Land of Unreason (2 page)

           
Oh, for heaven's
sake! Why couldn't they let up? Why couldn't anybody let up? If he had been
more sure of Kaja, of where she might be spending that night when the bombers
came, he wouldn't have run out of the Embassy. If he could be more sure of Kaja
now, he wouldn't be miserable. He allowed his mind to dwell on Kaja, pleasant
thought, her red hair and long silky legs, and the fact that although she had a
straight nose and Hungarian name and claimed to be from Budapest, she was
unquestionably Jewish.

            Kaja, pleasant thought,
always looking light enough to fly. The fragment of a song occurred to
him—"I wonder who's kissing her now"—and he smiled wryly. Anybody who
could buy her enough Scotch. Kaja preferred Scotch to champagne. It was a good
drink, Scotch. Useful when a man couldn't sleep.

            He got up, more slowly this
time, and dug out his bottle of Scotch, pouring himself a hefty dram. He
swashed it around in the glass, staring at the pale-orange liquid. Useful
stuff, but only up to a limit. What was his limit? The limit of a diplomatic
career which had already reached its limit when he fed horse meat to the
Congressman. Oh, damn! Oh, hell! It might have been all right but for this war,
might have been forgotten if foreign affairs had not become so tense that every
member of the service was forced, so to speak, to operate in a show window,
with his name constantly under Congressional scrutiny. And Kaja ... ? He lifted
the glass.

           
Beroom.

           
And set it down
again. With a trick of automatic memory his mind had jerked back to the picture
of Mrs. Gurton going out the back door. She had had something in her hand, a
bowl, a bowl of ... milk. Milk? The Gurtons didn't keep a cat. Why milk to the
back door?

            Fred Barber remembered that
Mrs. Gurton had said this was St. John's Eve, the twenty-third of June, the day
before Midsummer Day. Oh, yes, something in
The Golden Bough.
You leave
milk out for the Little People that night, especially if there is a baby in the
house, for unless the Little People receive their tribute they are likely to
steal the child and leave a changeling. Interesting survival; who would have
believed that a woman whose husband ran a drill press in a munitions factory
and who herself went to nurse a neighbor through a bomb wound, would leave milk
at the door for fairies? Almost worth writing a sardonic little note about, to
be sent to the
New Yorker
which would return him a check no doubt, to be
spent on Scotch for Kaja.

            Milk.

            Fred Barber liked milk, a
fact which he concealed with the most painful care from the gay, interesting,
mocking crowd in London. He had been brought up on a drink of milk before
bedtime. It made him sleep. But the war and milk rationing had made him go
without, like many others to whom milk was more of a hobby than a necessity.
Mrs. Gurton could have it for the baby of course. But if she were going to give
it to the fairies, why, Fred Barber argued to himself with a grin, he was as
good a fairy as any who would be abroad that night. The mission of fairies was
to bring gifts and he was bringing the Gurtons a pound sterling a week.

            Milk. The mere idea of
drinking it instead of the Scotch gave him a sense of virtue and power. What
was it Nietzsche had said: "Every conquest is the result of courage, of
hardness towards one's self"? Well, he would conquer, in spite of the
crack on the head. His mind flashed back to the determination with which he had
set out on his career. If he could recover some of that, the old pep, a little
crack on the head wouldn't matter. He could demonstrate a capacity for hardness
to himself, recall the sense of destiny that had filled him once. To hell with
the Scotch, and Kaja too. He strode to the door, his mind so intent on the
peculiar nobleness of using milk instead of Scotch as a sleeping powder that he
carried the glass with him.

            The moonlight showed the
bowl, sure enough, a pale circle beside one of the flowerpots that lined the
back of the cottage. Barber stuck his finger in the bowl and tasted. It was
milk—trust Mrs. Gurton. He set down the glass, and as the bombs in the distance
continued their infernal beat, lifted the bowl in both hands, drinking slowly
and with relish.

            Over the edge of the vessel
he could see the red glow that marked something burning in Bradford, with searchlight
beams flickering cobwebby above. And what would the fairies of St. John's Eve
do now, poor things, with no milk, and bombs falling on their heads? Fred
Barber set the bowl down, and then grinned like a small boy in the dark as
inspiration came to him. They could drink Scotch!

            He poured the slug of Scotch
into the bowl, watching the last dregs of the milk weave through it, and
chuckled at the thought of Mrs. Gurton's expression when she found the milk of
which she had robbed the baby so mysteriously transmuted. The delicious sense
of languor in every limb that presaged instant slumber was still wanting, as it
had been ever since his injury, but he knew now it would come, he was at peace.

            The trouble with these
English feather beds, though, was not merely that they were too warm for the
twenty-third of June, but also that you went right on down through the softness
till you hit a bump. There was one under his hip and he shifted position to
avoid it. Wonderful people, these English— His carefully cultivated cynicism
broke down when he contemplated them. Fairies and machine shops and courage
under bombings—like something out of a poem by Walter de la Mare. Or Masefield.
Yes, especially Masefield.

            His mind swung lazily into
contemplation of the essential Tightness of choosing Masefield as the poet
laureate of this people, for whom he wished he could do something—then drifted
into a hazy picture of Masefield characters, all mingled with fairies, Kaja and
the Gurtons. He came to with a start, realizing that he had almost been asleep.
Without regrets, he drifted into a blankness of thoughts half formed ...

           
Tik.

           
The door hinge,
faintly, as though someone had moved the door through a few minutes of arc.
Then again—tik—tik—tik, tik tik, tiktiktik.

            Barber, fully awake now,
looked toward the door. It was open, and something coming through it. He
couldn't be sure in the gloom, but it looked like a face, an incredible face
that might have come from a comic strip. The loose lips were drawn back in a
grin so extended that the corners of the mouth were out of sight. For all
Barber could tell the grin went all the way round and met at the back, like
Humpty Dumpty's. The ears were pendulous; over the grin was a head utterly
hairless but bearing a pair of knobbed antennae.

            Oh, well,
that,
said
Fred Barber to himself, and with that strange double vision, outside and inside
of one's personality, that comes at the edge of sleep, felt certain he was
dreaming and slipped down into the blank again.

-

            He was lying on his side,
one arm curled under his head and blue moonlight all around him. Bright
moonlight: one could read newsprint in such an illumination, he reflected in
the first half second of returning consciousness, and then write to Ripley about
it. Somewhere in the "Believe It or Not" collections was the
statement that the feat was impossible. If ...

            He became aware that the
fingers of the hand underneath were touching grass and heaved himself to a
sitting posture, now bolt wide-awake. From beyond his own feet the face of the
dream was grinning under knobbed antennae, which pricked eagerly toward him
like the horns of a snail. Behind, Barber was conscious of other crowding
figures as he tried to concentrate on what Knob-horns was saying.

            "... mickle bit o'
work, moom." Knob-horns spread arms and let the hands dangle from a pair
of loose wrists, slightly swaying like a tight-rope walker. " 'E were that
'eavy.
'ic."

           
There was a
little ripple of suppressed amusement behind Barber, with a clear contralto
voice rising out of it:

            "Wittold! Is't so you
were taught to address the Queen's Majesty? What said you?"

            The mobile features
regrouped themselves from a grin into an expression of comic and formidable
sullen-ness.

            "I said 'e were
'eavy."

            "Aye. One needs not
your ass's ears to have caught so much. But after that?"

            Barber swiveled. The
contralto belonged to a beauty, built on the ample lines of a show-girl chorus
he had once seen, justifiably advertised as the "Ten Titanic
Swede-hearts." He caught a glimpse of patrician nose, masterful chin, dark
hair on which rode a diadem with a glowing crescent in front.

            The being with the antennae
replied: "I said nowt after that,
'ic."

           
Barber
experienced the odd sensation of being informed by some sixth sense that the
individual was not quite sure of his own veracity. The tall lady had no such
doubts:

            "Ah, 'tis time for a
shaping, indeed," she cried, "when my husband makes messengers of
louts that lie barefaced! What is't, I asked, some new form of address in mock
compliment from my gentle lord? You said
Ic!"

           
Antennae shifted
his feet, opened his mouth and abruptly fell down. The others clustered around
him, twittering, babbling and pushing, a singular crowd.

            Some were as tall as Barber,
and some small, down to a foot in height, and their appearance was as various
as their size. Many, especially of the smaller ones, had wings growing out of
their backs; some were squat and broad, as though a gigantic hand had pushed
them groundward while they were in a semi-fluid state. An individual with a
beard and wall eyes that gave him an expression of perpetual surprise was
dressed like a Palmer Cox brownie; others wore elaborate clothes that might
have been thought up by King Richard II, and some had no more clothes than a
billiard ball.

            Pink elephants, thought
Barber, or am I going nuts? One half of his mind was rather surprised to find
the other considering the question with complete detachment.

            "What ails yon wight?"
demanded the regal lady, who had not condescended to join the crowd.

            The brownie looked around.
"A sleeps; plain insensible like a stockfish, and snoring." There was
a chatter o£ other voices: "An enchantment, for sure— Send for Dos Erigu
... The leprechauns again, they followed the king ... Nay, that's no prank,
'tis sheer black kobbold malice ..."

            "Peace!" The
contralto cut sharply across the other voices, and she extended her arm. Barber
saw that she held a slender rod about a foot long, with a point of light at its
tip. "If there's sorcery here we'll soon have it unsorcelled.
Azam-mancestu-monejalma—sto!" The point of light leaped from the tip of
the rod, and moved through the air with a sinuous, flowing motion. It lit on
the forehead of the antennaed one, where it spread across his features till
they seemed to glow from within. He grunted and turned over, a fatuous smile
spreading across his face, but did not wake. The tall lady let arm and rod
fall.