Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  “Very strange, very strange indeed,” Dunnett replied. He was conscious of an obligation to shoulder his share of the conversation. With Señor Muras so prodigal, it seemed discourteous to remain silent.

  A servant entered, carrying glasses on a tray. They held champagne. Dunnett took one. “You must excuse my wife,” Señor Muras remarked. “She is resting. She would not wish us to wait.”

  At that moment the evening stillness of the hacienda was broken by the sound of someone—a girl—singing. Señor Muras crossed to the window and threw it open.

  “That,” he said proudly, “is my daughter.”

  The words of the song came through, clearer now. They filled the room where the listeners waited.

  “If you’ll be my sweetie” the voice went on

  “You’ll sing to me

  Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweetie

  Like a bird in the tree.”

  The singer stopped abruptly, as though she had suddenly remembered something else to do, and Señor Muras came away from the window. “It was an American convent she was at,” he remarked affectionately.

  Dunnett stood for a while at the window looking out. It was a golden evening, beautiful and still. The hacienda, set in a shallow saucer of land, seemed to rest in a perpetual atmosphere of peace, as though the rush and turmoil of the world swept heedlessly over the edge and left everything inside untouched. A hundred feet from the house two large black birds with bare, muscular necks were stooping over something that lay on the ground, and tearing off bright scarlet strips of it with the motion of the thrush tugging at the worm. Dunnett could hear the ripping sound they made, and the scraping of their wing tips on the ground as they steadied themselves before taking a bite.

  “You’ve got a nice place out here,” he remarked politely.

  “You like it?” Señor Muras remarked in a surprised tone of voice. “I had scarcely hoped for that. For my part I find it a tomb; a remote, melancholy tomb. We try to disguise it, but that is all we can do. How can one make a house beautiful without people? And we live so quietly. In all, we are only three.” He raised his glass to his lips and emptied it. “Before we came here,” he said regretfully, “we lived in the centre. Such crowds! Such stimulation! At midnight we had to close the windows for the noise; I swear it. And now here at midnight the grave itself would be gayer. More champagne, Mr. Dunnett?”

  Before Dunnett could reply, the door had opened and Señorita Muras was standing there. She was dressed all in white and wore a crown of artificial white flowers in her hair. She remained where she was, her dark, handsome eyes playing into the room. Then she came forward, holding out a hand tipped by long, blood-red nails. When she was by him he discovered that she was as much drenched in perfume as Señor Muras himself. It was, at that moment, as he caught her eyes, that he recognised her as the closely-guarded convent schoolgirl on the boat. She had certainly emerged all right; what he had seen had evidently been the last day of the chrysalis stage.

  “My daughter, Carmel,” Señor Muras said proudly. “This is Mr. Dunnett.”

  “How are you?” she said. “I’ve been just crazy to meet you. I saw you on the boat, but you wouldn’t recognise me.”

  “How do you do?” Dunnett replied.

  Señorita Muras smiled back at him. “Oh my,” she said. “You are English. Do you know, if anyone else said ‘How-do-you-do’ like that it’d be a snub? But when you say it it’s perfect.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” Dunnett answered.

  “There you go again,” Señorita Muras exclaimed. “You sound as though you were snubbing the whole time. But I know you’re not. I think it’s lovely hearing English spoken. I do really. We heard a lot of it in Hollywood.”

  “That wasn’t real English,” Dunnett replied.

  “I’ll say it was,” Señorita Muras answered. “There was one actor lived over by the convent had an accent you could hitch a horse to. He used to wear a black coat and striped trousers even when he was only in crowd scenes. He was very English.”

  “Well, you’re very American, aren’t you?” Dunnett asked.

  “Me?” Señorita Muras enquired in astonishment. “Oh no, I’m not American. Everyone at the convent thought I was awfully foreign; and there were all sorts at that convent. There were Chilenos and a Cypriot in my dormitory.”

  “So you’ve only just left school, have you?” Dunnett asked.

  Señorita Muras did not bother to reply. Instead she came over and led him to the couch. Her hand was cool and soft to the touch. “You tell me about London,” she said. “You know it, don’t you?”

  “I live there,” Dunnett replied.

  “Say, are those Ripper murders still going on? I read a series about them.”

  “No: they’re done with now; that’s ancient history.”

  “That’s swell, but what about Buckingham Palace— have you ever been over it?”

  “It isn’t open to the public, you see,” Dunnett explained.

  “Well, what about Bond Street?”

  “I know Bond Street all right.”

  “Is it very smart? Is it smarter than Paris?”

  “I’ve only been to Paris once. It didn’t look very smart to me then.”

  Señorita Muras paused. “You know the Old Curiosity Shop?” she asked. Dunnett nodded.

  “And Albemarle Street where Lord Byron limped downstairs?”

  Dunnett nodded again: he had not the least idea what she was talking about.

  “I can’t have too much of that sort of thing,” she told him. She indicated a spot vaguely in the region of her heart. “Antiquity gets me there every time.”

  A contemplative look came into her eyes as she thought about the past. She took a cigarette out of the box beside her and without saying a word accepted the match which Dunnett struck for her. Antiquity had evidently affected her pretty deeply and she sat where she was, scratching patterns on the silver top of the cigarette box with the point of her finger nail.

  Dunnett was not sorry that the first rush of conversation was over; on the Señorita’s part it consisted so much in asking questions to which the actual answer appeared to be unimportant. And he had a curiously uneasy feeling that Señor Muras was watching. When he turned round he found that this was so. Señor Muras was lying back at full length on a rattan chair. When he saw that he was observed his expression at once changed. The whole face softened and his eyes began to smile again. He even made pawing motions with his foot preparatory to rising.

  “No, please don’t get up,” Dunnett begged him. “I don’t want to disturb you.”

  Señor Muras waved the remark aside. “I must be up,” he said. “My wife, you know. … She will be down at any moment now.” He shifted his weight onto his two feet and pushed himself up in the arms of his chair. Then he came over and whispered in Dunnett’s ear. “Please do not tire her,” he asked. “She is not very strong and is easily exhausted.”

  The light by now had changed. The sun slipping suddenly behind the distant range had left the room suspended in a warm gloom. It was all abrupt and instantaneous, as though unexpected even by nature; that was the peculiar charm of tropic sunsets, Dunnett discovered. At one moment it was full day and, at the next, one more page of the calendar had already gone over the edge into night. The shadows in the garden disappeared; and the two obscene birds continued their meal in darkness. The sound of tearing and feasting continued at intervals to penetrate within doors. The room grew blacker. Señor Muras did not move: the red circle of his elegant cigar butt established his position but the rest of him was in darkness. He was visible only when he drew at his cigar. Then his features lit up with startling prominence. Dunnett felt that somewhere beneath those glowing eyebrows the small, bright eyes were still regarding him. When he put the lights on, Señora Muras was already coming into the room.

  In mere physical terms Señora Muras was large, not large in the way her husband was large, but big in a heavy and imposing fashion that made small chai
rs—she invariably chose small ones—sag under her . But it was her colour rather than her size that caught Dunnett’s eye. For all practical purposes she was black. Not a gross, smiling negress—whatever the point of contact with the jungle might have been, it was obviously historic generations back—but black, nevertheless. She advanced, agitating the shelfful of jewellery that lay upon her bosom, and held out her hand. Dunnett took it, but not before he had noticed those whitish crinkled give-away folds between the fingers.

  “You must forgive my wife,” Señor Muras reminded him. “No linguist. It was my daughter who wrote for her. Pure Portuguese family my wife’s.”

  It was Señorita Muras who came forward to help her. They exchanged a few words and the Señorita turned to Dunnet “She says that she’s very pleased to meet you, and hopes that you’ll be seeing a lot of each other,” Señorita Muras volunteered. “She asks me to say that she wouldn’t have been late if she hadn’t been upstairs resting.”

  At what was obviously the end of the sentence Señora Muras gave a little titter and nodded her head. She was evidently anxious that her part in the conversation should not be overlooked; and it was also quite clear that so far as she herself was concerned she regarded her last remark as in the nature of a supreme politeness.

  When dinner was served, the exceedingly small company went into an excessively large loom. Señora Muras took Dunnett’s arm, and he was aware of a musky bulk of womanhood beside him as he walked. She seemed to enjoy the association, and kept on saying things in Portuguese that sounded like compliments; her voice, he noticed, was as low and unmodulated as a man’s. Behind them Señorita Muras pranced and chattered like a squirrel.

  Dinner was a meal on a Colonial scale, full and lavish and supporting. By the time they had reached the second dish of chicken—this time boiled with paprika and served with rice—Dunnett felt himself quietly and severely sweating. At first he had begun to remove his handkerchief and wipe his forehead between mouthfuls, but the others did not seem to worry. Señor Muras himself sat at the top of the table, his bald head gleaming. Dunnett therefore let the perspiration remain. The Señora kept dabbing at herself with a rolled-up handkerchief like a sponge.

  Dinner had drawn to a close and Dunnett had been given more brandy than he had ever seen put before any man, when the butler informed Señor Muras that he was wanted on the telephone. For a moment the placid smoothness of his countenance was disturbed. His features flickered. He heaved himself to his feet and excused himself with a flourish of apologies. When he came back his face was smooth and smiling again; if anything smiling a little more than it had been before.

  “The spectacle,” he announced, “is getting on nicely.”

  “The spectacle?” Dunnett asked.

  “Yes; we’ve planned something pretty good for you, something you won’t forget in a hurry,” Carmel Muras explained. She turned to her father. “Do you know what’s holding things up?”

  “We are,” Señor Muras replied complacently. “I didn’t want Señor Dunnett to miss any of it.” He rang a bell on the table beside him; it was counterpart to the miniature bell which he had used within his office. When he picked it up his hand engulfed it. There was something rather absurd about a man of his size emitting a sound like a tinkle on a cat’s collar.

  No sooner had he given his message to the servant than Señora Muras began to show signs of extreme alarm. The jewellery on her bosom started rattling and her breathing came in short, restricted gasps. Her hands made vague, strolling movements in the region of her temples.

  Señor Muras turned to Dunnett. “It is my wife’s nerves,” he said. “We must be very careful.”

  “But what about?”

  “The noise.”

  “What noise?”

  “The noise of the spectacle.”

  “What kind of a spectacle is it then?”

  Señor Muras appeared surprised, almost offended. “Fireworks,” he replied. “We have been preparing them all the afternoon.”

  “I see,” Dunnett replied. “I hadn’t understood.”

  At that moment Carmel intervened. “Don’t tell me that you don’t like fireworks, Mr. Dunnett,” she said.

  “I do,” Dunnett assured her hurriedly. “Only I haven’t seen any for a long time. We don’t get many in England.”

  “Do you hear that,” Carmel exclaimed in amazement. “And we call all our big displays Crystal Palace Spectacles. It sounds screwy to me.”

  Señor Muras rose majestically to his feet, and the chair in which he had been lying gave a little volley of creaks as it began to remould itself into its previous shape. Señora Muras immediately became more voluble than ever: her zero hour was evidently approaching. Both Señor Muras and Carmel were needed to comfort and reassure her. They led the quaking woman to the couch at the far end of the room and left her.

  “Shall we go out onto the terrace?” Señor Muras asked.

  It was a deep, sultry dusk outside. A faint expansive glow over to the west gave promise of moonlight as soon as the clouds had cleared. But at that moment there was nothing. The night seemed to have drawn in very closely. It lay over the house, enveloping and smothering it. Wherever one looked, there was the same velvet screen of darkness. Altogether it was perfect. It might have been designed for Señor Muras’s firework display. Señor Muras himself went away to superintend.

  “It’s a pity your mother doesn’t enjoy fireworks,” Dunnett observed.

  Señorita Muras looked up at him. “You’re kind of dumb, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “Do I look like her daughter?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Well, haven’t you ever heard of people marrying twice.”

  “I … I’m sorry,” Dunnett stammered.

  “It’s all right so long as you didn’t mean it,” Señorita Muras assured him. “You just didn’t think. But say, we’re missing things.” She pointed out into the garden in front of her.

  The brandy which he had been given helped to add to the mystery of the evening; it made him feel at once happy and remote. Dim shapes were moving in the rear courtyard and among the trees. They loomed up suddenly and seemed larger than life when close at hand. Once they had gone a few feet away they were lost again in the gloom. There might have been six of them. Or ten. Or a dozen. It was impossible to tell. What was obvious was that they were all carrying heavy things. The sounds of their laboured breathing came through the night.

  Señor Muras returned, smiling. “It ought to be a very distinguished performance,” he observed. “I have novelties here to-night that we have never seen before.”

  “What about my Egyptian Rain?” Carmel demanded.

  He turned and allowed his hand to rest for a moment on her head. “There is better than that to-night,” he said. “I have got Rings of Saturn and Stygian Candles and rockets that are a flock of birds when they explode. But it is the set-piece that is most beautiful. It is a burning ship. You see the passengers actually jumping overboard one by one. Jumping overboard and burning all the time. The effect is never forgotten if one has seen it. Children should not be allowed to watch: it damages their minds too much.” He paused a moment for breath. His enthusiasm was indisputably genuine. He might have been trying to sell the fireworks instead of merely describing them.

  “But what about my Egyptian Rain?” Señorita Muras persisted.

  “It is there,” Señor Muras answered. “It comes last of all. Flood upon flood of it. It will extinguish even the set-piece.”

  One of the workmen appeared without warning at their elbows and announced that everything was ready. Carmel gave a quick little excited intake of breath and edged up closer to Dunnett. From the open window behind them came the low groans of Señora Muras. With head buried in the cushions on the couch, she was agonisingly awaiting the first of the explosions.

  One came almost immediately. At what was evidently some prearranged signal, four small infernos were simultaneously ig
nited. They v/ere not particularly startling; childish even among fireworks. They burnt fiercely for a moment, sending out dense clouds of yellow smoke, and then exploded with a foolish report. Bits of hot cardboard shot through the air and a coop full of fowls somewhere on the hacienda started chucking and squalling. The groans from the couch changed abruptly into hysterical sobbing.

  Then there came bigger things. A man with a cloth across his face to save him from the sparks went round igniting a dozen Roman Candles. They hissed and roared and fired their stars into the air with an almost pathetic eagerness to please. The walls of the house seemed to jump backwards and forwards in the shifting light. Carmel Muras seized hold of Dunnett’s hand and held it; hers was hot and sticky from excitement.

  As the spectacle continued, there were, Dunnett discovered, fine points about fireworks of which he would otherwise have remained ignorant. In South America, Carmel told him, fireworks were never out of the air for long; tons of the stuff were going up all the time. They occupied, it appeared, a place in the national life somewhere midway between opera and religion.

  “A little more red in the Rings and fewer sparks from the Candles,” Señor Muras was saying under his breath when they were over. “Then it would have been perfect, quite perfect.”

  It was obvious, however, that his tastes were for the lavish and the spectacular. He was itching for his rockets. They were enormous things, of the height of a man—their striped bodies had been revealed in the glow and fires of the previous exhibits. Even the workman who attended them seemed somewhat nervous. He used a fuse attached to the end of a long stick. From inside the room there came a shrill scream. Señora Muras had evidently roused herself enough to look out of the window and see what point of the programme had been reached.

  The rockets went up one by one with the noise of an express train rushing madly off into space. They seemed to be dragging the earth up with them; a fierce rush of wind surged round the heads of the watchers as, one by one, half-a-guinea’s worth of good rocket went up somewhere among the stars. The sky above them was soon a concentrated carnival of streamers and coloured moons. And still more rockets went up into the night to disturb and add to it. Señor Muras’s pyrotechnic display was working up to its grand finale.