The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories

by Geoffrey Household

  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 in 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 wild, dripping, and cheerful head. 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.

  In the third class were another happy group whose passages had been paid—Czech and Polish peasants contracted to work and expected to die in the Chaco—and an unhappy group of 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.

  On four benches Danno saw prostrate bodies ending in heavy knee-high boots. On another was a shapeless mound of greasy shawls that finally resolved itself into a Polish woman, her small son, and a bundle of pitiable possessions which she did not dare leave in the cabin. In the recess on one side of the steward’s pantry was a grave Jew in frock coat and skullcap staring at nothing and moving his lips; and in the other recess was a tall girl in a blue sweater and skirt with a red ribbon round her dark head. She was reading, and had bare, slim, impatient, and rather furry legs which ended in sandals.

  “Good morning to you,” said Danno to the barman.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Have you beer, steward?”

  “Draft or bottled, sir?”

  “Now would ye believe that I must walk through six inches of raging ocean to quench my thirst when they have but to carry a barrel up a pair of ladders?” asked Danno triumphantly. “I’ll have draft, me boy, and will you be taking one with me?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And the lady, too. Will ye have a beer, ma’am, or a drop of what you fancy?”

  “Thank you,” said the girl with a slight foreign accent, “but I don’t drink.”

  “Ah, and what would ye say to that?” exclaimed Danno, unabashed.

  He turned to the old man on the other side.

  “Will your reverence take a beer?” he asked.

  The Jew looked up, startled, and met Mr. Flynn’s dancing eyes. What had been said to him he did not know, but, seeing that he had to deal with a rowdy, aggressive, powerful, and incomprehensible Gentile, he assumed that it had been an insolence. He did not reply, and returned with dignity to his meditation.

  “Be God, ’tis an unsociable ship!” said Danno Flynn.

  “He didn’t understand you,” explained the girl. “My father speaks hardly any English.”

  “Like me grandad,” Danno replied. “But he’d understand if you asked him what he would take—for it was not often he heard them words, he being the thirstiest man in Connemara. Beer?” he asked very loudly. “Will ye take a beer?”

  He swayed to the motion of the ship, the surface of the beer in his glass forming an acute angle to the level of the floor. The girl’s father, overcome by this monstrous prodigy of plane surfaces, collapsed upon the table with a groan.

  Danno slid a hand under his shoulders and deposited him at full length on the bench with a rug beneath his head. His movements were so swift and confident that, though the girl had rushed simultaneously to her father, there was nothing for her to do but flutter anxiously around him.

  “What is it?” she sobbed. “He is worn-out. Is there a doctor? Get me a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor meself,” said Danno, “so let you not be troubling your pretty head. ’Tis the seasickness, and nothing else at all. I should not have been disturbing his reverence the way he is, and I the last straw that turns the camel’s stomach.”

  “Will it pass? Are you sure it will pass?”

  “He’ll be easy when ’tis calm,” answered Danno positively. “Is it the first time he is at sea?”

  “The first time that either of us is at sea,” she replied.

  “Ah, to be sure! You’ll come from a far country.”

  “From Germany.”

  “And is it not a wonder,” exclaimed Danno cordially, “that you are after leaving Germany and I Eire, and we meeting in the rainy ocean with no land under our feet at all?”

  The smell of the saloon and the effort of listening to an unfamiliar dialect of English were too much for her.

  “Oh, please!” she cried. “You will excuse me. I—I am tired!”

  She rushed into the open air. The wind seemed to pick up her slim, swaying body and carry it away.

  “To be sure, ’tis not all of us have voyaged to Liverpool with the cattle as I have meself,” remarked Danno. “Will ye take a beer, steward?”

  The Alhaurin slid sideways down an invisible slope and recovered her balance with a lurch like that of a self-conscious drunk. A crate of bottles glided across the floor of the pantry, and the steward grabbed the edge of his sink with both hands. Danno Flynn, seeing the back of his neck turn from brown to green, gave up hope of further conversation and returned to his cabin in the first class.

  Danno spent the following day drinking beer with the immigrants from eleven to one and six to eleven. While the ship was in Lisbon and the bar closed, he slept; but as soon as the steward, halfway down the Tagus, reopened his hatch he let in the upper half of Mr. Flynn’s waiting body and began to serve his charges with Mr. Flynn’s free drinks. So it went on for three days, until steady irrigation with beer broke the drought in Danno’s interior. Thereafter he continued to spend his time in the third-class saloon and his hospitality was as promiscuous as ever, but he drank in half pints instead of pints; he shaved; he clipped his moustache; and he began to pay more attention to the slim Berta Feitel than to the bar.

  The peasant immigrants did not worry themselves to account for the visitor and his streams of beer. If, having a first-class ticket, he chose to drink in the third-class bar, they assumed—those of them who were intelligent enough to assume anything—that it was because the drinks were cheaper. To the Jews, however, he was a mystery. They could not understand why anyone should prefer the cheerless, reeking immigrant saloon to the luxury, envied and therefore exaggerated, of the first class. Most of them, sitting in melancholy resignation before the punishment their God had inflicted on them, welcomed Mr. Flynn as a comparatively pleasant chastisement. A few were suspicious.

  “Oy, Berta! What has he been telling you? A doctor? That man? Of course he is no doctor! Did he tell you so, Berta?”

  Her questioner laughed irritatingly, making a sound like fee-fee-fee through his little round mouth. He had a gross body, a pink and featureless face, and the habit of
generally being right. She disliked him intensely—the more so since it occurred to her that there was an air about doctors, Jewish or Gentile, that Mr. Flynn certainly did not possess.

  “Why should he not be?” asked a small dark chess player, coming to the rescue. “He is an intellectual. I do not understand all he says, but he is an intellectual.”

  “Everyone you like you call an intellectual,” said the fat man, nodding his head up and down with the air of one for whom human nature had no secrets.

  “At any rate he has no prejudice,” Berta said.

  “But why does he come here?” insisted the suspicious one. “Why does he try to make us drunk? Why does he listen to us—tell me that! Perhaps he is paid to listen to us.”

  “And perhaps he likes us,” answered Berta impatiently. “Is it so very extraordinary?”

  She was fascinated by Danno’s shimmer of charm, drunk or sober; it was a lighthearted quality uncommon among her own people or indeed among any city dwellers. And it rested and healed her to be with him, a man who had never felt any prejudice against her race, never thought about it, never heard of it—or, if he had heard of it, then as a newspaper story of distant happenings in a very distant Europe. She was sure that he had not realized the two different religions in the immigrant saloon.

  She was, however, uneasily aware that she knew nothing whatever about the man. His exuberance puzzled her and prevented intimacy. She longed for her father to come on deck; having spent a wise and simple life between the schools and the synagogue, he had a peculiar gift of seeing to the heart of any human being and could have summed up Danno Flynn for her. But Mr. Feitel was still in his bunk, continually sick though the sea was calm, and Berta had no wisdom to fall back on but the experience of her own agitated youth.

  When one evening Danno turned up in a boiled shirt and a dinner jacket, a hush descended upon the saloon. The peasants shuffled their preposterous boots, stared, and breathed very loudly. Such raiment was connected in their minds with the President of the Republic or a marriage or the excitement of a traveling salesman; they expected Mr. Flynn to unfurl a banner and pull a diamond ring or a bottle of medicine out of his pocket. Israel in exodus questioned its trust in him, questioned his motives. He was rich. He had no good right to be there.

  The silence impressed even Danno. He was, for about the third time in his life, self-conscious. He had dressed himself up for a gala dinner in the first class and saw no reason for changing merely because he craved a beer. He met Berta’s ironical eyes, and flushed. It occurred to him that he had been guilty of wanting to be admired, that he could, after all, have drunk whiskey in his own smoking room.

  “But why would I not be showing meself to the darling,” argued Danno loudly to himself, “seeing she could know me for a hundred years and never see me in the like of these clothes again?”

  He drank a beer with the steward and departed hastily, wishing the saloon a noisy good-night.

  Meanwhile Berta had silently vanished into the night. She was hurt by his impudence in appearing amongst them with this bold admission that he belonged to another world. The suspicions which she had ridiculed haunted her. Paid to be here—was it possible? She determined to find out what he was. This was the moment to ask questions when she was at her coldest and he off his guard; she knew instinctively that he desired admiration.

  Danno emerged from the severe cubical deckhouse which contained the immigrants’ public rooms. The iron plates of the main deck and the tarpaulin-covered hatches were flooded with moonlight. The Alhaurin, at this level a ship rather than a floating hotel, swished through the calm water while a band faintly sounded from somewhere in the towering terraces of the first class and a light flashed on the horizon, reminding the traveler that even in the wastes of the Atlantic were the Azores.

  Berta leaned over the rail, waiting. As the door of the saloon slammed, she turned and smiled invitingly at Danno.

  “How is your da?” he asked.

  “Still sick. He cannot eat or get up.”

  “I’ll see him,” said Danno.

  “It’s nothing,” she answered swiftly. “It will pass. Stay here and talk to me.”

  A strand of her black hair, fragrant in spite of the saloon and the peasants and the paintwork of a stuffy cabin below the waterline, blew gently against his face.

  “What land is that?” she asked, pointing to the light.

  “’Tis Africa,” he replied, “with Negro slaves, and they holding out a jewel to you that you shall pass no further on your journey to the west, but stop and be the bride of their great king.”

  “I would rather be where I am,” said Berta dreamily.

  Danno felt the wind cold against his unaccustomed shirt front as two drops of sweat shot down his chest from hair to hair like the balls on a pin table.

  “Then I would not be changing places with any king in the wide world,” he said.

  He laid his hand over hers. It did not return his pressure, but remained warm and unresisting while Abraham looked down approvingly—or so Berta hoped—upon his handmaiden.

  “You must know all the lands we pass so well,” she suggested, hoping to find out whether he traveled regularly by the line.

  “I was always a great reader,” answered Danno cautiously, “and many’s the beating I had for it. If it was not my da had the hide off me for not attending to the sheep, ’twas Father Donnelly for not attending to my book.”

  He told her a little of his boyhood in Connemara, of the green hills and white villages, of the glimpses of the Atlantic and the soft rain that drifted inland like smoke from the sea. As he talked, it seemed to her that her budding suspicion had been utterly foolish. She protested to herself that the curse of her race was to suspect, always to suspect.

  “So that is why you came here, down to the third class!” she cried with a warmth that surprised him. “You have been poor. You like simple people—true people!”

  “And what more would I need to bring me here but the sight of your face?” he answered.

  “But you didn’t know I was there. And sometimes—those first days—you did not speak to me.”

  “To be sure, I did not,” he admitted penitently. “But it was the sorrow of my heart at leaving Eire, and the thirst was on me would have floated the ship from under our feet. And, God help me, it was the barrel of beer that brought me to the third class and no other thing at all.”

  “Have they no beer in the first class?” she asked.

  “Devil a drop!”

  It couldn’t be true. Dear God, he was lying to her! And he wasn’t a doctor—that was now quite obvious, but she had overlooked it in her eagerness to trust him. They were right. He was paid to be there—some sort of immigration agent watching them, listening to them, making a filthy dossier for the police at their destinations. That wild exuberance of his was simple; it was as coarse an invitation to confidence as the overheartiness of a salesman.

  “You expect me to believe that?” she cried. “That we—cattle—down here can get something that you cannot?”

  Her face was drawn and her mobile mouth twitching with disgust. Danno Flynn stared at the explosive young woman, his features showing a sudden and comical consciousness of guilt.

  “You cannot harm us!” she stormed. “We are not afraid of you. Nothing can happen to us now, nothing any more. We—we snap our fingers!”

  She burst into tears and ran from him. Even the beating of her feet upon the deck was angry.

  “’Tis the long voyage,” said Danno, “and a young girl is a chancy thing and a vain. I should not have been telling her that I came for the beer.”

  He climbed back to his own quarters and strolled into the smoking room in the certainty of finding the ship’s doctor. Part of the girl’s unaccountable moodiness was due, he thought, to worry about her father. Mr. Feitel ought to have been up and about long sinc
e, for the sea had been calm as a lake since they sailed from Lisbon.

  Dr. Pulberry was in his usual chair and was, as usual, alone. His little red face and little white moustache were perched perkily upon the high butterfly collar of his mess uniform. His brusque and hearty manner did not gain for him all the free drinks that he felt to be his due; he accepted Mr. Flynn’s offer of a whiskey with gratitude, made a joke about an Irishman, and, finding it well received, became very communicative.

  “Yes, I’ve seen the old fellow,” he said in answer to Danno’s questions. “I know those cases—have ’em every voyage! Nerves—funk—no stamina! Goes on being sick because it’s less effort than exercising a little will power!”

  Dr. Pulberry, having retired from practice ten years since, considered that his job should be a sinecure. One patched up the crew. One discussed their ailments with the first-class passengers, especially the good-looking women. But one resented immigrants. At his age one resented them very strongly. If they didn’t have infectious diseases, they had diseases of malnutrition; and if they didn’t have those they were seasick.

  “Cannot ye give him a pill?” asked Danno.

  “The usual sedatives. Of course! Certainly! But they don’t stop him. I’ll try a better cure on him soon.”

  On his visit to the immigrant saloon the next morning Danno discovered that communication had become very difficult. Those passengers who had spoken English to him were absorbed in chess or meditation or excited arguments—which ceased when he drew near. Those who did speak to him, all of them fair-haired, spoke in tongues so utterly incomprehensible that Danno shouted back to them in Irish. This amusement, however, palled under the contemptuous gaze of Berta’s large, clear eyes. She ignored his inquiries about her father by replying that he was better and instantly returning to her book.

  Danno Flynn put a black curse upon the night that he had gone to the third class in a dinner jacket, and passed two whole days moping in his own smoking room and hanging over the rail for a sight of Berta as she lay peacefully on the hatch of the main deck. Whether it was to emphasize the difference between herself and the shapeless bundles of peasant women or whether because she knew Danno would be looking, she made a habit of taking the sun for an hour a day in a yellow swimming suit. This delightful sight led Dr. Pulberry and other pillars of the bar to desert their usual chairs for chairs on the verandah.