Land of Unreason (17 page)

            Or almost perfect. There was
the incident of the broken hoe. Both men were engaged in what Fawcett called
"cultivatin' " a field of potatoes, an operation that seemed
singularly pointless to Barber, as it consisted in no more than digging
vigorously with a hoe at the base of the young plants, piling the earth half an
inch deeper around the stalks. "Make's a neat field," was Fawcett's
only answer to Barber's protest that the few sprigs of grass rooted up in the
process could be of no importance to the potatoes, which grew underground in
any case. "Good farmers have neat fields."

            As he brought his hoe down
in a particularly vigorous sweep to emphasize some conversational point he was
making, the farmer struck a subsoil rock and the blade snapped off at the
shank. He clucked annoyance over the small disaster. "Guess I'shall have
to make another hoss trade with the mountain heathen," he remarked, when
he had replaced the instrument with another from the house. "Ain't got but
three hoes to the hull place. That's funny, too, now I call it to mind. They
ain't been 'round for a right smart spell; usually you can't keep 'em away,
specially when they know I'been makin' berry wine. They'd most trade their
eyeteeth out for berry wine."

            He trailed off into an
anecdote illustrative of the kobolds' appetite for berry wine, and next morning
after breakfast dug out a big blue-and-white flag on the end of a stick and
affixed it to the roof of the house, explaining that this was the signal he
wanted to trade with the kobolds. Barber wondered whether there would be any of
the gang he had encountered among the traders, but he might have spared himself
the worry. No kobolds came that day or the next. The second night Fawcett
exhibited a trace of concern across the supper table.

            "Dunno what's come over
'em; maybe they're waxed at me 'bout suthin'. They have mighty ungainly idears
about what's right, those mountain heathen, and when a man won't go 'long with
'em, they set in the seats of the scornful. But I should hate to lose their
trade; ain't been any hardware peddler through this way since I'come. A man
can't farm without tools."

            "I could go look them
up and find out what's wrong," offered Barber tentatively.

            "By George, that's
right! Them mountain heathen is choosy as all git out 'bout lettin' people into
their place, but I fergit you was a perfessional ambassador to increase
perfumes afar off in the sight of the Lord, like it says in fifty-seven Isaiah.
Tell you what, mister; I shall give you a jug of berry wine in the mornin' and
you mosey up there."

            Barber was already repenting
his overready suggestion, but there was no decent method of withdrawing, and
next day he set out across the little belt of upland rolling to the Kobold
Hills. As he went he became more than ever regretful over having let himself in
for this piece of foolishness. The day was already hot and the wine jug
burdensome; he could not but contrast his present toiling gate with the easy
lightfootedness of his previous journey. As a matter of fact, it was even
slower and more difficult than it should have been. Made thus, as a reversed
experience, the journey underlined something of which he had been
uncomfortably, but only vaguely, conscious for some time: that he felt
definitely less well than he had before.

            No, "felt" was the
wrong verb, he assured himself, realizing with the other, critical half of his brain
that the ceaseless flow of Fawcett's chatter had kept him from introspection
for weeks. And through it from localizing the trouble. He "felt" like
a prize bull pup, now that he came to examine the question; his sensations with
regard to the world about him were of extreme enjoyment. If he could have been
translated back to the Embassy he would have plunged into the compilation of
official reports with positive delight.

            In short, he felt swell. It
was the physical equipment which accompanied his feelings that seemed to be
showing deterioration. He had not realized it till undertaking this long hike,
but it was actually growing difficult for him to walk. His legs were stiff, and
was it mere hypochondriac imagination or had they acquired a tendency to bow?
No, he decided, pausing on the last rise but one to catch his breath and gaze
at the offending limbs, it was not hypochondria. The other manifestation was
real enough; his feet had spread, grossly and outrageously. The shoes made by
the royal tailor he had been forced to discard at the end of the first week at
Fawcett's. Now he was wearing a pair of the farmer's enormous boots, and even
these, which had begun by fitting him like bedroom slippers, were now pinching
him painfully.

            There was something wrong
with his eyes, too. When not consciously focused on something they had a
tendency to roll outward—not painful, but noticeable when he discovered that he
was seeing double. It must be some kind of allergy or vitamin deficiency, he
decided. Diet might be responsible; it included a plenitude of fresh
vegetables, but was lacking in the familiar dairy products and in any meat but
the venison which Fawcett secured by trading with the heathen. Acromegaly,
Barber presumed his ailment might be called, but the prescription for it he did
not know. At all events it appeared to have the compensating benefit of causing
those absurd shoulder-blade wings of his to stop growing. They had actually
shrunk an inch or two.

            ... He was at the entrance
of the caverns, the same, as near as he could judge, by which he had left. All
dark inside, and now that he noticed it, all silent, too; not a sound of forge
or hammer, in waltz time or any other. Very dark; he was reminded of a lecture
in his college physics class: "The only complete black in nature is a hole
in the ground." It seemed absurd to plunge into that well of night,
equally absurd to turn back without trying it. After a moment more of
irresolution, he gathered force and took the step, feeling along the wall with
one hand.

            The wall was slightly damp,
and the deeper he went the more he cursed himself for a fool—with no light or
Ariadne's clue to bring him out again. He started counting his steps, trying to
keep them even in length, which would be at least some help ... Twenty-two,
twenty-three, twenty-four—he paused, turned and looked back at the shield of
light. Still there ... A hundred and forty-nine, a hundred and fifty—he turned
again, saw the light spot smaller, and wished he had started counting at the
very mouth of the tunnel. Somewhere ahead there was a small sound—tap, tap,
tap, which, after a moment's agonized attention, he identified as the dripping
of water.

            A hundred yards more—and the
supporting wall at his right suddenly disappeared, so that he went sprawling.
Branch in the tunnel. It brought him face to face with the problem of carrying
on, through those blind, involuted galleries. No, certainly not worth it,
without lights and no sign of life. He compromised by standing at the angle for
a moment and shouting. There was no answer but the monotonous drip, drip, drip
of the subterranean water. After waiting a few more hopeless moments he turned
and groped his way back.

            When he reached the mouth of
the cavern, the morning's faint overcast had turned to cloud and persistent,
drizzling rain that felt delightful after the heat. Fawcett was nowhere visible
as Barber trudged across the rises toward the homestead. Neither was the horse,
Federalist, which probably meant that the farmer had ridden up the stream to
indulge in his favorite rainy-day sport of conducting a trade with the forest
natives.

            Barber went into the house
and upstairs to a room that was used relatively rarely. Fawcett had furnished
it with unusual elaboration, even to window curtains of his own manufacture and
in materials that had probably never been used for curtaining before. That
brocade, for example, might have come from the upholstery of the Escorial. It
was the sturdy Yank's one touch of sentiment, the one indication that he might
harbor the thought of a partnership in this wilderness. Barber had found him
curiously reticent on the point except when the farmer delivered one of his
occasional tirades on the habits of the heathen.

            "Them women
_v
now," he would say, waving his mug of wine. "Some of 'em are purty as
a pitcher; look like good workers, too. But they skrawk round like chick
turkeys with the pip till a man could chaw the wall. They have a superstition;
you say suthin' to 'em, and accordin' to their rules, they's only two-three replies
they can make. Blessed if I want a woman that has a law of the Medes and
Persians to make her say 'Good mornin' every time I say 'Howdedo.'"

            ... Barber jumped to his
feet, with a sudden horror embracing him. When he had come into that room and seated
himself in the homemade rocking chair, there had certainly been a pair of flies
cruising about the ceiling. The door was closed, and the windows, but the flies
were no longer there—

            And Barber could remember
distinctly that, while he had been meditating on Fawcett's sentimental spot, he
had once—twice—shot a hand out, with the ease of reflex action, and put it to
his mouth.

            The fear that he was going
insane leaped on him again, enforced and redoubled. What else could make him do
a thing like that? Perhaps it was even a part of the delusion that his legs
were bowing and his hips seemed to have acquired a sudden "middle-aged
squat"; perhaps—whoa, that wasn't it, either. There was no reasonable
doubt about the changed size of his feet; Fawcett himself had remarked on it
when lending him the boots. Something had just gone wrong, badly wrong with his
whole physical make-up.

            He began to pace the floor
in agitation, hunting for the answer, then paused with a flash of recollection.
It was his own fault. He had allowed himself to sink into the contentment of
this farm. But it was not the discovery of the good life, it was old-fashioned
shirking. The venture into the Kobold Caverns had been only half his task.
However completely he had brought to an end their swordmaking—through no great
address of his own—there remained the second duty of returning Titania's wand.
He had tried to forget it by escaping into Fawcett's clocklike existence, but
the responsibility remained. Whatever had gone wrong with him would probably,
nay, certainly, grow worse till he finished his job. In fact, it might continue
until he found his way back to England and sanity along the same route he had
traveled to reach this place. It was the "misadventured piteous
overthrow" the Queen had promised.

            And how was he to finish
that job? How find his way back through the caverns, across the desert and to
the Plum who had taken that confounded stick? Damn it! He kicked at air in
irritation over the unfairness of everything. Why did all these Fairyland
people have to be so vague? Fawcett was the only one in the lot capable of a
definite statement, and now Barber was being forced to leave him behind.

            For that was what it
amounted to. Wherever that needlelike wand was in this immense vague haystack
of a country, whatever handicaps his splay-footed, bow-legged, wall-eyed
condition imposed upon Barber, it was clear he would have to get away from that
farm and go searching. The excuses he could make to himself were unlikely to be
convincing to this case of galloping jimjams from which he was suffering.

            A sound outside made him
step to the window. Fawcett was riding into the yard, with rain dripping from
his own hat and the horse's mane, an expression of pleasure on his sideburned
face. The trading expedition had evidently been a success; across his saddlebow
was a large and bulging bag, incongruously made of cloth of gold, with the
handle of something sticking out of it. It occurred to Barber that the last
thing in the world he wanted was to explain his plight to that cold-eyed and
skeptical New Englander. He took three quick steps across the room, flung open
the door, and dashed into his own room. The sword he had brought was there; he
snatched it up, went down the stairs three at a time, and gazed from the
kitchen window. Fawcett had just dismounted, and was leading Federalist into
the sod-house barn.

            Barber stepped quickly to
the door of the kitchen-living room and out, slipped round the house to put it
between him and the farmer, and started off. He looked back now and then,
changing direction slightly to keep the bulk of the buildings between him and
the house, and so angling away from the Kobold Hills. The rain felt good on his
face.

            Not till he was passing
among the first sentinels of a line of trees did he remember the Kobold caves
again and the fact that he was leaving Fawcett in quite genuine trouble, with
his supply of iron tools cut off. However, there was nothing that he, Barber,
could do about it in his present condition and with more urgent business on
hand. If he found the wand and returned to Oberon with it, perhaps that monarch
would do something for the farmer. Perhaps he would be able to send Barber back
where he belonged.