He sat, alone in the compartment, in a daze of contentment with the magazines unheeded on the seat beside him. He watched the bare empty landscape trundle by and grow slowly greener as they went west. He had no idea why he was going to Cladda. It was certainly not to gather information in the police sense. He was going—to find B Seven. That is as near as it could be put into words. He wanted to go and see this place which so nearly reproduced the landscape of the poem. He wondered, sunk in sleepy bliss, whether B Seven had ever talked to anyone about his Paradise. He remembered the writing and thought not. Those tightly arcaded M’s and N’s were too defensive to have been made by a talker. In any case, it didn’t matter how many people he had talked to about the thing, since there was no way of making contact with them. He could hardly put an advertisement in the papers saying: Read this poem and tell me if you recognise it.
Or—why couldn’t he?
His sleepiness fell from him while he considered this new angle.
He considered it all the way to Oban.
In Oban he went to a hotel, ordered a self-congratulatory drink, and while he consumed it he wrote to each of the London daily papers enclosing a cheque and asking them to print an identical notice in their personal column. The notice said:
‘The beasts that talk, the streams that stand, the stones that walk, the singing sand….Anyone recognising please communicate with A. Grant, c/o P.O., Moymore, Comrieshire.’
The only daily papers to which he did not send this appeal were the Clarion and The Times. He did not want Clune to think that he had taken leave of his senses altogether.
As he made his way along the front to the cockleshell in which he was due to brave the Minch, he thought: ‘It will serve me right if someone writes to say that the thing is one of the best-known lines of some Xanadu concoction of Coleridge’s, and that I must be illiterate not to have known it!’
6
The wallpaper consisted of far too heavy roses hanging from a far too slender trellis-work, and the insecure character of the whole thing was increased by the fact that the paper not only hung away from the wall but moved about in the draught. It was not readily obvious where the draught came from because the small window was not only tightly shut but had patently been tightly shut since its manufacture and original insertion in the house structure about the beginning of the century. The little swing mirror on the chest of drawers lived up to its promise in the first respect but not in the second. It would swing with ease amounting to abandon through the whole circle of three hundred and sixty degrees; but it did not reflect anything to any noticeable degree. A last year’s cardboard calendar folded in four kept its gyratory talents in check, but nothing of course could be done to increase its powers of reflection.