Cigarette-pictures have been one of the greatest powers of education that this country’s ever known, and when I was in hospital I set to work to cultivate my mind with them, and I’ve done it, sir. If ever any of you gentlemen want to know anything about the Little Crested Grebe, or the Snow Bunting, or even how to put down linoleum properly, I can tell you. Why, they’re just like a University, sir, if you collect them seriously. I’ve got two sets of every series that’s been issued, one pasted into my albums face up—that’s with the picture showing—and one with the letterpress, so to speak. I learnt a good lot about printing-terms from them too—”

  “But how did you get hold of the idea for these blue cocktails?”

  “It was out of Native Wild Flowers. I don’t want it spread abroad, as it were, but I can trust you gentlemen and you too, miss, can’t I? Well, there’s a flower called the Blue Gentian, and the information on the back of the, picture of it—like a little essay, you know, sir—said that a harmless vegetable dye could be made out of it. So I went to a chemist and he had it right there on his shelf. I bought a bottle—it only cost eighteenpence—and then I set to work. Some kinds of gin took the colour right out of it, but I wasn’t going to be beat, so I experimented, and experimented—I got more help from a series that told all about the solar spectrum—and at last I got it, sir. And now won’t you gentlemen try one?”