The cube of shed left upright was about thirty feet high. It stood because it had been reinforced to take the weight of the concrete gun platform on the roof.
‘This will get us up, sergeant-major.’
A long strip of iron railing had been hurled against the trucks. It did not look as if it had fallen from anywhere, but as if it had been preserved on the ground for some calculable event of peacetime—to rail off the crowds at an embarkation of the royal family, or to fence a bit of welcoming garden in front of the customs-house. They up-ended the railing with some difficulty and leaned it against the wall for a ladder.
The heat of the burning ship seared eyes and face as Coulter looked over the top. On the platform was the gun, pointing at the scorched foremast of the City of Syracuse and partly wrenched from its mountings. There were two great-coats, forming a vaguely human-shaped pile which aroused and disappointed the gallant zeal of the sergeant-major. There were the long slender Bofors shells ready arranged to be seized by their partners in the complicated dance of loading. The place was deserted. Well, what else could you expect? The officer in charge would have ensured—and of that Coulter had all along been certain—that none of his men was left up there alive.
‘Time we were going, sergeant-major,’ he said irritably.
‘We’ll just have a look-round in the rubble, sir.’
‘All right. It’s possible of course.’
And he dutifully searched the hollows and dark corners where one of the gunners might have been blown. By this time he had become such a fatalist that he was jesting with the sergeant-major. To himself he said: chum, you won’t know a damn thing about it if the ship goes up, so why worry?
He clung to that unreasonably comforting thought until such time as Sergeant-Major Wrist decided that honour was at last satisfied.
Coulter offered him a cigarette, and walked back to his truck which was parked outside the port offices. He could have run now with a clear conscience, but it did not seem worth while. He was neither courageous nor cowardly; he was just empty.
As they drove out of the dock gates, he said to the sergeant-major:
‘Well, Mr Wrist, if there are many chaps like you among the old regulars, I suppose we might win the war after all.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the sergeant-major complacently. ‘There’s one thing we’re taught early, if I may say so, sir, and that’s our duty to look after the men, sir.’
They had gone half a mile from the docks when the City of Syracuse blew up. The blast cut a swathe through the houses packed on the hill above the port, but on the open sea front, along which they were driving, buildings merely spilled all their windows on to the pavement as neatly as if a stage set had fallen flat. Then a vast bulk, blacker than the night, swooped out of the sky before them and hurled up a water-like spout of trees, earth and grass as it plunged into a little public park at the cross-roads.
‘Gawd, what was that?’ the sergeant-major yelled.
‘Must be the whole forepart of the City of Syracuse,’ Coulter answered, fascinated by such a colossal show of violence.
The bows and forecastle had pitched right way up, and immediately looked as if they had been on the site for years—a fitting decoration for the park of a seafaring people.
‘Gawd!’ exclaimed the horrified sergeant-major again. ‘She must have been full of ammo, and me muckin’ about alongside like a bleedin’ good Samaritan!’
‘But I thought you—’ Coulter began, and stopped.
Well, what was the use of saying that he thought Wrist knew, that he never dreamed he didn’t know? However he put it, it would inevitably look like boasting. And he was sure—indeed he well remembered—that any unnecessary dwelling upon danger had not been considered a soldierly virtue by that lost generation whom he could never hope to equal.
Six Legs are Welcome
IT’S no good waving at them. Take this one, for example! She’ll get bored with crawling up my arm in a moment, and fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there’s just the usual mixture of insects, and on a twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all the available air.
No, I don’t know what these are called—apart from their Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren’t they? Six legs. Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo tube in the stern. That’s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick it out! There you are—neither of you one penny the worse!
We’ll go inside in another half hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn’t pay any attention at all to these fellows. They’re just satisfying their curiosity with only one day to do it in perhaps.
Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don’t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won’t squash a cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in-law. I’ve no fellow feeling for any of the little pests. But if it hadn’t been for them I should be half-way through a life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. A man can never quite forget a bit of luck like that. It’s bound to influence him. Let me get you another glass! That one’s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably.
Live and let live—that’s all I say. This bit of Paraguay belongs to them quite as much as to me. I’d better tell you the story. I haven’t listened to myself speaking my own language for more than a year. And it will stop you imagining that something is crawling down the back of your neck when all you need, like the rest of us, is a haircut.
I was a mechanic in Argentina then, repairing tractors and managing the power plant and refrigeration on a big estancia up in the north-east corner of Corrientes. That’s a strip of real white man’s country—in between the marshes of the Paraná and the forests of Misiones. I liked the life and the people. Took to it from the start, like so many other Englishmen.
The nearest town was Posadas, where the train ferry crosses the Paraná from Paraguay to Argentina. I used to go there three or four times a year to keep an eye on the discharge of any of our machinery from the river steamers, and arrange for its transport up-country. You could drive a truck from Posadas to the estancia—just—but it was more comfortable to ride.
Posadas was not much of a town. A lot of dim lights, but no bright ones except the railway coaches and the Estrella de la Banda. The Estrella was a far better joint than you would have expected to find in a little river port, not at all the usual pulpería with a couple of half-witted girls in a dusty corner and drunks sleeping it off outside the door. Posadas had a small floating population of travellers between Paraguay and Argentina—some of them men of distinction or money, or even both—and Don Luis, who owned the Estrella, found it worth his while to feed them decently and provide entertainment. There were plenty of first-class passengers who made a point of staying the night, whenever they had to cross the Paraná, just in order to visit Don Luis’s joint.
He was a big buck of an Italian—padded shoulders, local politics and all—but he was born in the pampa and he flattered himself that he was an Argentine of the Argentines. Anyone who addressed him as Luigi instead of Luis was safer the other side of the river. I knew him well enough to dislike him thoroughly. He didn’t suspect it. You can go on detesting a man for years in Spanish so long as you have good manners. That’s quite impossible in English.
There was a north wind blowing on that last visit of mine to Posadas. Just like today. It always brings the damp heat and the insects. And thirst. The boat from Buenos Aires had not arrived; so, instead of the drinks with the captain which I had been looking forward to, I went into the Estrella de la Banda. You could trust Luis’s whisky. I’ll say that for him.
It was early, and the place had not got going. Luis had a new girl.
‘That’s a little beauty!’ I said to him.
She was not my sort, he told me. She was meant for travelling senators and so forth.
‘She’s only a mestiza,’ I said. ‘What’s so special about her?’
He whispered to me what
was special about her. I didn’t believe him. But one of those senators off the international train might possibly want to believe him.
I sat down beside her. She wasn’t more than seventeen, and she was wearing a frock of innocent respectability just like any young girl at her first party—except that it was black. She had the wide, gentle face of the Indian, with eyes far apart and hair growing low on the forehead; but her mouth and her nose and all the rest of her were Spanish of the loveliest. I couldn’t get much out of her but si, señor and no, señor. Very haughty indeed. Full of conventional little parlour tricks. She wouldn’t touch anything but lemonade. The line would have gone over very well in Buenos Aires, but I thought she was overdoing it for Posadas where we all liked a bit of slap-and-tickle with, say, the third round of drinks.
I spent an hour with her and then cleared out. I told Don Luis he was right—that she wasn’t at all the sort for a hardworking man.
All the same I could not get her out of my mind. Her face was so selfless and serious, too comfortable for a place like the Estrella de la Banda. Not that there aren’t some perfect beauties about in cabarets, as well as in shops and offices. But her type was different. I’ve often thought about it since, and I can’t put it better than this. You did not feel she was bothering about being loved. She wanted to love. Her name was Rosalinda Torres. But I couldn’t guess much from that. Rosalinda sounded professional. On the other hand they do like, out here in the backwoods, to give their daughters high-sounding names.
There was no steamer next day, so I had nothing to do but hang around in the heat and slap at all the life coming down on the north wind, just like you chaps who travel for pleasure. By the evening my curiosity was greater than ever. I call it curiosity. But I thought I would be quite ready to take it to another table if young Rosalinda showed no interest in it.
She was sitting with the Captain of the Port, whom I did not like to interrupt for the sake of favours to come. However, he wasn’t a wealthy man—in spite of all the help we shippers used to give him for the sake of his dear wife and children—and he soon got the same impression as I had the previous night. Meanwhile, I was surprised to find myself a bit short with the other girls who wanted to share my whisky.
I had the sense to play up to Rosalinda’s act. So, instead of beckoning or sending the waiter for her, I went over hat in hand. She gave me a reasonably courteous little nod, and indicated that I might sit down. We got on a little better until I told her that I was English. That closed her up tight. I gathered that foreigners were right out of her experience—as terrifying as a jaguar until you are sure it isn’t hungry.
But I kept on treating her as if she had just been let out of the convent school for a day with uncle. I must have convinced her in the end that I, at any rate, wasn’t hungry. Suddenly she burst out:
‘I do not understand this place!’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked. ‘It’s as good a place as there is till you get down to the Plata.’
‘It’s not this way that a girl gets married,’ she answered.
One doesn’t like to be fooled. I’ve knocked around the cabarets of two continents, and I expect you have, too. You never know what tricks those girls will be up to. I told myself firmly that I was not rich enough to be a senator, and was too old to be sentimental.
‘When did you leave the convent?’ I asked, not making the irony too obvious.
‘In May,’ she said.
It was a plain fact that she was stating.
‘And your parents?’
Then it all came out—so far as she herself was capable of understanding what had happened to her. She had never come to grips with everyday life at all, you see. The forest, her parents, her simple education—those were all her past.
She was Paraguayan. Her parents, both of them, were of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. Humble folk, but true Americans and proud of it. They had managed to make a good living—and a little cash over—out of a remote holding up the river. No near neighbours but the forest Indians. As a matter of fact, their original farm was a part of this one. And it was a lot harder for them to reach by paddling than for you in your motor launch.
When Rosalinda came home from the convent at Asunción, she found that the land was going back to scrub, that the few peons had left, and that both her parents had been dead for over a month. Her brother, Hilario, was away in the Chaco, where the post was not nearly so reliable as word of mouth passed from settlement to settlement.
So there she was. Relations, none, Money, none. Food, what there was on the place. And then some fool, wanting to get her a free passage—but as likely as not he had no money either—put her on Don Luis’s launch as a first step towards returning her to civilisation. Luis was on his way down the Paraná from Brazil, and he had some woman with him—I never found out who it was—that he passed off as his wife. Both of them, Rosalinda insisted, were angels to her. And when Luis suggested that, if she stopped off at Posadas, he would find her a husband, she believed him.
Can you imagine such simplicity? He would find her a husband, just like that. Well, after the war I gave up the sea—and me with my Chief’s ticket and a good job—because a Brazilian told me that he only needed a young partner, with lots of energy and a knowledge of machinery, to develop his diamond mine. What’s the difference?
Don Luis cannot have expected that she would tell me so much. Or perhaps he didn’t mind. Argentines never quite understand the Paraguayans, who are nearly all of mixed blood whatever class they belong to. He may have been looking at the girl the wrong way up.
Put it this way! He had picked up a destitute Indian girl with a little white blood; if he placed her well, it would be considered—by his friends and customers—a lot kinder than letting her starve in the forest.
But call her an ordinary Paraguayan girl, decently educated by poor parents who chose to live at the back of beyond, and the thing was an outrage on humanity!
I did not know what to say to her. I could not tell her on so short an acquaintance to jump on a horse and come to me if the going got really rough. She was far too lost to understand whom she could trust. And, anyway, it was a delicate subject to approach. I felt she was so blooming innocent that she might not know what she was in for. Of course she knew. Any woman would. But it had taken her a long time to put her uneasiness into definite thoughts which she could talk over with herself.
What I was really afraid of was her submissiveness. She was so used to doing what her parents told her and then what the nuns told her that she went and did what Don Luis told her. She had not grown up at all. If she stayed at the Estrella de la Banda for long, Indian resignation was going to overcome Spanish pride. That, no doubt, was what Luis reckoned.
‘Do you want to go back to the convent?’ I asked her.
‘Not much,’ she said, giving me her first smile.
‘What can you do to earn a living?’
‘Cook,’ she answered, ‘and sew and look after a house.’
Well, that was that! Like so many old-fashioned girls, she could spend the rest of her life as somebody’s servant if she hadn’t any money, or as somebody’s wife if she had.
‘Where are you living?’
‘In a little house which Don Luis has lent me. There is a woman to look after me.’
A real professional he was! The only mistake he made was to exhibit her in the Estrella. If he hadn’t, she would never have seen that there was anything wrong at all. I doubted if I could even get any help from the parish priest. He wasn’t a man of the world, and would hesitate to believe the libellous accusations of a red-hot heretic when Don Luis subscribed heavily to the Church, and had provided the little waif with chaperon and all. As for the police, they would take the same point of view for less charitable reasons.
I had no intelligent suggestion to make—except that she should stick to lemonade—so I just sat with her till the place closed down, limiting my whisky to one every half hour and playing baby games w
ith pencil and paper. Don Luis did not object. From time to time he would give me a grin and shake his head at me across the room. There was none of his high-class custom about.
The next afternoon the steamer arrived. By the time I had collected the electric pump I was waiting for and stowed it safely on a truck and had a meal, it was late and the Estrella was full. Besides the regulars there were a young Argentine off the train—very much the moneyed señorito—and a mixed bunch of passengers from the boat.
Don Luis had already fixed up Rosalinda with the likely young Argentine. She didn’t know the conventions of the place, and she left her escort with a polite little bow and came straight over to my table. He stared murder, half rose and thought better of it. I was a much bigger man, wearing my working clothes with the flies buzzing round the sweat stains. He couldn’t quite guess what he was up against. Mark you, I’ve said the Estrella was a high-class joint, and so it was compared to the other places of so-called amusement along the Paraná; but to well-dressed young gentlemen, fresh from Buenos Aires, we probably looked a lot of customers who would stand no nonsense.
I was getting along splendidly with Rosalinda. Bless her heart, she had forgotten her troubles enough to be flirtatious! Just a matter of eyes, of course. Nothing that she wouldn’t have done in her own home with proud mother looking on benevolently. And then she suddenly jumped up and cried:
‘Hilario!’
We were sitting at a little table at the unfashionable end of the Estrella, near the angle of the bar and wall. Hilario’s eyes must have been burning into us while he first watched from the entrance, and then walked the length of the room. It was the end of a long, desperate journey to his sister, during every hour of which he had imagined himself arriving too late. He did not kiss her or throw his arms round her. He was the kind of stern brother you read about in the Old Testament. I was his first objective. He said to me:
The Brides of Solomon Page 7