Appleby considered. ‘Don’t they,’ he asked cautiously, ‘behave with some degree of folly?’
‘Their behaviour isn’t technically migration, because they never come back. It’s irruption. Every now and then their numbers rocket up – nobody knows why. So food grows scarce, and they get on the move. That’s sensible enough. But their one idea is to move on a dead straight line. There may be millions and millions of them, obsessed with this necessity to turn themselves into a vast crawling Roman road. They turn aside for nothing at all. When they get to the sea – as they’re bound to do in the end – they don’t turn aside for that either. They swim straight out into it till they drown.’
‘It’s disturbing,’ Appleby said.
‘Just that. You’ve found a splendid word for it.’ Jean spoke ironically, but her voice was tense with the excitement of some inward vision. ‘Ages and ages ago, this forward-march business must have had some positive biological value. It was what, if you were a Lemming, in certain circumstances got you through. So Lemmings, when they get rattled, do just the same thing today – and will go on doing it, one supposes, as long as any Lemmings are. Don’t you think, Sir John, viewing human behaviour as a whole, that it’s the Lemming and not the Lemur or the Chimpanzee that has most claim to cousinship with us?’
She hadn’t spoken for effect; it wasn’t like a clever point in an undergraduate debate. A certain impulse towards sombre philosophical reflection was perhaps constitutional among the Howes. And Appleby had a sudden and alarming picture of this intermittently brooding and intense girl forty years on – if somebody didn’t come along and rescue her from Ailsworth and its birds. She would be as cranky as her grandfather was said to be now. And this would be a great shame. An attractive as well as an intelligent girl.
There was a flight of wild duck in the air, and across the pool some swans were majestically gliding. But what one was chiefly aware of was silence and the empty sky.
‘You spend quite a lot of time here, when you’re at Ailsworth?’ Appleby asked.
‘Quite a lot. It depends on the season.’ Jean caught his glance and laughed. ‘You’re thinking it’s all rather bleak and lonesome? It isn’t, if you understand what’s happening. I think I could spend my life very happily here – if I didn’t have an idea that it would be a kind of running away. To get like my grandfather – frankly preferring feathered to unfeathered bipeds – is rather throwing up the sponge, don’t you think?’
‘Well, yes.’ Appleby smiled. ‘That’s to say, I think it may be all right in an elderly eccentric. Your grandfather no doubt does good work on the feathered tribes, whereas he might be a mere nuisance in the House of Lords. But I’d deprecate it in a young woman.’ He took a last look out over the empty landscape, and turned to descend the ladder. ‘But I’m not sure, myself, that I’d find your birds the best way of escaping from a contemplation of the human condition. Certainly not the migrating ones. They get together in mobs for the purpose of performing prodigious but senseless acts. That’s precisely the state of the case in our own world. Lemmings, birds, or men: there’s really nothing to choose between them.’
Jean laughed. ‘You’d better not make that a line of talk with my grandfather. Why, there he is! He’s been to the other tower. He keeps the big maps there, and allows nobody near the place. He likes to make a secret of them until he really has something to communicate.’
Appleby, who had been about to scramble down the ladder, turned back and looked out. At the moment, Lord Ailsworth was a barely distinguishable figure. One might have taken him for one of his own ducks – the more so as he appeared to be advancing mysteriously on the surface of a patch of water. ‘Is he wading?’ Appleby asked.
‘No. There are several little causeys, although it’s hard to see them. Can you make out what’s following him? Use your field glasses, if you can’t.’
Appleby got out his binoculars. What was following Lord Ailsworth was really ducks: a sedately waddling line of them. Lord Ailsworth himself turned out to be a long-legged man with a stoop – less a duck, after all, than a heron. As Appleby watched, he stopped, turned, and appeared to address the creatures that were following him. Then he rummaged in a basket which he carried over his arm, scattered something, and walked on.
‘We’ll go and meet him,’ Jean said. And she added, with a touch of mockery, ‘It will be fun seeing what you make of each other.’
‘I’m sure it will. But please remember that my actual business isn’t at all funny.’ Appleby was serious. ‘I’d like to think I can rely on you to back me up.’
‘I’ll do what I can, of course, Sir John.’
‘Thank you. By the way, what are the big maps?’
‘Maps of the world. There’s a storey in the other tower which has its walls lined with them. When a bird that has been ringed here is reported as caught and recorded in another country, the place is marked with a coloured bead. You know the sort of war film in which people keep track of air raids, and so on, on enormous charts? It always reminds me of that.’
‘With your grandfather as a sort of Air Marshal, sending his winged squadrons hither and thither about the globe? It’s another queer parallel between birds and men.’
‘Except that men carry bombs, and birds carry nothing but their own identification papers.’
They had reached the ground, and Lord Ailsworth was no longer visible. But Jean set a brisk pace in the direction from which he would come. For a couple of minutes they walked in silence. There were more pens, but Appleby didn’t much attend to them. At least, he was telling himself, one couldn’t find more appropriate territory upon which to conduct a wild-goose chase. He had sent Judith on one yesterday, and he had himself embarked on one today. That, at least, was the sober probability of the matter. Unless, of course –
He turned suddenly to Jean. ‘Out there where your grandfather is now,’ he said. ‘Is it dangerous? Would it be risky for someone who didn’t know the place to go prowling over all that marshland?’
‘I’d scarcely suppose so. There can’t be any deep water to drown in, or the sort of mud in which one can sink and leave nothing but bubbles. And it’s late in the season for my grandfather to feel he must take a shot at anybody trespassing on the breeding grounds.’
‘Would he really do that? It sounds a little feudal and high-handed.’
‘Of course not. There have been incidents in which he has raved at intruders in a most alarming way. But I’ve never known him
do
anything as a result of that sort of brainstorm… Now then, here he is.’
They had walked down a long path past a line of pens sheltering a variety of exotic fowl. Lord Ailsworth had paused beside the last of these, set down his basket, and stooped over a bird. Now he straightened up. He was older than Appleby had supposed – a worn and haggard man, with craggy features, and long and untidy white hair. His expression was gentle and withdrawn – a fact which made the more startling the extraordinary brightness of his deep blue eyes.
‘The Andean Crested Duck,’ he said. ‘Something not quite right about him, I’m afraid. Pinioned, of course. One is never quite easy about captives, wouldn’t you say? But they can’t be helped.’
Appleby was for a moment at a loss. The formidable Lord Ailsworth, whom Colonel Pickering had been so little anxious to approach, had addressed him casually and almost absently, as if here were somebody he was accustomed to meet about the place every day.
‘This is Sir John Appleby,’ Jean said.
‘How do you do?’ Lord Ailsworth now advanced with a sort of shy courtesy and shook hands. ‘I am always very glad to see Jean’s friends. I should have liked to meet more of her Oxford companions. But we are not much by way of having visitors at Ailsworth, these days.’ Lord Ailsworth delivered himself of this in a mildly puzzled manner, as if it were a circumstance of which there must be some obvious explanation that escaped him momentarily. ‘Do you come from Oxford yourself?’ he asked. ‘I get great assistance from the Bureau of Animal Population there. It is much the most important department of the University at present. I myself read Greats, with some emphasis on philosophy. But studies of that sort were already in a decline.’
‘I don’t come from Oxford,’ Appleby said. ‘I come from the Metropolitan Police.’
‘Yes, of course. How foolish of me.’ Lord Ailsworth appeared to judge himself guilty of some discourtesy in not having been better informed about his visitor. But he was not otherwise discomposed. ‘Shall we go up to the house?’ he asked. ‘I hope you can stay to lunch. You mustn’t expect roast duck.’ This was apparently a joke, and it was accompanied by a smile which somehow made Appleby uneasy. ‘But Jean will have explained to you that ours is a vegetarian regimen.’
‘When did you last eat roast duck, Grandpapa?’ Jean appeared to ask this question quite seriously.
‘In 1898, my dear.’ Lord Ailsworth gave this reply confidently. ‘I remember the occasion very clearly. It was – God help me! – a very
good
roast duck. In fact it gets into my dreams from time to time. Probably roast duck is not what it was. Burgundy is certainly not what it was. Which makes abstention from roast duck the less of a penance. And therefore the less meritorious, it is to be feared.’ He touched Appleby lightly and with charming politeness on the arm. ‘Let us take this path, my dear sir. No, Jean, you need not carry that basket. I am very capable of managing it myself. I have been taking some cress to the Versicolour Teal. And passing the time of day with our new arrival, the Perry River White-fronted Goose. A charming creature, but rather uncommunicative at present.’
It was obviously desirable, Appleby thought, to find out at once just how mad Lord Ailsworth was. ‘You find,’ he asked, ‘that new arrivals haven’t much to say for themselves at first?’
‘Quite so, my dear sir. And there is no occasion for your being an exception to the rule.’ Lord Ailsworth smiled gently. ‘But perhaps I might know whether you are interested in birds? It is something inborn, I think. Certainly I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know a hawk from a hernshaw.’
It required only a nodding acquaintance with the tragedy of
Hamlet
to realize from this that Lord Ailsworth – superficially at least – had all his wits about him. But it still didn’t necessarily follow – Appleby thought – that his madness was only north-north-west. A man can be at the same time extremely acute and extremely crazy. ‘I should certainly like to speak up about myself at once,’ Appleby said, ‘and before trespassing further on your hospitality. It’s true that I haven’t come because I’m interested in birds. But I have come because it seems probable that somebody else is. I understand that Colonel–’
‘Good heavens!’ Lord Ailsworth had paused by a pen and now interrupted in some agitation. ‘Whatever can have happened to the Wandering Whistling Duck? Fully winged, of course – but very sedentary in habit. And now there’s no sign of him. This is most upsetting.’
‘Mightn’t he’ – Appleby ventured to suggest – ‘for once be living up to his name? If he’s a
wandering
–’
‘Precisely!’ Lord Ailsworth was becoming more and more excited. ‘Sometimes, you know, birds stray out of the reserve and over to the village. They’re all scoundrels there – all damnable scoundrels. Particularly at the Bell.’
‘At the inn?’ Appleby was interested.
‘If my fellow magistrates did their duty, that fellow, What’s-his-name–’
‘Keylock,’ Jean said.
‘Yes, Keylock. Ought to be under lock and key – eh? Certainly he has no business to be holding a licence. Put anything in the pot – absolutely anything.’ Lord Ailsworth was now hurrying forward, apparently intent upon hunting the errant bird. But at the same time he talked on with mounting vehemence and increasing incoherence. ‘Weren’t we talking about roast duck? Frivolous talk never any good. Real thing on top of you in no time. Apple sauce. I was going on to make a joke about apple sauce. Still possible to have the apple sauce. And something about Burgundy – eh? But Keylock keeps nothing in his miserable tavern except mouldy cheese. So how did he come to be feeding that fellow Juniper on a roast bird? Smell of it all over the place when I went in to talk to him.’
Appleby stopped in his tracks – so uncompromisingly that the others halted too, ‘Did you say Juniper?’ he asked. ‘You are talking, Lord Ailsworth, about Professor Howard Juniper?’
‘Yes, that’s the man. Put up at the Bell about six weeks ago.’
‘But am I not right in thinking that you told the Chief Constable yesterday–’
‘Pickering? Tiresome fellow. Do you think I’d admit to young Tommy Pickering that I’d been induced to pay a friendly call on a man who turned out to be eating one of my own ducks?’
‘But you’re admitting it to Sir John,’ Jean said. ‘And I’m very glad. I’d like you to go on and tell him all about it.’
‘Should you, my dear?’ Lord Ailsworth was calming down. ‘Why, there he is!’ He pointed ahead. A large – and, to Appleby’s eye, quite commonplace – duck had turned a corner and was coming sedately towards them. ‘Do you know, I think he’s struck up a friendship with the Sushkin’s Goose? Yes, I believe that is the explanation. Which is a great relief, I’m bound to say. Now, what were we talking about?’
‘Howard Juniper,’ Appleby said with emphasis.
‘Ah, yes. Well I’ll tell you all about him at lunch. Interesting chap, in a way. Tolerable, but for his disgusting feeding habits. Had a sense of adventure that’s not common nowadays. And intelligent. But that made it all the worse – wouldn’t you agree? Stands to reason he knew what that blackguard Keylock had served up to him. However, one oughtn’t to speak ill of the dead.’
‘The dead?’ Appleby was startled. ‘You have some reason to suppose that Professor Juniper is dead?’
‘Oh, yes. Oh, dear me, yes. Almost sure to be, I’d say. But here we are. I’ll show you where to wash, my dear Sir John. Madeira, Jean, would be the right thing, to my mind. Sherry-drinking is overdone these days. And didn’t I say something about Burgundy? Capital with nut cutlets. I’ll tell Cowmeadow to hunt up a bottle. This way. Water not hot, but privy does flush. Cowmeadow is my butler. My great-grandfather found a lad called Cowmeadow in his regiment of militia. Engaged him as a stable boy at once. And we’ve had them ever since. Wonderful name – eh? No towel? Too bad. Use my handkerchief.’