Сарбан - Ringstones

Piers put the exercise book carefully on the table beside him and stood up. I was mystified by his manner. Daphne Hazel's excursion into fiction seemed to be worrying him out of all proportion. Then he began tapping his toe on the little iron fender round the hearthstone.

“That's it!” he exclaimed. “That is it! I couldn't have known that myself, because I don't know any Eastern language. I thought you might be able to see something there that I couldn't. Of course, she heard the name.”

“Heard it? Instead of getting it out of a book? Well, she might have done. Come to think of it, if she'd got it out of a grammar she might have written the ''ain' in a more scientific way. The grammars give lots of good advice about how to write it in English characters but none that's any use about how to pronounce it. But it's scarcely a point that you sensitive students of literature would consider important, is it? Fascinating as it may be to a pedant like myself.”

“Of course it's important,” he said, turning on me in some agitation. “Why should a girl like Daphne write all that and send it off to me without preface or explanation?”

“Well that,” I replied, not able to help grinning, “is just the question I politely refrained from asking. I suppose we all have an itch to shine in something that's not our own metier. Your Daphne, who, I'll warrant, can creak a joint with any gymnast in the Kingdom, has a secret craving to cut as handsome a figure in print as she does on your wall−bars, your vaulting−horses, your parallel bars, beams, ropes and what else have you that takes the place of the racks and strappados of a less refined age. Why man, you scratch the same itch yourself. It's the right cacoethes, and time's the only D.D.T. I should simply say that her job at what's−its−name, this place, didn't give her enough to do. She was probably lonely, She amused herself by writing this, and as you're probably the most sympathetic person she knows, she sent it to you.”

Piers shook his head. “I know her well enough,” he said. “At school she never wrote anything—I mean, of that sort, imaginative. She can express herself well enough and she has read a lot. But, as I told you last night, inventing fairy stories is quite out of character in her. She just wouldn't have invented that story.”

“Well she did. There it is. Unless she wrote it down from dictation or copied it from a book for some utterly unimaginable reason I don't see any other answer but that her imagination is capable of getting up to tricks that you never suspected. And, though I know little about the imagination and less about young women, it's not improbable that their fancies may fetch a frisk or two in private that you and I might never see but for some such whim as this.”

“You don't see any other answer?” “No, do you?”

“Yes. The answer I see is that this is not invented. It's a record of something that happened.”

I expostulated. But my mind is less subtle than Piers's, or I haven't his practice in resolving ambiguities, allegories and the contradictions of actual and imaginative experience. I fear I did not altogether understand his argument that though the narration of incidents in Daphne's story might not, or could not, be a description of actual events which occurred, yet the experience dictating the form and character of the fancied events must have occurred; and, the choice of symbols in which to represent an experience depending intimately on the experience itself, the interpretation of the idlest fancies must reveal an active truth. Dimly I could see what might be troubling Piers, but the chimaeras he was tracking seemed to me to be denizens of a region of the mind too remote and mysterious for my plain conducted−tour kind of psychology to dream of venturing into. I can box the compass of sense with any man and do my bit of hawk−spotting between the cardinal points besides; but Piers was trying to make the needle point to a three hundred and sixty−first degree within the circle.

“Nay, Piers,” I said in the end. “All these subtleties and hair−splittings, all these attempts to prove that black and white are interchangeable and that truth's only to be known by falsehood and cabbages to be recognised through a knowledge of kings, why, all this is but to say that if the lass has begun imagining things she never did before something has happened to make her.”

“Well, I am saying that!” he cried.

“Why then,” I said, “since it seems to prey on your mind, though I'm damned if I quite see why, there's only one thing to be done and that's to ask her why she wrote it.”

“Good!” said Piers with quite an ominous note of satisfaction in his voice, and at once substituting action for argument he yanked a chair out of the way and reached down a bundle of Ordnance maps from the top of his cupboard. I began to commend the postal services, but protested with less and less vigour as he sorted out the right map and spread it out on the table.

“There, you see,” he pointed out, “is Staineshead. We can go by train with a couple of changes, but I expect the bus is easier. We'll go down to the Haymarket and find out the times. Now, where's Ringstones? Ah! here it is. You see there's a footpath marked from Staineshead over Nither Edge, and a bridle road from Ringstones Hall to Blagill. And the Stone Circle is marked, too.”

So it was. All as our author related: even to the loop of the beck round Ringstones Park and the Roman mine in the valley below.

“Well go to Staineshead and then up the path to Ringstones,” Piers said.

“And being much cleverer at that sort of thing than the heroine,” I commented, “we shall not get lost. Nor shall I go up to my backside in a bog−hole. Oh no! Nothing like that. I've been over moors with you before. However, it's a jaunt, and if the wench is in jeopardy no Knight Errant, or erring, ought to boggle at a few marish wastes and deserts wild. Let me draw a dragon or two on the map just for the sake of appearances while you work out the distances between pubs. But,” it occurred to me to point out, while he stared at the map like a hungry bloodhound at a bit of black−pudding in a porkshop window, “but do you know for a fact that this job of hers was at Ringstones Hall?”

“She says so,” he replied, refusing to be drawn from the map. The point, however, seemed to me of some importance. Had she ever actually given the address of this place she was going to? In a letter, I meant, apart from the story in the book.

He lifted his head at last.

“Well, no,” he said. “The last letter I had from her was from Towerton. She said the place was near Staineshead. That's all. Well, Ringstones Hall is near Staineshead.”

I looked at those contours and that dotted line drawn with a confidence I have learned to mistrust in Ordnance maps and observed that if it was only twice as far as it looked I should count myself lucky. “Well, but,” I persisted, after some aspersions on my map−reading which there is no point in repeating, “what about the book itself? The postmark?”

So we hunted until we found the brown paper it had been wrapped in. The post−mark would have defied a better epigraphist than I am. There was indeed a 't' in it, or something uncommon like a 't'. But so there is in Timbuctoo. I abandoned that line of enquiry.

“We can make a loop,” said Piers, who had reverted to the map, “either by going on from Ringstones to Blagill or cutting across Blagill Moor, down on to the road, and back into Staineshead. We'll stay the night at a pub in Staineshead.”

The last remark was made with quite unjustifiable assurance. Piers still believes, in spite of the weight of evidence from Joseph of Nazareth onwards, that an inn is a place where you can be put up merely for showing the colour of your money. However, Northern farmers are hospitable though landlords are surly, and, as the Highlander said in reference to the lack of another sort of accommodation, “Och, leddy, there's always the hill.” It looked good country beyond Staineshead. The fine sunny weather was holding out astonishingly. I didn't think it mattered a damn whether we visited Daphne Hazel or not, but if Piers was so keen to see her I felt it was not beyond the powers of two able−bodied young men to discover the whereabouts of a Towerton girl, given a small place like Staineshead as a centre for the search. What sort of fools we looked when we found her was Piers's affair.