Land Beyond the Map

Crane chuckled. “Don’t you believe it. They have as many complications and figurative knives flashing into backs in a small village as you’ll find any day in your London. Come on, start her up. We’ve no time to waste.”

“County Tyrone?”

“When we’re ready. I’m thinking of McArdle.”

“We know from the booksellers that he’s after the map and, conversely, he must know from them that we’re searching, too.” Polly let in the clutch and the Austin rolled smoothly away. “He was after the map before — trying to wrest it away from Allan violently enough to cause a fight. He’s likely to be an ugly customer.”

The conception was abruptly novel to Crane. All the way back to Belfast through a countryside that, with its unpredictable shifts of mood, was gray and brooding and misted with rain, Crane thought about McArdle.

When Polly pulled the car up before their hotel he was right back in his thought maze at the place he had started. He roused himself with a little grunt.

“I’ll go along,” Polly said, “and check the hotel register. If McArdle signed in, his address must be there.”

“Yes, you do that, Polly,” said Crane humbly. He hadn’t thought of it. Not at all. Polly was the practical one.

She came back to late lunch with a triumphant expression. A triumph, Crane noted, that overlaid a grimness.

“He gave his address as some place in County Tyrone.”

“Well now,” said Crane.

“Only trouble is that the place name has been obliterated by burns. The whole register is badly charred They keep it in the safe and regard it as a curio. A memento of the Great Fire, if you follow me.”

“Yes. Well, it’s too late to do much more today. Any ideas?”

“I ought to try to find a story this afternoon.”

“Huh?”

Polly looked at him reflectively, almost calculatingly, pulling her lower lip.

“You’re a rich man, Mr. Crane — very rich, I mean?”

“Why, I suppose so. And what’s all this Mister Crane stuff, anyway?”

“Rolley?”

“I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

She laughed. “Well, Rolley, hasn’t it occurred to you, living in your ivory tower buttressed by a financial empire, that a young unmarried girl has to work for a living?”

It hadn’t — not in Polly’s case, at any rate.

“Why — huh—” Crane said intelligently.

“I’m a reporter. I kid myself I’m a journalist; not yet, but that’ll come. My paper thinks I’m onto a big story here, as I well might be, but—”

But Crane was blazing with anger.

“Is that all you’ve dragged me here for — to get a story for your confounded paper?”

She blazed right back.

“Your sort are all so high and mighty your feet never touch the ground! I mention that I have to earn my living and I’m trying to find a story — I barely manage to open my mouth telling you what I’ve told my paper and you jump down it with both hob-nailed boots!” Dots of color in her cheeks and sparkles in her eyes couldn’t stop Crane from riposting — and even as he spoke he felt the meanness of his words.

“You know what those few people I’ve spoken to about the Map Country think of me. Dolally-tap! And you propose to smear the whole story across the front pages. I can see it now! ‘Multi-millionaire map-hunts for phantom world!’ You’d soil and degrade the whole object of our search here — and I trusted you!”

Polly stood up to him, chin tip-tilted aggressively.

“With a headline like that thank your lucky stars you don’t have to earn your living writing for the papers! And you still haven’t given me a chance to tell you what I told my editor! That’s just like you — typical. If everything doesn’t go your way — blooey! Fire everyone!”

“Now look here, Polly—”

She brushed aside whatever he was going to say.

“No! You look here! You know why I’m in Ireland with you. My editor will get nothing from me that in any way can cause you distress — because that would do the same things to me.” She was breathing deeply now, angry and annoyed, and yet, Crane somehow knew without doubt, partially angry with herself and understanding what he’d so clumsily been trying to say. “Have you forgotten about Allan?”

At once he saw the enormity of what he had been saying, the attitude he had taken, and contrition swamped him — tinged, thankfully, with a dash of mocking humor. Talk about the grindstone and the steel — the sparks generated here would have done O’Connell’s conception of McArdle no injustice.

“Sorry,” he said, meaning it. “Sorry, my dear. Just that, well — I’ve become so bound up in this thing that the thought of millions of gawpers prying into it over their breakfast cereal turns my stomach.”

“Don’t worry. There’s a time for everything. By the time the story is finished with us — or us with it — and I file it you’ll be as blasé£ as the next.”

Thinking of the thoughts that had crowded his brain in O’Connell’s neat cottage, of the dark enchantment of Ireland, of the potentialities of the Map Country, Crane said slowly: “I wonder.”