Poet's Pub [antikvár]

CHAPTER I The storm gathered and its thunder broke the fantastic idyll. The female centaur, ink-stained, with blown grey hair and the end of a cigarette in her mouth, faded like a Cheshire cat. The hunted poet Hylas stood up, weak as water because of the rape he had eluded, and vanished before his knees could knock again. The thunder became nearer, clearer, and increasingly wooden in tone. A square of day-light opened into the forest and made everything evident—the end of the bed, blue and grey jugs on the washstand, a crumpled coat, red toes that stood up from beneath the ruffled nether hem of a sheet. Saturday Keith was awake. All right, he shouted, and there was no more knocking. It's eight o'clock, said a female voice. Not that it was a woman who wrote it, thought Keith. Women never write in the Literary Supplement; or at any rate no oftener than they preach from other pulpits. But I've never dreamt of anything so like a critic as that she-centaur. The engulfing female. The shy poet lost in a marsh of explanation. Centaur, censor, ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross. And I'm damned if 8 The Blue Scarf is like the Boat Race. He reached for his glasses and the crumpled copy of The Times Literary Supplement which lay on the floor at his bedside. He had reached Betterton the night before after walking thirty-two miles—which made a hundred and eight in four days—and found,