The Complete Stories (42 page)

  But still the shade of Bellorius stood at his elbow demanding placation. There was unfinished business between these two. You cannot keep close company with a man, even though he be dead three centuries, without incurring obligations. Therefore at the time of the peace celebrations Scott-King distilled his learning and wrote a little essay, 4000 words long, entitled The Last Latinist, to commemorate the coming tercentenary of Bellorius's death. It appeared in a learned journal. Scott-King was paid twelve guineas for this fruit of fifteen years' devoted labour; six of them he paid in income tax; with six he purchased a large gun-metal watch which worked irregularly for a month or two and then finally failed. There the matter might well have ended.

  These, then, in a general, distant view, are the circumstances—Scott-King's history; Bellorius; the history of Neutralia; the year of Grace 1946—all quite credible, quite humdrum, which together produced the odd events of Scott-King's summer holiday. Let us now "truck" the camera forward and see him "close-up." You have heard all about Scott-King but you have not yet met him.

  Meet him, then, at breakfast on a bleak morning at the beginning of the summer term. Unmarried assistant masters at Granchester enjoyed the use of a pair of collegiate rooms in the school buildings and took their meals in the common room. Scott-King came from his classroom where he had been taking early school, with his gown flowing behind him and a sheaf of fluttering exercise papers in his numb fingers. There had been no remission of wartime privations at Granchester. The cold grate was used as ashtray and wastepaper basket and was rarely emptied. The breakfast table was a litter of small pots, each labelled with a master's name, containing rations of sugar, margarine and a spurious marmalade. The breakfast dish was a slop of "dried" eggs. Scott-King turned sadly from the sideboard. "Anyone," he said, "is welcome to my share in this triumph of modern science."

  "Letter for you, Scottie," said one of his colleagues. "‘The Honourable Professor Scott-King Esquire.' Congratulations."

  It was a large, stiff envelope, thus oddly addressed, emblazoned on the flap with a coat of arms. Inside were a card and a letter. The card read: His Magnificence the Very Reverend the Rector of the University of Simona and the Committee of the Bellorius Tercentenary Celebration Association request the honour of Professor Scott-King's assistance at the public acts to be held at Simona on July 28th–August 5th, 1946. R.S.V.P. His Excellency Dr. Bogdan Antonic, International Secretary of the Association, Simona University, Neutralia.

  The letter was signed by the Neutralian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. It announced that a number of distinguished scholars were assembling from all over the world to do honour to the illustrious Neutralian political thinker Bellorius and delicately intimated that the trip would be without expense on the part of the guests.

  Scott-King's first thought on reading the communication was that he was the victim of a hoax. He looked round the table expecting to surprise a glance of complicity between his colleagues, but they appeared to be busy with their own concerns. Second thoughts convinced him that this sumptuous embossing and engraving was beyond their resources. The thing was authentic, then; but Scott-King was not pleased. He felt, rather, that a long-standing private intimacy between himself and Bellorius was being rudely disturbed. He put the envelope into his pocket, ate his bread and margarine, and presently made ready for morning chapel. He stopped at the secretary's office to purchase a packet of crested school writing paper on which to inscribe "Mr. Scott-King regrets ..."

  For the strange thing is that Scott-King was definitely blasé. Something of the kind has been hinted before, yet, seeing him cross the quadrangle to the chapel steps, middle-aged, shabby, unhonoured and unknown, his round and learned face puckered against the wind, you would have said: "There goes a man who has missed all the compensations of life—and knows it." But that is because you do not yet know Scott-King; no voluptuary surfeited by conquest, no colossus of the drama bruised and rent by doting adolescents, not Alexander, nor Talleyrand, was more blasé than Scott-King. He was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet; he was travel-worn in the large periphery of his own mind, jaded with accumulated experience of his imagination. He was older, it might have been written, than the rocks on which he sat; older, anyway, than his stall in chapel; he had died many times, had Scott-King, had dived deep, had trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. And all this had been but the sound of lyres and flutes to him. Thus musing, he left the chapel and went to his classroom, where for the first hours he had the lowest set.

  They coughed and sneezed. One, more ingenious than the rest, attempted at length to draw him out as, it was known, he might sometimes be drawn: "Please, sir, Mr. Griggs says it's a pure waste of our time learning classics," but Scott-King merely replied: "It's a waste of time coming to me and not learning them."

  After Latin gerunds they stumbled through half a page of Thucydides. He said: "These last episodes of the siege have been described as tolling like a great bell," at which a chorus rose from the back bench—"The bell? Did you say it was the bell, sir?" and books were noisily shut. "There are another twenty minutes. I said the book tolled like a bell."

  "Please, sir, I don't quite get that, sir, how can a book be like a bell, sir?"

  "If you wish to talk, Ambrose, you can start construing."

  "Please, sir, that's as far as I got, sir."

  "Has anyone done any more?" (Scott-King still attempted to import into the lower school the adult politeness of the Classical Sixth.) "Very well, then, you can all spend the rest of the hour preparing the next twenty lines."

  Silence, of a sort, reigned. There was a low muttering from the back of the room, a perpetual shuffling and snuffling, but no one spoke directly to Scott-King. He gazed through the leaded panes to the leaden sky. He could hear through the wall behind him the strident tones of Griggs, the civics master, extolling the Tolpuddle martyrs. Scott-King put his hand in his coat-pocket and felt the crisp edges of the Neutralian invitation.

  He had not been abroad since 1939. He had not tasted wine for a year, and he was filled, suddenly, with deep homesickness for the South. He had not often nor for long visited those enchanted lands; a dozen times perhaps, for a few weeks—for one year in total of his forty-three years of life—but his treasure and his heart lay buried there. Hot oil and garlic and spilled wine; luminous pinnacles above a dusky wall; fireworks at night, fountains at noonday; the impudent, inoffensive hawkers of lottery tickets moving from table to table on to the crowded pavement; the shepherd's pipe on the scented hillside—all that travel agent ever sought to put in a folder, fumed in Scott-King's mind that drab morning. He had left his coin in the waters of Trevi; he had wedded the Adriatic; he was a Mediterranean man.

  In the midmorning break, on the crested school paper, he wrote his acceptance of the Neutralian invitation. That evening, and on many subsequent evenings, the talk in the common room was about plans for the holidays. All despaired of getting abroad; all save Griggs who was cock-a-hoop about an International Rally of Progressive Youth Leadership in Prague to which he had got himself appointed. Scott-King said nothing even when Neutralia was mentioned.

  "I'd like to go somewhere I could get a decent meal," said one of his colleagues. "Ireland or Neutralia, or somewhere like that."

  "They'd never let you into Neutralia," said Griggs. "Far too much to hide. They've got teams of German physicists making atomic bombs."

  "Civil war raging."

  "Half the population in concentration camps."

  "No decent-minded man would go to Neutralia."

  "Or to Ireland for that matter," said Griggs.

  And Scott-King sat tight.

  II

  Some weeks later Scott-King sat in the aerodrome waiting room. His overcoat lay across his knees, his hand luggage at his feet. A loudspeaker, set high out of harm's way in the dun concrete wall, discoursed dance music and official announcements. This room, like all the others to which he had been driven in the course of the morning, was sparsely furnished and indifferently clean; on its walls, sole concession to literary curiosity, hung commendations of government savings bonds and precautions against gas attack. Scott-King was hungry, weary and dispirited for he was new to the amenities of modern travel.

  He had left his hotel in London at seven o'clock that morning; it was now past noon and he was still on English soil. He had not been ignored. He had been shepherded in and out of charabancs and offices like an idiot child; he had been weighed and measured like a load of merchandise; he had been searched like a criminal; he had been cross-questioned about his past and his future, the state of his health and of his finances, as though he were applying for permanent employment of a confidential nature. Scott-King had not been nurtured in luxury and privilege, but this was not how he used to travel. And he had eaten nothing except a piece of flaccid toast and margarine in his bedroom. The ultimate asylum where he now sat proclaimed itself on the door as "For the use of V.I.P.'s only."

  "V.I.P.?" he asked their conductress.

  She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner. "Very Important Persons," she replied without evident embarrassment.

  "But is it all right for me to be here?"

  "It is essential. You are a V.I.P."

  I wonder, thought Scott-King, how they treat quite ordinary, unimportant people?

  There were two fellow-travellers, male and female, similarly distinguished, both bound for Bellacita, capital city of Neutralia; both, it presently transpired, guests of the Bellorius Celebration Committee.

  The man was a familiar type to Scott-King; his name Whitemaid, his calling academic, a dim man like himself, much of an age with him.

  "Tell me," said Whitemaid, "tell me frankly"—and he looked furtive as men do when they employ that ambiguous expression—"have you ever heard of the worthy Bellorius?"

  "I know his work. I have seldom heard it discussed."

  "Ah, well, of course, he's not in my subject. I'm Roman Law," said Whitemaid, with an accession of furtiveness that took all grandiosity from the claim. "They asked the Professor of Poetry, you know, but he couldn't get away. Then they tried the Professor of Latin. He's red. Then they asked for anyone to represent the University. No one else was enthusiastic so I put myself forward. I find expeditions of this kind highly diverting. You are familiar with them?"

  "No."

  "I went to Upsala last vacation and ate very passable caviare twice a day for a week. Neutralia is not known for delicate living, alas, but one may count on rude plenty—and, of course, wine."

  "It's all a racket, anyhow," said the third Very Important Person.

  This was a woman no longer very young. Her name, Scott-King and Whitemaid had learned through hearing it frequently called through the loudspeaker and seeing it chalked on blackboards, calling her to receive urgent messages at every stage of their journey, was Miss Bombaum. It was a name notorious to almost all the world except, as it happened, to Scott-King and Whitemaid. She was far from dim; once a roving, indeed a dashing, reporter who in the days before the war had popped up wherever there was unpleasantness—Danzig, the Alcazar, Shanghai, Wal-Wal; now a columnist whose weekly articles were syndicated in the popular press of four continents. Scott-King did not read such articles and he had wondered idly at frequent intervals during the morning what she could be. She did not look a lady; she did not even look quite respectable, but he could not reconcile her typewriter with the calling of actress or courtesan; nor for that matter the sharp little sexless face under the too feminine hat and the lavish style of hair-dressing. He came near the truth in suspecting her of being, what he had often heard of but never seen in the life, a female novelist.

  "It's all a racket," said Miss Bombaum, "of the Neutralian Propaganda Bureau. I reckon they feel kind of left out of things now the war's over and want to make some nice new friends among the United Nations. We're only part of it. They've got a religious pilgrimage and a Congress of Physical Culture and an International Philatelists' Convention and heaven knows what else. I reckon there's a story in it—in Neutralia, I mean; not in Bellorius, of course, he's been done."

  "Done?"

  "Yes, I've a copy somewhere," she said, rummaging in her bag. "Thought it might come in useful for the speeches."

  "You don't think," said Scott-King, "that we are in danger of being required to make speeches?"

  "I can't think what else we've been asked for," said Miss Bombaum. "Can you?"

  "I made three long speeches at Upsala," said Whitemaid. "They were ecstatically received."

  "Oh, dear, and I have left all my papers at home."

  "Borrow this any time you like," said Miss Bombaum, producing Mr. Robert Graves's Count Belisarius. "It's sad though. He ends up blind."

  The music suddenly ceased and a voice said: "Passengers for Bellacita will now proceed to Exit D. Passengers for Bellacita will now proceed to Exit D," while, simultaneously, the conductress appeared in the doorway and said: "Follow me, please. Have your embarkation papers, medical cards, customs clearance slips, currency control vouchers, passports, tickets, identity dockets, travel orders, emigration certificates, baggage checks and security sheets ready for inspection at the barrier, please."

  The Very Important Persons followed her out, mingled with the less important persons who had been waiting in a nearby room, stepped into a dusty gale behind the four spinning screws of the aeroplane, mounted the step-ladder and were soon strapped into their seats as though waiting the attention of the dentist. A steward gave them brief instructions in the case of their being forced down over the sea and announced: "We shall arrive at Bellacita at sixteen hours Neutralian time."