The Brides of Solomon (20 page)

The purser was shouting in English. He was a man without manners, as I think the Nazis must have been—nothing but a white uniform buttoned too tightly over bad temper. He had twice been
rude to me. You will not believe it, but he made me declare that my disfigurement was not infectious. He resented the presence of a single woman among males.

There is no dignity in the English language when men are excited. The Purser was swallowing hard, and croaking:

‘Jam, jam, ja-a-am! Jam, jam, ja-a-am! Here you will not sell your ja-a-am! No and no! I forbid you to give your party. The
Naarden
is a German ship, not a grocery
shop!’

Naturally I passed them as quickly as I could, and did not watch until I was sure they could not see me. Don Francisco was being very mischievous. Evidently he had given up all hope of obtaining
his request. He had no interest at all in calming the purser. He smiled and weaved his tall body over him like a snake above a fat frog. He patted him on the shoulder and warned him that he should
be careful, that after a heavy dinner in the tropics a man of his build might easily have a stroke. And when the purser began to insult the English in general, he waved him back into the office
with the gesture of one who shoos away a fly.

I was sitting in the darkness of the boat deck when Don Francisco joined me. After we had talked a little while, he said to me that curiosity killed the cat. The proverbs of his people are
coarser than our own.

I answered with dignity that if it had been I who wished to talk to the purser, I should not have approached him at that hour. Everyone knew that he liked to shut himself up in his office after
his over-solid evening meal. He even had a notice of
Verboten
on his door.

Don Francisco admitted humbly that I was perfectly right, and that indeed the purser, unlike the majority of men, was less approachable after dinner than before. For that reason he himself had
been particularly tactful, he said, and had knocked his forehead three times upon the purser’s counter and kissed the ground.

And then, at last permitting himself some slight loss of self-control, he began to curse the purser for an unbelieving, unimaginative Kraut—which means, I think, a cabbage. And after
swearing like a gaucho, though most delicately changing the words, he translated some English oaths. At any rate they were quite unlike our own and far less reasonable. It is permissible to guess
at the parentage of someone who has insulted you, but you cannot anticipate the fate of his soul.

‘And what astonishes me,’ he declared, ‘is that I damn the man so thoroughly and he is none the worse.’

‘Thank God for his mercies!’ I answered.

He lay back in his chair and laughed.

‘Well, it is true one would have to be careful. To phrase a curse which is meant so that it can be distinguished from a curse which is not—I do not know how my ancestors managed
it.’

‘Pizarro? Or his Inca princess?’ I asked—for you know how I adore the ridiculous, and I wanted him to recover his temper and entertain me.

‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘From them I am descended on my mother’s side. On my father’s side we were always witches. Life is like that. To the rich comes more money.
Upon the improbable it pours improbabilities. In my club there is a man who has the hereditary right to undress the bishop of his diocese and wash him in the River Thames. In winter he trains
elephants. Why not? To him it is all perfectly natural.’

One’s breath is taken away by such flights of fancy. All I could find to say was that the bishop must be glad his friend had another occupation in winter.

Don Francisco answered that the bishop could be washed on demand, whatever the weather, and that I must not put any faith in the common illusion that the English were influenced by common sense.
They always preferred the fantastic to the practical.

‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘in England everything that has ever existed still exists. That is the kind of people we are. There was once a chief witch in Hereford. Therefore there
is still a chief witch in Hereford. And I, who have the honour to be at your feet, am he.’

‘So it is due to your charms that we buy the Hereford cattle?’

‘Not forgetting the jams and jellies.’

‘And we part tomorrow and you have never shown me yourself flying upon a broomstick.’

‘For that,’ he said, ‘one needs a familiar spirit—if it has ever been done, which I doubt.’

‘Dear Don Francisco, is there any spirit which is unfamiliar to you?’

He kissed my hand. It always delighted him when I enjoyed this sort of tennis with words, though I myself would wonder afterwards if I had not been too bitter.

‘Have you never heard that the soul must be fed as well as the body?’ he asked. ‘And, believe me, the sustenance it prefers is alcohol in moderation. Far better that than to
take oneself too seriously and always be whispering
Down
,
Fido!
to something which would be happier in hell!’

‘And without Fido?’ I laughed. ‘Nothing to show me? Nothing at all?’

‘I am not in practice,’ he replied. ‘I am a traditional figurehead—a mere administrator. Old women’s tricks are all I know. Like curing—perhaps—of
warts.’

Little sister, I did not answer anything. I do not think I even looked at him.

‘That is all it is, you know,’ he said. ‘A giant wart which lives on you because it has no other home. I could take it away, if you believed.’

I recovered myself at once, and told him that it was not a subject which my most intimate friends were permitted to discuss with me.

He was quite unconcerned by my rebuke. He stood over me, grinning as if he had just thought of still greater riches of impertinence.

‘All the same, I want it,’ he said. ‘Do you give it to me?’

I answered passionately that I gave it to him with my whole heart. I do not quite know what I meant. But I was so sincere I could have struck him.

I am ashamed to tell you what happened. I can only say that I was fascinated by him and quite helpless; and the indignity was so swift. He spat on his finger and touched my disfigurement. Then
he spat to the four points of the compass and did something with his hands in the darkness which I could not distinguish.

‘And now, my daughter, it is good-bye,’ he said. ‘You are outraged by me, and would not speak to me in the morning even if we had time to talk. I shall leave the ship early
with the customs launch, and as the purser will not let me give my party I shall not return.’

I could not trust myself to speak. I stared at him as one stares at a lover who has forgotten decency.

‘Remember it is not what friends say at parting which matters,’ he told me, ‘but what they think about each other afterwards. Half I have done for you; the other half depends
on your belief.’

Conchita, I awoke in the morning utterly disgusted with myself. There might be some excuse for him, but
I
had not been drinking. What I had spoken of, and what I had allowed—all
humiliated me.

I looked out of the porthole of my cabin. Two miles away were the low houses and docks and sands of Callao, the port of Lima. The customs launch was just leaving the
Naarden
, and Don
Francisco was in it as he said he would be. It was the first time I had ever seen him well dressed. Immaculate, with a flower in his buttonhole.

When I came on deck, the ship was alongside the quay. I was most courteously saluted by a captain of police who addressed me by my name. He astonished me by saying that in case I wished to land
and visit Lima a room in the best hotel had been reserved for me. He also presented to me the compliments of Don Francisco Jones y Harborough, who regretted that he was unavoidably prevented from
escorting me since he had been commanded to accompany the Vice-President of the Republic on a visit to Cuzco.

Was I never to escape from his lunacy? I thanked the captain and remarked, controlling my voice as best I could, that it was not my custom to interrupt my travels at the request of
foreigners.

‘But Don Francisco does not count as a foreigner!’ he exclaimed. ‘He is a descendant of Francisco Pizarro and Atahualppa’s daughter. There are only two of them left, and
the other is old and in Spain and will die childless.’

Who could have guessed that he was telling the truth? I went back to my cabin, with all my emotions shattered. The mirror faced me. As you know, I have trained myself not to notice a mirror any
more than you, Conchita, the pavement under your feet. But the man’s bad taste had made me conscious of that loathsome mark. And then, hating him and in tears, I suddenly realised that never
would he have forgotten his courtesy and tenderness unless he believed in himself. What I believed I could not be sure.

That night, little sister, while the ship remained in harbour, I slept sweetly. I went to breakfast early. But no, I did not go to breakfast at all! I went no further than the door of the
saloon. The purser was eating alone, and fingering a black mark on his cheek. I rushed back to my cabin, telling myself that I was a romantic fool. But the lower fragment of my growth had gone, and
the skin was red like that of a healthy scar.

I packed, and I fled to the room in Lima which Don Francisco had so thoughtfully reserved for me. I remembered his words: that it lived on me because it had no other home. I could not go on to
Panama. How could I ever have met the purser’s eyes during a whole week—the week that has just passed—while hour by hour I was returning so eagerly to my mirror?

I
N
spite of heat, insects and isolation, Don Felipe had made himself comfortable. He had two more years to serve in the Peruvian forest, administrating
the head waters of the Madre de Dios, and every reason to believe that he would finish them with some remnants of health and a reputation as a reasonable man. He preferred his cool office to the
jungle. That, too, was reasonable. It was the first duty of a government servant to be easily and courteously accessible.

He was intimidated—though he did not for a moment show it—by the determined Diocesan Visitor who had so smoothly come up from the river. Father Hilario held himself most
unnecessarily upright in the curves of his basket chair. He seemed to set an awkward standard not only for administrators of Indian territory but for the flowers and creepers which rioted over the
patio and were so obviously and carelessly growing when compared with the rigid black figure of the Diocesan Visitor.

‘It is true then that this Englishman has two hundred wives?’ Father Hilario asked.

‘If one believed all one heard,’ answered Don Felipe with a prudent wave of the hand by which he hoped to dismiss the subject, ‘there would be no end to
investigations.’

‘You have not confirmed the rumour yourself?’

‘I cannot afford to be absent from my post so long, padre. And for what? There is no objection to a serious anthropologist living among the Indians.’

‘Provided he confines himself to the interests of science,’ Father Hilario said. ‘But this Englishman is conducting a mission.’

‘I do not remember that he had any interest at all in religion.’

‘It is nine years since you saw him.’

Don Felipe looked surprised. Time ran away while one occupied oneself at leisurely government pace. But it was indeed all of nine years since Solomon Carver had called on him with—after a
full measure of formal courtesies—the bald statement that he intended to go into the forest and study a primitive tribe. Don Felipe told him that he would not be allowed to do any such thing,
that the days were long past when you could paddle up the rivers and establish, if you lived, a mission or a private army or your own little slave state. Peruvian policy was all against
irresponsible interference with the Indians.

‘Here as elsewhere,’ Don Felipe had explained to Carver, ‘he who desires to serve must be appointed to do so.’

‘I am.’

‘But by whom?’

‘Myself,’ Carver said.

Don Felipe pointed out that he had been thinking of some official body like a botanical or geographical society.

‘If you mean,’ replied Carver, ‘that I must be vouched for by any committee which will take the trouble to print a few letter-heads and obtain some half-witted minor royalty
for a patron, then I will see that it is done.’

Being a son of parents so poor that his career could only be made in territory where no one else would serve, Don Felipe was bewildered by the arrogance of an ancient university. He perceived,
however, that his decayed bungalow, commanding nothing but a landing-stage, a handful of demoralised military and a collection of thatched roofs hardly distinguishable from the surrounding forest,
was being invited into partnership against the whole easily impressionable world.

‘It will take me a month,’ said Solomon Carver.

It took him two. When the plane from Lima set him down once more on the river, his credentials were in perfect order and described him as an anthropologist.

The Diocesan Visitor, disapprovingly silent while Don Felipe repeated this conversation, replied at once that Carver indeed had influential friends. The suave enquiries of the Church had found
out everything about the man. Before the war, a lecturer on anthropology and comparative religion. A serious and too self-sufficient colonel at the end of the war. And then, in his early forties,
he had considered it his duty to reject civilisation, earnestly proclaiming that there was no other hope for the future of humanity but intensified study of its beginnings. That in itself, Father
Hilario insisted, was a doctrine which might lead to all kinds of aberration.

Don Felipe did not agree, but had no wish to argue with Authority. From the government point of view it was far more important that he should be able to reply to consuls and relatives that
Carver was safe and well, and that no unseemly expedition was required to look for him.

News of the man had filtered down from Indian to Indian, and Indian to trader, and trader to Don Felipe’s office. He had wandered about among the tribes who understood a little Spanish,
learning their languages and how to keep alive. He penetrated further and further into the vaporous gorges where the Amazon forests became the Andes, and settled down at last with the dying,
melancholy Icuari. Apparently he had found what he wanted, or they had.