The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (14 page)
Read The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon Online
Authors: R. F. Delderfield
Tags: #School, #Antiques, #Fiction
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"I-I'm most fearfully sorry," said Mr. Sermon earnestly, "it came on very suddenly, I imagine, I don't even recall . . ."
"Oh, you don't want to apologise for it, Professor," said Bella gaily. "I mean to say, it comes over all of us now'n again, don't it? It's not as tho' you were a nuisance when we was hauling you up an' getting you undressed like some of 'em. Limp you was, right up to the time I come back with the head-lifter and propped you up to swallow it."
"What ... er ... what happened then?" asked Sebastian, nervously.
She threw back her head and laughed so that Mr. Sermon noticed her powerful throat muscles and the strength of her shoulders.
"Oh, I had to put up a bit of a fight for me honour you might say. Nothing reely but you kept catching me round the waist and trying to hoist me on to the bed. I couldn't help laughing, with you in that state! I dunno what you thought you could do if you got me there. We'd have both dropped off disappointed, I reckon."
She told him this without a blush but he blushed for the two of them. He was deeply ashamed, not so much because he had been guilty of such ungentlemanly behaviour but because it had been practised on someone who was taking considerable risks to help him.
"Where . . . where did you sleep, Bella?" he said humbly.
"Me? Oh, I was all right, I popped into Number 42 on the second floor and made up the bed again first light, so no one'll know, and in any case, the boss is away until after lunch. I'd have taken a chance on it mind you even if he'd been around. I know a gentleman when I see one!"
"I don't think I behaved very much like a gentleman," said Mr. Sermon sadly and felt extraordinarily deflated, vastly different, he reflected, from how he had felt when he began his wanderings the previous day at the abandoned siding in the country. What was the matter with him, and why was he behaving in this extraordinary fashion? Was this throwing off of fetters, this curiously powerful urge to begin again nothing more than sexual hunger, the final erotic flailings of a man approaching his second childhood. He shivered slightly and she noticed it at once.
"What's up? You cold?"
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"No, no, Bella, I'm not cold-just, well, just a little afraid, I suppose!"
"What of? No one don't know and you'll be out of here before anyone comes."
"Oh, it's not that, it's not getting drunk and spending the night here. I dare say I'll laugh at myself over that in due course, but..." He stopped. He could hardly express his real fears to a barmaid whom he had attempted to assault a few hours ago.
"It doesn't matter, Bella," and he began to sip his tea.
"Oh, but it does! You're upset about something. Any fool could see that. Me especially because I know men. Now listen to me. You don't need to be! You didn't worry me a bit, I wouldn't even have mentioned it if you hadn't pressed me. Besides, it wasn't you reely, it was the liquor. After all, that's what we drink it for, isn't it ? I mean, it lifts the lid off and lets your fancy roam around a bit. I'll tell you something else, too, it's a compliment to me in a way."
"Compliment?" he echoed, faintly.
"Yes!" She was slightly defiant now and her earnestness brought a pink flush to her slightly pendulous cheeks.
"You see, Professor, in the ordinary way, an educated bloke like you wouldn't look at a girl like me! I mean, if you wanted that you'd go looking for a real tart wouldn't you? But you didn't think that way, not even when you were full of beer. You just wanted . . . well, a bit of a cuddle, I reckon, someone to fall asleep on and feel safe, if you follow me, and if I hadn't been sure you'd have taken it the wrong way soon as you come round, I'd never have gone up to Number 42, I'd have stayed here all night. Matter o' fact I near as dammit did, so there! Here, what have I said now to make you worse?" and she took his half-empty cup from his hand, plumped herself down on the bed beside him and threw a vast arm along his shoulders.
He was weeping, not very obviously so for he fought against the flow of tears with all his strength and mastered it within seconds. He was weeping with a kind of humility and relief, humility at hearing this kind of admission from a plump, half-ignorant barmaid in a country pub where he supposed she had already spent most of
her adult life. He was weeping because his entire conception of what constituted knowledge and civilisation, and the kind of teaching in which he had been engaged for twenty-five years, looked bloodless and sterile in the glare of her honesty and simplicity. He supposed Sybil and her suburban set would hardly deign to notice a girl like this, someone who prefaced everything she said with the phrase "Well I mean ter say ..." and found it almost impossible to express the generosity and tolerance of her heart, yet somehow still managed to do it and reduce him to tears in the process. But as well as shame at his own watered-down philosophy he felt relief that he had stumbled through and beyond it to a place where he could at least begin re-learning about people, about what made them tick and about a world where people came out into the sun to laugh and enjoy themselves. Sitting there, with Bella's arm across his shoulder, he felt he had learned more in ten seconds than in all the years he had taught in school and crammed for examinations. He whipped out his handkerchief and blew his nose, letting the corner of the linen brush the moisture under his eye. Then he said:
"I think you're wonderful, Bella, quite wonderful! You don't know it and I'm at a loss how to tell you, but you've done me no end of good, no end, d'you hear me?" And then, briskly: "Do you think you could find me some hot water for a shave ? And after that could I buy some breakfast before I push on into Kingsbay?"
"Why, that's better," she said, smiling, "now you're talking! Put your jacket and tie on and come downstairs. You can shave in the Gents, there's hot water in there, and I'll fix breakfast in the dining-room because everyone'll think you're a late booker-in and early starter. You're not all stirred up with guilt no more, are you? No you aren't, you're all right again, I can see that!" and suddenly she took his face between her hands and kissed him on the lips and before Mr. Sermon could return the kiss she jumped up and skipped out of the room, shouting "Bring the tray!" over her shoulder.
Mr. Sermon put up his hand and touched his mouth almost as if the kiss had been a benediction and he wanted to trap it before it escaped. Then, slowly, he completed his dressing, picked up his knapsack and went out of the little room and down the backstairs where the smell of cooking was already circulating in the stairwell.
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At the very foot of the stairs he noticed a dog-eared calendar hanging on a disused gas-bracket and turning slowly in the draught. It was a Religious Tract publication, with the name of the month wreathed in scrolls of gold and surmounted by a text in cobalt blue. The text was the jist verse of the roth chapter of St. Mark and read: "But many that are first shall be last; and the last first." 'And very appropriate, too,' thought Mr. Sermon, 'if the Kingdom of God is a reality then I'd offer ten to one that Bella isn't even asked to produce credentials!'
CHAPTER THREE
Mr.
Sermon Crosses into Arcady
concerning
most things, Mr. Sermon was an exceptionally modest man but in at least one respect he was very vain. He was extremely proud of the general neatness of his mind which, ever since his youth, had operated like a filing cabinet maintained by an exceptionally diligent clerk. He could always find what he sought in it and that with the minimum of delay. He did not, like most of us, have to forage about in search of facts and figures, names, dates and arguments extracted from leading articles and statistics that were aimed at reducing blustering opponents to stuttering impotence but so seldom did. Everything he had read and learned was there in its proper place and most people gave him credit for a remarkable memory but this habit of ready-reference had very little to do with memory as memory is generally understood; it was more the result of a careful sorting process, deliberate and discretional. Mr. Sermon had once been impressed by a lecture delivered by a brain surgeon and had learned, in the course of the evening, that no one ever forgot anything but stored it away and lost the key. Mr. Sermon rarely lost the smallest key. Even his dreams were tabulated and filed away, and whenever he was free from emotional stress each fantasy could be taken out, contemplated and, if necessary, re-classified before being returned to its locker. But there was a
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'nele flaw in his system. One dream could never be pinned down, labelled and tucked away. Always it had eluded classification for the reason that it never took on solid shape like the others, never stayed with him long enough to be saddled and bitted but hovered just out of reach, a tantalisingly beautiful dream utterly unlike all its brothers and sisters and cousins, a dream in which time and location and atmosphere, particularly atmosphere, were inexplicably interwoven and therefore defied analysis. And because it was so ethereal and diaphanous, because he could never decide what it was or where it was, he thought of it as his Arcadian or Avalon dream and had long since abandoned attempts to bring it to heel.
It had about it an air of eternal summer. He knew that because its sounds were those of bees humming and the sough of the south wind in spruce and larch and silver birch. Its scent was that of wildflowers carried on the breeze, coming to him out of deep, cool woods and across leagues of still, sunlit water. There was absolutely nothing positive about it, like his sex fantasies or his heroic feats that excited the envy of the handsome and successful, for all these lesser fantasies were enacted within the web of the Arcadian dream. Thus, in a sense, it was not a fantasy at all, having no separate existence except as a kind of frame for all his other fantasies. Yet it was the frame that fascinated him, the setting where all these other triumphs were achieved, and deeply rooted in his imagination was the certainty that triumphs would evade him unless he found the right field of operations. It was towards this Arcady that he was consciously directing himself when he walked out into the night but only now was he on the edge of discovering this important fact because, under the spur of his adventures, all his creative impulses were beginning to flower. He could feel the sap rising in him with every breath he drew and as he walked up the bare coast road towards the town of Kingsbay after breakfasting at the Cat and Carthorse that morning, he was suddenly aware of an absolute certainty that he was now on the very threshold of Arcady, not merely a physical conception of the setting that had eluded him so long but a realisation of himself as the man he had always yearned to be, a human being with a purpose that was recognised by those about him. The certainty of ultimate fulfilment enlarged and revivified him
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to such an extent that his step seemed to lengthen with every stride and the scent of Spring rushed into his lungs with such force that it almost lifted him and ballooned him up the gentle slope to the dark brown horizon that sat on the crest of the moor.
He almost ran the last two hundred yards up the incline and when he topped it, and stood gasping at the crest where the road wound down between two plantations into Kingsbay and the sea, he uttered an involuntary shout for he knew then that his instincts had not betrayed him and that spread out below him, like a relief map of Europe they used in Geography classes at Napier Hall, was his personal Shangri-la, his Arcady, his Avalon, the place to which, like Arthur, he had come to be healed of his grievous wounds.
The white road plunged down from the wooded slopes and ran almost straight between two sandstone bluffs, one impressively high and bare of everything but gorse, the other, to the west, a more modest promontory shaped like a fat paw and clothed with pine-woods. In between, occupying a valley about a mile broad, was the wedge-shaped town set on the gentle slope, a town that did not seem to belong to Britain at all, but had drifted there from the Caribbean Sea, for its houses, or most of them, were a dazzling white and advanced on an ever-broadening front to meet and touch the sea. The houses were dotted about the valley with what struck Sebastian as a careless but pleasing symmetry, here huddled together, there interspersed with green patches of lawn and shrubs and sometimes a tall sycamore or a few Scots firs. The bay itself was a sheet of silver but further out to sea, two miles or more he would judge, were yellow sandbanks and here, where shallow water caught the light, it was a deep greenish blue, flecked with the white ruffles of wavelets breaking on the banks. There were boats about, a dozen or so, seemingly stationary between the breakwaters and at the extremity of the bay he could see one or two cars gliding along the promenade. Apart from this there seemed to be no movement in the town which lay dreaming and waiting as it soaked up the April sun.
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He stood there a long time drinking in the beauty of the scene and feeling like a man who, after incredible hazards, has crossed a continent and a formidable range of peaks, to view the sea. There was no doubt about it, this was it! This was Avalon, and hitching his rucksack he went on down the hill to the top of the wide High Street, glancing about him with a satisfaction that he could not have expressed in words but settled somewhere between throat and navel with a kind of pulsing glow.