Appleby's End Read Free

Fluellen when he came to compare Macedon and Monmouth.”
    â€œA river in each,” said Appleby. “And salmon in both.”
    Mr Raven nodded, evidently much pleased. “I perceive that you are a student, Mr Appleby. And the common factor among my small batch of books should now be obvious to you. The Docetists and the Monophysites may be subsumed under the common term Religion; Dostoievsky suggests Russia; the Tyrannosaurus is a Reptile; Livy treats of the history of Rome; the Turf Guide concerns Racing; artificial respiration is an aspect of Resuscitation; and Anthony Hope wrote about Ruritania. The link, in fact, is alphabetical. I am deep in the doggy letter, sir.” Mr Raven paused and chuckled. “What the grammarians were fond of calling litera canina . And hence too those floating scraps of information on Railways with which I had the pleasure of initiating our acquaintance.”
    â€œThen would I be right,” asked Appleby, “if I were to have another guess and say that you are editing an encyclopaedia?”
    â€œYour guess,” said Mr Raven, “would be approximately correct. Unfortunately” – he spoke with sudden gloom – “the word ‘edit’ scarcely meets the case. You would do better to say ‘compile.’”
    â€œCompile?”
    Mr Raven nodded. “I write it.” He lowered his voice. “I write,” he said unexpectedly, “the whole damned thing.”

 
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2
    It was dark now and the journey had become interminable. The engine, while daylight lasted simply an obsolescent locomotive tugging grimy carriages across English ploughland, was now a creature alien and dragonish, panting on some vast and laboured quest. The engine was a monster – one of Swincer and Tiver’s Dinosauria, Appleby thought – with ghastly respirations striving to free itself from an engulfing Jurassic slime. Its reeky breath, faintly luminous, flipped momentarily at the windows. Sometimes, with an indescribable eeriness, it howled against the night. The pinch of famine this, perhaps – for station by station its clanking and jerkily oscillating maw was voiding itself into the murk: more passengers were getting off than getting on. Behind the grimed glass bowl the stinking little light now shone on the dusty red of empty seats, on cigarette butts and the dottles of pipes, on banana skins and orange peel mingled and pashed with the weed-killers, the love-nests, the ephemeral renaissance of Gaffer Odgers. Only the four corners of the carriage were occupied. In one a priest, heavy-breathing and rumbling dyspeptically within, stared with glassy concentration at an open breviary. In another was a slatternly woman clutching an idiot boy. Mr Raven, with a censorious pencil poised over Dr Bossom, occupied a third. And in the fourth Appleby, his overcoat buttoned up to his nose, endeavoured to grapple with Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda . “Being the History,” he read, “of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman.” Well, perhaps the unfortunate man had attempted a cross-country journey in an English railway train.
    â€œBoo,” said the idiot boy; “boo, boo.” The slatternly woman smiled gently and patted his hand. “Boo, boo, boo,” the idiot boy said; “boo, boo, boo.”
    Appleby put down his book in desperation. “About that encyclopaedia,” he asked. “May I enquire how long it is likely to take you, and when you hope to publish?”
    â€œMuch of it is published already.” Mr Raven took off his gold-rimmed glasses and held them some inches in front of a markedly long nose. “ The New Millennium Encyclopaedia, edited by Everard Raven, with the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science.”
    â€œBut I understood you to say that you were doing it all yourself?”
    â€œAs indeed I am. Our title-page, I fear, has been conceived according