The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Outside!’

  Rosalinda evidently thought this was the proper way for a brother to behave. She made no attempt to touch him until she had loosed off some quick explanations in Guarani. They had been brought up together in the loneliness of the forest, those two, and words were hardly necessary to them at all. A half sentence, an exclamation, a tone of voice could tell far more essentials than the usual forms of speech which you and I go through. Hilario begged me to forgive him, and, if I could not see my way to forget an unjust insult, to wait for him a little while until he had obliged the gentleman responsible for his agitation.

  He was only about eighteen and looked extraordinarily like his sister—the same gentle, tender face with the features a little sharper and the mouth a little thinner. He was wearing the old-fashioned hat and poncho which you might see in Posadas on a fiesta. On working days, however, we wore coats and trousers like anyone else, with a few individualities in the way of boots and belts. Hilario and his manners belonged to the Latin-America of the last century.

  ‘Which is this Don Luis of whom I have heard?’ he asked me.

  He felt it indelicate even to mention the name to his sister.

  Luis had just come in from the kitchen—about the only place where his personal influence never did anything but good—and was standing near the other end of the bar, staring at the new arrival. He must have guessed who Hilario was—the resemblance to Rosalinda was so marked—but probably reckoned that a half-Indian boy, with a face made for women and the guitar, was not likely to give him much trouble.

  They met in the upper half of the dance floor, and Hilario called him exactly what he was. Luis’s knife was out before the second syllable. I don’t know whether you have ever seen our up-country fighting. Srrr! Click! Ssssh! And it’s all over. One moment Luis was as fast as a hornet’s sting, and the next moment he was lying on the floor with his works coiling out around him and the flies beginning to come in from the kitchen. He had courage. He did not complain. That sort of thing was an occupational risk, I suppose.

  Hilario’s face was still soft and courteous. He might have been apologising to the company for some outrageous favour which he had felt bound to extend to Don Luis. He had cut upwards and his hand had followed the knife. The blood was running down from his fist to the blade and dripping on the floor. You could hear it. That flash of red and silver under the hard white light hypnotised everyone into silence for a second or two. Rosalinda was already behind her brother—though I don’t quite know how she had got there. It was the only safe place in the whole world for her. She knew that instinctively.

  No one—except Rosalinda—had moved yet, but Hilario had not a hope of reaching the front door. He backed towards the kitchen entrance alongside the bar. Out to his right flank the barman reached for a gun. We didn’t normally use such things in Posadas. It was the bar revolver—kept under the counter for emergencies alongside the lemons and the dishwater. I don’t believe in getting mixed up in foreign rows like a drunken fireman. Still, what was I to do? Hilario was the only chap who could produce a satisfactory solution for Rosalinda.

  The barman was half turned away from me, and the soda-water siphon took him over the right ear. It was far too forcible a way of expressing my sympathies with a murderer’s sister, but I had nothing else handy. Disastrous! I tell you, I knew while that siphon was still in the air that the only future for me in Argentina was a long gaol sentence.

  That broke the spell. A woman screeched. The room rose at us. The customers might have shrugged their shoulders and attended to their business, such as it was, if this affair had merely been a difference of opinion between two of them about an Estrella girl. But Don Luis was a prominent citizen, and he had been so very thoroughly killed.

  If I’d had half a chance I would have slipped through the kitchen door and bolted. But Hilario and Rosalinda were blocking it. I caught a glimpse of the cook—he was a Syrian and a sensible man—sailing out through the window, and then I found myself cast for the part of Horatius on the Bridge while Hilario shoved Rosalinda out at the back and told her to run.

  I wasn’t alone long enough for any heroism. I remember smashing a bottle on somebody, and getting in a right hook which hurt me quite as much as the other fellow. Then a chair broke on my head. I suppose the leg was rotten. Fortunately for me, Don Luis had never succeeded in keeping termites out of the furniture. I went down and, for an instant, out. The next thing I knew was Hilario dragging me out of the kitchen into the open.

  That appalling knife of his seemed a bit wetter round the point, and he had managed to slam and lock the door behind us. The pursuit—this was all a matter of seconds—had not yet had time to disengage and run round the block to the back of the Estrella. There were only some shanties and a lane between us and the river bank; as soon as we were clear of them and had collected Rosalinda I was running rather than staggering.

  After paddling himself across the Paraná, Hilario had left his canoe about two miles down stream. He hadn’t stopped to think. Indeed he had not thought at all during his journey on foot and horse and rail and river right across the length of Paraguay; he was just a moving blaze of anger. Posadas police hardly entered into his calculations at all. They preferred to spend their nights in decent gentlemanly idleness—but once their attention had been drawn to any undesirable character trying to escape from Argentina to Paraguay, stopping him was a routine job. They knew the river bank so thoroughly that they could count on picking us up and returning to their bottles before wives or waiters had time to clear away.

  The night was dark; but one can see by starlight in these parts and spot a moving figure at twenty-five yards so long as it does move. There was no cover at all along the flood plain of the Paraná. Worse still, there were creeks and patches of marsh so that we could never race off into the Americas at large or even get very far from the tracks. To my mind our chance of reaching Hilario’s canoe was nil.

  We just bolted along the river bank until we were stopped by a creek. We had to follow it up to its head, and that lost us our lead. Once round the creek, we had a choice of three tracks westwards—one north of a marsh and one south, and a third which ran down to the sands. We heard horses already cantering out from Posadas, and there was no time at all for hesitation.

  We took the middle track north of the marsh. The going was good, and Rosalinda didn’t hold us back. She was not even shocked by all this savagery. Murder didn’t count when it was right. Just another example of her extraordinary innocence. She had kicked off her shoes and was running as free as a little twelve-year-old. Her education had not lasted long enough to soften the soles of her feet.

  But it was the shoes which gave us away. The police troopers spotted them, lying bang in the middle of the right track. They did not have to split up and do a bit of scouting. They came on behind us like a charge of cavalry.

  There was a small patch of open plain by the side of the track, and we dropped flat on it. When the pursuit—six of them—had thundered past, I began to have hopes of getting clear. The obvious move was to return to the head of the creek and try one of the other two routes. We had just reached the junction when back came the police. They must have reached some point—a customs post, I think—beyond which we could not have passed. Three of them were riding south of the marsh, and three north—at the same time quartering the narrow strip of plain where we had lain down and covering the third track to the sands.

  In the direction of Posadas were more lights, carried by such of the sporting citizenry as were attracted by the chance of a free shot at human game. No hope for us there, either—so we cut down into the angle between the creek and the Paraná where our first dash from the town had landed us.

  The whole of the hunt gradually converged upon our corner. I thought this was an unfortunate accident until a launch drifted down from Posadas and began to search the water’s edge with its light to prevent us swimming away. The police knew exactly where we were. Long experience
and elimination of all the possibilities.

  ‘Why do they not bring nets?’ Hilario whispered bitterly. He was hurt at being treated as something only fit for the taxidermist. After all, he knew that he was a harmless and honourable boy on all occasions when convention did not call for murder.

  The advancing line, with one flank on the Paraná and the other on the creek, became shorter as it approached us. There was not a hope of breaking through. To judge by the lights, the gap between man and man was about forty yards and rapidly lessening. It was then that I began to see stars, and ascribed them to the crack I had received over the skull. It’s not what a man really feels which finishes him, but what he thinks he feels. Just because there was a sickening, patternless mess of lights in front of my eyes, I was ready to pass out. I told Rosalinda and Hilario to slip through the line if they saw the remotest chance, and leave me.

  They were whispering excitedly in Guarani, and seemed unreasonably hopeful.

  ‘But why? Why give up now?’ Rosalinda asked me.

  There was a sob of disappointment in her voice, just as if I had refused her something which she had set her heart on, when all the rest of her world agreed.

  I tried to pull myself together, and noticed that some of the lights, instead of dancing in front of my eyes, were stationary in Rosalinda’s hair.

  Then I understood. There had been a hatch of fireflies on the river flats. The muggy weather and the hot north wind had brought on the one day in twenty-eight that I was telling you about. They might have been ants or flies or these savage-looking fellows which you seem to have forgotten about for the moment; but they happened to be beetles—fireflies.

  Beautiful? I don’t know whether it was or not. It was mad. I tell you that there wasn’t a cubic foot of air—literally—without a firefly in it. You couldn’t see. No wonder I thought I was fainting! It was like—well, I’ve often tried to describe it to myself. Imagine yourself infinitely small and suspended in a cylinder of gas! Imagine the hot molecules rushing about and cannoning into each other. No, it wasn’t beautiful.

  The three troopers on the left of the line had been following the bank of the creek. They were now so close that we didn’t dare whisper. Not that they would have heard us. They were cursing and damning and waving their hats about. Quite useless, but it’s a human instinct to try and clear a space in front of the eyes. Their horses were nervous and giving any amount of trouble. I doubt if they were in the least bothered by the fireflies; they had caught the exasperation of their riders, as horses always do.

  Hilario started to squirm forward foot by foot, and Rosalinda and I followed. You couldn’t tell where the police troopers were going, fighting their horses in that damned silly way instead of showing confidence. One of the poor beasts was just about to tread on me when it saw me. It shied, and its rider’s language was worse than ever. He did not look at the ground. He was trying to pierce the intolerable flickering on a level with his eyes.

  It was perfectly safe to stand up and run as soon as we were past them. At the head of the creek we took the track down to the sands, and reached Hilario’s canoe by swimming and wading.

  Of course I can never go back to Argentina, but who cares? Three thousand acres I farm here. When Hilario showed me this place and its own private river with a flow of 300,000 gallons a minute and an even drop of twenty feet in half a mile, I saw what could be done in the way of power plant and refrigeration. It wouldn’t suit everyone. But we often have visitors like yourself. And they are very welcome whether they have two legs or six. Hilario himself always preferred mining to farming. He has done very well at it.

  Rosalinda? Well, they get a bit full in the figure, you know. But does that matter when the only face you ever want to look at is on top of it? Our boys made her go out fishing this afternoon. They’ll be back any moment. Certainly before the mosquitoes start. Well, yes, if you look at it that way, I suppose they have started. But don’t go slapping at them! Round here nobody has ever died of fever since her poor mother and father.

  Roll Out The Barrel

  MARGIT was an island like the rest of us. In the set of complicated currents she kept her shores intact only by loyalty to what was best in herself. She had not much else to be loyal to.

  She was a Hungarian peasant who had earned her lonely living as a servant in Budapest ever since she was fourteen years old. Social democracy and a husband with a bit of land—those were her desires, political and personal. Towards the present regime she was dully neutral, for it snatched away with one hand what it gave with the other.

  She took pride in her skill, and as much in her employers as they permitted. For the last six months she had worked for a middle-aged consulting engineer, respectable and law-abiding. He seldom laughed, and his ready smile seemed to spring from a natural courtesy rather than any personal interest. He left no doubt, however, that he appreciated her cooking, and that was enough for Margit.

  She used to day-dream—failing a better subject—that he had asked her to be his wife, though any woman could see that he was dedicated to something, perhaps the memory of a former love, more distant than marriage. The dream never lasted longer than the washing-up of two plates and a coffee cup.

  Margit knew very well that she hadn’t the beauty to revive a dead heart. All her mirror told her was that she was squat and thick and brown; it could not reveal that her eyes were gay and that she moved with light feet and a provocative swing of the skirt. That touch of gallantry had been born of the czardas danced in the village of her girlhood, and was kept alive by the barrel of excellent wine in the kitchen.

  The barrel was a present from her brother, who had inherited the little family vineyard and contrived to hold back enough of the harvest to supply himself and her. The rest went to the state cellars for export. Margit was puzzled that wine should have become so scarce and expensive. In the days before the war a generous employer would no more have thought of reckoning up what was drunk in the kitchen than of counting the potatoes.

  So Margit treasured her hundred-litre barrel. She wasn’t a heavy drinker. At the moderate rate of a big glass for lunch and another for supper, there was only enough to keep her morale more gay than grim for about two hundred days. The barrel, too, was a symbol. It brought into the worried city a sense of solidarity with her village—a spiritual rather than political class-consciousness. She felt for her hundred litres the welcome that a business woman would give to a hamper of flowers from the garden of her first lover.

  Some of her treasure, of course, she had to share; but that, too, was joy. She was enabled to be gracious and to indulge the aristocrat that lived in her peasant heart. So, when she received a visit from the well-dressed gentleman who had recently begun to sit outside the café at the corner, it was hospitality rather than fear which made her draw a jug for him.

  She knew what he was. Among the humble there was unspoken alliance for the recognition of secret police. The porter of the block, who that very day had been ordered by the well-dressed gentleman to give him a weekly bulletin of information, had dutifully kept the secret, but handed out broad hints to chosen friends.

  The policeman in Margit’s kitchen was a very superior specimen of the breed—not at all the type which normally collected information from porters. She greeted him with the politeness reserved for a class above her own, and hovered hospitably over him.

  ‘Good wine, this!’ exclaimed the gentleman from the café at the corner, stretching his legs under the table. ‘Is your employer rich?’

  ‘My brother sent it me,’ she replied. ‘It has nothing to do with the master.’

  ‘And what does he drink himself over there?’—the visitor jerked a thumb towards the narrow passage which led, through a faintly delicious atmosphere of spices and onions, to the office and dining-room of Margit’s consulting engineer.

  ‘Whatever he can get, sir.’

  ‘And plenty of it, eh?’

  The visitor, determined to be a democrat, pinched her
playfully. Margit’s reception of the compliment was cold. She knew from experience that her rotundities were eminently pinchable, and she did not—for example, with the porter—take offence. But the caress of her visitor was incorrect; he made it appear a studied gesture rather than an irresistible temptation.

  Margit dropped her best manner and answered him with a rough frankness. That was one good thing about the present regime. You needn’t—if you belonged to the proletariat—bother with ceremony when you didn’t feel inclined.

  ‘How can anyone get plenty of it?’

  ‘Complaining of the regime, are you?’

  ‘Listen, I’m a peasant! Better off, worse off? I don’t know. Wait and see—that’s what we say.’

  ‘What about the visitors here? Is that what they say?’

  ‘Do you think I’ve nothing to do, cocky, but crawl up the passage and listen at the door?’

  The visitor gave a hoarse chuckle, into which Margit’s wine and pleasant, broad accent had injected some sincerity. ‘We come from the same district,’ he exclaimed. ‘I see that!’

  ‘Every district has some black pigs among the white.’

  ‘That’s the end, sweetheart,’ he said—quite tolerantly, but as if the inevitable time had come to exchange good-fellowship for his normal business attitude. ‘Sit down!’

  Resignedly she sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. He represented the limitless power of the state. There was no need for him to explain or threaten, and they both knew it.

  He drew from his pocket three photographs of the same man: full face, right profile, and left profile.

  ‘Have you ever seen that one?’ he asked her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever heard the name of Istvan Sarvary?’

  ‘No. Who’s he?’

  ‘An enemy of our country, my girl. A revolutionary and warmonger. And at last I’m on his track. Look at those photos, and take your time.’