The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays (22 page)

ARTHUR
: Yes. Does he look all right to you?

BERNARD
: He’s got a beard. The Minister won’t like that.

ARTHUR
(
nods
): No, then.
(
ARTHUR
closes the file decisively
.)

BERNARD
: He asked me for my views about French, you know.

ARTHUR
: French?

BERNARD
: Poor French. Out of touch. Do you know what he said to me about French?

ARTHUR
: Who—the Minister?

BERNARD
: Know what he said?

ARTHUR
: What?

BERNARD
(
shouts
): Do you know what he said about French?
(
Normal voice
.) Called him a booby.

ARTHUR
(
gives up
): Really.
(
Considerable pause
.)

BERNARD
: I was in Belgium, having a look round the village church of Etienne St.-Juste, when I had the good fortune to receive a slight injury. The morning after my return to London, I remember, was one of those rare February days
when winter seems to make an envious and premature clutch at the spring to come. I breakfasted by the window. The panes of glass in the window suddenly pulsed (
makes the sound
)—woomph-woomph—as though alive to the shock-waves of distant guns. I started to sob. But it was only a motor coming up the road. It stopped. The doorbell jangled below stairs, and then there was a knock at the morning room. Lloyd George was shown in. My father had already left for the City, as he liked to put it. He owned an emporium of Persian and oriental carpets in Cheapside, which was indeed in the City, and that is where he had gone. So there I was, a young lieutenant, barely blooded, talking to the Prime Minister of the day, and receiving ribald compliments on the shell splinter lodged in my lower abdomen. The shell itself had made a rather greater impact on the church of Etienne St.-Juste. I explained my father’s absence, but Lloyd George was in no hurry to leave. It was then that he made his remark about French. ‘What do they say in the field?’ he asked me. ‘Were they glad to see him go?’ I replied tactfully that we all felt every confidence in Field-Marshal Haig. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Haig’s the man to finish this war. French was a booby.’ That is what he said. (
Pause
.) Presently, Big Ben was heard to strike ten o’clock. Lloyd George at once asked me whether it was possible to see Big Ben from the upstairs window. I said that it was not. ‘Surely you’re wrong,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely certain?’ ‘Absolutely certain, Prime Minister.’ He replied that he found it difficult to believe and would like to see for himself. I assured him that there was no need. The fact was, my mother was upstairs in bed making out her dinner table: she had the understandable, though to me unwelcome, desire to show me off during my leave. Lloyd George pressed the point, and finally said, ‘I will bet you that I can see Big Ben from Marjorie’s window.’ ‘Very well,’ I said, and we went upstairs. I explained to my mother that the Prime Minister and I had a bet on. She received us gaily, just as though she were in her drawing room, Lloyd George went to the window and pointed.
‘Bernard,’ he said, ‘I see from Big Ben that it is four minutes past the hour. The £5 which you have lost,’ he continued, ‘I will spend on vast quantities of flowers for your mother by way of excusing this intrusion. It is small price to pay,’ he said, ‘for the lesson that you must never pit any of the five Anglo-Saxon senses against the Celtic sixth sense.’ ‘Prime Minister,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid Welsh intuition is no match for English cunning. Big Ben is the name of the bell, not the clock.’ He paid up at once …
    … and that was a fiver which I can tell you I have never spent. (
He shows the note to
ARTHUR.)
How they laughed. ‘Marjorie,’ he said, ‘that boy of yours does not miss a trick.’ I left then, to take a cab to Dr. Slocombe in Pall Mall. When I returned I saw Lloyd George alone for the last time. He was coming down the steps. Nervousness caused me to commit the social solecism of trying to return him his money, ‘Keep it,’ he said, ‘I never spent a better £5.’ He got into the back of the motor and waved cheerily and called, ‘You will go far in the Army.’ Well, he was wrong about that. And he was not entirely right about Haig either. It was the Americans who saved
him
.

ARTHUR
: This applicant is American.
(
Pause
.)

BERNARD
: An
American
with a beard? Oh dear … of course, in those days it was the other way round. It was difficult to get British nationality
without
a beard. A well bearded and moustachioed man stood an excellent chance with the Home Secretary. A man with a moustache but no beard was often given the benefit of the doubt. A man with a beard and
no
moustache, on the other hand, was considered unreliable and probably fraudulent, and usually had to remain American for the rest of his life. Does he have property?
(
From here on
ARTHUR
refers to the file
.)

ARTHUR
: He is associated with a stable in Kentish Town.

BERNARD
: Epsom Downs?

ARTHUR
: No—Kentish Town.

BERNARD
: A racing stable?

ARTHUR:
It seems to be more of a farm really. …
(
Considerable pause
.)

BERNARD:
Did you say he farms in Kentish Town?

ARTHUR
: Yes.

BERNARD:
Arable or pasture?

ARTHUR:
It does seem odd doesn’t it?

BERNARD:
I imagine that good farming land would be at a premium in North London. Is he prosperous?

ARTHUR:
He has an income of £10.50 per week.

BERNARD:
Hardly a pillar of the community, even with free milk and eggs.

ARTHUR
: No.

BERNARD:
He is either a very poor farmer indeed, or a farmer of genius—depending on which part of Kentish Town he farms.

ARTHUR:
He’s not exactly a farmer I don’t think … he has other interests. Publishing. And he runs some sort of bus service.

BERNARD:
Publishing and buses? And a farm. Bit of a gadfly is he?

ARTHUR:
Yes. And community work.

BERNARD:
They all say that.

ARTHUR:
Yes.

BERNARD:
Anything else?

ARTHUR:
There’s a theatrical side to him.

BERNARD:
Do you mean he waves his arms around?

ARTHUR:
No—no—he writes plays, and puts them on and so on.

He seems to have some kind of theatre.

BERNARD:
Oh dear, yes. A theatrical farmer with buses on the side, doing publishing and community work in a beard … are we supposed to tell the Minister that he’s just the sort of chap this country needs? Does he say why he wants to be British?

ARTHUR:
Yes, because he’s American.

BERNARD:
Well he’s got a point there.
Do you know America at all?

ARTHUR:
Do I know America!

BERNARD:
Americans are a very modern people, of course. They
are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don’t stand on ceremony. They take people as they are. They make no distinction about a man’s background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence of scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly goodhumoured, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I’ve got nothing against them.

ARTHUR
: My America!—my new-found-land! (
He takes surprising flight
.) Picture the scene as our great ship, with the blue riband of the Greyhound of the Deep fluttering from her mizzen, rounds the tolling bell of the Jersey buoy and with fifty thousand tons of steel plate smashes through the waters of Long Island Sound. Ahead of us is the golden span of the Brooklyn Bay Bridge, and on the starboard quarter the Statue of Liberty herself. Was it just poetic fancy which made us seem to see a glow shining from that torch held a thousand feet above our heads?—and to hear the words of the monumental goddess come softly across the water: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore …’? The lower decks are crowded with immigrants from every ghetto in the Continent of Europe, a multitude of tongues silenced now in the common language of joyful tears.
(
By now
BERNARD
has fallen asleep
.)
The men wave their straw hats. Shawled women hold up their babies, the newest Americans of all, destined, some of them, to become the captains and the kings of industrial empires, to invent the modern age in ramshackle workshops, to put a chicken into every pot, an automobile by every stoop, to organize crime as never before, and to fill the sky over Hollywood with a thousand stars! Nor is the promenade deck indifferent to the sight. Many a good hand is abandoned on the bridge tables, many a diamanté purse
forgotten on the zebra-skin divans, as glasses are raised at the salon windows. New York! New York! It’s a wonderful town! Already we can see the granite cliffs and towers of Manhattan, and Staten Island too, ablaze like jewels as a million windows give back the setting sun, and soon we have set foot on the New World.
    The waterfront is seething with life. Here and there milling gangs of longshoremen scramble on the ground for the traditional dockets to work the piers, and occasionally two of them would give savage battle with their loading hooks. At the intersection of Wall Street with the Bowery the famous panhandlers, the wretched refuse of cheap barrooms, huddle in doorways wrapped in copies of the
Journal
. Behind us a body plummets to the ground—a famous millionaire, we later discover, now lying broken and hideously smashed among the miniscule fragments of his gold watch and the settling flurry of paper bonds bearing the promises of the Yonkers Silver Mining and Friendly Society. The air is alive with bells and sirens.
    But now a new sound!—ghostly trumpets and trombones caught in the swirling eddies of the concrete canyons!—and a few more steps bring us to Broadway. Every way we turn excited crowds are thronging the electric marquees. Sailors on shore-leave are doing buck-and-wing dances in and out of the traffic, at times upon the very roofs of the yellow taxis bringing John Q. Public and his girl to see the sights of Baghdad-on-the-Subway. In threes and fours, sometimes in lines a hundred wide, the midshipmen strut and swing up the Great White Way chorusing the latest melodies to the friendly New Yorkers, to the dour Irish policeman swinging his night-stick on the corner, to the haughty hand-on-hip ladies of the night who have seen it all before. But it’s time to tip our hats and turn aside, for the tall columned shadow of Grand Central Station falls across our path. We are booked on the Silver Chief.
    Begging the pardon of a cheerful Redcap we are directed with a flashing smile to the Chattanooga train. Night is falling as we cross the Hudson. Friendships are struck,
hipflasks are passed around, and cigar-smoke collects around the poker schools. A cheerful Redcap with a flashing smile fetches ice. The Silver Chief surges through the night. When we retire behind the curtain of our comfortable berths the roaring blackness outside the windows is complete, save for the occasional pillar of fire belching from the mines and mills of Pennsylvania.
    And it is to fire that we awake; woods blazing in tangerine shades of burnt umber and old gold—the Fall has come to New England. The train drives relentlessly on, dividing whiteframe villages from their churches, and children from their hoops. And the woods give way to suburbs, and the suburbs to stockyards and slaughter houses, and the wind is slamming off the Great Lake as we pull round the Loop into Chicago—Chicago!—it’s a wonderful town! Tightlipped men in tight-buttoned overcoats and grey fedoras join the poker games. C-notes and G-notes raise the stakes. Shirt-sleeved newspapermen of the old school throw in their cards in disgust and spit tobacco juice upon the well-shined shoes of anyone reading a New York paper. A cheerful shoeshine boy with a flashing smile catches nickels and dimes as he crouches about his business. (
He crosses his legs, revealing Stars and Stripes socks
.) The air is scented with coffee and ham and eggs.
    And the countryside is changing too as we swing south. Blue skies and grass are as one on the azure horizon of Kentucky. Soon thoroughbred stallions race the train on either side. Young girls in gingham dresses wave from whitewood fences. But again untamed nature overcomes the pastures—we climb through mountain ash and hickory into the Tennessee Hills. Tumbledown wooden shacks and rusty jalopies give no hint of life but the eye learns to pick out hillbilly groups sullenly looking up from their liquor jugs and washboards.
    We doze and wake in thundery oppressive heat. Thick groves of oak and magnolia darken the windows of the speeding train—and encroach, too, upon the fly-blown shutters of white-porticoed mansions which stand decaying
sill-high in jungle grasses that once were lawns. Atlanta is burning. A phlegmatic Redcap serves fried chicken and bottles of cherry soda. The poker players have departed. Big-bellied red-eyed men in white crumpled suits swig from medicine bottles of two-year-old sour mash bourbon.
Enormous women in taffeta dresses stir the air with panhandled fans advertising Dr. Pepper Cordials. The train bursts Alabama-bound into the blinding flatlands where cotton is king and a man and mule dominate a thousand acres of unfenced fields like a heroic sculpture. The sun hangs over them like a threat. Our wheels break into clattering echo as the iron girders of the Mississippi Bridge slash across the windows, sending shock-waves to make the glass pulse woomph-woomph around us. Far below, a boy on a raft looks up wistfully at the mournful howl of the Silver Chief, but that old green river rolls them along toward the bend where chanting Negroes heave on the rudder-poles of barges bringing pig-iron from Memphis and hogsheads from St. Louis—and where the last of the river boats working out of Natchez rides the oily waters like a painted castle way down yonder to New Orleans.
    The train slows, crawling through the French quarter of the City on the Delta. The sun hangs like a copper pan over boarding houses with elaborately scrolled gingerbread eaves. In the red-lit shadow of wrought-iron balconies octaroon Loreleis sing their siren songs to shore-leave sailors, and sharp-suited pimps push open saloon doors, spilling light and ragtime to underscore the street cries of old men selling shrimp gumbo down on the levee. A dignified Redcap hums an eight-bar blues—how long, how long, has that evening train been gone?—At the back of the car a one-armed white man takes a battered cornet from inside his shirt and picks up the tune with pure and plangent notes. Soon the whole car—Bible salesmen, buck privates from Fort Dixie, majorettes from L.S.U., farm boys and a couple of nuns—is singing the blues in the night. (
He lights a cigarette—American brand
.) The sun drops into the smoke stacks of Galveston like a dirty dinner plate behind a sofa. The train
   picks up speed. When we retire behind the curtains of our comfortable berths the roaring blackness outside the windows is complete save for the occasional pillar of fire flaring up from oil wells under the cooling scrub.