Fellow Passenger

by Geoffrey Household

  While we were at Rugby, Schatz spent far too much time in the elephant lines listening to tales of the gorgeous East. One night she turned up in hardly more than she wore for the public. I kept my mind firmly on the guitar and the sexless good-fellowship of the circus, and explained to her that in India we were easily shocked. She called me St Anthony of the Elephants. It was, as Wellington said, a damned close thing, and, by God, I don’t think it could have been done if Pearl hadn’t been there! Her attitude towards Schatz was much like her treatment of Topaz—friendly but contemptuous. As the flesh and the devil were about to overwhelm me, I took refuge beneath that all-embracing trunk.

  When Stoffel complained to Benjafield, I judged that the time was ripe to approach the subject of the guitar. I knew that he had complained because Benjafield had a long and friendly conversation with me in which he pointed out that the morality of circus folk was the highest in all England. I dare say it was. Sixteen hours a day doesn’t leave much time for dalliance.

  It was difficult to find an occasion for an interview alone with Stoffel. Either the pair were practising or out shopping together, or Schatz was hanging round the elephants. I had to wait for a morning when, owing to a slight coldness between the pair of them, Schatz did her shopping alone. I called at the caravan and bored Stoffel with conversation. After a while I took down the guitar and began to play. I had never dared to do so while any identity was still mysterious; but now everyone knew I was an Indian.

  Stoffel, surprised, invited me to sing. I replied that I knew no Spanish, only the tunes.

  ‘But how?’ he asked.

  ‘I made a study of Western folk music for the sake of my spiritual development. The tunes which come most easily to me must be those I heard in a former existence.’

  Stoffel gave this remark his most serious German consideration. I knew he would.

  ‘You mean you were a Spaniard in a previous incarnation?’ he asked.

  ‘I am sure of it.’

  ‘I do not think the evidence sufficient,’ he said solemnly. ‘Forgive me!’

  That was as good an opening as another. I explained that my spiritual development was being hindered by the circus, and that I wanted to leave it. Stoffel did his best to keep a polite dead pan, but hope simply leaped into his normally expressionless face.

  ‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you could teach Steve to take over your act.’

  He thought I took a pride in my craft. I admired that. He had a one-track mind, but it was a kindly track.

  ‘I could,’ I replied, ‘easily. But I’ve no other way of earning a living on my travels—except music.’

  ‘Can you play other instruments?’

  ‘Only the guitar.’

  He weighed up the comparative values of his guitar and Schatz. But that is a most unfair way to describe his second’s hesitation. He knew what he must do, and the silence was only one of disappointment. He treasured that guitar. It was a symbol of what he would like to be, never could be and wouldn’t enjoy if he was. But we are all so made that those are the most difficult dreams to surrender. Schatz and her mysterious Faiz Ullah. Stoffel and his useless guitar. I hope, when both had vanished, they found time to pay a little more attention to the reality of each other.

  ‘I can’t give you its value,’ I said. ‘Only a couple of pounds and an old bicycle.’

  Of course Stoffel took it, and I went straight round to see Benjafield. He was hurt. He offered me proper quarters, more money, anything in the way of comfort that the circus could provide. He could not make out why I wanted to leave him.

  ‘Circus morality,’ I told him magnificently. ‘I do not wish to see two other hearts broken besides my own.’

  He patted me on the back and blew his nose. It is astonishing how those tough eggs in the show business can reduce themselves to the intelligence which the public expects of them. Journalists, of course, are the same. Benjafield, with his knowledge of men, could not have believed for a moment that, if I had a heart to break at all, I should talk about it in the terms of a novelette. But the convention was in his blood.

  I must admit, however, that I did find in myself a quite unexpected depth of sentimentality. It saddened me that Pearl should hoist Mrs Benjafield again upon her back, and that other hands but mine should be calloused by the hayfork, the shovel and the wheelbarrow. I went out to the fairground and bought them a dozen toffee-apples apiece. Dear Pearl and Topaz, a prisoner in the Tower, about to eat his lunch, salutes you! The chaste kiss upon the forehead with which I bade farewell to Schatz had not the power to affect me of those coiling trunks. It matters not at all that they only represented sensuality in search of toffee-apples. It is in the nature, the too poetic nature, of the male to believe on such evidence that he is loved.

  I was now well equipped for the road. I had my last week’s wages, and a pack with all necessities and change of clothing. Over my shoulder was the guitar, safely protected from rain in an oilskin case. I strode out happily from Rugby and picked up the quiet, straight lane of the Fosse Way, writing and singing my songs as I went.

  I had to write them. It was far too risky to draw attention to myself by singing in Spanish. The papers were again growing tired of Howard-Wolferstan, but they had given him a good run. Meanwhile the police, who had come in for columns of unmerited abuse, were still picking up harmless Latin Americans and asking them to show their passports. So I hit on a really brilliant idea. As I did not dare to use Spanish, I decided to translate my repertoire into Quechua. It was fairly improbable that I should meet anyone who could swear it was not a language of India—since India, I believe, speaks some three hundred—and if I ran into some exile from the high Andes who could speak Quechua or even recognize it, he would be far more interested in giving me a chance to explain myself than in a humourless rush for the police.

  Myself, I spoke it with more freedom than accuracy. Some I had picked up from my nurse, the colour of whose Sunday garment had so intrigued Veronica, and the rest from Indian labourers at one of my father’s mining camps on the Peruvian border—the only useful asset which ever came out of that concession. But, however bad my Quechua, at least it sounded like a language; when I did not know a word or could not find a rhyme, I invented whatever was required with the correct consonants and vowels. The result was rather as if one were to translate English lyrics into schoolboy French and sing them with a passably good accent.

  After a couple of nights in which I learned by heart my preposterous Quechua couplets, I struck down into Stratford-on-Avon to try out my trade. It was instantly profitable, and would have been more so if I had only known how to do the collection. I couldn’t take off my pugaree and set it at my feet to receive coins; so the English, not being sure whether I was performing for money or not, hesitated to shower their offerings on the pavement. Some North American tourists, however, had no such scruples. They solved the problem by stuffing money into my pocket. They could not make me out at all—an Indian singing (as they put it) Mexican songs.

  One of them, a solid old fellow who looked as if he might have been a colonial administrator, said he betted I came from the Philippines. To please him I admitted it. I instantly found myself being cross-questioned in English and several unknown tongues, and I was not sorry when the police moved me on for causing a crowd to collect. I had learned at the circus to look a policeman in the eye—apologetically, of course. But I dared not take the least chance with the Law in Stratford. There was evidently a tradition that tourists should only be entertained in the name of Shakespeare.

  For a week thereafter I practised my art in the villages. The farmers and squires and Birmingham business men who inhabited the grey stone houses of the Cotswolds were resigned to improbable musicians; they had to put up with Morris dancing, harps, sackbuts, psalteries and all other kinds of Olde Englishe music. September began still and golden, the days exquisite for walking, the night
s too cool for sleeping out. I had some slight difficulty in obtaining bed and breakfast, for, after all, I was a hairy heathen with no visible means of support; but when I had been taken in I always found a warm interest in myself and my supposed country. I should like to discuss that with an intelligent Indian and find out if he shared my astonishment that the people should accept so strange and foreign a nation as unquestioned partners. History, since we saluted the sub-continent and departed, is taking an exciting turn.

  Stratford had given me due warning of the risk of playing in any town big enough to have a resident policeman and a handy bench of magistrates. Yet, when I walked into Chipping Camden on a market day, I could not resist unslinging the guitar. I felt in place, socially and aesthetically. That ancient and lovely wool town cried out that it had been accustomed to wandering foreigners, with money or without, for five hundred years; and those same houses which now enclosed and gave spirit to an Anglo-Ecuadorian pursued for High Treason had looked down, I persuaded myself, tolerantly upon buyers all exquisite from Constantinople or lousy and furred from Moscow.

  I had not seen a little town so faultless and receiving since I left Quito. I placed my guitar cover on the flagstones, with a few coins in it to encourage the public, and played for pleasure as much as for gain. But as soon as I had finished a couple of Asturian jotas—they lent themselves more readily to Quechua than the modes of the south—I was moved on by the local sergeant of police. I dutifully moved, but so did a score of my listeners. I was as obstinate as the Pied Piper, operating in the midst of somewhat similar architecture. Three times I picked up my money, slung the guitar and started again in a side street. A modest audience followed me. So, after a decent interval and reluctantly, did the sergeant. Eventually he ran me in.

  Name: Faiz Ullah. Address: Nil. Occupation: Musician. I might get off with a small fine, but what I most dreaded was the kindliness of the Law. No one would be happy until assured that I was not in want. However good my story, I should be remanded for further enquiries, and a letter sent to the High Commissioner of India or Pakistan (I had never really decided to which I belonged) with copy to Scotland Yard.

  That’s what you get for being carried away by generous temperament. I blamed myself for an utter lunatic. One always curses oneself, in trouble, for following instinct instead of reason. Yet Chipping Camden’s tolerant mediaevalism did in fact come to my rescue. My subconscious feeling that the character of the inhabitants must be conditioned by the aesthetic appeal of their town turned out to be correct. As the melancholy procession—the sergeant, Faiz Ullah and some small boys—passed a pub on the corner of the main street, two local worthies of influence if not of leisure leaned out of the open window of the saloon bar.

  ‘What are you running him in for, John?’

  The speaker had a round face, reddened by Cotswold wind and some fifty years of good living. He was a shade too casual to be either farmer or landowner. I tried to measure his quality as desperately as any stranded climber hanging from a strange rope. He was solidly of Chipping Camden, tweeds, manner and all, but had an air of the wider world of business. He left his tankard discreetly upon the table inside the pub, whereas his companion was leaning over the window-sill, shamelessly brandishing his beer in the face of the public.

  ‘Causing a crowd to collect, Mr Moleyns,’ the sergeant answered.

  ‘Wouldn’t he move on when you told him to?’

  ‘He did. But look at the traffic, sir!’

  My last pitch had, I must admit, interfered with a sudden and quite unexpected rush of market traffic from the south. That was chiefly the fault of a lorry driver who pretended he couldn’t get through because he wanted to stare and listen. The baaing of the sheep in his lorry and the tooting of horns behind had brought the sergeant again.

  ‘Oh, we mustn’t be too hard on strolling minstrels in Camden,’ said Mr Moleyns. ‘And he’s good, you know! I’ve been listening. Couldn’t we turn him loose in the car park?’

  ‘Not on market day.’

  ‘Let him play in my pasture then. He won’t be breaking any by-law there.’

  ‘Not if you permit, sir. But it wouldn’t do him much good,’ said the sergeant, his community spirit overcoming him, ‘unless we organized it, like.’

  ‘Organize it, Adrian! Organize it!’ declared his companion in a voice which covered an entire octave. ‘A pastoral of the age of reason! And whence, sir, come your songs?’

  ‘The Spanish Indies,’ I answered.

  ‘Do you then ignore the papal line of 1493?’

  ‘Don’t worry the poor man, Thomas!’ said Adrian Moleyns. ‘He means Goa and places like that.’

  ‘Goa, my dear fellow, following, as I have already indicated, the arbitration of Pope Alexander VI, is Portuguese. And these excellent tunes are Spanish.’

  ‘You forget, sir, the Philippines,’ I reminded him respectfully.

  ‘By God, so I did!’ he answered with courteous vehemence. ‘Are you then a Moslem from the Philippines? And the language you sing is—?’

  ‘Of our island.’

  His thin, keen face, the cheeks slightly hollow yet glowing with health, had immediately suggested some learned and pleasant profession. The moment he opened his mouth I knew him for a Don. Oxford, instead of being thirty safe miles away across the Cotswolds, was alarmingly present with us. And this was no harmless scientific specialist, but a man of letters. His general knowledge was likely to be wide.

  ‘Does your religion permit the consumption of alcohol?’ asked Adrian Moleyns.

  ‘During licensing hours,’ I answered, ‘it does.’

  The don Thomas gave a high hoot of laughter.

  ‘John, surrender to us your prisoner!’ he ordered affectedly. ‘I claim for him the privilege of a clerk.’

  ‘Now, Mr Rundel,’ said the sergeant, grinning. ‘I’ll let you ’ave him, and glad. But don’t you start it all up again, like!’

  Thomas Rundel evidently had a reputation for whimsey. Moleyns also put in a word of warning.

  ‘Now, look here, Thomas!’ he begged. ‘Not before lunch on a market day! You’ll only get the poor chap arrested again.’

  How I longed at that moment for the right to be myself! Too many months had passed since I had talked to men with tastes similar to my own, and I was abominably weary of the trick which had so far ensured my safety: the domination of others by sheer eccentric impudence. The company of this Thomas Rundel was just what I needed, though I dreaded his perspicacity.

  I had a quick drink in the pub with my saviours—quick because Moleyns was a little uncomfortable and suppressed us firmly. He had saved the strolling minstrel for the honour of Chipping Camden, but he was too responsible a worthy to welcome the company of vagabonds. I found out afterwards that he was an architect of immense distinction and that, when it came to housing the masses, the essential choice was between Moleyns-Camden and Corbusier. Any middle course was a mere begging of the question.

  Thomas Rundel, full of questions, carried me off to lunch. He was, of course, accustomed to cultured Indians who, when they chose, could be more English than the English; so I did not have to bother with any phoney show of oriental customs. He immensely enjoyed listening to himself, and I was able to get some sort of working picture of him during our short walk to his cottage on the outskirts of the town. In a way he reminded me of Stoffel and Schatz. He swung on the trapeze of his own intellect; and, though it might travel anywhere, he lived in a caravan of books. Never could it occur to him that the criminal world was so close that he might be brought face to face with Howard-Wolferstan. On the other hand what language I sang and to what community I belonged he was determined to know.

  The cottage was his refuge during vacations. It consisted of a library, a kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. He did his own cooking and, to judge by the omelette he gave me at lunch, he could not have found anybody to do it be
tter. He had a small cellar as well, and skilfully applied its contents to the mellowing of me. His curiosity was far from idle, for his subject was modern languages.

  He tried me out unexpectedly in Spanish, which he spoke stiltedly but well. That was a trap I had trained myself to avoid. I showed interest and answered him in the sort of broken jargon that you might hear from a bare-bummed cacique on the head waters of the Amazon. He was convinced that I could do no better and that I had not translated the songs myself.

  ‘Very well, Faiz Ullah,’ he said. ‘I can tell that your language is a language, and I am prepared to accept the fact that it is spoken in the East Indies. But when were these translations made? Who made them?’

  I gathered that my island—which had by this time collected a vague population of aborigines, Malay pirates and Indians who had been there since time unknown—was breaking all the rules; it was most exceptional for an Eastern or any other people to accept a whole body of foreign music and put their own words to it. No doubt Thomas Rundel was right. One can hardly imagine that Green grow the rushes, oh! would be sung by a Malayan in Malay; if he wanted to sing it at all, he would do so in English. Even in Latin America I have never come across Spanish songs translated into Indian languages. Mexico might have examples, but I doubt it. Opera libretti pass from language to language with the music unchanged, but they merely prove that the process is most unnatural.

  Answering his persistent questions was an impossible trial for my nerves when I was longing to enjoy his room and his society in peace. I was continually conscious of that damned beard which was now far from a perfect fit, for my own hair was growing splendidly underneath. Treatment with stiff pomade kept moustache and whiskers flattened down, but the only way of dealing with my chin was to grease the hairs to a point and cut a hole to let it out. The discomfort, if compelled to talk while eating, was a minor, nagging hindrance to concentration.