The Heather-Moon Part 24

"Record impressions," Mrs. James helped me out.

Smiling, Basil took from a breast-pocket a small green morocco volume with a pencil slipped into a loop. Compared to Mrs. West's pretty book, his was a shabby thing; but it smelt of good cigarettes.

"I'm afraid this will disillusion you," he said, "if you expect something interesting. I simply make notes of things I want to see, or jot down thoughts to recall pictures to my mind. Reading over one's notebook is like glancing over a lot of kodak films. Sometimes one sticks in a lot of nonsense."

I opened the little volume, and ran my eyes down the short pages.

"Carlisle, Sat.u.r.day, August Something or Other. Notes for Scotch Tour,"

I read aloud. "Story of honeymoon. English hero--American girl. Aline wants her Canadian. I see her American. Dispute. Must decide soon.

Reading up Galloway makes me want to go there. Aline says rush straight on to Ayr, and save time. Hate saving time! Worst economy. More time you spend, more you have. Must go along coast of Ayr, anyhow. Once lined with strongholds of great families. See Dunure, Crossaguel, and deuced lot of others.

"Keats visited Burns's birthplace. Wrote sonnet there. Look this up.

"Burns sought out, along banks of Ayr, places where Wallace was supposed to have hidden. Good stuff this. Wallace fought all over the place here.

At Irvine, one of his earliest exploits. Kindled big fire, neighbouring village. When English soldiers marched forth to put fire out, jumped on them and killed the lot. Stuffed bodies into dungeon of castle at Irvine. Called 'Wallace Larder' after that. Nasty larders people had in those days. Read up account Douglas Larder. Compare the two. See which worse. Why not call Barns of Ayr Wallace Oven? Read up Blind Harry for picturesque story Barns of Ayr. Far as I remember, English enticed all neighbouring Scots to powwow of some sort. Wallace expected; delay on way. Scots executed on some pretext. When Wallace turned up, niece warned him. He routed up few followers, set fire to barns and burnt English, who were celebrating triumph over Wallace and his men. When get to Ayr look this up further.... Word 'Whig' comes first from Ayr. Wonder why? Look up. Also get Burns glossary. Dialect difficult. Aline won't read Burns. Fear she's going to fail in this book. Thinks only of one thing. But no matter. Courage, mon brave!

"Sunday. Had batch bad notices of last book from America. Aline gone to bed with headache as usual after bad reviews. Says we must economize.

She'll forget when we start and want best suites of rooms with baths everywhere. I _know_ that book was good. Hang notices! Understand so well what Job meant when said, 'Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!'

He wanted to criticise it. Each new boil would suggest scathing epithet.

"Monday. Everything changed. Old plot exploded in thousand pieces.

Mustn't be honeymoon couple. Heroine radiant young girl, eighteen, hair red as Circe's, eyes of new-born angel, comes like bombsh.e.l.l into hero's life. Not good simile, bombsh.e.l.l. Query, hero. Would she fall in love with man of B. N.'s type? I see another type more probable, but don't want that.

"August 4th. Fearful row. General upset. Don't see any book unless I write it alone. Aline says I can save situation for her. Would like only too well do what she wants, but difficult bring it off as things are.

Chances in favour of other man. Temptation consent be cat's-paw. Is that fair to the lovely chestnut in the fire? Extra-ordinary that child like this can so upset us all. What is the electric attraction we can't resist? More than normal amount of radium, perhaps!"

"Well, why don't you laugh at the rattle of the dry bones?" asked Basil, as I read on, more and more puzzled.

"I haven't come to many funny things yet," said I, "except about Job.

That was rather good, though I don't see how you weave such things into your books."

"Job--Job?" he repeated vaguely. Then a rush of blood went over his whole face, up to his forehead. His dreamy dark eyes looked suddenly anything but dreamy. "Good Heavens!" he gasped. "What have you got there?" and began to ransack all the pockets of his waistcoat and coat until he found the twin of the book he'd given me. "This is what I meant you to see," he said in a queer, ashamed voice.

I handed the first book back to him. He seized it and glanced from page to page, looking almost ill. By and by he came to something which seemed to scare him. As far as I could tell, it was farther toward the end than I had read.

"Would you mind showing me where you left off," he asked.

"It was where you were wondering whether your new heroine had swallowed radium or something," said I.

"Oh!" He looked relieved. "Well--I wouldn't have had you see that idiotic stuff for a good deal. But I told you, didn't I, that if the book went on I'd have to put you into it? There's a lot of silly rot there. Poetical license!"

"The thing that made the most impression on me was the part about the red hair," I said. "The description sounded so nice. Who was Circe, please? Was she Scottish? It's a name a Pictish princess might have had."

"The first Circe lived even before the Pictish princesses," Basil answered, quieting down, though he was still very flushed. "But she's had a good many descendants--one or two at least in each generation of women born in every country. Not that you--I mean the new heroine--will be one of them really."

"What did Circe do?" I hurried on.

"Do? She was an exceptionally attractive woman. She had a special kind of magnetism that n.o.body could resist. She amused herself by turning all the men she knew--there were quite a lot of them--into animals of different sorts."

"I think it would have been cleverer and more attractive of her if she had turned animals into men," said I.

"That's what _my_ heroine can do," Basil explained. "She's a kind of miniature baby Circe, for her red hair and general get up, and her curious power of upsetting people and their plans from the first minute they see her. But--my heroine wouldn't and couldn't turn her victims into beasts. She makes them want to transform themselves into something very extra special in the way of manliness."

"Why do you call her _your_ heroine with an emphasis?" I wanted to know.

"Isn't she your sister's heroine, too?"

"No. My sister doesn't see her as a heroine for a novel. And that's why I say the book we started out to write won't materialize. No author can write a story he or she doesn't take a strong interest in."

"That's where my writing is easier," I said. "I just put down all the things exactly as they happen, and as I see and think about them. So there's no heroine--and no hero--and no story."

"Yes, that is simpler," he agreed. "That's the way the Great Author writes His book. Only all His characters are heroes and heroines in the stories of their own lives."

As we talked, the moon went down in the west. The sky was a pale lilac, like a great concave mirror reflecting the heather. Then it darkened to a deeper purple, and made my thoughts feel like pansies, as they blossomed in my mind. We fell into silence. But Mrs. James said afterward that was because we were hungry and didn't realize what was the matter with us. Perhaps she was right, but it didn't seem so prosaic at the time.

As the car brought us near the town of Ayr (which, with its lights coming out, reddened the purple mirror) it was too dark to see details clearly. But, driving slowly, we were aware of a thing that loomed out of the quiet landscape and seemed strangely foreign to it, as if we were motoring in Greece or Italy, not Scotland. It was a great cla.s.sic temple, rising on the banks of a stream that laughed and called to us through the twilight.

"Can it be somebody's tomb?" I asked. But there was no cemetery, only a garden, and close by a camel-backed bridge that crossed the surging river.

"It must be the Burns monument," said Basil. "I've never been here, but I've studied up the place and looked at maps till I can see them with my eyes shut. This is the right place for the monument, with a museum, and some garden statues of Tam o'Shanter and Souter Johnnie, which we'll have to visit by daylight to-morrow. I hope you're going to invite me to sight-see with you?"

"It's not for me to invite any one."

"Look as if you want to, and it's done."

"Oh, I'll do that!" I promised.

VIII

We stopped at a big railway-hotel when we came into Ayr. Basil and Mrs.

West took rooms there too, because it was the best in town, and Mrs.

West always wants the very best--except when she's depressed by bad notices of her books!

It was late, and she was so faint with hunger that she begged us not to dress, but to go to dinner in ten minutes. We agreed; but when we'd hurriedly washed our hands and faces and a.s.sembled at the rendezvous, there was no Mrs. West. Basil was the only one who didn't look surprised. Ten more minutes pa.s.sed, perhaps, giving us time to think how hungry we were too, and then the lady appeared. She hadn't exactly dressed, but she had done something to herself which made her look fresh and lovely and elaborate, in contrast to Mrs. James and me.

"Dear people!" she exclaimed, "I'm so sorry if I've kept you waiting, but I simply couldn't find a _thing_; and the more haste, the less speed, you know. Mr. Somerled, you've been here before in your pre-American days. Do, like an angel-man, show me the way to the dining-room. I can never get used to going in late, with a lot of people staring. Basil will take care of Barrie and Mrs. James."

I felt as if I should go mad and bite something if she were to cultivate the habit of calling me "Barrie"; but as I'd invited both her brother and Sir S. to do so, and Mrs. James had never called me anything else, I couldn't very well make Mrs. West the one exception.

A good many of the hotel guests had finished dinner by that time, but twenty or thirty were still at their tables in the big dining-room, which seemed to me absolutely palatial after my "gla.s.s retort."

Evidently we were well in the thick of "tourist zone" again, judging by the look of the people, for most of them had the air of having travelled half round the world in powerful and luxurious motor-cars. You could see they weren't "local"--with four exceptions, our nearest neighbours. I thought they were pets; but Mrs. West stared in that pale-eyed way I noticed women have when they wish to express superiority or contempt.

All four of the pets were old--two very old, two elderly. The first pair wore bonnets which they must have had for years, things that perched irrelevantly on the tops of their heads, and looked entirely extraneous.

The second two had something more or less of the hat tribe, and Sir S.

said this was because their elders considered them girls, and granted them the right to be frivolous in order to attract the opposite s.e.x.

Mrs. West was sure that such headgear couldn't be got for love or money except in small remote Scottish towns. "Might come from Thrums," said Sir S. I'd never heard of Thrums, and Basil explained that it was a famous place in a novel, written by a man of my name, Barrie. "The real place is Kerrimuir," he went on, and promised to give me the book.