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Days of Your Fathers
Geoffrey Household
Contents
Kangaroo Loves Me
A Jew and an Irishman
Firefly
Keep Walking
Yours Obediently
Women’s Lib
Debt of Honour
Exiles
Red Carpet Treatment
The Singular Story of Mr Hackafree
Space Fiction
Estancia La Embajada
No Police in the Cemetery
Chaplain to the Embassy
Kangaroo Loves Me
He wore a bowler hat. There was a faded velvet collar on his dark-blue overcoat. His gaily striped tie was worn and greasy with years of constant use. His teeth were decayed. One knew at first sight that he was married to a woman much bigger than himself. He was obviously a Londoner.
He had no part in the New York crowd of the nineteen twenties. A townsman, yet racy of the soil, his place was in some pub of the London suburbs, where the landlord was a dog fancier and the local bookmaker had his sacred corner table and the best chair in the saloon bar. The odour that his memory most lovingly selected was a mixture of beer and iodine; so the pub had smelt whenever a new litter of prize terriers entered the world, and their little tails were being docked on the bar before a choice crowd of the landlord’s favourites. He had often held the pup; the dirty hands were very gentle. He had been a favourite of the bookmaker, too. Knew a bit about the gees, he did. His bandy legs suggested an early training as a stableboy, and indeed he had ridden a race or two, but lost his job before he was old enough to know when and how to drink.
He stood before one of the kangaroo enclosures in the Bronx Zoo. A female kangaroo lay on her side close to the wire, listening to him. She reclined in the curious manner of kangaroos: full length and leaning on one elbow, like a Roman lady at a banquet. Her grey underside was luxuriously displayed. With her spare paw she fanned the flies from her nose. She watched him with languorous interest, and waved her ears when he spoke to her.
The crowd, a cross-section of central Europe, loudmouthed, well fed, and feeding as they walked, passed by the kangaroos with little interest; they were bound for the capybara and the ant-eater, distorted creatures to which they had a certain affinity. When people joined him at the railing, he glanced sidelong at them like a fox. If they belonged to the usual run of visitors, he ducked his peaked head into his dirty butterfly collar and waited resignedly till they moved on; but if the intruder was a man, and alone, and likely to be sympathetic, he motioned to him to be still. He showed uncanny judgement in picking those whom he chose to trust. They seldom let him down, but watched, smiling, while he continued the interrupted conversation.
‘Ain’t yer a lil bleeder?’ he would say softly. ‘Like to be back in Austrylia, wouldn’t yer?’
His voice was a caress of curious vowel sounds. The kangaroo fanned herself, and listened with obvious delight.
His name was Breown – so he pronounced it, and his associates, to whom such immigrant names as Szczewc were easy because they never saw them written, took him at his own valuation of it. His wife was a roaring Irish-American, red-faced and bulging. She ran a small hand laundry of her own. He had the reputation of a good-for-nothing little Britisher, who would be on the breadline if not for her. It was true that she supported him; yet he would have willingly slaved for some colourless little woman of his own breed. Kate’s overpowering vitality sapped his self-respect. A dog would have been something to live for, even to work for, but he hadn’t the heart to bring up a pup in a New York tenement. He hungered for the monotonous rows of small, sordid houses on the outskirts of London, each with its own back garden where a dog could run loose and there was room for a hutch of ferrets or Belgian hares.
Kate was not unkind, but she was no object for tenderness. She was a mother to men; a brazen, foul-mouthed mother who liked them rebellious and hard-fisted. Her husband was neither. She treated him with a good-humoured contempt, and was unfaithful to him on the rare occasions when she aroused a passing desire. He was surrounded by contempt – even at Mike’s, where the salted, ethered beer kept up some semblance of a saloon, and he should have been in his element. But Mike’s customers knew little of dogs, and of horses less. Of heavy badinage they knew all there was to know, and he was their butt.
Until he discovered the Bronx Park, and the inner shrine which housed his slender and gentle kangaroo, he had no creature to appreciate the sensitiveness that was his birthright. Twice a week for more than a year he had visited her. On every occasion he risked the three-dollar fine and brought her a carrot. For nine months he threw it over the netting. Then on one triumphant day, and ever since, she had taken it from his hand. Only one carrot he gave her at each visit, for he respected the rights of the zoological society, and did not wish to interfere with her carefully balanced diet.
The kangaroo gave him an ambition. It was very long since he had had one. If you had asked him what he most wanted, he would have answered: ‘To get ’ome agyne.’ But that was a mere longing, like the hope of the pious to go to Heaven; the difficulties seemed so immense that he never even planned return to England. His ambition was more definite. It might be attained. It was a desire that sweetened the hour in bed before he slept, and took away the bitterness of waking.
One day he overcame his fear of ridicule, and demanded boldly that his desire be granted. He swallowed before speaking, and his scraggy Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
‘Lemme in the kyge with ’er,’ he begged the keeper.
‘Against the rules,’ answered the keeper shortly – he was not a little jealous of Mr Breown’s conquest. ‘And don’t you kid yourself that you’ve made friends with her. Those kangaroos are the timidest animals in the gardens.’
‘Cripes! Timidest animals in the gordens! Yer don’t say!’ he muttered, deeply impressed.
He slunk away, hurt and disappointed, but his pride in his achievement increased. He did not know he was proud. It took the form of increased pity for the kangaroo.
‘She ain’t got no call to be timid,’ he murmured indignantly. ‘’Oo’s going to ’urt ’er? That’s what I’d like ter know! ’Oo’s going to ’urt ’er?’
He understood that he would never persuade the keeper to let him into the cage. The result of his disappointment was an orgy of poisonous whisky that left him whiter and spottier than ever. But the orgy was not bad for him spiritually. It was followed by an intense need to assert himself, which led him to use his brain. His cockney cunning, long unemployed for want of any worthy cause, came back to him.
The municipal elections were not far off. He sat in Mike’s, drinking cautiously, and dribbling a nasty stream of cockney irony against the Democrats. His tongue was a keen weapon, but he had ceased to use it on personalities, for the sallies which would have set a London pub rocking with laughter were lost in Mike’s. His comments on the public administration found listeners; the style passed unheeded, but the eloquence alone won attention. The district leader, white slip under his waistcoat, gold watch-chain across his ample stomach, was forced to take notice of this attack. He asked Mr Breown what the Democrats could do for him. Mr Breown told him.
‘Aw, come on now! Talk plainly, can’t you?’
‘I tell yer that’s what I want,’ repeated the little man. ‘Get me into the kangaroo kyge, and I’ll shut me ’ead!’
Enough of his race remained in the Jew to enable him to recognise a spiritual need when he saw one. He agreed to do his
best.
It wasn’t easy; but the district leader, his interest stirred both by the oddness of Mr Breown’s ambition and by the difficulty of realising it, went far up in the hierarchy of Tammany Hall to get permission. Eventually he got it.
The Londoner dressed as if for his wedding. He was conscious of the same feeling of excitement. It was purer excitement, for he had been afraid of Kate. His marriage to her was a desperate effort to make the new country liveable – as if by changing his manner of life he could change his tastes. He had no fear at all of this second wedding. He would have liked to buy himself a new suit for the occasion. But the kangaroo knew the smell of his old suit. She might be nervous of a new smell. Better not risk it.
In the subway he was very still and tense. He hated the subway – chiefly because it wasn’t the London tube – and took a perverse pleasure in losing himself on it that he might add fuel to his grievance. He did not lose himself on this journey, though Mott Avenue offered him the only genuine chance in New York to do so.
He had stipulated that the interview was to take place after the public had left the gardens. He slipped through the gates a quarter of an hour before closing time. He walked unseeing past the yaks and the ostriches, but stopped to say a word to the emu. The bird came from Australia, the same country as his beloved.
Waiting for him by the kangaroo paddocks were the district leader, his little boy, and two friends. The district leader had a healthy human curiosity, sometimes offensive in its outward manifestations, but always kindly. Nevertheless, Mr Breown resented his presence. It seemed an intrusion on his privacy that made him flush with unreasoning anger. He comforted himself deliberately with the thought that for once he was the centre of interest.
‘Timidest animal in the gordens! Er-r, I’ll show ’em!’
But even the fame which he knew he would win did not compensate him. It was like making capital out of the timidity of a bride.
His audience greeted him with the gibes of crude good-fellowship, slapping him on the back, telling him he’d forgotten his whip and uniform, begging him to put his head in the kangaroo’s mouth. He stepped jauntily to the cage, acting, acting, with an absurd feeling of disloyalty to his kangaroo.
‘’Ere y’are, gen’l’men! Walk up and see Mr ’Arry Breown do ’is fymous act!’
The keeper unlocked the door.
‘She won’t let you touch her,’ he growled disgustedly. ‘I never saw a kangaroo yet that would let itself be handled.’
The little cockney entered the cage, and crept softly through the door in the partition that led to the paddock. The kangaroo shied away from him and sat on her hind legs, startled and ready for flight. She recognised him, but he was in the wrong place. It took her some time to reconcile the contradictory fact that a friend whose essence was outside-the-cage-ness was now inside it. He sat on the step and talked to her. After ten minutes of false starts, she hopped across the paddock and rested on her tail, looking at him. He stood up very slowly and made a step towards her. She trembled and her ears moved anxiously, but she didn’t stir. He talked to her until it was safe to take one more step. Once she was under the spell of his voice, he offered her the carrot. She hopped forward on hands and haunches with the ungainly motion of a kangaroo at ease and took it. While she was eating he talked to her, humourously and gently.
She lifted her head and waited for more carrot. Instead, the offering hand came nearer and touched her muzzle. She shied, but it wasn’t a determined shy. She tempted him again, ears pricked like the gracious ears of an antelope. He stroked her throat and scratched her behind the ears. She lay down on one elbow. Never hurrying, always talking, he stroked the brown back and the soft grey belly. The kangaroo fanned herself with coy detachment. At last she hopped away from him.
He left the paddock, happy as he had not been happy since childhood. He simply didn’t see the men who surrounded him. The keeper was generous and enthusiastic. The others, taking their cue from him, showed no less astonishment.
‘She sure loves you!’ exclaimed the keeper.
‘Loves me?’ repeated the little man, still dazed by his good fortune. ‘Loves me?’
The district leader guffawed.
‘And, oh boy! Is you in love with her!’
The gibe, innocently enough meant, crashed into the smooth and shining pool of his mind. He blushed, ducking his head within the butterfly collar, and walked rapidly and guiltily away.
He never went back to Kate or to the district. That was well for him. Yet, had he done so, he would have met with a new respect. They didn’t believe that he was really in love with his kangaroo.
A Jew and an Irishman
The liner plunged down the first of the great Biscay seas and met the second with a crash and shudder that set in motion all movable objects within her. The sigh of human beings, each in his prison of panelled teak or painted iron, sounded through the Alhaurin like a passing ghost, while a loose water-pipe, a chair sliding across the lounge, a falling shaving-brush and the crated locomotive at the bottom of No. 3 Hold mingled their sounds with a thousand others into one distant and all-pervasive groan.
Mr Flynn, finding his feet suddenly higher than his head, was inspired to raise them still higher and to kick a tattoo against the springs of the empty bunk above him.
‘Danno me boy’, he said loudly, ‘ye’ve been shipped to Buenos Aires like an old maid’s dream. Ye’re dishonoured for ever, Danno, and the little yellow man that bought your soul will be driving you to market seven days a week. Or would they be eating horse-flesh, now, in Brazil? God help you, you have the drink taken, and there’s none to listen to you!’
Danno Flynn heaved himself down his bunk until the small of his back was resting upon the foot of it. From this position he could reach the bell with his big toe; he rang it; propped up his heel on the rosette, crossed his legs and fell asleep again.
His precarious balance was disturbed by the opening of the stateroom door. Mr Flynn raised his knees to his chest, and a simultaneous and violent pitch of the ship rolled him head over heels so that he came to rest on all fours.
The steward seeing this tousled quadruped staring at him from the bunk, hesitated in surprise.
‘Wuff!’ barked Mr Flynn, joyously appreciating his own fantastic appearance. ‘Wuff, wuff!’
With his dark skin, his hair falling over his eyes, and the black and grey of his unshaven bristles and untidy moustache, he looked remarkably like an irate sheep-dog.
‘Is there anything you want, sir?’ stammered the steward, carefully keeping all but his head and one shoulder behind the door.
‘There is,’ said Flynn. ‘Will ye tell the Canine Defence League of Connemara that I am shipped to Buenos Aires?’
‘It says on your card that you’re going to Santos, sir.’
‘Do you have the time now, steward?’ asked Danno Flynn, seeing that conversation with this literal-minded Englishman would be difficult.
‘Eight o’clock – and the second day out from London, sir.’ answered the steward pointedly.
‘And where the devil are we?’
‘In the Bay.’
‘By God, if it’s a bay,’ said Danno, ‘the waves do be coming to dance in it from all the oceans.’
‘It’s the Bay of Biscay, sir,’ said the steward.
‘Then I’ll be having a beer.’
‘Sorry, sir, bar’s shut.’
‘Ah, to hell with you!’ said Danno, rolling backwards and pulling the sheets over his head.
At mid-day the Alhaurin was a dripping nucleus of solidity between the low grey sky above her and the grey seas that she rode. The squalls blew up from the west, driving hard and low into the promenade decks. The spray and rain swept the main deck so that the hatches between the first and third class were low islands in a miniature surf that broke against them with every roll of the ship. There was no one about save an occasional oil-skinned seaman or officer paddling grimly to duty. Under the lee of the smoking-room t
wo hardy Englishwomen were bundled up in chairs and regarding the Bay with well-bred contempt; they gave an impression of holding under their rugs Britannia’s shield and trident.
Mr Flynn lurched out of the smoking-room, attired in an old sweater and tweed trousers. He had neither shaved nor brushed his hair, and was wet, dirty and unsteady as the Alhaurin herself. He greeted the ladies loudly.
‘Good morning to you!’
‘A nice, fresh morning,’ answered the elder Britannia cheerfully.
‘It is, ma’am. But it’s a poor ship, God help us!’
‘Oh dear!’ said the younger. ‘Don’t you think she’s safe?’
‘Safe, is it? She’d float with the gas that’s in the bottled beer –’ Danno raised his hand to his mouth and produced a sound as sudden and alarming as a sergeant-major’s word of command ‘– and I ask you, ma’am, would ye have shipped to Buenos Aires and you knowing there’s not a barrel of beer on her?’
‘My dear,’ whispered the younger Britannia, ‘I’m afraid he’s a little – er –’
‘Good morning,’ said the elder Britannia severely.
Danno Flynn took a turn round the promenade deck and looked in through the windows of the lounge and writing-room. The Alhaurin was carrying two hundred first-class passengers to the Atlantic ports of South America, most of them enjoying a three weeks’ passage paid by an employer and without a worry except how to get the bar bill on to the expense account. But, under the circumstances, they were in no mood for conversation and glanced coldly at Danno’s dark, dripping and cheerful face. He gripped the rails of the companion in both hands and slid from B deck to C deck, from C deck to D deck, and from D deck into a puddle of water on the main deck. In the hope of human society he splashed across to the immigrant saloon.
The Alhaurin in that spring of 1939 was doing good business on the outward voyage. In the third-class was a happy group of Czech and Polish peasants, contracted to work and – though they naturally did not know it – to die in the Chaco, whose passages had also been paid, and an unhappy group of thirty Central European Jews who had paid their own. The saloon stank of oilcloth, stale cucumbers and sweat. Wooden benches ran along the walls, and opposite them were iron tables and uncompromising wooden chairs screwed severely into the floor.
Days of Your Fathers Page 1
