The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories

by Geoffrey Household

  “Courage would have saved him,” announced the colonel superbly.

  “No!” shouted Shiravieff. “We’re all cowards, and the healthiest thing we can do is to express fear when we feel it.”

  “The fear of death—” began Romero.

  “I am not talking about the fear of death. It is not that. It is our horror of breaking a taboo that causes shock. Listen to me. Do either of you remember the Zweibergen case in 1926?”

  “The name’s familiar,” said Banning. “But I can’t just recall … was it a haunted village?”

  “I congratulate you on your healthy mind,” said Shiravieff ironically. “You can forget what you don’t want to remember.”

  He offered them cigars and lit one himself. Since he hardly ever smoked it calmed him immediately. His grey eyes twinkled as if to assure them that he shared their surprise at his irritation. Banning had never before realized, so he said, that the anti-smoke societies were right, that tobacco was a drug.

  “I was at Zweibergen that summer. I chose it because I wanted to be alone. I can only rest when I am alone,” began Shiravieff abruptly. “The eastern Carpathians were remote ten years ago—cut off from the tourists by too many frontiers. The Hungarian magnates who used to shoot the forests before the war had vanished, and their estates were sparsely settled. I didn’t expect any civilized company.

  “I was disappointed to find that a married couple had rented the old shooting box. They were obviously interesting, but I made no advances to them beyond passing the time of day whenever we met on the village street. He was English and she American—one of those delightful women who are wholly and typically American. No other country can fuse enough races to produce them. Her blood, I should guess, was mostly Slav. They thought me a surly fellow, but respected my evident desire for privacy—until the time when all of us in Zweibergen wanted listeners. Then the Vaughans asked me to dinner.

  “We talked nothing but commonplaces during the meal, which was, by the way, excellent. There were a joint of venison and some wild strawberries, I remember. We took our coffee on the lawn in front of the house, and sat for a moment in silence—the mountain silence—staring out across the valley. The pine forest, rising tier upon tier, was very black in the late twilight. White, isolated rocks were scattered through it. They looked as if they might move on at any minute—like the ghosts of great beasts pasturing upon the treetops. Then a dog howled on the alp above us. We all began talking at once. About the mystery, of course.

  “Two men had been missing in that forest for nearly a week. The first of them belonged to a little town about ten miles down the valley; he was returning after nightfall from a short climb in the mountains. He might have vanished into a snowdrift or ravine, for the paths were none too safe. There were no climbing clubs in that district to keep them up. But it seemed to be some less common accident that had overtaken him. He was out of the high peaks. A shepherd camping on one of the lower alps had exchanged a good-night with him, and watched him disappear among the trees on his way downwards. That was the last that had been seen or heard of him.

  “The other was one of the search party that had gone out on the following day. The man had been posted as a stop, while the rest beat the woods towards him. It was the last drive, and already dark. When the line came up to his stand he was not there.

  “Everybody suspected wolves. Since 1914 there had been no shooting over the game preserves, and animal life of all sorts was plentiful. But the wolves were not in pack, and the search parties did not find a trace of blood. There were no tracks to help. There was no sign of a struggle. Vaughan suggested that we were making a mystery out of nothing—probably the two men had become tired of domestic routine, and taken the opportunity to disappear. By now, he expected, they were on their way to the Argentine.

  “His cool dismissal of tragedy was inhuman. He sat there, tall, distant, and casually strong. His face was stamped ready-made out of that pleasant upper-class mould. Only his firm mouth and thin sensitive nostrils showed that he had any personality of his own. Kyra Vaughan looked at him scornfully.

  “‘Is that what you really think?’ she asked.

  “‘Why not?’ he answered. ‘If those men had been killed it must have been by something prowling about and waiting for its chance. And there isn’t such a thing.’

  “‘If you want to believe the men aren’t dead, believe it!’ Kyra said.

  “Vaughan’s theory that the men had disappeared of their own free will was, of course, absurd; but his wife’s sudden coldness to him seemed to me to be needlessly impatient. I understood when I knew them better. Vaughan—your reserved Englishman, Romero!—was covering up his thoughts and fears, and chose, quite unconsciously, to appear stupid rather than to show his anxiety. She recognized the insincerity without understanding its cause, and it made her angry.

  “They were a queer pair, those two; intelligent, cultured, and so interested in themselves and each other that they needed more than one life to satisfy their curiosity. She was a highly strung creature, with swift brown eyes and a slender, eager body that seemed to grow like a flower from the ground under her feet. And natural! I don’t mean she couldn’t act. She could—but when she did, it was deliberate. She was defenseless before others’ suffering and joy, and she didn’t try to hide it.

  “Lord! She used to live through enough emotions in one day to last her husband for a year!

  “Not that he was unemotional. Those two were very much alike, though you’d never have guessed it. But he was shy of tears and laughter, and he had armed his whole soul against them. To a casual observer he seemed the calmer of the two, but at bottom he was an extremist. He might have been a poet, a Saint Francis, a revolutionary. But was he? No! He was an Englishman. He knew he was in danger of being swayed by emotional ideas, of giving his life to them. And so? And so he balanced every idea with another, and secured peace for himself between the scales. She, of course, would always jump into one scale or the other. And he loved her for it. But his noncommittal attitudes got on her nerves.”

  “She could do no wrong in your eyes,” said Romero indignantly. His sympathies had been aroused on behalf of the unknown Englishman. He admired him.

  “I adored her,” said Shiravieff frankly. “Everybody did. She made one live more intensely. Don’t think I undervalued him, however. I couldn’t help seeing how his wheels went round, but I liked him thoroughly. He was a man you could trust, and good company as well. A man of action. What he did had little relation to the opinions he expressed.

  “Well, after that dinner with the Vaughans I had no more desire for a lonely holiday; so I did the next best thing, and took an active interest in everything that was going on. I heard all the gossip, for I was staying in the general clearinghouse, the village inn. In the evenings I often joined the district magistrate as he sat in the garden with a stein of beer in front of him and looked over the notes of the depositions which he had taken that day.

  “He was a very solid functionary—a good type of man for a case like that. A more imaginative person would have formed theories, found evidence to fit them, and only added to the mystery. He did not want to discuss the case. No, he had no fear of an indiscretion. It was simply that he had nothing to say, and was clearheaded enough to realize it. He admitted that he knew no more than the villagers whose depositions filled his portfolio. But he was ready to talk on any other subject—especially politics—and our long conversations gave me a reputation for profound wisdom among the villagers. Almost I had the standing of a public official.

  “So, when a third man disappeared, this time from Zweibergen itself, the mayor and the village constable came to me for instructions. It was the local grocer who was missing. He had climbed up through the forest in the hope of bagging a blackcock at dusk. In the morning the shop did not open. Only then was it known that he had never returned. A solitary shot had been heard about 10.30 pm,
when the grocer was presumably trudging homewards.

  “All I could do, pending the arrival of the magistrate, was to send out search parties. We quartered the forest, and examined every path. Vaughan and I, with one of the peasants, went up to my favorite place for blackcock. It was there, I thought, that the grocer would have gone. Then we inspected every foot of the route which he must have taken back to the village. Vaughan knew something about tracking. He was one of those surprising Englishmen whom you may know for years without realizing that once there were colored men in Africa or Burma or Borneo who knew him still better, and drove game for him, and acknowledged him as someone juster than their gods, but no more comprehensible.

  “We had covered some four miles when he surprised me by suddenly showing interest in the undergrowth. Up to then I had been fool enough to think that he was doing precisely nothing.

  “‘Someone has turned aside from the path here,’ he said. ‘He was in a hurry. I wonder why.’

  “A few yards from the path there was a white rock about thirty feet high. It was steep, but projecting ledges gave an easy way up. A hot spring at the foot of it bubbled out of a cavity hardly bigger than a fox’s earth. When Vaughan showed me the signs, I could see that the scrub which grew between the rocks and the path had been roughly pushed aside. But I pointed out that no one was likely to dash off the path through that thicket.

  “‘When you know you’re being followed, you like to have a clear space around you,’ Vaughan answered. ‘It would be comforting to be on top of that rock with a gun in your hands—if you got there in time. Let’s go up.’

  “The top was bare stone, with clumps of creeper and ivy growing from the crannies. Set back some three yards from the edge was a little tree, growing in a pocket of soil. One side of its base was shattered into slivers. It had received a full charge of shot at close quarters. The peasant crossed himself. He murmured:—

  “‘They say there’s always a tree between you and it.’

  “I asked him what ‘it’ was. He didn’t answer immediately, but played with his stick casually, and as if ashamed, until the naked steel point was in his hand. Then he muttered:—

  “‘The werewolf.’

  “Vaughan laughed and pointed to the shot marks six inches from the ground.

  “‘The werewolf must be a baby one, if it’s only as tall as that,’ he said. ‘No, the man’s gun went off as he fell. Perhaps he was followed too close as he scrambled up. About there is where his body would have fallen.’

  “He knelt down to examine the ground.

  “‘What’s that?’ he asked me. ‘If it’s blood, it has something else with it.’

  “There was only a tiny spot on the bare rock. I looked at it. It was undoubtedly brain tissue. I was surprised that there was no more of it. It must, I suppose, have come from a deep wound in the skull. Might have been made by an arrow, or a bird’s beak, or perhaps a tooth.

  “Vaughan slid down the rock, and prodded his stick into the sulphurous mud of the stream bed. Then he hunted about in the bushes like a dog.

  “‘There was no body dragged away in that direction,’ he said.

  “We examined the further side of the rock. It fell sheer, and seemed an impossible climb for man or beast. The edge was matted with growing things. I was ready to believe that Vaughan’s eyes could tell if anything had passed that way.

  “‘Not a sign!’ he said. ‘Where the devil has his body gone to?’

  “The three of us sat on the edge of the rock in silence. The spring bubbled and wept beneath, and the pines murmured above us. There was no need of a little particle of human substance, recognizable only to a physiologist’s eye, to tell us that we were on the scene of a kill. Imagination? Imagination is so often only a forgotten instinct. The man who ran up that rock wondered in his panic why he gave way to his imagination.

  “We found the magistrate in the village when we returned and reported our find to him.

  “‘Interesting! But what does it tell us?’ he said.

  “I pointed out that at least we knew the man was dead or dying.

  “‘There’s no certain proof. Show me his body. Show me any motive for killing him.’

  “Vaughan insisted that it was the work of an animal. The magistrate disagreed. If it were wolf, he said, we might have some difficulty in collecting the body, but none in finding it. And as for bear—well, they were so harmless that the idea was ridiculous.

  “Nobody believed in any material beast, for the whole countryside had been beaten. But tales were told in the village—the old tales. I should never have dreamed that those peasants accepted so many horrors as fact if I hadn’t heard those tales in the village inn. The odd thing is that I couldn’t say then, and I can’t say now, that they were altogether wrong. You should have seen the look in those men’s eyes as old Weiss, the game warden, told how time after time his grandfather had fired point-blank at a grey wolf whom he met in the woods at twilight. He had never killed it until he loaded his gun with silver. Then the wolf vanished after the shot, but Heinrich the cobbler was found dying in his house with a beaten silver dollar in his belly.

  “Josef Weiss, his son, who did most of the work on the preserves and was seldom seen in the village unless he came down to sell a joint or two of venison, was indignant with his father. He was a heavily built, sullen fellow, who had read a little. There’s nobody so intolerant of superstition as your half-educated man. Vaughan, of course, agreed with him—but then capped the villagers’ stories with such ghastly tales from native folklore and mediaeval literature that I couldn’t help seeing he had been brooding on the subject. The peasants took him seriously. They came and went in pairs. No one would step out into the night without a companion. Only the shepherd was unaffected. He didn’t disbelieve, but he was a mystic. He was used to passing to and fro under the trees at night.

  “‘You’ve got to be a part of those things, sir,’ he said to me, ‘then you’ll not be afraid of them. I don’t say a man can turn himself into a wolf,—the Blessed Virgin protect us!—but I know why he’d want to.’

  “That was most interesting.

  “‘I think I know too,’ I answered. ‘But what does it feel like?’

  “‘It feels as if the woods had got under your skin, and you want to walk wild and crouch at the knees.’

  “‘He’s perfectly right,’ said Vaughan convincingly.

  “That was the last straw for those peasants. They drew away from Vaughan, and two of them spat into the fire to avert his evil eye. He seemed to them much too familiar with the black arts.

  “‘How do you explain it?’ asked Vaughan, turning to me.

  “I told him it might have a dozen different causes, just as fear of the dark has. And physical hunger might also have something to do with it.

  “I think our modern psychology is inclined to give too much importance to sex. We forget that man is, or was, a fleet-footed hunting animal equipped with all the necessary instincts.

  “As soon as I mentioned hunger, there was a chorus of assent—though they really didn’t know what I or the shepherd or Vaughan was talking about. Most of those men had experienced extreme hunger. The innkeeper was reminded of a temporary famine during the war. The shepherd told us how he had once spent a week stuck on the face of a cliff before he was found. Josef Weiss, eager to get away from the supernatural, told his experiences as a prisoner of war in Russia. With his companions he had been forgotten behind the blank walls of a fortress while their guards engaged in revolution. Those poor devils had been reduced to very desperate straits indeed.

  “For a whole week Vaughan and I were out with the search parties day and night. Meanwhile Kyra wore herself out trying to comfort the womenfolk. They couldn’t help loving her—yet half suspected that she herself was at the bottom of the mystery. I don’t blame them. They couldn’t be expected to understand her intense s
pirituality. To them she was like a creature from another planet, fascinating and terrifying. Without claiming any supernatural powers for her, I’ve no doubt that Kyra could have told the past, present, and future of any of those villagers much more accurately than the traveling gypsies.

  “On our first day of rest I spent the afternoon with the Vaughans. He and I were refreshed by twelve hours’ sleep, and certain that we could hit on some new solution to the mystery that might be the right one. Kyra joined in the discussion. We went over the old theories again and again, but could make no progress.

  “‘We shall be forced to believe the tales they tell in the village,’ I said at last.

  “‘Why don’t you?’ asked Kyra Vaughan.

  “We both protested. Did she believe them, we asked.

  “‘I’m not sure,’ she answered. ‘What does it matter? But I know that evil has come to those men. Evil …’ she repeated.

  “We were startled. You smile, Romero, but you don’t realize how that atmosphere of the uncanny affected us.

  “Looking back on it, I see how right she was. Women—good Lord, they get hold of the spiritual significance of something, and we take them literally!

  “When she left us I asked Vaughan whether she really believed in the werewolf.

  “‘Not exactly,’ he explained. ‘What she means is that our logic isn’t getting us anywhere—that we ought to begin looking for something which, if it isn’t a werewolf, has the spirit of the werewolf. You see, even if she saw one, she would be no more worried than she is. The outward form of things impresses her so little.’

  “Vaughan appreciated his wife. He didn’t know what in the world she meant, but he knew that there was always sense in her parables, even if it took one a long time to make the connection between what she actually said and the way in which one would have expressed the same thing oneself. That, after all, is what understanding means.