The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Where have ye been at all?” asked his wife.

  “Begob, I couldn’t rightly say. I thought, maybe, with the sea wild, some of them drums—”

  The next day the postboy came down with the wind behind him and in great elation. He said, “The schoolmaster’s after seein’ Pat Kelly and Tom Malone an’ offerin’ them a pound apiece for the drums. ‘I t’ought,’ says Tom, ‘’twas five pounds ye was offerin’ me for I’m just after refusin’ four from the doctor.’ ‘Lookut here, man,’ says the schoolmaster. ‘’Tis a middlin’ poor sort of fool ye are, Tom,’ says he, ‘for ’tis three big drums was lolloping like porpoises this mornin’ in Roundstone Bay, an’ the stuff does be gettin’ commoner than mackerel,’ says he. ‘An’ be the look of the weather,’ says he, ‘it’ll make another storm before night, and the whole damn dump will break loose an’ the Guards will get the lot.’”

  “Och, ’tis a humbug,” said Kerrigan. “Sorra a drop of petrol there is.”

  And he turned his back on the postboy and looked out to sea and at the big chalky clouds bending in the sky.

  “Was it twenty or thirty drums was washed ashore last night?” asked Kerrigan with heavy irony the next day when he met the postboy on the road.

  “Bedad, man. Did ye not hear then?” exclaimed the postboy with excitement. “Did ye not hear?”

  “Hear what at all?” asked Kerrigan dubiously.

  “Faith, ’tis humbuggin’ me you are lettin’ on ye didn’t see what’s after happenin’ under your very nose, man,” cried the postboy. He was looking out to sea.

  Kerrigan turned his back on the postboy and looked out to sea as well. In his conversational duels the peasant always fights backwards.

  “Maybe, there’s some does be thinkin’ they know more’n me own nose about meself,” said Kerrigan with a sarcastic sniff to indicate the omniscience of his nostrils.

  “Troth,” cried the postboy. “I’m after seein’ the schoolmaster. ‘Man, darlin’, says he. ‘I’m after gettin’ a drum meself last night.’ ‘Where?’ says I. ‘Below Kerrigan’s house,’ says he. ‘It rolled up the bay with the tide,’ says he, ‘and lay high as a house be the wall o’ the road!’”

  “That’s right! Be me own house it was,” shouted Kerrigan, turning round and facing his man, blazing with his humour as though all that mystical petrol had ignited him. “An’ a fine drum ’twas then.” The fires of his humour licked the postboy up and down. “But not as big as the drum I got meself when the schoolmaster went! Cripes! I’ve never seen the likes of that one! Fifteen feet high ’twas then. An’ says I to my son, ‘Get out the cart, Michael, an’ we’ll put the dam ol’ drum on it,’ says I. Man, it nearly had us destroyed with the weight. But when we had the planks fixed under, and it half way up onto the cart it rolls down suddenly on us at a shockin’ speed as hard as hounds.…”

  The excited postboy took the cue without a blink, and said: “An’ then it exploded I believe, an’ disappeared!”

  Kerrigan turned and again closed his gaze down upon the white bumping waters.

  “It might,” said he slowly, “an’ again it might not.”

  The Haunted Room

  Lord Binglemoor undressed very slowly and irritably before the gas fire which mottled his calves and made the backs of his knees itch. He stood in his pants and vest considering the large room—haunted, of course; one of these old places—that his host had given him. As he stood there, Lord Binglemoor’s big nose sniffed a discontent it could not otherwise define. It was the most enormous nose built out from high in his forehead like a flying buttress and slanting heavily down, pulling his head forward with its unusual weight. And as his head was almost hairless and his complexion raw and shiny, this huge, firm, fleshy elbow of a nose seemed indecently naked and pimpled, a thing living a life of its own, searching for something which the two little blue beady eyes buried on either side of it, knew nothing about.

  He walked up and down the room restlessly. He opened the wardrobe door and considered his seven suits and his top-hat. He brushed two of the coats. He examined his shoes. He looked at the pictures. Silly pictures. There was a small portrait of John Miggert, grandfather of the present baronet, his host. Stupid, yellow, foggy, dirty portrait. It almost smelled.

  “Oh, damn! I don’t want to go to bed,” Lord Binglemoor exclaimed as though refusing advice. He looked bitterly at the four-poster. Then he yawned a small downward opening yawn and his stomach bubbled curious confidential noises. His eves almost steamed like two little pies. There was no doubt about it. That was what was the matter with him. He was hungry.

  Immediately, realizing the hopelessness of his case, he put on his pyjamas, turned out the fire and got into bed grimly like a man who has resigned himself to a surgical operation. He thumbed the switch, and darkness snowed down from the rafters and lay its healing on him. There was no chance of getting any more food in that house. These damned old families! Nothing for breakfast. Stupid lunches, silly teas, just like the silly pictures. What about a good knife-and-fork tea like he used to get in the old days! Heavens! now he came to think of it, he had not had a decent meal since he had come into this title and all this damn money. From mill-hand to Earldom! From your money’s worth to starvation was more like it! He put down his watch on the cabinet … not what he called a decent meal, nothing that smelled strong, plenty of it, solid … he fell asleep under the pricking, clattering wheels of the minutes with his thick naked nose living, hoping and seeking its own night life outside the sheets.

  At the end of three hours’ sleep that nose communicated to him sensations of the most enchanting restlessness. He woke up. He sniffed the air. Onions! Undoubtedly fried steak and onions! And in his room. He sat up in bed, heart beating rapidly, and to his astonishment and terror saw an old pedlar in the costume of three generations ago squatting on the floor against the dressing-table, an empurpled man with a face that might have been blobbed with squashed grapes, and with long white hair with streaks as yellow as vaseline in it. But the most astonishing thing of all was that he was sitting before a fire which was burning on the carpet and holding over it a chortling, bursting, spitting, hopping, frying-pan load of steak and onions. Lord Binglemoor sat up stiffly as though riveted to a steel plate; his jaws were fixed, his lips were blue and trembling. He could not speak, either for fright or for the wateriness of his mouth.

  “Who are you? What are you doing in my room?” cried the old man in a very surly tone, catching sight of Lord Binglemoor.

  “I’m Lord, Lord, Lord Binglemoor, Bingle— Binglemoor.”

  “Oh, Binglemoor. Don’t remember that one. Had it long?”

  “Had what long?”

  “The Lord.”

  “Four y-y-years,” chattered Lord Binglemoor. But for that paradisical smell of onions he could have shrieked “Fire!” or something to raise an alarm, for his gaze was needled in horror to the carpet where the pedlar’s camp-fire was burning. His nose saved him; it was dilating joyously.

  “Four years! They starved me in four years, the damned snobs,” snarled the old pedlar.

  “Who-oo,” began Lord Binglemoor, taking a long wobbling breath of extasiatine onion. “Who-oo are you?”

  “There y’are. That’s me. An’ it’s rotten, ain’t it?” said the pedlar, pointing to the portrait.

  Lord Binglemoor could say nothing. He stared at the picture and he stared at the man. His mouth was wide open, his chin drooping with stupidity. He looked again concernedly at the fire. Suddenly he started and jumped out of bed in a fury, for he had seen the remains of his dinner jacket and his evening shoes burning.

  “What the hell are you doing with my clothes,” he shouted, advancing upon the old man.

  “Sorry,” said he, giving the blistering shell of the coat a casual poke. “Burning them. No fuel. See? You can’t cook on them gas fires. ’Ave an onion?” He held up as it were a smoking olive-branch on a fork. “How would you like an onion yourself, now?” His eyes were red as his fac
e, and miniature yellow fires were burning in them. But it was the smell of that onion that calmed Lord Binglemoor’s rage. He stood in his pink and white pyjamas struggling with his dignity, his anger and his terror.

  “I’d give anything for an onion,” at last he cried out as his will wrestled with the smell and prevailed not. “Anything. Any mortal thing. I haven’t had an onion, not even the smell of one since I came into all that damn money.…”

  “All right, all right,” said the old man impatiently, “But the fire’s down. More fuel now. Come along. Look slippy. Bring us more clothes.”

  “Clothes!” exclaimed Lord Binglemoor. “Not my clothes?”

  “Your clothes. Now come along, please, if you want that onion.”

  “But you’re not going to burn my clothes.… Not my …”

  “Oh, damn you!” shouted the old man, his face as furious as a boiled lobster, and jumping up. “The fire’s nearly out, and I’m wasting time with you. I want another onion, if you don’t.”

  And opening the wardrobe door he hauled down Lord Binglemoor’s seven suits, his flannels, his plus fours, his best serge, his best tweed and the rest, his shirts, his ties, his collars and socks, even his studs and heaped them onto the fire. In a moment the flames blazed to the ceiling. Lord Binglemoor rushed to the door and shouted, but the smoke choked him. He could find no door. He shouted again, but no voice came from him. What amazed him now was that there was no smell of burning cloth whatever, but only a profound, sarcastic, enrichening, empowering, emancipating reek of celestial onions, more intoxicating than incense, something that was in his head and limbs like wine, in his little eyes like the purest tears of poetry, in his nose like the smartest sniff of wit. Drunkenly he swayed back to the old man who, clutching him with both hands by his third pyjama button, suddenly stripped his pyjamas off him in two sharp pulls, threw them on the fire, and left Lord Binglemoor gesturing like an astonished statue ridiculously stark.

  “And now eat this,” cried the old man, pushing a plate of the food he had fried on the immense caked glow of the fire. “Onions au naturel!”

  At this point, the squatting Lord Binglemoor was conscious of nothing but the divine flavour of those onions. They bit into his palate, they seemed to sing in his ears, to breathe down his nose, which glowed triumphantly as though at last justified of its owner. He laughed luxurious foody laughter as he ate. He dropped the aristocratic drawl he had been obliged to assume when he came into the title and fell into his old familiar speech. He was very common.

  “Ay, you ol’ rascal,” he said. “I know all abaht yer!” waving a fork at the portrait. “Same as me you was. Came into a baronetcy and four million, you did. Ow, I know yer! Yer artful ol’ beast! The lawyers found yer peddling the Chilterns, they did. Never slep’ under a roof you hadn’t. Not till you was forty-eight. Fried everything on yer own bloomin’ fire. Pulled down fences, bits o’ trees, palings, anything. Fair stripped the countryside you did, oh, I know!

  “That’s me,” said the old man, nearly choking with merriment. “Nothing like an onion for putting life into a man. Jes’ like you, I was. Never ’ad a decent meal when I come into it all. Five houses, oh, yes; and a blooming haunted castle. Enough servants to kill a man. Dassn’t go into me own kitchen, Me! They’d never ’eard of onions. Lord! But I get me own back in ’ere once or twice a week.”

  Lord Binglemoor woke up at nine o’clock by his frozen watch to hear the breakfast gong blaring like a church organ. The blinds were up. The day was shining. His early morning cup of tea was cold beside him. He sat up. Pyjamas? … He blushed—the maids! Heavens! Covering himself with a quilt he went over to the wardrobe and opened the door. There was nothing in it but his top hat!

  Rain in the Sierra

  The sound of gypsy voices arguing, insisting, flapped about in the wet air. There was a pause, then phrases were wielded in ringing anger. A scuffle and almost noiseless flinging together of bodies followed. A donkey jumped over the cactus down the hill. And words of hysteria and useless fury were wrenched from the jaws of a man.

  “Virgin! He has killed him. Dead. Mother of my life, he has thrown him to the ground, dead.’ Help!”

  The man howled like a wolf and danced about in the road. The murderer ran out of the blurred group, jumped the cactus, slid down the cliff, slanted across the olive grove, and dropped over the wall into the road. He stopped a moment to see if he were pursued. Already his face showed the first modellings of a change: he was no longer the gypsy. He was The Man. He began to feel the elation of his act. He felt within him the excitement, the stature of a natural force. His sudden passion had united him with the vast energies and passions of nature; his cunning would be no mere gypsy cunning now. He would use his head no more: in an ecstasy of destruction he had risen and seized dominion. He had destroyed.

  But the rain was falling heavily, and the Sierra, like a black sword thrust into the clouds, lay before him. The magnitude of the earth was too much for a stupid gypsy murderer, and his little fire of pretentious passion burned out. He shrank to the frailty of a cinder. The rain needled the earth. The man ran for his life.

  The hillside had been dark, but on the brown plank of land tilted up to the Sierra a damp light, half of day and half of night, remained. Not a light of the earth nor a light of the sky, but something interposed and glassy, still, like a mirror standing in a dark room. The Man turned and walked and ran, and kept running as the February rain struck his chin, stiffened his bones and made his clothes smell and hang like sodden turf; he gasped out a prayer in delirium:

  “Ay, little Virgin! My little Virgin: Saintliest, purest Virgin, help me! Help me, mother of God! Get me out of this trap and I will give you the money of two donkeys. Ay, Virgin, by all the rings on thy pretty fingers: Thou art the prettiest Virgin, the smartest in all Granada, my little Virgin of the Snows. Don’t let them catch me. Help me.”

  The glum rain of the mountains drummed from the skies washing on to the hillsides, streaming furrowing down the road where the Man was walking. The red soil of the mountains oozed onto the road and slid away in gullies of mud. The glum rain pushed the red mud down the road. In the slopes the dark rain vapours sagged, broke up and were dragging. The silent bulging sky and the feeble earth were pulling each other in to the grey water.

  The man went on splashing, muttering, stuttering, the water from the sky stinging his face, the vapour of the hills in his hair and starred on his blunted beard, his knees red and stiff. The wind came over the pass, bursting, veering, challenging, driving, curling the vapours and throwing the body of the water around, the naked body of water. The wind turned on him and gripped his aching waist. He felt its grey hands on his hips, then lowering till they grasped his knees, and then the hands let go and snapped their fingers like drivers’ whips. The tongues of the wind talked at him from the rocks and left him, buffeted, walking. The devil of a wind, how could a man face it? Crack, and it was gone with water of the sky blobbed on his chest. Was that all the Virgin did? Was she in league with the devils of the wind? She, the Virgin of the Snows? He said or thought or muttered:

  “Ay, Virgin! Treat me like a dog and see! See if the gypsy cannot take his revenge. Did he ever fail you? Hasn’t he always worked for you, more than for all the other Virgins of Granada? Was not his one of the shoulders that bore you through the streets in the Holy Week? Save me, pretty! Pretty little fair one!”

  The sky was bulging its watery purples and greys and throwing its vapours from range to range. The cruel singing of water in the firs, the steady pour of water in the valleys, the sucking of water in the red soil and the ripple of pools in the rocks—all this and the flowing together of earth and sky lost themselves in the full dark of night. The man left the road and struck up the mountains, breasting the thin fog, feeling the cold face of the vapour against his lips.

  Night now strode by in blue battalions, flaunting its black banners of wind, winding its horns and challenges of rain. The man slept a staring, half-co
nscious sleep under a bridge. Day followed with a weak rain-light, a ragged, blobbed-in day.

  The man had climbed to the cave of Cachachin, another gypsy. There was a stick fire in the cave. The wife of Cachachin was cooking meat on the fire. The man sat on the earth floor and the steam rose from his clothes. The water had washed gullies and channels into his brows and under his eyes. Like water-laden woods his eyes were purple and heavy. His face was like the water-channelled road. His body was sodden like the mountain sides. His bones were stiff and hard like the boughs of trees. He talked in rapid whispers to Cachachin. Excited, rapid words with syllables slurred or chipped off them. There was not a trick in one of them. They were the thoughtless, unchosen words of a cowardly gypsy with his heart and cunning washed out of him; sodden, and stupid with fright. Cachachin stared. He was as full of tricks as the future. The voice of Cachachin levered back speech with the jaw and then sent the words bounding forward as by a catapult, scattering through his teeth. The words struck and were forceful. The voice of the Man was halting, toneless like the sound of a cart-wheel on a wet road.

  The Man described the quarrel. How he and Juan the tall bargained till nightfall about a donkey. How the donkey was dying and wasn’t worth a spit. How they agreed on a price, and Juan paid his money and got the donkey.

  “Then, I thought, mother of mine, if a man buys a dying beast he must be a bigger fool than the beast itself. Isn’t that so? So I caught the little animal by the tail and told Juan there were ten reales short in his money. Said I, I told him, I said, ‘Hombre, that there are ten reales short, and I don’t let the little animal go, the finest little donkey in Granada. Come, little pretty one, I will not let the thief have thee.’ But misfortune, he saw the trick, the thief. And he struck me with his stick, a fine one on the head. Pues nada! Nothing! Nothing! ‘Insult me and the honour of my life,’ I shouted. I rushed at him with my knife, the little knife, felt it go into the body as he fell, and the blood shooting out. ‘He has killed him!’ they shouted, the bandits, as Juan fell with the donkey on top of him. Oh, Virgin, I have been running ever since. Last night I slept under a bridge and the Guardia passed as close as you are. Ay, Virgin, my pretty Virgin. Get me out of this.’”