Tales of Adventurers (13 page)

Salvador was a man of some education; that is to say, his system of bookkeeping was up-to-date; he could carry on the correspondence of his timberyard in correct Spanish; and he did not believe
in God – though not, of course, a declared atheist, for that would have been to identify himself with the enemies of timber merchants. He was immensely busy within the limited area of his
interests, and his workmen called him the wood-louse.

Salvador twisted himself this way and that among the onlookers in order to examine the tank from various angles. He apologized importantly and continually, and at last delivered his opinion.

“I will tell you how it is done,” he said. “There is a glass sheet which runs away from us diagonally –” he belched and had another shot at the word “– diagonally across the tank from top to bottom. Thus, friends, you see an unbroken sheet of water, but the mermaid is in an empty compartment.”

“Then how does she breathe?” asked a fisherman. “There would be no air.”

“She is wholly immersed in water,” answered the showman, the Andaluz. “The
pejemuller,
gentlemen, does not, as I have myself observed, breathe like a Christian. She
admits water into her body through a system of gills.”

“But where?” roared Paco. “Where does she keep them?”

He suggested several possible positions.

“
Caballero!
” protested the showman abruptly. “Be decent! She can hear.”

The
pejemuller
showed no sign of hearing. She waved her tail in languid response to the enthusiasm of the world outside her tank.

“But can she understand?” asked Salvador Aguirre with a precise little smile. “She seems to me to be an idiot.”

“She understands as much as you,” replied the Andaluz with a show of courtesy.

Paco shouted with laughter, and slapped his friend on the back.

“I say it is a little girl,” declared Salvador, his wrinkled face working with an excited obstinacy that hid humiliation. “I say that the tail is of colored scales of mica, and
that diagonally—”

“It is a
pejemuller,
” interrupted the showman.

“It would not be your daughter, perhaps?”

The face of the Andaluz burned and went white as ash.

“It appears I am among brutes,” he said.

“And whom,
señor,
do you call brute?”

“Since you have said,
señor,
that I would exhibit my daughter …”

“Man, I said there was a diagonal and—”

“There is no diagonal.”

“There is a diagonal.”

“You know as much of diagonals as of your father.”

“You lie!”

“Stupendous bastard!”

Paco Igarzábal swayed forward his big frame between the two smaller men.

“Let us see, friends! Let us see! What is this? Are we going to kill one another for a little difference of opinion? This gentleman says that there is no diagonal and that, by logic, the
pejemuller
is a
pejemuller.
My companion says that there is a diagonal, and that the gentleman is perhaps exhibiting his afflicted daughter.”

The Andaluz leapt at him, just as Paco expected – for he was never one to miss a chance of sport.

Paco grabbed him by the opening of his black waistcoat, and held him at arm’s length. The Andaluz twisted and stamped, answering the renewed insults of Salvador, who was kept back by
Paco’s other arm.

“Let us see!” repeated Paco. “A little calm, gentlemen! All this for a diagonal, that can be settled in a moment!”

“
Hijo de puta!
” hissed the Andaluz.

“Big names!” Paco answered, unaffected. “How much will you take to show us the tank?”

“More than I paid for your mother,” the Andaluz retorted, and spat in his face with a clean trajectory parallel to the arm which held him.

Paco Igarzábal barked with anger and flung him to the ground. Onlookers crashed down upon the struggling men, trying to separate them. The tank rocked on its trestles and spilled water
over the edge. The mermaid held her pose, ceasing only, since no eyes stared at her, to move her tail.

At last the tumult of bodies cohered into two groups. The fisherman, huge and benevolent, held the Andaluz. Paco and Salvador were surrounded by the rest of the onlookers, all counseling
prudence at the tops of their voices. Not a word could be distinguished in the uproar. The tent heaved and shook as passers-by pushed down the door to listen to so magnificent and delectable a
row.

Paco was now more angry than Salvador – if indeed there could be any choice between two men who were living in a fantasy of rage – but, seeing himself surrounded by fellow townsmen
who were wont to respect him for his supercilious calm, he choked on his stream of oaths and shouted at the Andaluz in a voice that quivered with the effort of control:

“Listen you! This is to end all argument. I will buy your mermaid and your tent! Understand?”

This astonishing offer brought silence. The Andaluz seemed to recoil as if his spirit were about to leap into passion beyond the reach of all humanity. The fisherman who held him tried with
sincere simplicity to conciliate.

“Sell him the mermaid at your price, friend!” he said. “Don Paco has money. And thus – in peace!”

“Ten thousand pesetas,” offered Paco.

“I am a
caballero,
” answered the Andaluz, each word a slow, reluctant gasp of pain. “I carry this vile trade among brutes who have no upbringing, but I am a
caballero.
You have called me a liar. You have said that this unhappy thing is my daughter. Now you think that for your money –” his voice rose to a scream “–
Where, among whom am I? Ay, my pride! My shame!
Cabrones!
Must I show you what it is to have a heart?”

He fell upon his knees, and the fisherman, not knowing whether this unexpected limpness was a mere feint or the illimitable appeal of a defeated soul, rested a light, embarrassed hand upon his
shoulder. The Andaluz dived beneath the rope and flung himself at the nearest trestle. The green light went out. The tank thudded on the ground, and the water flopped in two solid masses against
the canvas of the booth. The plate glass tinkled and crashed as the Andaluz flailed it with the trestle.

Men fumbled for the switch, heaving and swearing in the corner where the showman had turned off the central light. No one crossed the rope to enter that shadowy hell where a spirit translated
its devastation into the material.

White light glared. At the back of the booth stood the Andaluz, the trestle in his right hand, his left around the waist of the
pejemuller.
She clung to him with her arms round his
neck, pitiable as a shivering monkey. She was even smaller than she had seemed in the tank; her tiny yellow head was against his cheek, but the glittering tail did not reach his knees. Except that
she clung to what she knew, she was not human.

The Andaluz walked through the tent and over the prostrate door. He still held the trestle in his hand, but it was no fear of physical violence that parted the crowd of powerful Basques. He
passed under the harsh lights of the roaring fairground, blood and filth upon his face, clothes dripping water. He walked proudly. What march, what music of sunlit trumpets he heard, that too was
accepted by the onlookers. They followed.

He took the lane to the sea, where, beyond the circle of trees, only the softness of the night gleamed on the black and changing mirrors of that marvel which flapped against his thigh. He strode
over the rock and down to the boat-slip. The ripples of the Atlantic, inch-high, hissed as they parted over the descending stone.

“God guard thee, little friend!”

He loosened the thin arms from his neck, and flung the
pejemuller
into the night sea. She took the water cleanly, rose once and went under, her tail seeming to flick the starlit
surface.

“And now – leave me in peace!” cried the Andaluz.

He stumbled away across the rocks, unnoticed, uncared for. The crowd were arguing, shouting with a recrudescence of anger, gaping into the darkness for another sight of the
pejemuller.

In the morning, when they wanted the Andaluz, he had gone, leaving behind him only the debris of the tank, impossible to reconstruct. They understood that he had flung away his living for the
sake of his honor; that was no thought foreign to any of them, except perhaps to Salvador. But what it was that he had flung away neither high-tide mark nor the passing of the months disclosed.

S
HE WAS
a treaty cruiser, built for speed. Urgency was in her lines, urgency in the deep hum of the engines. Urgent were
even the seemingly casual attitudes of the men in open shirts and gray flannel trousers who crowded her decks. She was jammed full as a refugee ship; yet this was no ragged cargo hysterical with
relief and embarrassing the ship’s company by their gratitude and misery. The men on deck were lean well-fed army officers returning hastily to the Middle East from their canceled leave. They
were not yet in uniform. War had not been declared.

Mr. Avellion sat on a locker, watching the two huge curves of Mediterranean that raced towards the horizon from the cruiser’s bows. There was no other movement on the water and no cloud
but a dark patch of haze astern hanging over Marseilles. Ships, more sensitive to threat of war than of weather, were in port. The sea was an empty blue pool.

He was a civilian. In that eager warship, racing to deliver her packed human freight at Alexandria, there was a small group of businessmen, all specialists in shipping, oil and cables, or
obscurer but imperial trades. None of them was important enough to command an unpurchasable air passage, but all were badly needed at their stations before Mussolini, if he meant to move, could
delay their arrival.

There was peace in Avellion’s heart; quivering and uncertain, but peace. He drew a deep breath as if to float this unaccustomed ardor of well-being more securely in an expanded soul, and
coughed.

He was of use; he was wanted. What was it that the Board of Trade chap had said to him?
Mr. Avellion, your local knowledge will be invaluable.
To ask him to leave in twenty-four hours
was a bit stiff. Still, chaps like himself were important in times of war. Nobody could tell what value they mightn’t find in his little business at Suez. He was sometimes hazy about the
details of what he did there, especially in the morning with always a gaggle of silly Arabs shouting at him; but objectives became beautifully clear at sundown when his boy brought in more ice and
the second bottle. Whatever he might feel for the rest of the day, there were two hours every evening when his life was full of interest. The dreams of those hours had, after all, been true.
Invaluable
– that was what the Board of Trade chap had called him.

He became aware of a voice.

“Eh? What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Not much chance if they catch us.’”

The speaker, by profession a cable manager, was as obvious a businessman as Mr. Avellion, but his fat was more neatly distributed throughout his person. Avellion was pear-shaped, with much of
his weight far to the south of his belt; he cultivated a small white military mustache, above which was a powerful nose sprouting blue-gray buds like a tree in winter; his appearance was raffish
and faintly disreputable, at any rate when compared to the plumpness, the round clean-shaven face, the precise little mouth and nose of his fellow passenger.

Avellion’s bloodshot eyes twinkled at him.

“They won’t try, my boy.”

“First thing we’ll know about it will be the whole Italian Navy on us,” grumbled the cable manager.

“They won’t start till we do,” said Avellion, “not they! They’re still hoping we shall rat, like we did at Munich.”

“Hope you’re right. But I don’t like it,” replied the cable manager judiciously. “I don’t like it. The ship can’t even fight. Do you know we have
fifteen hundred passengers on board?”

“A fine lot of boys!” Avellion boomed. “Proud to be with ’em. Well, how about a little drink?”

“There isn’t any.”

“What?”

“There couldn’t be enough, you see. So they’ve closed down altogether. We’ll be short of food, too. Bound to be.”

“Bound to be,” echoed Avellion dully.

All around the afterturrets the deck was strewn with men lounging on blankets and reading, sun-bathing, playing bridge, or asleep. The more energetic strolled back and forth, picking their way
through and over the tangle of feet. The lifeboat against which Avellion leaned his shoulder was full of men; an orderly shambles in which everyone seemed to be unpacking and repacking kit. Scraps
of conversation drifted past him, mingled of annoyance, indignation, and sardonic amusement.

“Thirty-six hours in the train, and we drank it all up. … No time to buy any. … Well, who the devil would think of packing his cellar? … Now you know what war is like, old
boy!” Then laughter at the sorry plight of eight hundred officers on the quarter-deck and seven hundred men in the flats that did duty as troop decks, all torn at two days’ notice from
the delights of leave, and all without a drink.

Avellion had done just as they – packed his immediate needs and drunk them up. He was allowed only such baggage as he could carry; there had been no room for more than two bottles. They
had left Newhaven on the night boat, sleeping wherever there was space to sit or lie, then spent an unshaven dawn at Dieppe, where the six special trains stood hissing in the sidings and the French
children cheered and the adults watched with grim, set faces these forerunners of another war. So passed a day and a night, while they waited in sunbaked railway yards or trundled slowly southwards
to Marseilles, until the trains emptied themselves into the cruiser and that weary, merry crowd sorted itself out on her decks.

It was magnificent, thought Avellion, a memory forever. During the last war he had been out East, clerk in a merchant’s office. He had since accused himself of – well, not funk but
lack of spirit. He had been indispensable, they said; and it was true that, so far as the business went, he was. He had always told himself that next month the rush of work would ease, and that
then he could enlist; it never did ease, and suddenly the war was over.