The Disappearing Dwarf (23 page)

Jonathan gestured toward the snoring Quimby. ‘He’ll never make it another twenty-five miles. It’ll take us a week unless we can hitch a ride somehow.’

‘We already have,’ Bufo said. ‘There’s a mail wagon going down tomorrow morning. We talked to the driver. Squared it with him. Plenty of room, he said. We gave him a couple of coins to cement the deal.’

‘I’ll do the same,’ Jonathan said. ‘If he can’t take all of us, I’ll put Quimby aboard and walk down myself.’

‘What if we saved our poems for tomorrow?’ Gump asked abruptly in a tone that seemed to suggest that Jonathan would be disappointed. ‘I’m too tired to get into the spirit.’

Jonathan swallowed the last of his ale. ‘The spirit, I suppose, is important?’

‘Vital,’ Bufo confirmed.

‘I’m too fagged out,’ Gump said. ‘We haven’t had four hours sleep in two days.’

‘Of course,’ said Jonathan. ‘We’ve got a long ride ahead tomorrow. Plenty of time for poetry.’

And with that they woke Quimby and the lot of them turned in.

There wasn’t any problem the next morning about getting down to Landsend. The mail cart was a long covered wagon, large enough for eight or ten people, or, as the case may be, for any number of big sacks of mail. But there wasn’t actually much mail at all. Only one lonely sack and a half dozen boxes were traveling along with them, so the driver was happy to take on more passengers. As it turned out, the wagon didn’t get away until almost ten in the morning. It would put them into Landsend rather later in the day than Jonathan had hoped, but that gave the four of them time to do a bit of shopping in town. Quimby bought a new suit and shoes, which he complained about as being cut-rate. But they were better, he admitted, than his cut-up suit and shoes, which he finally gave to the woman who owned the inn. Before the wagon left, she’d dressed her scarecrow in them.

The rest of them bought a few things too – a change of clothes and such, and Jonathan bought a jacket and a knapsack. They packed a lunch just in case they got hungry along the way, and then, sharply at ten o’clock, rattled off down the road. Although the wagon was covered, the back was open, and now and again they could see little bits of the Tweet River running broad and green beyond occasional hills.

At noon they broke into their food, shoving bits of meat, cheese, and bread up to the driver who, since he was dieting, had brought along nothing but a brown rice salad and a tin of Power’s Unleavened Snap Crackers. When Bufo offered him a share of their ham and cheese, he pitched the salad into a ditch, which, Bufo happily pointed out, is generally the most sensible way to treat salads.

‘So what inspired you to set in writing poetry again?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Oh,’ Gump replied, ‘we never gave it up. We can’t. It’s in our blood.’

‘Like an infection,’ Bufo said.

Gump agreed with him. ‘That’s right. And some things set it off: changes of seasons, for instance, or weather. Poetry is the sort of thing that just comes sailing in.’

‘Kind of like a bat that gets tangled up in your hair,’ Bufo put in.

‘Or a ‘possum,’ Gump observed, scratching his head, ‘that sneaks in at night and ravages your shoes.’

Bufo nodded. ‘That’s it exactly. As you can see, metaphors like that fly out like popping corn. A poet can’t help himself. He’s a slave to it.’

Jonathan said he understood. Quimby declared he knew a fellow once who was a poet: he wrote inspirational pieces for the local newspaper. Very heartfelt. Bufo didn’t look as if he cared much for inspirational pieces.

‘What sort of inspirational pieces?’ asked Gump, who, like Bufo, had a natural distrust of all other poets. ‘Do you recall any?’

Quimby thought it over. ‘Something about pressing on in hard times. You know, the stiff lip and straight back sort of thing. Bearing up. Doing one’s duty. Very stirring, really. Touched home.’

‘I should say,’ said Bufo. ‘Sounds like a laugh a minute. But that’s not what
we
write. Not by a long nose. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you; this poet of yours was likely quite a gem, in his way. I’ll look for his book when I get back home.’ He winked at Gump to alert him to how clever this final comment had been.

‘So anyway, you’ve run up some good ones, eh?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Some smashers.’

Bufo agreed. ‘It was the explosions that did it. We were sure you and the Professor and Miles were – well, you know … That you hadn’t made it. Moroseness is what it was that got things going.’

‘Morosity,’ Gump said.

‘Pardon me?’

‘Morosity, I believe it is,’ Gump repeated. ‘Not moroseness.’

‘You’re thinking of porosity,’ Bufo said. ‘Like your head.’

Gump gave him a look. But by then he was charged up with his poetry, so he let the matter drop. Quimby said that Bufo was probably correct anyway, and that his poet friend had spelled it ‘morosion’ once, which seemed quite suitable under the circumstances since it rhymed, to a degree, with ‘erosion’, which was what was happening to this fellow’s soul in the poem. Gump and Bufo looked for a moment as if it were happening to their souls too, but then Gump pulled out his sheaf of papers and cleared his throat.

‘Poor Squire Lost,’ he read in a voice of woe, and he set in on a long poem about the Squire’s tragic wanderings in faraway Balumnia. The whole thing took about half an hour and seemed to confuse poor Quimby no end – he, of course, having no idea that Balumnia was a faraway magical land. He seemed to think, however, that poems were by their very nature obscure, and that it was the inexplicable bits that were the best parts. Jonathan sometimes felt the same way himself. The poem ended up something like this:

Gump finished and sat very still. It had been a sad poem, even for Quimby – who, by the end of it, had tears in his eyes. He’d never, he insisted, been a part of a poem before. The poems that his friend wrote weren’t the sort that had anyone
doing
anything – knitting hats or creeping through peat bogs or shrinking away or any of that sort of business. This was, he said, awfully powerful stuff.

Jonathan liked the poem too. It had the unmistakable stamp of Gump and Bufo on it. ‘Are you just going to leave him lost there?’ he asked them. ‘Can’t you save him? Hoist him out?’

‘Reality can’t be tampered with,’ Bufo said. ‘We’re slaves to it. This will only be half a poem until we find the poor Squire.’

‘An unfinished symphony,’ Gump observed.

Jonathan could see the logic in it. ‘I suppose it has to be such. Let’s hope you can finish the poem fairly soon.’

The two nodded but didn’t say anything. Jonathan assumed they were thinking about the Squire. He knew how they felt – that nothing much had been accomplished yet. But then it was true that they had run into Quimby and learned a bit about the Squire’s whereabouts. And if, when they got to Landsend, they could find Miles and the Professor, then Jonathan would count them all well off indeed. They wouldn’t have long to wait either, for just about then the driver shouted, ‘About a mile to go, boys,’ and kicked up the horses’ pace a bit, anxious to get into town.

Landsend wasn’t quite the sprawling seaport city that Jonathan expected. It wasn’t any bigger, in fact, than the city of Seaside on the delta of the Oriel River. And the Tweet, of course, was twenty times the size of the Oriel. Jonathan had assumed that Landsend, then, would be twenty times the size of Seaside, or some such thing. It was impossible for any of them to know much about the city from within their little canvas-covered mail wagon. But Jonathan sat nearest the rear, so he had the best view.

They couldn’t see the ocean, but the air was tangy with salt. A coastal mountain range rose behind the city, densely forested above houses that climbed a quarter mile or so up the slopes. The wagon swung around and revealed a broad expanse of river delta thick with fishing boats. Along the shore were mud flats and backwaters tangled with exposed roots and shore grasses, and dotted with pools of standing water shining in the afternoon sun. Long thin piers ran out across them and into the brackish waters of the delta. Small boats were tied to some of the piers; other piers were in disrepair, often simply lines of broken pilings that weren’t much good for anything but pelican perches.

The wagon bounced along past boatyards where the skeletons of half-finished sailing ships sat on great trestled structures and where decaying clinker-built hulls lay scattered about, beyond repair, weeds and wild fuchsias and trumpet flower vines growing through and around them.

The backwaters and mud flats and boatyards gave way finally to scattered inns and cottages. There were people everywhere: vendors selling ice cream, lemonade, and fresh fruit; groups of shirtless sailors and idlers lounging in doorways; shoppers clumping down the boardwalks; children dashing about and carrying on. It seemed as if every third or fourth building sported a sidewalk cafe, the sort in which you could take an hour and a half over your coffee. Even at four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour that Jonathan would have thought either a bit early or a bit late for lounging about in sidewalk cafes, there were few empty tables.

Most of the buildings along the street were built of clapboard and shingle. The road was paved with square gray stones worn by traffic, all cut from some dark granitic rock. Wherever he looked Jonathan could see wild foliage. Hibiscus flowers bloomed everywhere – great red and orange and yellow blooms with petals the size of a man’s hand. Purple trumpet flowers and bougainvillaea twined through fences and trellises, and even unkempt yards were a wonder of bright green grass and wild colorful flowers. Landsend was altogether a beautiful sort of place – in a state, thought Jonathan, of colorful and sublime decay.

It was nicely coincidental that the wagon was hauling them straight up to the post office at the top of the hour. Jonathan barely had time to think ‘What if they aren’t here?’ and feel the first pangs of dread and worry when they rattled to a stop not six feet from where Professor Wurzle leaned against the post of a gaslamp reading some sort of announcement or advertisement. Jonathan thought furiously of clever things to say to him, something subtle and witty and surprising, but Ahab got in before him. Catching sight of old Wurzle, he barked twice and leaped down onto the road, nearly landing on the Professor’s shoes.

‘Ahab!’ Professor Wurzle shouted. Then he pushed his glasses onto the edge of his nose and peered over them at Jonathan, Bufo, Gump, and Quimby, who issued, one by one, from the rear of the wagon.

Jonathan shook his hand, feeling as if he hadn’t seen the Professor for six months. ‘What ho?’

‘Oh,’ the Professor responded, ‘not much ho. How about you?’

‘Not much ho with us either,’ Gump announced.

About then, the driver teetered past under the canvas mailbag and a stack of boxes – what Jonathan’s father used to call a lazy man’s load. They all shouted thanks to him, since the pile of debris precluded his shaking hands.

‘Where’s Miles?’ Jonathan was sure, somehow, that the Professor would know.

‘Down the block.’

‘Is he okay?’ Bufo asked.

‘Safe and sound. We had a remarkably easy time of it, I must say. Hardly got wet at all.’ The Professor greeted Quimby, who stood off to the side a bit, not wanting to push in among the old friends. It was as if his arrival at Landsend had restored him, and he was no longer a wretched soul but was once again a haberdasher with a reputation.

Quimby bowed slightly. ‘I’ll be thanking you, Mr Bing, and you lads too, for looking after me. I’m not much good at tramping abroad, I’m afraid. Haven’t got the constitution for it.’

‘Nonsense,’ Jonathan said, patting the man on the back. ‘It was our pleasure. It’s rare that we run into such good company.’

‘That’s right,’ Bufo agreed, and Gump nodded assent.

‘Well,’ Quimby said. ‘I’ll be off now. I’d show you around the shop, but it’s a bit late for that. It’ll be closed by now, and my keys are in the river. Come round tomorrow, though, and have a good look. Fascinating business, really.’

‘It couldn’t help but be,’ Jonathan remarked, although the statement puzzled just about everyone there, including Jonathan, who hadn’t really given the matter much thought. Then everyone shook hands, and Quimby disappeared up the avenue.

‘What’s that you have there, Professor?’ Gump asked. That leaflet.’

The Professor held the thing up for them to have a look at. On the front of the paper was a pen and ink drawing of the face of Squire Myrkle, his cheeks puffed out as if they were loaded with horse chestnuts, his eyes crinkly, cheerful, and enthusiastically befuddled. Below the picture was written in bold printing: ‘Have you seen this man?’ Below that, in smaller letters, was information about what to do if you
had
seen this man. Above the whole thing was a headline that announced: REWARD!