The Investigations of Avram Davidson

by Avram Davidson

  The guests and hostess listened, silent, pleased. They exchanged looks of deep satisfaction. The servants came in with trays of food, the voice and its accompaniment ended, and a night bird sounded its few sweet notes in the lemon grove.…

  * * *

  RICHARD STANLEY HAD for some years taught history at a small college, but found that he was increasingly unable to cope with his work. Some men would have found it bearable, even soothing, to go through the same scheduled subjects year after year; to receive the same answers to the same questions and to issue the same grades; to arise at fixed hours and lecture at fixed hours; to parry semester after semester the unripe rudeness of adolescent students; to engage in the unvarying hypocrisy of rigid and petty small-college faculty politics and socializing.

  It was not out of any resolved attitude or principle that Richard Stanley found any or all of this unbearable. Something in his metabolism seemed to be at fault—ceased, so to speak, to secrete the necessary hormones or enzymes. Conscientiously he reported this to his president.

  “We can’t have any nervous breakdowns on our faculty,” the man said helpfully. “Tell you what you better do. Better see Dr. Wombaugh, the students’ psychologist—he can help you decide what you’re going to do next year.”

  Thus subtly informed that he need expect no renewal of contract (and, in fact, desiring none), Richard Stanley obediently reported to the office of Dr. Wombaugh. There he found a copy of The Literary Digest (predicting the election of Alf M. Landon by a landslide), a copy of a soon-to-be-extinct humor magazine full of He/She jokes, and a copy of The National Geographic.

  He thumbed listlessly through a pictorial account of the nesting habits of the bulbul of the Hindu Kush, an article on Picturesque Patagonia, another on New Insights to Old Zeeland, and came, finally, to a description of the Republic of Hidalgo—Where the Palm and the Pine Meet.

  By the time the doctor’s assistant got around to looking into the waiting room, Mr. Richard Stanley was no longer there. His savings were not large, but travel was cheap in those days. The port of Santa Luisa, where the banana boat left him, was full of unshaven customs officials with rude manners, demanding cab drivers with worse, and swarms of street gamins with none at all. In short, a larger, tropical, and equally uncopeable version of a small college.

  The fact was obvious: the Palm would not do. Would the Pine? Richard Stanley had to see.

  It took him three days, in that not very large country, to get by railroad, riverboat, and narrow-gauge railroad to his destination. He did not know, then, that it was his destination. He knew that he seemed suddenly to come alive one afternoon when the toy train jerked to a stop in front of a toy station. He was no longer hot, no longer torpid. Not only was there not a palm in sight, there—not twenty feet away—was the great-grandfather of all pines.

  Richard Stanley seized his bag and got off the train. The sign on the tiny depot read Monte del Incarnacion. He could see no mountain. Only one person in sight seemed to be moving, an old Indian lady draped all in black. He followed her.

  On the other side of the station, in a tiny plaza flanked by a tiny church, sat a large brown man on the driver’s seat of a curious vehicle, half stage-coach, half diligence, with sides bulging out and a pair of folding steps behind. The old woman clambered up the steps. Richard Stanley followed. They were presently joined by a man in a linen suit and a large black mustache.

  After a while the train whistled and tooted and chuffed away. The four mules stopped trying to bite off their harness and broke into something vaguely resembling a gallop. The road went up steadily. A stone marker said Monte del I K 10. Now and then a gap in the trees lining the road showed a glimpse of the countryside. It was quite beautiful—hills and valleys and forests and lakes and farms, with blue mountains in the distance and green ones near at hand.

  “I think this is it,” Stanley said, half aloud. “I really do.”

  Late in the afternoon the mules ambled into the town of which the railroad station was merely … the railroad station. “Oh!” Richard exclaimed. “Oh, my!”

  Above the town the great Mountain of the Incarnation raised its massy peak, wreathed in but not obscured by fleecy clouds. There was only one automobile in sight, but there were a good many horses. The plaza itself was cobbled, but nothing else was paved. The air was clear and fresh and sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight. A group of Indian men came by, clad in a sort of white kilted costume belted by a sash of red and purple which went over one shoulder. They smiled at him, greeted him in a language which was not Spanish. Richard smiled back.

  The town which surrounded him was totally Spanish—or, rather, totally Spanish Colonial. With the solitary exception of a two-story red brick building—evidently a convent and school of the time of Pius IX—there did not seem to be a single structure which had been built in the Republican period.

  On one side of the plaza was a building which looked like an inn. Suddenly aware of hunger, Richard went in and sat down at a table. He was served, with grave courtesy, a large clean meal; and after a few long and tranquil hours over coffee, rum, and mild cigars, he was shown to a large clean room. The room had a window at each end, one opening onto the courtyard and the other onto the plaza. The Mountain showed at both.

  “I do not believe,” Richard Stanley said, shortly after he had wakened and washed, “that I will ever leave.”

  And he never did.

  * * *

  THE MORNING AFTER the gathering at which he had read the latest of his papers on the history of the Monte del Incarnacion region, Richard Stanley was at the side of his room which served as a study, examining an old map lent to him by his friend, the Director of the little-visited library and museum, when the proprietor of the inn entered. Stanley anticipated the familiar questions by praising his recently eaten breakfast: the eggs were exquisitely fresh, the coffee deliciously hot, the fruit perfectly ripe—in short, a rich and succulent meal.

  Don Nestor beamed, bowed, and eventually came to the point of his visit. There was in the dining room of the inn a stranger, either an Englisher or a Northamericano, who desired to know if there were any other Englishers or Northamericanos in the community. And, as Don Ricardo was the nearest such, he, Don Nestor had—

  “Perfectly,” said Stanley. “I will go down to see him in a little moment.”

  “Ah, you are very genteel. I will tell him. With permission…”

  “Pass, your mercy.”

  Stanley took a last fond look at the old map, covered with old-fashioned Spanish calligraphy and Indian symbols or pictographs, and at length walked down the winding stairs to the first floor of the inn.

  An informal but decently dressed man of early middle-age was drinking coffee. He looked up and waved.

  “You must be the English-speaking fellow the owner was telling me about,” he said.

  “I am Richard Stanley.”

  “Bob Pepper. Know how I knew? The complexion. I can tell it every time.”

  Stanley took the proferred seat. “There are many natives of the area,” he said, “who are lighter or ruddier than I am. Let us not forget that the Goths were in Spain, the Celts before them, and as for the Iberians—”

  “I can tell it every time. Something about the complexion. Isn’t this a great little town? Beautiful, unspoiled, a lovely climate—”

  Stanley nodded, smiling assent to every point.

  “—lovely people—AND—do you know what I paid for breakfast? I. Paid. One. Dolar. One, I tell you, count them, one. For eggs, steak, coffee, toast, damned good jelly, some kind of fruit, very good fruit—for all this I paid one dolar! Isn’t that incredible? All that for only twelve and a half cents, U.S.A. Wow!”

  Warming to all this appreciation of his chosen residence, Stanley invited the visitor, Bob Pepper, to take a walk around the town. “If you’d like. That is, if you can spare the time.”

  “I’d like nothing better. If you can spare the time.”

  A wagon ornament
ed with pictures illustrative of the history and miracles of St. Fransico, and loaded with corn for one of the small mills in the town, passed by, its horse-bells jingling. The driver, removing his hat, greeted Stanley and his companion.

  “Oh, I can always spare time,” Stanley said, putting his own hat back on. “That’s one reason why I love it so here. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Heeber College in New Wurtemburg, Nebraska.… I thought not. I could never spare time there. The local citizens here regard time only as something which is sounded by the church bells. The bells only sound noon, midnight, and the ecclesiastical hours. And those of us who hail from more bustling climes have fallen—happily, I will say—into the local ways of thought.”

  He showed Bob Pepper the bull ring, with its quaint and unusual carved wooden balconies; the now-disused bear pit—bears had been brought, on occasion, from as far away as California, at great cost; the Little Market, which had once been enlarged so that ever since it had been bigger than the Big Market; the baroque church, La Parroquia; and the ancient and original church of the founding father.

  “What are those people doing on the steps of those little-bitty churches next to that big wild pink one?” demanded Bob Pepper. And he was so struck by the reply that he hastily pulled a notebook and jotted it down. Chapels dedicated to The Seven Wise Virgins of the Parable! Which the Indians identified with The Seven Sweet Sisters of their own mythology! Said their Christian prayers properly inside! Then came outside and made their pagan offerings on the steps! Incense, cornmeal, rose petals, honey, parrot feathers—and whatnot!

  Wow!

  Bob Pepper was completely enamored of all that Richard Stanley had to say about Monte del Incarnacion.

  * * *

  AFTER LUNCH—A lunch so big with a price so small that Pepper could scarcely eat it all from excitement—the newcomer declared that he had some pictures to take. He invited, he even pressed his guide to come along; but Stanley explained that he paid a call every Friday afternoon on his friend, Captain Stone.

  “We have a rather funny, odd custom here, Mr. Pepper—Bob. We visit each other only once a week, and we have a once-a-week get-together where we all meet. We—by we I mean the other English-speaking people here in town—there are only six of us, so it works out quite well, giving all of us periodic days entirely to ourselves and preventing our getting on each other’s nerves—and so we remain very happy and contented here, you see.”

  Bob Pepper nodded and agreed to meet him later on at Captain Stone’s quinta. “Gee, this is a peach of a place!” he exclaimed deliriously, arranging his photographic equipment, and starting out into the clean picturesque streets. Then a sudden thought occurred to Stanley, and he called the visitor back.

  “Are you—would you be interested perhaps…” he said haltingly, rather wistfully, “…in old Indian ruins?”

  “Would I!”

  Stanley, in a rush of words, explained to him that the remains of the Temple of Achichihuatzl lay higher up the Mountain, deep in the woods. He could hardly say that he had “discovered” them; they had never been lost, only neglected.…

  “…and he said he would very much like to see the Temple, so I promised to take him tomorrow,” Stanley finished his account of the newcomer to the red-bearded Captain Stone.

  The Captain, who had been nodding and grunting and showing other signs of following the narrative, gave a little start as Stanley finished. He raised his rufous eyebrows. “What? Sun over the yard-arm? Let’s see what there is to drink, then I want to show you my scale model of the Battle of Jutland. Gin! Gin! Good old genebra! And you, old boy, I suppose you’ll want yours fancied up with pomegranate juice and other foo-foo waters.”

  Stanley nodded delightedly.

  The Captain hummed a naughty, nautical song to himself, off-key, as he raised bottle and glass. Then he stopped humming. A puzzled, unhappy look came over his face. For a moment he stood still, then he lowered glass and bottle.

  “Richard, forgive me. I’m afraid I was not following all you said with the attention which courtesy requires. But did I hear—did you say that this fellow’s name was Pepper?”

  “Why, yes. Why?”

  The Captain stared at him, and uttered a groan of deepest misery. Then, swiftly, he poured a tumbler half full of straight gin and drank it down in three swallows. Then he looked at his astonished guest and pronounced a religious phrase in a most profane tone.

  “This is the end,” he said. “This is the end.”

  * * *

  ONCE AGAIN THE San Jorge looked down on a gathering of the tiny English-speaking colony of Monte del Incarnacion; but this time the atmosphere was quite different. It was late afternoon; there were no songs, no spicy smells from the kitchen, and no one was smiling. Captain Stone had the floor.

  “All right, let’s get on with it,” the Captain said. “We have a bitter draft to swallow, and what the antidote might be—if there is any—I do not know…”

  He paused, shifted his eyes to a point where the rafters and ceiling met, and went on in a stiff, painful tone of voice. “Briefly, my story is this: I was commander of one of His Majesty’s ships and one night—a night which I should like to forget—I put that ship on the Goodwin Sands. Two tugs were required to get her off. Charges were made against me—charges ranging from incompetence to intoxication. I was spared the disgrace of being cashiered. I was allowed to resign. Naturally, I was expected to remove myself as far from England as I could, and so I did.”

  He did not suppose, the Captain said, that any of them had ever heard at that time of Olang Batto. He himself had located it with some difficulty. Picture to yourselves (he asked his friends) an island only half a day’s journey by sea from Singapore, yet on no regular shipping route and known to hardly anyone in that great city. Clean sea breezes, yellow sands, rents so small as to be almost invisible by civilized standards, ample and inexpensive provisions, competent servants at ridiculously low salaries. Malay fishing villages and a trading town which was a small Chinese city in miniature.

  “There I lived,” the Captain said, “for twenty years in perfect peace, in perfect contentment. My slender income was not only sufficient, I was even able to save a bit. No one had ever heard of my past, or would have cared about it. And then one day—”

  He paused. His throat worked. “One day, as I was walking along the boat landing to see if my copies of The Times had come in, a young man stepped ashore from a sampan and hailed me in English. I greeted him courteously, invited him to my place, gave him drinks and tiffin, and escorted him all round the island. There being no hotel, I lodged him and fed him for two days until a trading vessel heading for Kuala Lampur chanced to put in and took him aboard. I heard nothing further from him for some months.

  “Further intelligence came like a burst of thunder upon my heretofore peaceful existence. The man, it seemed, was not a mere wanderer as I had thought, not even a mere tripper or beachcomber. He was a journalist, I learned to my horror. He had written up his experiences in articles variously describing Olang Batto as The Poor Man’s Shanghai or The Tahiti of the Malayan Archipelago. This article was syndicated—I believe that is the term—and consequently appeared in newspapers published in Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Bombay, Calcutta, Capetown, London, New York, Los Angeles, and every large city in the Republic of Texas.”

  The results were catastrophic. Within two years Olang Batto had become a port of call. Tourists thronged its once little-frequented lanes. Hotels were built, restaurants, cabarets. The nights, formerly disturbed only by the booming of the surf and the occasional roar of a bull crocodile, now became hideous with jazz music. Rents went up 1000 and even 2000%. Servants betook themselves to high-paid positions in the expensive villas of newcomers. Tailors who had once been happy to make a suit of pongees for five Straits dollars now demanded fifty—and were insolent and dilatory. Farmers ceased to bring their produce to private dwellings and sold them at inflated prices to the multitude of establishments erec
ted to cater to the needs of tourists.

  “I was even recognized on the street by a newspaper photographer from The Daily Mail,” Captain Stone continued bitterly. “I packed my belongings and fled into the night, obtaining passage on a sea junk engaged in the pearl shell and bêche-de-mer trade.” A single tear slipped down into his red beard. He plucked a large handkerchief from his sleeve and blew his rufous nose resoundingly. “Need I say,” he concluded, “that the man who had brought all this about was the infamous scribbler and penny-a-line spy, Robert Pepper?”

  The somber silence which followed was finally broken by the soft voice of the hostess. “I was born and raised in Canada,” she said, “and had an uneventful but rather happy life, particularly with my husband and only child. I lost them both—under tragic and well-publicized circumstances which I cannot bear to describe. You must excuse me.

  “Most of my income perished with my husband. I had and have no commercial talents. Not caring much what happened to myself, but being under the necessity of sustaining life and finding some occupation or preoccupation, I went to Newfoundland, and settled in the smallest, most remote community I could find which offered some minimum of amenities.

  “The place was called Little York Cove. The people fished for cod, hunted seal, raised potatoes. In the nearby rivers were salmon and trout. It was a rather severe life, but it was simple and clean. I became an amateur fisherwoman of some skill, and I learned to make the most of the brief winter days as well as the long, long ones of summer. I could not afford to buy a house, but I rented one for a moderate sum and gradually fixed it up to my liking. I was happy.”

  Happy, that is, until a brief but searching visit by a man she did not know. His visit resulted in a series of newspaper and magazine articles describing Little York Cove as a Fisherman’s Paradise and a New Low-Priced Vacationland. The village was not adequate to house and supply the swarms of people attracted by the articles. So new buildings were erected, but even so there was an inevitable increase in rents.