Sheiks and Adders (2 page)

‘Would that ha’ been the new furriner?’ he asked.

‘Yes, indeed, Hoobin. A Professor McIlwraith. Another very learned man.’

‘Had he any call?’

‘Had he what?’

‘Any call to call. Furriners ha’ no business to make themselves known unbid.’

‘We mustn’t be too punctilious, Hoobin. And I have probably been at fault myself. Professor McIlwraith is known to be a widower, and no doubt I ought to have taken some initiative in the matter myself.’

‘It should be a long time afore we take account of furriners.’

‘Possibly so.’ Appleby found this xenophobe note depressing. ‘Where’ – he asked by way of changing the subject – ‘is Solo?’

‘The dratted boy’s asleep again.’

‘And I used to wonder,’ Appleby said darkly, ‘why this place is called Long Dream.’

The aged Hoobin, who perhaps made nothing of this remark, returned to his paper, and Appleby returned to the house still not in a very genial mood.

‘An accession to our neighbourhood, the learned McIlwraith,’ he said to his wife. ‘A most stimulating chap, and with a breadth of view fully equal to that of dear old Mrs Mince, or Admiral Havering, or even the Birch-Blackies themselves.’

‘I’m not sure there isn’t a little more to Professor McIlwraith than appears. If he’s not exactly a dark horse, at least he’s a piebald one. And in any case, John dear, don’t be supercilious.’

‘I’m sorry. Admirable people, all of them. And I’m not a bit bored, you know – not a bit.’

‘Why should you be? You have that knack. I believe “knack” must be of what is called echoic origin. Don’t you?’

‘Who’s mocking that erudite character now? But what knack are you talking about?’

‘The knack of being bumped into when meandering, of course. It keeps on happening. So don’t despair.’

Nothing of all this can have been lingering in Appleby’s mind a few days later as he drove home from a duty visit to an octogenarian female relative in Bath. Bath, thought of as a ‘distant kingdom’ by the Wessex rustics of Thomas Hardy, was quite a considerable distance from Long Dream too, and Appleby had in consequence started his return journey at an early hour in the afternoon. So he had arrived on familiar ground, and was in fact passing through the successive rural centres of King’s Yatter and Abbot’s Yatter, while still having abundant time in hand before dinner. Indeed, he had only to traverse the region known as Boxer’s Bottom, and thence ascend to the brow of Sleep’s Hill, to command with binoculars (if prompted to do such a thing) the ancient stone roof and obsolete brick chimney-stacks of his own dwelling.

Meanwhile, on his left hand lay the Forest of Drool. It couldn’t really be a forest, but it was certainly a very considerable tract of woodland territory. And it so happened that Appleby, although he had walked over most of this countryside at one time or another, had never penetrated this stretch of it. Now here it lay, dark and mysterious if one chose to think it so, but with numerous broad ridings and scattered glades expansed beneath a cloudless June sky. Here and there, moreover, some local authority, bowing before the spirit of the age, had put up sundry small signposts of a positively inviting sort. Most of these said ‘Footpath’, and a few – by way of variety – said ‘Bridleway’. Those saying ‘Footpath’ carried in addition a schematic representation of a couple of men walking, and those saying ‘Bridleway’ similarly displayed a single man leading a horse – a thoughtful provision, Appleby supposed, for pedestrians from the Emirates of the Middle East, or perhaps merely for that increasing proportion of the inhabitants of these islands to whom – as to Solo – it had not occurred to learn to read.

Miss Appleby of Bath had not been inspiriting; in this regard, indeed, she might be estimated as rating very much with dear old Mrs Mince of Long Dream. But Mrs Mince at least didn’t keep a parrot. With Miss Appleby’s parrot Appleby had been obliged to converse. And since the creature was held to be a tropical bird, requiring for its health a very warm temperature indeed, visiting Miss Appleby had been a decidedly stuffy and sticky experience. Appleby felt he needed fresh air – more of it, even, than was blowing through the open windows of the old Rover as he drove. He also felt that he wanted to stretch his legs. And it was thus that he presently found himself drawn up in a parking place and scrambling from the car.

Enter those enchanted woods, you who dare…
There was no reason to suppose the rather grandly named Forest of Drool to harbour much in the way of enchantment, nor did Appleby feel he had to dare anything as he negotiated a stile and plunged within its shades. He wasn’t even risking being taxed with trespass: behaviour which a retired policeman should particularly seek to avoid. There was a perfectly well-defined footpath before him, and above his head one of the little signposts made the point, as it were, over again – like a bath mat that says ‘bath mat’ in case you should mistake it for a drawing-room rug. Nevertheless Appleby did faintly feel that he was being adventurous, and the absurdity of this sensation actually occupied his mind for the first hundred yards or so of his stroll. As a small boy, he supposed, something had happened to him in a wood. He might have come upon some wild creature horrifyingly caught in a trap. A fox might have startled him. A nasty old man might have made faces at him. An equally nasty old woman might have begged the little gentleman to spare a copper, but at the same time have betrayed the fact that she was a witch. Or perhaps he had played exciting Robin Hood games with rather bigger boys, and been more scared of the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men than he had cared to admit. Very probably he had been told that, if captured, he would be hanged.

These were idle fancies. Yet it is true, Appleby told himself, that one can suddenly be aware of experiencing – although never for more than the briefest moment – a sharp recrudescence of sensation which one knows perfectly well to have attached to some specific occasion years ago. One tries to identify the occasion, but the elusive memory vanishes, leaving the mind a total blank. If Appleby was interested in this phenomenon it was perhaps because the practice of criminal investigation turns up something similar from time to time. A tiny signal arrives from the region of buried memory; catch it and hold it and you have solved your mystery. But too often it dissolves away again in the instant that you put out your hand. This, however, was past history so far as he was now concerned. Scotland Yard had become, for all practical purposes, as far removed from him as was the Taj Mahal. He was an elderly individual taking a late afternoon stroll amid sylvan scenes remote from any sort of mystification whatever. He was certainly meandering – the word came back to him from that pedantic old professor’s visit – but it had been absurd for Judith to say that, when so employed, he had the knack of persuading untoward situations to come bumping into him. His business now was to note with satisfaction the various appearances of external nature in evidence.

But what next caught his attention was the handiwork of man. It was a square board nailed to a tree, and lettered in a much bolder fashion than had been the signposts of his first observation. And whereas they had invited carefree pedestrianism in the Forest of Drool, this one was distinctly forbidding. It read simply:

ADDERS

KEEP OUT

Appleby received this injunction with displeasure. He was offended, in the first place, by the irrationality of being bidden to keep out of something he must already be near the middle of. It was of course possible that the present location of the notice was a product of the same species of juvenile rustic humour as frequently occasioned the turning of signposts the wrong way round. Or conceivably Appleby had arrived at a point, not otherwise demarcated, at which one landowner’s territory gave place to that of another more nervously disposed. Or the assertion might be quite untrue, like the ones saying ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’, but more effective than that hackneyed kind, all the same. An authentic proliferation of adders was surely improbable. However all this might be, the mandatory phraseology of the notice was objectionable. Appleby had lately visited a Cambridge college, and been edified by a placard saying, ‘It is earnestly desired by the Master and Fellows that perambulators be not perambulated on the grass’. He now saw no reason to be deterred from further perambulating himself in the Forest of Drool.

So he walked on in restored equanimity. There was much to observe. The beech trees had the curious form sometimes to be remarked of them, thrusting up out of the ground like a bunch of pencils or like so many fingers held tightly together as if in an act of prayer. Midsummer Day was only round the corner; primroses had given way to bluebells, and now the bluebells were yielding to campion and brier rose. There was a faint murmur in the air that spoke of a vigorous if invisible insect life, and the feathered songsters of the grove their various notes supplied. The wise thrush sang his song twice over; the woodland linnet – also no mean preacher – dispensed his unbookish wisdom as he flew; Appleby sat down for a few minutes on a tree trunk and was entertained alike by the various birds and their familiar poetic associations; then he glanced at his watch and decided he must return to the Rover. Still just ahead of him, however, the path took a turn round a hazel thicket and vanished. What happened round this bosky corner? The answer, almost certainly, was ‘Nothing at all’; the Forest of Drool simply went on as forests do. Nevertheless Appleby felt that he might as well walk on and see. There might be an interesting little vista down a long straight riding. He might even come upon a badger poking a misdoubting snout into sunlight. There was everything to be said for continuing to advance another hundred yards or so.

So Appleby penetrated a little further. What he came upon almost at once was something much less interesting than badgers. It was a Range Rover, halted on a broad green riding which here cut across his own path at right angles. Beside it stood a tall lean man in an attitude suggesting a momentary pause from labour. But not a labouring man in the accepted sense of the term, since something not readily definable about him proclaimed his adherence to the academic, or at least the investigating, class of society. He could very well have passed the time of day, Appleby thought, with the Applebys’ new neighbour, Professor McIlwraith. Appleby ventured to pass the time of day himself.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said – and as he did so observed that the owner of the Range Rover was holding in his hand a piece of apparatus not readily to be identified. It was a long light pole, equipped at one end with what seemed to be a trigger-like device operating along a slender metal rod. At the other end there dangled what seemed to be a small wire loop or noose. It wasn’t a fishing-rod, nor was it a butterfly-net, but it did belong to that order of contrivance. Appleby had distinguished so much when his glance went to the vehicle, which proved to bear a neatly-lettered inscription. This read:

Oxford University Institute of Advanced Herpetology

‘Dear me!’ he said. ‘May I ask, sir, if you are engaged in eradicating the adders?’

‘Ah, the adders! No doubt you have seen that absurd notice. Not that there are
no
adders. Indeed, I have seen several today, and hope to get hold of a few. But it cannot be said that I am positively engaged on a venation of vipers, sir. I am simply collecting grass snakes. And when I conclude my foray tomorrow I am confident I shall have about a hundred of them.’

‘But surely grass snakes are quite harmless?’

‘Oh, entirely so – although few will be persuaded of the fact. I am not, I fear, performing any kind of public service, but simply stocking up for certain large-scale experiments at our Institute. It is quite a new concern, you know.’

‘I am most interested to hear of it,’ Appleby said politely. ‘And its being of recent foundation must excuse my not having heard of it at Oxford before.’

‘Our fame is all to earn, my dear sir. And there were those who objected to the innovation on the score that at Oxford there are abundant snakes in the grass already.’

Appleby received this donnish witticism with appropriate subdued amusement, and lingered for a few moments in further talk. He rather hoped to be treated to a glimpse of this devoted scientist in action. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps the chap felt that, although engaged in the serious business of enlarging the frontiers of human knowledge, he must cut rather an absurd figure angling around on dry land for anything so elusive as the reptile creation. So Appleby wished him good hunting, and walked on.

There was a further inviting turn, and a further hazel thicket ahead. He was now moving, as it happened, quite silently, since underfoot was a thick mast such as, in a properly organized rural economy, would have been regaling a sizable herd of swine. The trees from which this neglected fruitage had fallen were a random lot. Beech, oak and chestnut stood shoulder to shoulder – nudging or jostling one another, indeed, in a spirit of robust competition. It wasn’t a scene suggesting that at any previous time the Forest of Drool had been the object of much arboricultural care. One had a feeling that in this small patch of England Nature, despite the intrusion of Advanced Herpetology, was still contriving in a more or less primaeval fashion.

Appleby rounded the further hazel thicket and at once came upon a changed spectacle. He was looking down into a large and deep basin or natural theatre, such as might have been punched into the yielding globe by some wandering celestial object which had then evaporated in flame long before life on earth began. And an effect of grand combustion, indeed, had for a moment the appearance of strangely lingering on the stage. This was because the glade – for it had to be called that – was ringed with elms in a manner which did perhaps suggest the hand of art, elms being more commonly hedgerow than woodland trees. But the point about these elms was that they were dead, every one. From a few of them tiny shoots were already springing from the bole, so that Nature was perhaps not going to be wholly defeated in the end. But at present the spectacle was as of the aftermath of a forest fire – or better, possibly, of some unfortunate nuclear episode in human history.