There was an exclamation from Lewis Banning.
“Ah—you remember now. I thought you would. The press reported that rumor as a fact, but there was no definite proof, I tell you.
“Vaughan begged me to keep it from his wife. I was to persuade her to go away at once before a breath of it could reach her. I was to tell her that he might have received internal injuries, and should be examined without delay. He himself believed the tale that was going round, but he was very conscious of his poise. I suspect that he was feeling a little proud of himself—proud that he was unaffected. But he dreaded the effect of the shock on his wife.
“We were too late. The cook had caught the prevailing fever, and told that unpleasant rumor to Kyra. She ran to her husband, deadly pale, desperate, instinctively seeking protection against the blow. He could protect himself, and would have given his life to be able to protect her. He tried, but only gave her words and more words. He explained that looking at the affair calmly it didn’t matter; that no one could have known; that the best thing was to forget it; and so on. It was absurd. As if anyone who believed what was being said could look at the affair calmly!
“Sentiments of that kind were no comfort to his wife. She expected him to show his horror, not to isolate himself as if he had shut down a lid, not to leave her spiritually alone. She cried out at him that he had no feeling and rushed to her room. Perhaps I should have given her a sedative, but I didn’t. I knew that the sooner she had it out with herself, the better, and that her mind was healthy enough to stand it.
“I said so to Vaughan, but he did not understand. Emotion, he thought, was dangerous. It mustn’t be let loose. He wanted to tell her again not to ‘worry.’ He didn’t see that he was the only person within ten miles who wasn’t ‘worried.’
“She came down later. She spoke to Vaughan scornfully, coldly, as if she had found him unfaithful to her. She said to him:—
“‘I can’t see the woman again. Tell her to go, will you?’
“She meant the cook. Vaughan challenged her. He was just obstinately logical and fair.
“‘It’s not her fault,’ he said. ‘She’s an ignorant woman, not an anatomist. We’ll call her in, and you’ll see how unjust you are.’
“‘Oh no!’ she cried—and then checked herself.
“‘Send for her then!’ she said.
“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 wa
s 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.
The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories Page 16
