Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘What’s up? What’s amusing you?’ asked Carver suspiciously.

  ‘My dear, noble friend! Ah, but you must see the jest of it!’

  ‘I do not,’ Don Salomón insisted formally. ‘You must forgive me. The Icuari laugh seldom. One loses the habit.’

  Don Felipe silently agreed. It was appallingly true—poor devils that they were out there in the uninhabitable. He himself, before this journey with Father Hilario, had for years seen no reason for any more than a melancholy smile.

  ‘You have never any thought of the world outside—you and your two angels?’

  ‘I must admit, padre, there are times when we think of home. But what with keeping each other alive and speaking the language to each other, we do tend to become single-minded—indeed, apart from our purpose, to have few thoughts the Icuari cannot share.’

  ‘But they would not mind, I suppose,’ Father Hilario asked, ‘if the girls you buy were your wives in fact as well as name?’

  ‘Mind? No, of course they wouldn’t. Oh, I understand at last! Laughing at yourself, were you? The inquisitor descending upon Bluebeard! But, my dear fellow, it beats me that you couldn’t see from your own experience how that sort of thing interferes with a mission.’

  The administrator gasped at so uncompromising a rejection of opportunity.

  ‘If you had any faith, Don Salomón, you would be a saint!’ he portested.

  ‘Don Felipe,’ said Father Hilario, ‘when God has produced the miracle before the faith, we should not, I think, be too ready to advise Him from our own experiments in mere trifles of administration which should come first and which second.’

  Cancer

  1

  First Blood

  SHE was a treaty cruiser, built for speed. Urgency was in her lines, urgency in the deep hum of the engines. Urgent were even the seemingly casual attitudes of the men in open shirts and grey flannel trousers who crowded her decks. She was jammed full as a refugee ship; yet this was no ragged cargo hysterical with relief and embarrassing the ship’s company by their gratitude and misery. The men on deck were lean, well-fed Army officers returning hastily to the Middle East from their cancelled leave. They were not yet in uniform. War had not been declared.

  Mr Avellion sat on a locker, watching the two huge curves of Mediterranean that raced towards the horizon from the cruiser’s bows. There was no other movement on the water and no cloud but a dark patch of haze astern hanging over Marseilles. Ships, more sensitive to threat of war than of weather, were in port. The sea was an empty blue pool.

  He was a civilian. In that eager warship, racing to deliver her packed human freight at Alexandria, there was a small group of businessmen, all specialists in shipping, oil and cables, or obscurer but imperial trades. None of them was important enough to command an unpurchasable air passage, but all were badly needed at their stations before Mussolini, if he meant to move, could delay their arrival.

  There was peace in Avellion’s heart; quivering and uncertain, but peace. He drew a deep breath as if to float this unaccustomed ardour of well-being more securely in an expanded soul, and coughed.

  He was of use; he was wanted. What was it that the Board of Trade chap had said to him? Mr Avellion, your local knowledge will be invaluable. To ask him to leave in twenty-four hours was a bit stiff. Still, chaps like himself were important in times of war. Nobody could tell what value they mightn’t find in his little business at Suez. He was sometimes hazy about the details of what he did there, especially in the morning with always a gaggle of silly Arabs shouting at him; but objectives became beautifully clear at sundown when his boy brought in more ice and the second bottle. Whatever he might feel for the rest of the day, there were two hours every evening when his life was full of interest. The dreams of those hours had, after all, been true. Invaluable—that was what the Board of Trade chap had called him.

  He became aware of a voice.

  ‘Eh? What did you say?’

  ‘I said, “Not much chance if they catch us.”’

  The speaker, by profession a cable manager, was as obvious a businessman as Mr Avellion, but his fat was more neatly distributed throughout his person. Avellion was pear-shaped, with much of his weight far to the south of his belt; he cultivated a small white military moustache, above which was a powerful nose sprouting blue-grey buds like a tree in winter; his appearance was raffish and faintly disreputable, at any rate when compared to the plumpness, the round, clean-shaven face, the precise little mouth and nose of his fellow passenger.

  Avellion’s bloodshot eyes twinkled at him.

  ‘They won’t try, my boy.’

  ‘First thing we’ll know about it will be the whole Italian Navy on us,’ grumbled the cable manager.

  ‘They won’t start till we do,’ said Avellion, ‘not they! They’re still hoping we shall rat, like we did at Munich.’

  ‘Hope you’re right. But I don’t like it,’ replied the cable manager judiciously. ‘I don’t like it. The ship can’t even fight. Do you know we have fifteen hundred passengers on board?’

  ‘A fine lot of boys!’ Avellion boomed. ‘Proud to be with ’em. Well, how about a little drink?’

  ‘There isn’t any.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There couldn’t be enough, you see. So they’ve closed down altogether. We’ll be short of food, too. Bound to be.’

  ‘Bound to be,’ echoed Avellion dully.

  All around the after turrets the deck was strewn with men lounging on blankets, and reading, sunbathing, playing bridge, or asleep. The more energetic strolled back and forth, picking their way through and over the tangle of feet. The lifeboat against which Avellion leaned his shoulder was full of men; an orderly shambles in which everyone seemed to be unpacking and repacking kit. Scraps of conversation drifted past him, mingled of annoyance, indignation, and sardonic amusement.

  ‘Thirty-six hours in the train, and we drank it all up. … No time to buy any. … Well, who the devil would think of packing his cellar? … Now you know what war is like, old boy!’ Then laughter at the sorry plight of eight hundred officers on the quarter-deck and seven hundred men in the flats that did duty as troop decks, all torn at two days’ notice from the delights of leave, and all without a drink.

  Avellion had done just as they—packed his immediate needs and drunk them up. He was allowed only such baggage as he could carry; there had been no room for more than two bottles. They had left Newhaven on the night boat, sleeping wherever there was space to sit or lie, then spent an unshaven dawn at Dieppe, where the six special trains stood hissing in the sidings and the French children cheered and the adults watched with grim, set faces these forerunners of another war. So passed a day and a night, while they waited in sun-baked railway yards or trundled slowly southwards to Marseilles, until the trains emptied themselves into the cruiser and that weary, merry crowd sorted itself out on her decks.

  It was magnificent, thought Avellion, a memory for ever. During the last war he had been out East, clerk in a merchant’s office. He had since accused himself of—well, not funk but lack of spirit. He had been indispensable, they said; and it was true that, so far as the business went, he was. He had always told himself that next month the rush of work would ease, and that then he could enlist; it never did ease, and suddenly the war was over.

  Yet now, twenty years later, here he was among these careless, loose-jointed boys and men, off to war with the first party of the professionals. Followed their mercenary calling and took their wages and are dead—that was one of the bits he would chant in his imperial solitude. And he was proud of himself. At fifty-five it wasn’t so bad to have completed the journey and shared the hardships, such as they were, without feeling one penny the worse—except that, God, he couldn’t endure many more hours without a drink!

  Dusk fell. The blind turrets lifted their guns like the antennae of insects feeling for the night, and fired blank charges. The professionals jumped, and for a moment searched sea and sky for the
enemy; then smiled as if they had known all along that these muted bangs were some naval ritual of active service. Avellion did just as they, but with effort. Though his mind was calmly convinced that there was no chance of war for at least another week, his nerves were uncontrollable. Thereafter he started at any sound at all.

  A bugle summoned his mess to supper. He followed the notices which led him down, through hot and hotter boxes of steel, into the Marines’ Flat. The ship’s company seemed little affected by August in the Mediterranean. The soldiers blenched as they insinuated themselves between the steel walls, and the sweat leapt to their skins. Avellion felt faint. He slid on to one of the long wooden benches and smiled dimly at his neighbours across the table until he recovered. The meal was simple; there was tinned stew, tinned and now liquid butter, and marmalade. He pecked at them. There was warm water to drink.

  The man who sat opposite him, sunburned as an Egyptian, said, as if apologizing for the shortcomings of the senior service:

  ‘Not much in the way of grub, I’m afraid. They were given no warning that they had to pick us up, and it’s a marvel how they manage to feed us at all.’

  The speaker’s silk shirt was open to the waist, and beads of perspiration trickled between the iron-grey hairs of his chest. Avellion knew the type. The man would turn out to be a colonel at least, when he changed into uniform in Cairo.

  ‘Jolly good show, I call it!’ said Avellion stoutly.

  The military eye rested on him pityingly and approvingly.

  ‘They shouldn’t have sent civilians out this way.’

  ‘It was the fastest,’ Avellion replied. ‘We have to be there before the balloon goes up.’

  A good phrase that. He had learned a number of them in the train: to say ‘browned off’ for ‘fed up,’ to speak of ‘armour’ instead of ‘tanks.’ Thirty-six hours in the train. In his compartment one other businessman and four young chaps on their way to rejoin their units. All the whisky gone as well as some bottles of red wine they bought at a station. Whisky. It was hard to eat a meal without it.

  The senior officer left. Avellion asked who he was, and immediately aroused enthusiasm. Yes, he was a colonel and certain to be commanding a division in a year, and had all sorts of new theories about armour. He had been invited to mess with the captain of the cruiser, but as soon as he saw how bloody uncomfortable everyone else was going to be, he insisted on coming along to share. Just like him! Grand fellow.

  With this shot of romanticism in his water, Avellion managed to drink two glasses of it. The liquid poured through his skin, leaving no satisfying body behind.

  He staggered up on deck and retired to the space of forty square feet, between some ventilators and a pom-pom, where the civilians had drawn apart and spread out their bedding—two blankets per man issued by the ship, and whatever they could find in their baggage to mitigate the hardness of the deck. Once by themselves, the businessmen were outspoken in their condemnation of the cruiser, the discomfort, and the various government departments that had facilitated or demanded their voyage.

  The ship raced southwards at thirty knots, and for a little while the contrast between the cool wind of her passage and the sweltering heat below decks was calming as whisky to Avellion. He took no part in the general conversation. His inflated imperial mood had vanished, but nevertheless he was disgusted with his fellow civilians. They were wrong, and he was weary, and the world was very wrong. If only he could sleep!

  The night passed. It seemed an interminable twisting from one hip to the other; yet at times there was a glassy unconsciousness and at times a wild succession of half-wakeful thoughts, so mad that they could only be explained as dreams.

  At dawn he watched his companions crawl from their blankets, ridiculous in untidy scraps of clothing or wormlike in nakedness. He stayed still. The dreams bothered him. There was no way of waking up from them; yet he was, he knew, awake. It was familiar enough, that feeling, but shadowed by the apprehension of some horror still unrealized.

  The horror rose to the surface. There was to be no whisky that day and nearly all the next day. No whisky till Malta, thirty hours away, and no guarantee that one could land at Malta. But of course they would be allowed to land. He clung to that. Only thirty hours away. And of course they would be allowed to land.

  ‘Good morning to you.’

  It was the cable manager. He had washed and shaved and extracted enough from a well-packed suitcase to give himself the dapper niceness of a holiday-maker.

  ‘Got a touch of fever?’

  Avellion tried to concentrate his thoughts.

  ‘Fever? Fever?’

  ‘You’re shaking all over.’

  Avellion held out his hand and looked at it stupidly. It did not seem to belong to him. It was dancing. He put the tips of his index and third finger on his knee and let them gambol like the legs of a ballerina. That was an old trick of his at parties—to wrap a handkerchief round his wrist to form the skirt and let his fingers dance. They danced now. His whole hand danced furiously, and there was nothing at all he could do to stop it. He felt a rush of anger at the man who stared.

  ‘Nonsense! Nonsense!’ he said. ‘Always like this in the morning. Everybody is. Where the devil do I get a wash?’

  He could not shave, but the cool water in which he dipped his face and wrists revived him. He dressed, and strolled round the deck, stepping with care over the penetrate bodies of the army. With many he exchanged smiles. They felt, obviously, that their discomfort was comic, that nothing whatever could be done about the inefficiencies of the War Office as a travel agency, and that one might as well enjoy the enforced idleness. For Avellion there was comfort in the prevailing bonhomie, and again a measure of calm in the exhilarating rush of the ship across a perfectly flat Mediterranean. He could not face breakfast or lunch, but it was not so bad. Not so bad. And he was four and a half hours nearer Malta.

  In the afternoon he had trouble with a very primitive Avellion who wanted to scream. He kept him in order, but was driven to cadge—very decently—for drinks. Drink was the subject of his conversation with all casual acquaintances. But the passengers’ baggage was bone-dry. Everyone to whom he spoke was also hoping to God that Mr Avellion—his nose looked so promising—would produce a bottle and himself offer treat. A naval officer murmured uncomfortably that the wardroom too was dry; they couldn’t, he said, very well open the bar for themselves alone when the ship was full of devastatingly thirsty soldiers. He moved uneasily away.

  Avellion clung for support to that invaluable local knowledge. He had it all right. His line had always been the native trade, and he knew the dhow skippers from Oman to Suez, their ships, their reputations, and their rackets; little cargo could run the blockade to Abyssinia and no gossip of it be repeated in his office. He looked forward to new, stern friendships, more dutiful than his innumerable bar acquaintanceships, more familiar than the strange attachments occasionally and passionately formed by Arabs for those they could not understand.

  No more of just making and losing money. At last, he told himself, he had something to serve, and in good company like that colonel’s. For an important man, an important man in good and gallant company, not to be able to stand two days without a drink was absurd. Self-control! Mustn’t make a fuss.

  Two more hours passed, long as the whole voyage. The bugle summoned him to eat, but he could not face the mess flat and sweating alleyways. The open deck was fresh and cool as sanity.

  The cable manager had pity on him and, suspecting that the oily smell below had upset Mr Avellion, brought him a sandwich. Avellion ate it and swallowed water. Nothing had taste or even feeling.

  ‘Bothered by the sea, old chap?’

  Avellion shook his head. The confession broke from him.

  ‘I’ve got to have a drink,’ he cried harshly. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve shifted a lot in the last twenty years. Not real heavy drinking. Only just what one needs in the tropics. It doesn’t do me any harm, but being c
ut off like this—’

  His hand danced in the air describing a vague figure of eight, a complicated gesture of emptiness.

  ‘Ask the doctor for some,’ suggested the cable manager. ‘You ought to taper off gently. He’ll know that.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will. Of course.’

  Avellion got up from his two blankets spread on the deck. He did not look back at them. There had been a queer shadow close to his ear, at the limit of vision. He scuttled off towards the sick bay, and then could not remember why he wanted to go there. He sat down heavily on a stanchion. To go to the doctor—of course that was it: to ask the doctor for a drink.

  The cruiser hurled herself through the water, white ensign at the stern stiff with the wind of passage as the tin flag on a toy ship. The mercenaries of the Middle East strolled leisurely past Avellion; they could, he gathered, endure the steady diet of stew and marmalade; they could sleep well enough on blankets and the deck; they were ribald at the overcrowding, so close that one man’s head was between the feet of another; but they still cursed bitterly at the lack of any alcohol to beguile the tedium of the voyage. It occurred to Avellion that he was not alone in his torment. He was again ashamed. He, too, was a servant of the state, and invaluable. If they could endure privation, he could. Good God, he had recaptured his youth during those long hours in the train! The doctor? It might be less than twenty hours to Malta at this speed. Then he could soak in it, and afterwards taper off gradually. That colonel, the one who sat and sweated into his marmalade, wasn’t asking for special privileges. What? Go squealing to the doctor with all his comrades as thirsty as he? Comrades—comrades—he kept rolling the young word through his mind as he walked back to his blankets.

  The night was peopled with strange images. It seemed busier and less long than the last. Once he screamed.

  ‘Sorry, chaps. Must have had a nightmare.’

  It cost him a physical effort to say so. He wanted to go on screaming and tell them why. He screamed twice more—simply couldn’t help it—but managed to make them sound like violent coughs.