The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (19 page)

“The cook came in. How could she know, she sobbed—she had noticed nothing—she was sure that what she had bought from Josef Weiss was really venison—she didn't think for a moment … Well, blessed are the simple!

“‘My God! Be quiet!' Kyra burst out. ‘You all of you think what you want to think. You all lie to yourselves and pretend and have no feelings!'

“I couldn't stand any more. I begged her not to torture herself and not to torture me. It was the right note. She took my hands and asked me to forgive her. Then the tears came. She cried, I think, till morning. At breakfast she had a wan smile for both of us, and I knew that she was out of danger—clear of the shock for good. They left for England the same day.

“I met them in Vienna two years ago, and they dined with me. We never mentioned Zweibergen. They still adored one another, and still quarreled. It was good to hear them talk and watch them feeling for each other's sympathy.

“Vaughan refused his meat at dinner, and said that he had become a vegetarian.

“‘Why?' I asked deliberately.

“He answered that he had recently had a nervous breakdown—could eat nothing, and had nearly died. He was all right now, he said; no trace of the illness remained but this distaste for meat … it had come over him quite suddenly … he could not think why.

“I tell you the man was absolutely serious. He could
not
think why. Shock had lain hidden in him for ten years, and then had claimed its penalty.”

“And you?” asked Banning. “How did you get clear of shock? You had to control your emotions at the time.”

“A fair question,” said Shiravieff. “I've been living under a suspended sentence. There have been days when I thought I should visit one of my colleagues and ask him to clean up the mess. If I could only have got the story out of my system, it would have helped a lot—but I couldn't bring myself to tell it.”

“You have just told it,” said Colonel Romero solemnly.

 

 

 

 

DIONYSUS AND THE PARD

 

 

 

 

HIS thumb was very obviously missing. You can know a man for weeks—if you are interested in his face—without spotting the absence of a finger, but you must miss the thumb of his right hand, especially when he is raising a glass at reasonably frequent intervals. A hand without a thumb is strangely animal; one looks for the missing talon on the underside of the wrist.

If you saw the back view of Dionysus Angelopoulos in any eastern Mediterranean port, you would at once put him down as an archaeologist or something cast up upon the beach by the Hellenic Travelers' Club. Judging by the tall, spare figure, slightly stooping, dressed in shaggy and loose-fitting Harris tweed, you expected a mild, pleasing, and peering countenance with perhaps a moustache or a little Chelseaish beard; but when he turned round he showed an olive face with thin jowls hanging, like those of an underfed bloodhound, on either side of a blue chin, and melancholy brown eyes of the type that men call empty and women liquid when they are hiding nothing but boredom.

It was for the sake of professional prestige that Mr. Angelopoulos modeled himself upon what he considered an Englishman ought to look like. He was the Near Eastern agent for a famous English firm whose name is familiar to few women but to all civilized men. He was responsible for shining palaces above and below ground from Alexandria to Ankara. Wherever there were Greek priests and Turkish coffee one was faced sooner or later by his trade-mark (a little below that of his Staffordshire principals):—

THE ALPH

DIONYSUS ANGELOPOULOS

Sanitary Engineer

He was a man of poetic imagination and had read his
Kubla Khan.
He was also a historian.

“Between myself and the fall of the Roman Empire,” he said when presenting me with his card, “there was nothing but indiscipline.”

We had met on board a tiny Greek passenger ship bound from the Piraeus to Beyrouth. The cramped quarters and the Odyssean good cheer had swiftly ripened friendship. That is to say, he accepted me as a listener and, when he permitted me to speak, took note of any colloquialisms I might use and added them forthwith to his astonishing vocabulary.

“It is obvious,” said Mr. Angelopoulos, “that the ancients righted themselves with more enthusiasm than we. Frenzy, no? Wine and poetry were the businesses of Dionysus, no? For Plato it was natural to see godliness in a righted man. To-day we see no godliness. We have changed. It is the fault of the religious. Dear me, what bastards!”

Considering he had just consumed two bottles of admirable claret made by the Jesuits on the slopes of Lebanon, he was unjust to Christianity. But Angelopoulos was a Wesleyan Methodist. It was a really original point of Anglicism, like the Harris tweeds. He had adapted his sect as well as his appearance to the respectable selling of sanitary earthenware.

“Godliness!” shouted Angelopoulos, raising the bottle with his right hand and placing an imaginary crown upon his head with his left. “Do I tell you how my thumb goes to pot?”

“Not yet. I was going to ask you.”

“All right. You are my friend. At this table with you I am sitting a living example of Hubris and Nemesis. I am proud I lose my thumb. Do you know La Brebis Egarée?”

“I've heard of her.”

There were few travelers on the Syrian shore who had not heard of the Lost Sheep—a pale, rolling Frenchwoman whose habit it was, when she felt specially obscene, to declare in the unctuous voice of a priest:—

“
Monsieur, je suis une brebis égarée!
”

Since, anyway, she looked like a gross white ewe, the nickname stuck. She was not the type to run mythical cargoes to Buenos Aires. She merely knew everybody. Whether you fell in love with a Kurdish princess in Smyrna or a German Jewess in Jerusalem, she could tell you what your chances were and whom you should approach.

“I tell you, old chappie,” said Angelopoulos, “I thought she was no more of this world. I did not know till that evening where she now abided—hung out, I should say, no?

“The Agent Socrates found for her a house in Athens, in the new suburb below Lycabettos. It is the last house in a little street that ends slap up against the cliff. The goings-on cannot be overlooked unless one should hang by his toes from the rocks. Only once was she taken at a loss. A Daphnis and Chloë were in the laurel bushes making love—how do you say that?”

I told him. He thanked me and, pulling from his pocket an expensive notebook bound in limp leather, made a formal entry in Greek and English.

“They were so happy they went right through the laurels and slid down the rocks into her back garden. A very proper place to find themselves, no?

“The Losted Sheep has a little restaurant upon the roof where the Agent Socrates invited me to lunch. He does not pay there, I think. A meal ticket, no? He is a very useful chap. I will give you his card.”

Mr. Angelopoulos searched through a portfolio full of badly printed cards, each of which set forth not only the name and address of its owner but his profession and any title to distinction he might have. He handed me:—

SOCRATES PANCRATIADES

Agent d'Affaires

Hypothèques, Locations, Immeubles

Vins en gros

Publiciste

whereupon I understood that if I bought wines, a building lot, or a political libel from Socrates Pancratiades I should be quoted a reasonable price and Mr. Angelopoulos would get one of the infinitesimal commissions by which the Near East lives and is made glad.

“We were two upon the roof,” went on Mr. Angelopoulos, “the Agent Socrates and I. The view was okay—the Acropolis, the Theseum, and to the south Hymettus. Rather! God's truth! We were content. And the Losted Sheep did us proud. The eats were top-notch. And we were served by two little Armenians—big-busted angulars you find seeing them dead upon the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Tartlets or Turtledoves! O estimable dead!

“Attend to me, old chappie. It was Athens in the spring, and the Losted Sheep's brandy was special reserve from the Achaea vineyard. You have seen the Achaea? Well, it is on the hills behind Patras. And there is the Gulf of Corinth at your feet with blue mountains beyond and the triremes skidding into the water at Naupactus. Splosh! No? And Aphrodite casts a veil about the swift ship. At that distance you cannot see oars and foam, but mist you see.”

“Triremes?” I asked, being a full bottle behind Mr. Angelopoulos.

“In the eye of the spirit, old chappie. I will give you a card. Then maybe they will let you buy the special reserve and you shall see triremes, remembering where the grapes grow.

“The Agent Socrates was soon tighted. I myself was tighted—but like an English gentleman. Or no. For an English gentleman always wants something. Barbarians! But I love you, my dear.”

“Hellas,” I said, realizing that this startling declaration was merely an apology, “is the mother of all nations.”

“Incontestably all right!” agreed Mr. Angelopoulos. “I was content; so you see I was not like an English gentleman. I wanted nothing. I was a god looking down upon Athens from the Losted Sheep's roof.

“She asked me if I would drink more brandy. I did not want more brandy. Then she asked me if I would make a visit to Fifi. I did not want to see Fifi. But the Agent Socrates was asleep and the Armenians were asleep, and the Losted Sheep chattered. She did not understand that it was Athens and sunset and I, Dionysus, have a poet's entrails. I did not want Fifi, but if Fifi were young and would stay naked and quiet upon my knees, she would be better than the talk of the Losted Sheep, no?

“So I said: ‘If your Fifi is beautiful, I will make her a visit. But if she is not beautiful, I will smell your fat, Brebis, while my priests eat you.' I was a god, you see.

“The Losted Sheep promised me that Fifi was more beautiful than any tailpiece I ever saw. So I went with her down from the roof and through the rendezvous house into the garden. In the side of Lycabettos was a cave with iron bars across the mouth.

“‘There is Fifi,' she said.

“I look. I see damn-all. A hole in the yellow rock and the shadows of the bushes where the Daphnis and Chloë entertained themselves. I do not know what to think. The Losted Sheep was a naughty one. She was maybe keeping a little savage behind the bars or a dame off her head with the bats. And then Fifi stretched herself and came to see who we were. She was a big leopard. Very beautiful, I bet you! The Losted Sheep had chattered but she had watched me. She knew I did not want human things to worship me.

“Herself she would not approach Fifi. The bars were wide, and Fifi could get her paws through and most of her head. But I, Dionysus, had no fear. I spoke to Fifi. I sat on the sill of the cage and tickled her behind the ears. She liked that. She rubbed herself on the bars and purred. Then she was gone. I could only see her eyes in the darkness at the back of the cave.

“I called to her and she came at me through the air. So long and slender as if a love should fly down from heaven into my embraces. The Losted Sheep shrieked like a losted soul. But I was not afraid. I never thought to be afraid. I was a jolly god. Fifi knew that I would not hurt her. I knew that she would not hurt me. It was mutual confidence, as in the sanitary or other business.

“She landed with all four feet together. I pulled her whiskers. She tapped my face with her paw to tell me she would play. So soft. So strong. I have felt nothing like it in my life. I shall never feel anything like it. They were created cats, you will remember, that man might give himself the pleasure of imagining that he caresses the tiger. To caress the tiger herself, that is for a god.

“I stroked her stomach. She purred. I stabbed into the fur my nails, up and down her backbone.” Mr. Angelopoulos held out his thumbless claw, crooking and contracting the fingers. “She was in ecstasy. There was a communism between me and Fifi. All she felt, I felt. It tickled me delicately from the point of my fingers to my kidneys. I knew when she had had enough, when her pleasure could not more be endured. It was the same for me. If she had touched me again with her paw, I should have bitten her.

“And so we parted. I wept. I knew I should never feel such godly pleasure again. And there was the Losted Sheep shrieking and moaning. I put out my hands to her to stroke her as I had stroked Fifi. She ran. And so I woke the Agent Socrates and we went away.”

Mr. Angelopoulos was silent, brooding over the splendor of his past divinity.

“But your thumb?” I asked.

“My thumb—yes, my dear, I had forgotten. Hubris and Nemesis, of which is sitting with you the sad example. A week later I was in Constantinople. I had businesses near the port and I was coming home at night from Galata to Pera. There are streets with steps, no? Little stairs with stinks. There was a street with cats on all the steps. I stopped to talk to them—I, Dionysus, the cat-man who is chums with leopards. But I forgot that I was sober. I was a man and no more a god. I was a danger to all beasts. There was a pail of ordures and a grey kitten eating fish heads from it. I stroked him and he bit me in the thumb. How should he know I did not want the fish heads? If I had been tighted and a god, he would have known I needed no fish heads.

“And so you see, old chappie, my thumb was tinctured red and then blue, and then it was green and white like marble. Thus I hospitalized myself, and they cut it off. Nemesis, old chappie, or the godly tit for tat, as we say in English.”

WATER OF ITURRIGORRI

THE
SS. Capitán Segarra
rested her five thousand tons of patch-painted black iron against the Bilbao dockside, heeling over wearily against the piles as the ebb tide slipped down river from under her. The fenders crackled and creaked. Capstans, spurting steam, chugged into their ragtime rhythm. The discharge gang swarmed over her, like hungry flies on an overweighted beast of burden.

She had to be emptied that day, for she carried a perishable cargo of crated Canary bananas. The dockers tore it out of her, racing against the fresh heat of the early morning. They were dressed so much alike that they gave the impression of a squad of soldiers: black
boina
on the head, wide red sash at the waist, blue trousers, and rope sandals. Only in their shirts was there variety; they were of many shades of blue, mauve, yellow, and green.

Apart from the bustle around the
Capitán Segarra
the riverside was still. It was a public holiday. The ships moored stem to stern along the wharf were dressed with flags. Here and there a watchman sat under the shade of a tarpaulin contentedly occupied with the rolling of one cigarette after another. The three
txistulari
marched along the waterfront—a drummer, a piper, and between them the leader of the band playing a drum with one hand and holding a pipe to his mouth with the other. The citizens, lying late in bed, were awakened by the gay Basque melodies which proclaimed a fiesta.

There was a halt in the discharge while the men below took the covers off another deck. Juan el Viruelas thrust a great hand into his sash and drew out tobacco and cigarette paper. He was a burly, pock-marked man with an expression of disgusted kindliness.

“Where's El Pirata?” he asked.

“I told him to come,” said the foreman.

“You told him? I spit on his mother! He's the man to lift these crates. Why isn't he here,
capataz?
”

“Who knows?” answered the foreman, turning away with the haughtiness of the petty official who has risen deservedly, but recently, from the ranks.

“He's still in the Sevillana,” said the oldest of the dockers.

He was nicknamed “El Cura”—the priest—from his hollow cheeks, his blue chin, and his body emaciated by the forced fasts of poverty. It was still useful, like an old rope worn thin.

“What the hell is he doing in the Sevillana?”

The Sevillana was a house of ill repute. A chorus of stevedores explained to Viruelas what El Pirata was doing there. Juan el Viruelas burst into a stream of profanity. It was interrupted by a sharp bellow from Evaristo, the crane mechanic, forty feet above their heads:—

“Stand clear!”

Viruelas leapt aside, and El Cura took up his post facing him. A sling of six crates thumped on to the ground between them. They became twin parts of a machine for loading porters, a four-handed engine which swung up each crate from the ground and lowered it precisely on to a human back bowed to receive it. As they bent down to lift the last of the sling, a hand loosened the sash round Viruelas's waist. When he heaved, the coils loosened and slid. He grabbed at his falling trousers, leaving one corner of the crate without support.

“Mind!” shouted El Cura.

Viruelas's hand stopped halfway and flashed back to the falling crate. His trousers fell around his ankles. The riverside shouted with laughter.

“I spit in the milk!” exclaimed Viruelas—it was his oath when he was really angry. “Who did that?”

“El Pirata! El Pirata!”

Juan el Viruelas lowered the crate to the waiting back, wound himself into his sash, and turned on El Pirata.

“You want me to kill you?” he stormed.

El Pirata swayed on his feet like the high round funnel of a tramp steamer in a gale. He was six and a half feet tall, broad in proportion, and lordly drunk. He was bred a deep-sea fisherman, not a laborer. Though of age to succeed his father in the command of the family launch and to raise a third generation of sons within the thick, sea-silencing walls of the family cottage, he had chosen to taste the freedom of the townsman. He came to Bilbao to scatter his wild oats more magnificently than they might be sown in Arminza; neither the single tavern nor the chirruping sisterly girls of that little village offered a field for the exuberant harvest he desired. Manual labor he detested. It was too easy and too poorly paid—an insult to his manhood. But there was no alternative. He could not read or write.

He was pure Basque, and his great head was rich with the marks of race: grey eyes, with dark, straight hair; a full-lipped, hearty mouth; a long hawk's nose whose chiseled fineness contrasted with the heavy curves of the high cheekbones. There was a kind of devil-may-care pride in the very flesh. His
boina
dripped gallantly over one ear. His sash was vivid crimson and wider than the ordinary. He wore gold rings in his ears and an orange shirt. Because of his dress they called him “El Pirata”—the Pirate.

“Come on!” said El Pirata. “Come on, Viruelas!”

“You're drunk!” remarked Viruelas disgustedly; he had no intention of fighting El Pirata, but had meant to satisfy himself by all the dramatic preliminaries.

“And what then, Juanito? And why aren't you drunk too?”

“Because he's a decent fellow,” interrupted the foreman.

“Is to-day a fiesta,
capataz?
” asked El Pirata, trying to get him into focus.

“
Si, señor,
” the foreman answered with exaggerated politeness—he too was feeling a grievance at having to work on a public holiday.

“Why?” asked El Pirata.

“How why?”

“Why's a fiesta?”

“God knows,” said the foreman.

“No,” replied El Pirata. “So's to get drunk the night before. That's why's a fiesta.”

He hiccuped wildly and slapped the foreman on the back.

“But I'm a man of my word, that's what I am! I say I'm coming to work. I come to work.”

“You can't work like that.”

“You, what do you know?” retorted El Pirata. “Stand out of the way there,
capataz!
”

El Pirata attacked the sling that had just descended. Without help he swung a two-hundred-pound crate on to his back, carried it away, and stacked it. He dealt with all six as quickly as Viruelas, El Cura, and the gang of porters. Then he pushed El Cura aside and took his place with Viruelas. The two grinned at one another. Evaristo stuck his oily head over the edge of his box to admire the two muscular backs whose pace he would follow.

“
Olé
El Pirata!” he cheered.

“
Olé!
” answered the gang.

There was no shade. The white sun smote upon the white concrete of the wharf. Particles of straw mingled with the dust that spurted up under the wheels of the loaded wagons; the dry mixture stung into the throats of the workers. Paint blistered on the
Capitán Segarra's
rails, and the distant piping of the
txistulari
died away in the heat. The men worked swiftly, savagely, thirstily. Then, a little after eleven:—

“Water of Iturrigorri! Water of Iturrigorri!”

A girl's voice called the words, rising and falling on the melancholy minor scale of a peddler's cry. Between the calls she blew a little horn which echoed along the deserted waterfront.

“La Rubia! It's La Rubia, I spit on her little body!” cried Viruelas affectionately. “Bless the girl! Who'd have thought she'd be here on a fiesta?”

“She's a comrade!” shouted El Pirata. “She's a worker! I say so! I, El Pirata!”

“You think a lot of her,” grumbled Viruelas, almost accusingly.

“I think a lot of—a lot of …” El Pirata paused. Whenever he stopped working, the scene of his labor whirled round him; he waited for it to be still. “… A lot of soli—solidarity!”

La Rubia came round the bend of the wharf into sight. She was seventeen, but no taller than a girl of ten. Yet all her fully ripened body was built to scale; she was a perfect miniature of a woman. La Rubia had only two garments—a blouse pulled tightly down into a skirt of sacking. Her fair hair was laden with dust; her feet and legs were bare; her face was dirty. A piquant dirty face it was: snub nose, grey Basque eyes, a high, wrinkled forehead, and a flower of a mouth that the effort of scraping a living out of the docks had hardened into a downward curve at the corners.

She was a virgin,—there wasn't a docker on the wharfs of Bilbao who had any doubt about it,—but apart from that she was much as the other waterfront women, haggard and strident workers continually with child, their own wombs serving them as an inspiration for rough humor. La Rubia was brazen and foul-mouthed as they, for she had walked the docks during half her short life; but, unlike them, she was accustomed to respect. The dockers had petted and protected her as a child. When she became a woman she demanded from them the same consideration; she enforced it with blistering language and a total lack of sentiment. Her power was easily held, for she was loved because of her trade. La Rubia was a water carrier.

She was the only water carrier in Bilbao. Indeed, she had invented the profession for and by herself. She supplied a demand which the numerous riverside taverns would not satisfy. For a
perra chica,
the smallest Spanish coin, she sold a pint of water with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of sherbet.

At her side walked a donkey towing a little cart to which was lashed a thirty-gallon barrel. The barrel had been filled at the spring of Iturrigorri. To the true Bilbaino that water was worth its price without the lemon; the very word was cooling—the very thought of Iturrigorri, where a full stream of icy water dashed out of the mountainside into a sunless pool overhung with ferns. La Rubia kept up the illusion. The barrel was decked with moss and greenery, and over it waved fronds of bracken freshly picked from the hillside. Between the donkey's ears was fastened a tall fern like an ostrich plume. The little beast resembled its mistress; it was diminutive, very dirty, and it would stand no nonsense.

She came abreast of the
Capitán Segarra
and blew her horn.

“
Agua de Iturrigorri! Agua de Iturrigorri!
”

“
Hola,
beautiful!” shouted El Pirata.

The daily competition of badinage between La Rubia and El Pirata was the delight of the wharf and of the contestants themselves.

“Whom are you calling beautiful, son?” asked La Rubia aggressively, drawing herself up to her full height of four feet six inches.

“He's drunk,” said Viruelas.

“Shall I tell you where he was last night?” asked El Cura.

“You, what do you know?” answered El Pirata, with a shade of anger in his favorite expression of disdain.

“Of course he's drunk,” La Rubia said. “Last night was the night before a fiesta.”

“She knows me, the little one!” El Pirata exclaimed delightedly. “How she knows me!”

La Rubia's cheeks flushed under the powder of dust.

“There are many like you,” she replied, implying that she took no particular interest in El Pirata.

She turned away to attend to the customers who crowded round her. Her hard fresh voice dominated the rattle of the discharge.

“No money, El Cura? Drink, man! Pay me next time! … You wish it were wine, Juanito? Water for thirst and wine for pleasure! … Mind your hands,
capataz!
They are walking where they shouldn't….
Hola,
El Pirata, why don't you come? Are you so drunk you can't see the barrel?”

“I see it,” said El Pirata. “I see it,
salerosa!
But I don't want a wash.”

He plunged a hairy hand into his shirt and searched among the objects next to his skin. He used his shirt as a general pocket. It hung out over his sash in lumps, each of which represented a personal possession. He drew out a bottle of beer and, closing his mouth on the neck, wrenched off the cap between his teeth. The gang shouted their admiration. They never tired of this trick.

“He's stronger than the devil!” El Cura exclaimed.

“
Quiá!
” said La Rubia contemptuously.

El Pirata felt vaguely that La Rubia was not impressed. He zigzagged toward the barrel, swept her into his arms, and held her above his head like a child, with his hands upon her hips.

“
Bruto! Bárbaro!
Let me go!”

She grabbed a wisp of black hair and wrenched it out of his scalp. Those of the gang who stood idling slouched swiftly on to El Pirata. The sullen wrath of El Cura deepened the wrinkles of his face. Viruelas bristled, and dropped his hand to the knife hilt that protruded from his sash.

El Pirata lowered La Rubia to the ground and looked at the circle of furious faces. He did not know why they were angry with him; he was at peace with everyone when he was drunk. His mind struggled to gain some concept of what was happening in the exterior world. One emotion chased another over his bewildered, mobile face. Viruelas pulled out his tobacco pouch instead of his knife; it was impossible to quarrel with a man like that.

At last El Pirata understood what he had done.

“It was a joke,” he said perplexedly. “A little joke, that's all! Pardon,
señorita!
”

He turned to the men around him.

“Look!” he said. “I didn't mean to touch her. I just picked her up. Just picked her up …”

He paused. El Pirata had no means of expressing fine distinctions. He knew that he had not meant to insult La Rubia, but it was hard to explain.

“… Picked her up like …” He sought desperately for an example.

He swayed toward the cart, slipped off the traces, and drew the donkey from the shafts. Then he put his shoulder under its belly and heaved. The donkey shot up in the air. A hand on each flank, he held the little beast above his head and grinned. He had explained himself—his mates would understand that it was just his desire for violent action which had made him lay hands on La Rubia. The donkey kicked wildly. A foreleg landed in the pit of El Pirata's stomach. He crumpled and dropped.