The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  I am quite well, and I am not in love—at least not in the usual sense. I am remaining here for a few days before I continue my journey up the coast to join Papa in Panama. I have of course sent a telegram to him, too. What has happened is nearly unbelievable.

  You remember the untidy foreigner who came on board singing at Valparaiso when you were saying good-bye to me, and saluted us all with such exaggerated politeness that we thought he must be drunk. He and I turned out to be the only passengers. He was travelling on the Naarden only as far as Peru, so I had no reason to discourage him. Besides, there was no one else to talk to.

  The German captain and his officers were appallingly formal. I would not like to marry a German; it would be difficult to call him by his Christian name. And the officers would stare at my face, which I hate. I can always tell what people are like by the way they look at me. Those who are truly kind forget all about my disfigurement after the first few minutes. I do not mean that they try to forget. They really do. Are you surprised at my mentioning what we never speak of?

  The tall foreigner was an Englishman, and of tradition! Our grandfathers always said they were mad, but people of our generation have found them most dull and respectable. Now I know what our grandfathers meant.

  His name was unpronounceable. It was written Harborough-Jones. He said that he was once a major in the Horse Guards of the Queen of England, but that he found it ridiculous to use the title of rank while travelling in jams and jellies.

  Jams and jellies! You would expect them to be sold by a fat Greek from Argentina, not a major in an aristocratic regiment! I could not tell what he really was, and it would have been useless to press him for an answer. He amused himself by making the wildest fantasies sound like truth. Even when sober, his imagination was out of control.

  He spoke Spanish with a queer, clipped accent and tremendous gusto. I think our language and our Latin-American civilisation intoxicated him as much as the glass which was too frequently in his hand. He told me that when he spoke English he was quite a different person and of the utmost propriety.

  ‘I have no sympathy for Major Francis Harborough-Jones,’ he said. ‘The man I like is Don Francisco Jones y Harborough.’

  You will see that he had the mixture of nobility and craziness which we all adore. He behaved to me at once as if I were a daughter from whom he had long been absent. Mama will think that an impertinence. But I liked it. I am so shy with strangers. With him I could be gay as I only dare to be at home. He made me feel completely irresponsible, as if nothing in life mattered but to enjoy it. I forgot my loneliness and that doctors could not help me without leaving a scar as hideous as what they removed. If he had been twenty years younger I should have fallen desperately in love.

  On the last evening before the ship reached Lima, where Don Francisco was to disembark, we were sitting together as usual on deck. I will give you his own words as exactly as I can remember them, and you must fancy that you are listening to a play. My own deep voice you can imagine; his was always loud and kind and laughing. Think of Papa telling us stories in bed, and how there was nothing we could believe but his affection.

  ‘I should like to give a party tomorrow in the ship’s lounge,’ he said, ‘if I can get the permission of the other passenger and the purser.’

  I replied that of course he had my permission, and asked if the party was for his customers.

  ‘Buy, buy my jams and jellies!’ he called like a street vendor. ‘Very cheap, my jams and jellies!’

  ‘But calm, Don Francisco!’ I begged him.

  ‘Yes, my daughter. I shall not leave out the customers. But I want the President of the Republic if he will come. The generals and the admirals and all the Children of the Sun! What joy, what joy is Spanish America!’

  ‘Would it not be better to give the party on shore?’

  ‘Dearest—’ he used such words most improperly, but as he was a foreigner I forgave him, ‘—dearest, it would indeed! But the fact is that in Peru I cannot give a party because I am not allowed to pay for anything.’

  That must, I thought, be due to some misunderstanding. The Peruvians are no more hospitable than the rest of us. We all entertain a foreign visitor as well and as long as we can; but eventually—at any rate in commercial circles—he is allowed to pay.

  I asked him if he would let me suggest some delicate way of returning hospitality. He insisted that it was utterly impossible. And off he went again upon his love for our Americas, as eloquently as any politician upon Independence Day. The long glass at his side was frequently refilled by the steward, who had orders to watch it and take it away when it was empty. He called that being refuelled in the air.

  I refused to have my curiosity deflected.

  ‘But why, Don Francisco,’ I persisted, ‘are you not allowed to pay for anything in Peru?’

  ‘Because, little one,’ he answered superbly, ‘I am descended from the conqueror Pizarro and the daughter of the Inca Atahualppa.’

  ‘So at last I know why you wear a bath towel instead of trousers,’ I replied, pretending to believe him and throwing back the ball.

  Such was his usual dress in the morning—a bath towel and an old tweed coat. The first time he appeared in my presence like that I intended to show myself a little cold, but a moment later I was giggling childishly at the look the captain gave him.

  We went to dinner—he at the officers’ table, and I, by preference, alone. When I had finished, I waited on deck for him. It was his habit to sit on for half an hour over his wine, amusing himself if none of the officers remained to amuse him. That was, he said, an English ceremony.

  As it was our last evening and still he did not come, I went down to my cabin for a book, but he was not in the saloon. On my return, as I passed the ship’s office, I saw the purser standing in the doorway and pounding his fist into his hand with one of those clumsy gestures of northerners who do not know by nature how to gesticulate. Don Francisco, who was opposite him in the passage, must have been much angrier than he appeared; but he only smiled down at the purser and swayed a little at the knees.

  The purser was shouting in English. He was a man without manners, as I think the Nazis must have been—nothing but a white uniform buttoned too tightly over bad temper. He had twice been rude to me. You will not believe it, but he made me declare that my disfigurement was not infectious. He resented the presence of a single woman among males.

  There is no dignity in the English language when men are excited. The Purser was swallowing hard, and croaking:

  ‘Jam, jam, ja-a-am! Jam, jam, ja-a-am! Here you will not sell your ja-a-am! No and no! I forbid you to give your party. The Naarden is a German ship, not a grocery shop!’

  Naturally I passed them as quickly as I could, and did not watch until I was sure they could not see me. Don Francisco was being very mischievous. Evidently he had given up all hope of obtaining his request. He had no interest at all in calming the purser. He smiled and weaved his tall body over him like a snake above a fat frog. He patted him on the shoulder and warned him that he should be careful, that after a heavy dinner in the tropics a man of his build might easily have a stroke. And when the purser began to insult the English in general, he waved him back into the office with the gesture of one who shoos away a fly.

  I was sitting in the darkness of the boat deck when Don Francisco joined me. After we had talked a little while, he said to me that curiosity killed the cat. The proverbs of his people are coarser than our own.

  I answered with dignity that if it had been I who wished to talk to the purser, I should not have approached him at that hour. Everyone knew that he liked to shut himself up in his office after his over-solid evening meal. He even had a notice of Verboten on his door.

  Don Francisco admitted humbly that I was perfectly right, and that indeed the purser, unlike the majority of men, was less approachable after dinner than before. For that reason he himself had been particularly tactful, he said, and had knocked his forehe
ad three times upon the purser’s counter and kissed the ground.

  And then, at last permitting himself some slight loss of self-control, he began to curse the purser for an unbelieving, unimaginative Kraut—which means, I think, a cabbage. And after swearing like a gaucho, though most delicately changing the words, he translated some English oaths. At any rate they were quite unlike our own and far less reasonable. It is permissible to guess at the parentage of someone who has insulted you, but you cannot anticipate the fate of his soul.

  ‘And what astonishes me,’ he declared, ‘is that I damn the man so thoroughly and he is none the worse.’

  ‘Thank God for his mercies!’ I answered.

  He lay back in his chair and laughed.

  ‘Well, it is true one would have to be careful. To phrase a curse which is meant so that it can be distinguished from a curse which is not—I do not know how my ancestors managed it.’

  ‘Pizarro? Or his Inca princess?’ I asked—for you know how I adore the ridiculous, and I wanted him to recover his temper and entertain me.

  ‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘From them I am descended on my mother’s side. On my father’s side we were always witches. Life is like that. To the rich comes more money. Upon the improbable it pours improbabilities. In my club there is a man who has the hereditary right to undress the bishop of his diocese and wash him in the River Thames. In winter he trains elephants. Why not? To him it is all perfectly natural.’

  One’s breath is taken away by such flights of fancy. All I could find to say was that the bishop must be glad his friend had another occupation in winter.

  Don Francisco answered that the bishop could be washed on demand, whatever the weather, and that I must not put any faith in the common illusion that the English were influenced by common sense. They always preferred the fantastic to the practical.

  ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘in England everything that has ever existed still exists. That is the kind of people we are. There was once a chief witch in Hereford. Therefore there is still a chief witch in Hereford. And I, who have the honour to be at your feet, am he.’

  ‘So it is due to your charms that we buy the Hereford cattle?’

  ‘Not forgetting the jams and jellies.’

  ‘And we part tomorrow and you have never shown me yourself flying upon a broomstick.’

  ‘For that,’ he said, ‘one needs a familiar spirit—if it has ever been done, which I doubt.’

  ‘Dear Don Francisco, is there any spirit which is unfamiliar to you?’

  He kissed my hand. It always delighted him when I enjoyed this sort of tennis with words, though I myself would wonder afterwards if I had not been too bitter.

  ‘Have you never heard that the soul must be fed as well as the body?’ he asked. ‘And, believe me, the sustenance it prefers is alcohol in moderation. Far better that than to take oneself too seriously and always be whispering Down, Fido! to something which would be happier in hell!’

  ‘And without Fido?’ I laughed. ‘Nothing to show me? Nothing at all?’

  ‘I am not in practice,’ he replied. ‘I am a traditional figurehead—a mere administrator. Old women’s tricks are all I know. Like curing—perhaps—of warts.’

  Little sister, I did not answer anything. I do not think I even looked at him.

  ‘That is all it is, you know,’ he said. ‘A giant wart which lives on you because it has no other home. I could take it away, if you believed.’

  I recovered myself at once, and told him that it was not a subject which my most intimate friends were permitted to discuss with me.

  He was quite unconcerned by my rebuke. He stood over me, grinning as if he had just thought of still greater riches of impertinence.

  ‘All the same, I want it,’ he said. ‘Do you give it to me?’

  I answered passionately that I gave it to him with my whole heart. I do not quite know what I meant. But I was so sincere I could have struck him.

  I am ashamed to tell you what happened. I can only say that I was fascinated by him and quite helpless; and the indignity was so swift. He spat on his finger and touched my disfigurement. Then he spat to the four points of the compass and did something with his hands in the darkness which I could not distinguish.

  ‘And now, my daughter, it is good-bye,’ he said. ‘You are outraged by me, and would not speak to me in the morning even if we had time to talk. I shall leave the ship early with the customs launch, and as the purser will not let me give my party I shall not return.’

  I could not trust myself to speak. I stared at him as one stares at a lover who has forgotten decency.

  ‘Remember it is not what friends say at parting which matters,’ he told me, ‘but what they think about each other afterwards. Half I have done for you; the other half depends on your belief.’

  Conchita, I awoke in the morning utterly disgusted with myself. There might be some excuse for him, but I had not been drinking. What I had spoken of, and what I had allowed—all humiliated me.

  I looked out of the porthole of my cabin. Two miles away were the low houses and docks and sands of Callao, the port of Lima. The customs launch was just leaving the Naarden, and Don Francisco was in it as he said he would be. It was the first time I had ever seen him well dressed. Immaculate, with a flower in his buttonhole.

  When I came on deck, the ship was alongside the quay. I was most courteously saluted by a captain of police who addressed me by my name. He astonished me by saying that in case I wished to land and visit Lima a room in the best hotel had been reserved for me. He also presented to me the compliments of Don Francisco Jones y Harborough, who regretted that he was unavoidably prevented from escorting me since he had been commanded to accompany the Vice-President of the Republic on a visit to Cuzco.

  Was I never to escape from his lunacy? I thanked the captain and remarked, controlling my voice as best I could, that it was not my custom to interrupt my travels at the request of foreigners.

  ‘But Don Francisco does not count as a foreigner!’ he exclaimed. ‘He is a descendant of Francisco Pizarro and Atahualppa’s daughter. There are only two of them left, and the other is old and in Spain and will die childless.’

  Who could have guessed that he was telling the truth? I went back to my cabin, with all my emotions shattered. The mirror faced me. As you know, I have trained myself not to notice a mirror any more than you, Conchita, the pavement under your feet. But the man’s bad taste had made me conscious of that loathsome mark. And then, hating him and in tears, I suddenly realised that never would he have forgotten his courtesy and tenderness unless he believed in himself. What I believed I could not be sure.

  That night, little sister, while the ship remained in harbour, I slept sweetly. I went to breakfast early. But no, I did not go to breakfast at all! I went no further than the door of the saloon. The purser was eating alone, and fingering a black mark on his cheek. I rushed back to my cabin, telling myself that I was a romantic fool. But the lower fragment of my growth had gone, and the skin was red like that of a healthy scar.

  I packed, and I fled to the room in Lima which Don Francisco had so thoughtfully reserved for me. I remembered his words: that it lived on me because it had no other home. I could not go on to Panama. How could I ever have met the purser’s eyes during a whole week—the week that has just passed—while hour by hour I was returning so eagerly to my mirror?

  The Brides of Solomon

  IN spite of heat, insects and isolation, Don Felipe had made himself comfortable. He had two more years to serve in the Peruvian forest, administrating the head waters of the Madre de Dios, and every reason to believe that he would finish them with some remnants of health and a reputation as a reasonable man. He preferred his cool office to the jungle. That, too, was reasonable. It was the first duty of a government servant to be easily and courteously accessible.

  He was intimidated—though he did not for a moment show it—by the determined Diocesan Visitor who had so smoothly come up from the river
. Father Hilario held himself most unnecessarily upright in the curves of his basket chair. He seemed to set an awkward standard not only for administrators of Indian territory but for the flowers and creepers which rioted over the patio and were so obviously and carelessly growing when compared with the rigid black figure of the Diocesan Visitor.

  ‘It is true then that this Englishman has two hundred wives?’ Father Hilario asked.

  ‘If one believed all one heard,’ answered Don Felipe with a prudent wave of the hand by which he hoped to dismiss the subject, ‘there would be no end to investigations.’

  ‘You have not confirmed the rumour yourself?’

  ‘I cannot afford to be absent from my post so long, padre. And for what? There is no objection to a serious anthropologist living among the Indians.’

  ‘Provided he confines himself to the interests of science,’ Father Hilario said. ‘But this Englishman is conducting a mission.’

  ‘I do not remember that he had any interest at all in religion.’

  ‘It is nine years since you saw him.’

  Don Felipe looked surprised. Time ran away while one occupied oneself at leisurely government pace. But it was indeed all of nine years since Solomon Carver had called on him with—after a full measure of formal courtesies—the bald statement that he intended to go into the forest and study a primitive tribe. Don Felipe told him that he would not be allowed to do any such thing, that the days were long past when you could paddle up the rivers and establish, if you lived, a mission or a private army or your own little slave state. Peruvian policy was all against irresponsible interference with the Indians.

  ‘Here as elsewhere,’ Don Felipe had explained to Carver, ‘he who desires to serve must be appointed to do so.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But by whom?’

  ‘Myself,’ Carver said.

  Don Felipe pointed out that he had been thinking of some official body like a botanical or geographical society.