The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories

by Geoffrey Household

  “Now I know why you went slumming! Pretty, eh?” said the doctor, digging Danno in the ribs.

  “You should not be looking at her, Doctor,” said Danno severely, “and her da dying on you.”

  “We’ll have him up this very afternoon,” Dr. Pulberry answered, rubbing his hands. “Sedatives won’t do it, so we’ll use shock. Done it before! Always works! Come down with me about four o’clock and I’ll show you!”

  “Shock, is it?” asked Danno gloomily. “If he’s a decent man, ’twould be enough for him to see his daughter parading herself the way an actress would not be doing in the moving pictures, and she paid a hundred pound a week for it.”

  At four o’clock Danno accompanied the doctor into the maze of passageways below the third-class deck. They pushed past motionless peasant women, staring blankly at nothing, and cannoned off bands of Czech, Polish, and Rumanian children pointing fingers at each other round corners and shouting their international word—“Stikummup!”

  Dr. Pulberry hammered smartly on a cabin door, and walked straight in. Mr. Feitel lay in a narrow lower berth, his shoulders imprisoned between the white rail of the bunk and the cheerless, bolt-studded iron of the white bulkhead. His face was sunken and grey, and he was breathing deeply as if the tiny cabin contained all the air that he could ever reach. Berta sprang up from the opposite bunk and faced the doctor challengingly, the distrust and anxiety of her face changing, as soon as she saw Danno Flynn, to an expressionless mask in which her large eyes burned with anger.

  “Captain wants you at once!” said Dr. Pulberry roughly to Mr. Feitel. “Up with you!”

  Berta translated to her father, who struggled painfully and raised himself on one elbow.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What have we done?”

  “No business of mine,” said the doctor briskly. “You’re not allowed to land. Wireless from the Brazilian Government—and I expect you know why.”

  Berta’s voice as she poured out the Yiddish translation to her father was like the cry of a whole people going up to heaven against injustice.

  “On deck in ten minutes!” said the doctor, unmoved. “Come on, Flynn!”

  He left the cabin brusquely. Danno remained behind watching the sick man, who sat up, swayed, and fell back again on to the pillow.

  “Whatever you want to let him alone,” said Berta slowly, as if every syllable were a tense muscular act, “I will give you. Do you understand?”

  “I should not be mixing meself in this,” murmured Danno thoughtfully, feeling Mr. Feitel’s pulse, “but if he goes on deck ’twill be the death of him.”

  “Leave him alone!” Berta cried. “Don’t you believe me? I will come to you when you like.”

  Danno glared at her, suddenly aware of her presence.

  “And are you not ashamed to be talking so with your da on his deathbed?” he roared. “You will stand up now and do what I tell you. You will go to the cook and turn your rolling eyes on him and ask him for an ounce of sugar and a teaspoonful of baking powder.”

  “What do you mean? You’re no doctor!”

  “I am in a manner of speaking, though ’tis sheep I treat the most of.”

  “Sheep?”

  “Sure, if you saw one stand on his hind legs,” shouted Danno, exasperated by her tone, “you would know ’tis only human like the rest of us. Be off with you now!”

  “I will not. He shall be on deck if I carry him on my back,” she said. “I know your sort. You only want a chance to say we were disobedient. Your sheep will go where they are told. They have learned that much.”

  “The devil is in the girl!” said Danno. “Now will ye listen? The doctor is after telling you your da must see the captain. ’Tis a lie—though, bejabers, the shock would have cured him if it were the seasickness he had! But ’tis not the sea—’tis his stomach.”

  “What do you know?” she asked contemptuously.

  “Am I not telling you I am a veterinary surgeon and the best sheep doctor in all Eire? And I know that if it were a sheep or a pig or a horse or a saint from heaven, and he seasick, he would be breathing fast and slow and jerky as if the soul of him were in torment, and not hungry for air and breathing deep, as is your da. ’Tis what they call acidosis he has, and though ’twas the sea that started it, ’tis not the sea any longer nor the fear of the sea that turns his stomach.”

  Berta stared at him, unable to take in all he said, unable as yet to escape from her fantastic vision of him, but aware that she was in the presence of kindliness and knowledge. Huge tears of relief spilled silently on to her cheeks.

  “Sure, if she hasn’t murder in her eyes, ’tis crying they are! Will ye go to the cook now,” he coaxed her, patting her hand, “and bring me a teaspoonful of baking powder and an ounce of sugar?”

  Berta nodded, and vanished down the passage. Meanwhile Danno soothed, groomed, and massaged her father as if he had been a thoroughbred recovering from severe fright—which indeed he was. The old man thanked him in scraps of broken English and, when Berta returned with the remedy, took it trustfully and in absolute faith that it was going to stay down.

  “Now keep him quiet, and he’ll be better before night,” said Danno. “I will tell the doctor ’twas the shock that did it, and he will be speaking of his cure from one end of the ship to the other, and that pleased with himself he will order special food for your da.”

  “But you’ll come and see him?” asked Berta anxiously.

  “You will have him on deck under the awnings tomorrow afternoon, and I will see him then. And I will send you one of them canvas chairs for him,” added Danno dryly, “so he shall not be sprawling on the hatches and the doctor and the proud English turning their opera glasses on him and jiggling their feet on the planks.”

  By nightfall Mr. Feitel’s condition had shown a marked improvement. A breakfast of eggs was followed by a lunch of chicken,—obtained through Danno’s outrageous flattery of the doctor,—and at five o’clock he was sitting in a deck chair, watching the flying fishes in the strip of blue sky and blue water between the awning and the rail, and thankful for his return to so brilliant and curious a world.

  A group of his compatriots gathered round him; they were oddly out of place in the South Atlantic, for they had no clothes but those in which they had left their cities, and they all wore cloth caps bought in the firm belief that a sea voyage demanded them. They seemed to have just stepped out of an office to visit a shop across the road.

  “All the same,” said the chess player, now determined to be a cynic, “he is here to watch us.”

  “To watch over us,” Mr. Feitel corrected him dreamily. “To watch over us.”

  “He has nothing to do with immigration,” added Berta indignantly.

  “But what did he come here for?” insisted the fat man. “Would you come down from the first class for nothing? No! Would I? No! Would Berta? No! Why did he come here? Tell me that!”

  He put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and walked two steps away and two steps back. For him, said his serious expression, there was logic, nothing but logic.

  “I do not know,” Berta answered truthfully.

  She was convinced, however, that she did know why he had returned again and again. She blushed. Mr. Feitel saw her embarrassment unmoved. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that, while his friends commiserated with him on his daughter’s thinness, she was devastatingly attractive to the Gentiles.

  “What is he?” he asked.

  “He doctors animals,” said Berta faintly.

  “Animals! Do animals have doctors? What kind of animals?” exploded the fat man incredulously.

  “Sheep,” answered Berta, waiting for the outburst of comment.

  It came. When the hands had ceased to wave and the mouths to gabble, Mr. Feitel murmured:—

  “He doctors sheep? So gentle
, so humble that even sheep he cares for? My daughter, the man should be a Jew.”

  “He is not,” said Berta.

  “In the eyes of God he has a Jewish heart. Has any one of you seen hatred in him? Has he ever shown that he knows a difference between Jew and Gentile?”

  “No,” the fat man admitted. “But he is a fool.”

  “You have well said the man is a fool. To such God allows greatness, and from such shall come deliverance,” said Mr. Feitel.

  Danno Flynn appeared at the after end of the promenade deck. There was no immediate evidence of greatness in him, nor did he descend to them in a manner befitting the deliverer of Israel, for he slid down the rail of the ladder to the main deck; but he undeniably had an air, and he was not in the least put out by the eyes that, almost reverently, gazed at him.

  “Sure and I knew me old cock would be on deck!” he exclaimed.

  He seemed to slap Mr. Feitel on the back, but his patient felt the hand alight firmly, gently, giving strength.

  The chess player moved his lips, rehearsing a speech that he had just composed in his school English; he considered that there were still too many mysteries unsolved.

  “Pardon me, noble Mr. Doctor, will you have the kindness to tell me please whether it is your purpose to practise in Brazil?”

  “’Tis not me purpose, ’tis the curse that is on me,” answered Danno. “For, God help me, I am the biggest fool in Eire!”

  Mr. Feitel smiled benignly and began to talk to himself in a soft singsong. Danno looked at him anxiously.

  “Now be off with you!” he said, waving his arms at the little group as if they had been an obstinate herd of sheep. “And let you not be troubling his reverence with your foreign talk and him with no strength to listen to his own!”

  Mr. Feitel’s friends hastily moved on. The deck had become for them a street with a person in authority to prohibit loitering.

  Berta laughed.

  “He is not lightheaded,” she said. “He is praying for you.”

  “’Tis very civil,” Danno answered. “But he should be sleeping now.”

  He stood behind the old gentleman’s chair and gently stroked the prominent veins of his temples. In two minutes Mr. Feitel was asleep.

  “Tell me,” she asked, “do you know that we are Jews?”

  “Jews, is it?” answered Danno with cordial surprise. “Then ’tis no great wonder they are saying the Irish are the thirteenth tribe. Or is it the twelfth? Be God, I am miscounting the tribes and holy apostles! All I know, ’tis the thirteenth that’s unlucky.”

  “What is the curse that is on you? Did something happen to you too to make you leave your country?”

  There was no longer any tone of cross-examination in her voice; she asked with the trust of a child that she would be answered.

  “’Twas like this, Biddy,” replied Danno. “A little yellow man came to me house, and he telling me that he was spending a great fortune to raise sheep on the far mountains of Brazil, and begging me to work with him—for if the sheep didn’t die on him, ’twas only because the ewes were barren.

  “‘I will not,’ says I, ‘for what would I be doing in India?’ ‘’Tis not India,’ he says, ‘’tis America.’ ‘Then do you go to my uncle,’ says I, ‘who is in Wyoming these thirty years and as good a man with the sheep as I am meself.’ So he told me ’twas South America and pressed a thousand pound into me hand, but I would not take it.

  “‘Will ye come so far as Dublin with me, Mr. Flynn?’ he asks. ‘I will that,’ I said—for he was a friendly little yellow man and free with his money, God forgive him! And when we had drunk three parts of the whiskey in Dublin, he would have me come to London and drink French wines. And how many days we were in London I misremember, but I signed me name on a paper and when the drink passed from me I found meself in a first-class cabin on the raging ocean, with all the money in the world in me pocket and a two-year contract.”

  “But that is terrible! It’s criminal!” she cried, all her pity for the exiled welling up.

  “It was surely!” he laughed. “But ’tis no fool that I am after all, for would not a man be glad to leave his country for a sight of your sweet face?”

  “Then we’ll comfort each other, Daniel,” she said frankly, linking her arm in his. “There is only a week more before we land, but it shall be a happy week for us.”

  “Let you not be talking so, Biddy!” cried Danno, much shocked by the nearness of her and the openness of her speech. “Would I be telling you of your eyes and your hair and the shape of you like a young tree and it heavy with fruit? And would I be kissing you in dark places till I was drunk with the scent of you and the white skin that is of a queen surely, and would I let you go then, and you the world’s wonder and the love of my heart? I will not be parting from you and his reverence, I tell you. It’s a poor bargain I have to offer you, with no country of my own and no women to greet you in the street, saying, ‘There goes the beauty that is the wife of Danno Flynn.’ But let you have patience for the two years, and you will not be lonely.”

  “I will not, surely,” she answered, unconsciously falling into the lilt of his speech. “But if I do not go with you I shall be lonely to the end of my days, and the women crying for pity of me.”

  WOMEN ON WHEELS

  WE were discussing the failure of the General Strike of 1926, and had come to the usual and woolly conclusion that it was beaten by the ability of the public to run the essential services for themselves.

  “No!” said Bill. “I was of the public, and I recognize my incompetence. So would you, if you had ever seen a big 4–6–2 Great Western locomotive stopped three yards from the east-bound tunnel in Earl’s Court station.”

  I did see it. There must have been thousands of Londoners who saw it. In a station meant for District trains skittering like mice from one hole to another was this great green monster which had never moved without space and due ceremony, immobilized, sweating steam, and obviously terrified. The tunnel into which it would have been driven, had the six-foot driving wheels made half a revolution more, was of less height than the boiler.

  “Anarchy!” Bill went on. “The skilled workers couldn’t stand it any more than a trained nurse can bear to see an ignorant mother pick the baby up wrong way round. They had to interfere or bust. It wasn’t our ability that beat them; it was their horror at our inability.”

  Somebody said that paradox had no place in serious argument, and that the waiter was waiting. Bill pointed out that he had already ordered a pink gin, and that since he was a papist,—as it pleased him to call it,—paradox was permitted to him. Had he been a Methodist, he said, we should have been slightly shocked at any sign of wit. Which proved the respect of the English for established rights. Which led to the necessity for caps with gold braid on them. Which brought us to the Great Western locomotive in Earl’s Court station.

  “I was the guard of that train,” said Bill. “I had no feeling one way or the other about the ethics of the confounded strike, but I hate specialists; I fear and resent them, whether they are bankers or biologists or skilled tradesmen. So naturally I was on the side of the non-specialists—the public, that is. I volunteered to be a porter, but when I ran into Jimmy Fell on Paddington station he appointed me his guard.

  “Jimmy was a constructional engineer on leave from the wilds of Africa. He had been working with black labor a year or two longer than was good for him, and felt imperial; in fact, he once left me behind in the Exeter station buffet, and I only caught my own train because they ran him into the engine sheds by mistake.

  “He had driven all kinds of locomotives in his time, so the Great Western gave him a main-line express and the County of London to pull it. He treated her as a pet car, and when he wasn’t on the footplate he was wandering about inside her guts like Jonah, with an oilcan. I call it an express, but all the signals were permanent
ly at danger, and we used to feel our way down to Devon from block to block, stopping to argue with other amateur railwaymen whenever we found ourselves on a line where we had no right to be.

  “After ten days or so of this, the Company chose us to take an excursion to Pangbourne. Yes, they actually wasted time on an excursion. It was a gesture, you see. Old Flugenheim always gave the salesladies of Nelson, Gordon and Company an outing in the same week of June; and Flugenheim, being both Nelson and Gordon and something in the City as well, was determined upon Business as Usual. The nation was paralyzed, but he wouldn’t disappoint his ‘girlies,’ as he called them.

  “Well, the Great Western were moved by this touching faith in their organization, so they agreed to the excursion. Britain, you see, with her Back to the Wall. They cleared the line to Pangbourne, and at 9.30 am we pulled out of Paddington with Jimmy Fell at the levers and five coachloads of chattering females between myself and him. Flugenheim and his managers naturally went by car; their lives were of value.

  “We reached Pangbourne about midday—our average of twenty-five miles an hour was excellent considering that Jimmy had climbed down twice to see which way the points were set, and had been hit by half a brick that was meant for the fireman. We never had the slightest trouble with the strikers,—we were free entertainment for dull days,—but the fireman thought he was entitled to call them names which would earn him half a brick at any time. He was a sort of Fascist, or whatever they labeled themselves in those days, and all out to smash the reds. In private life he sold silk stockings from door to door, and he was hungry for any job that needed more muscle but just as little brain. He used to splash himself with oil and coal dust to look like a real fireman. He didn’t. You’d have taken him for a traveling prize fighter who had been sleeping in a garage pit.