The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  After an hour of the colonel, Bill agreed that the sergeants might be right, and added that he thought the tide was rising.

  ‘Eight hours down, and four hours up,’ said Wagstaff.

  ‘Not six?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Hadn’t we better try to get out?’

  ‘You can try, Bill.’

  After ten minutes Bill said: ‘I guess I’ll learn some of those songs of yours, colonel, when I‘ve got my breath back.’

  ‘Repeat the words after me, Bill, facing the land.’

  In competition with each other, they so concentrated upon the job in hand that neither heard the approaching craft until she was three hundred yards away. With the fast tide under her, she was abreast of them before their yells for help met with any response.

  ‘’Old on!’ shouted the bridge. ‘It ain’t easy, yer know!’

  The engine-room telegraph rang. The wash from the propeller slid up the mudbank, as the ship was held steady in the tide. A beam of light glared into their faces.

  The captain certainly knew his channel well. Going gently astern, he edged into the bank until the bows towered above them. Prettily riding the crest of a wavelet, right under the forefoot of the ship, was the bowl.

  ‘Look out,’ Bill shouted. ‘You’ll run her down.’

  ‘Never saw there was another of you!’ bawled the captain.

  The telegraph rang violently. White water swirled at the stern. Their rescuer withdrew, edging out a little into the current, and the tide promptly swung the ship in a quarter circle with the bows as centre. The captain went ahead in a desperate effort to regain steerage way, and there she was, aground fore and aft across the channel.

  ‘Knew that would ‘appen,’ said the captain, addressing them conversationally from the forecastle. ‘Now where’s the lady?’

  ‘No lady,’ the colonel replied. ‘She walked home.’

  ‘What? And left you there?’

  ‘Must have forgotten.’

  ‘Cor! What I’d’ave said if I’d known there was no lady! Well, catch ‘old!’

  The rope fell by Wagstaff. The captain, the mate and the one deckhand dragged him, wallowing, through the mud and up the side of the ship.

  Sergeant Torbin followed, but left the rope in order to plunge sideways and recover the bowl. By the time the mate had recoiled the line and flung it back, very little sergeant was visible beyond his cap and an outstretched arm.

  ‘What d’yer do that for?’ asked the captain, when Bill too was safe on board. ‘Balmy?’

  ‘It’s two thousand years old,’ Bill explained.

  ‘Like me frying pan,’ said the mate. ‘Went up to me waist for that one, I did. fifty-year-old it might be, and they don’t make ’em like that no more.’

  The captain led the way to a small saloon under the bridge. It reeked of fug and decayed vegetables but was gloriously warm.

  ‘You take them things off, and Bert will ’ang ’em in the engine-room,’ he said.

  ‘Any old clothes will do,’ the colonel invited, dropping coat and trousers in a solid lump on the floor.

  ‘Ain’t got none. Don’t keep a change on board, not none of us.’

  ‘Blanket will do.’

  ‘Don’t sleep on board neither.’

  ‘What are you?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘Chesterford garbage scow. Takes it from the trucks and dumps it overboard at forty fathom, see? Never out at night, we aren’t, unless we misses a tide like we done yesterday. Bert, give ’em a couple of towels and shovel up them clothes!’

  Bill managed to make the towel meet round his waist. The colonel found his wholly inadequate.

  ‘I’ll try this,’ said Wagstaff cheerfully, lifting the bowl from the cabin table and removing the tablecloth. ‘Show you how they wear ’em in India!’

  The cloth had once been red plush, but the pile was smooth with age and grease-stains. The colonel folded it diagonally, passed two corners through his legs, knotted the tassels and beamed on the captain.

  ‘Well, I suppose,’ said the captain grudgingly, ‘that you’d both better ’ave a drop of rum, though it don’t look to me as if it was so long since the last one.’ He unlocked a first aid cabinet and produced a bottle.

  ‘I admit with pride that we have been celebrating the acquisition of a priceless antique,’ the colonel answered.

  ‘This ’ere?’

  ‘That there.’

  ‘Sort of basin, like?’

  ‘An old Greek drinking bowl, captain.’

  ‘How’s it used?’

  ‘It was not used,’ the sergeant shouted. ‘They kept it to look at. On the mantelpiece.’

  ‘Nonsense, Bill! They didn’t have mantelpieces. I’ll show you, captain. A slave took the jug, so!’—the colonel seized the bottle of rum—and emptied it into the bowl, so!’

  ‘Hey!’ the skipper protested.

  ‘And then it went round like a loving cup.’

  Wagstaff took a sip and with both hands passed the bowl courteously to the captain, who could only drink and pass it on to Bill. Bill despairingly lowered the level by a quarter of an inch, gasped and passed it to the mate—the mate to Bert.

  ‘Good navy rum, that!’ said the colonel, starting the bowl on its round again.

  ‘Got to stay where we are for the time being,’ the mate agreed. ‘Bert, you take them clothes away like the skipper ordered, and then you can ’ave a lie-down.’

  With the memory of the rising tide safely behind him, Bill felt that there was some excuse for the theory that an object should be used as its maker intended. Half an hour later, inspired by his towel, he was showing them a dance he had learned in the South Pacific when he began to think the saloon was going round.

  It was. The stern of the garbage scow, gently lifted from the mud, swung across river with increasing speed and thudded into the opposite bank. Bill made a dive for the bowl as it slid across the table and landed in the captain’s lap.

  ‘Knew it would ’appen!’ the skipper yelled. ‘That’s the last time I picks a Yank out of the mud!’

  He jammed in the doorway with the mate. The bows came off the mud and described the same semi-circle as the stern. The engine-room telegraph rang like a fire engine. Wagstaff, flung off the settee on to the floor, sat there cross-legged shaking with laughter. Bill cradled the bowl grimly on his knees.

  ‘Allies, Bill, allies! What did I tell you? It’s all your fault, and your towel has come off!’

  ‘Colonel,’ said Bill, reknotting it round his waist, ‘how come all the guys that tried to shoot you missed?’ He dropped his head on the table, and instantly fell asleep.

  They were awakened by Bert, flinging down two still soggy bundles of clothes. ‘Skipper says ’e don’t want no more to do with either of you,’ he announced, ‘and if you ain’t off this scow as soon as we ties up ’e’ll send for the police.’

  It was light. Up the reach the town, the castle and the municipal rubbish dump of Chesterford were in sight. The clock on the church tower made the time eight-thirty.

  ‘Bill,’ said Wagstaff, breaking the silence, ‘that piece of linen in which you have wrapped the bowl was once my shirt.’

  ‘Say, colonel, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Not a word. It will dry there. And I can do up my coat collar. Thank heaven I am known in Chesterford!’

  Bill took the remark on trust, though it seemed to him when he was escorted by the mate through the corrugated iron door of the garbage wharf, before breakfast and looking as if he had been dug out of the tip, that personally he would prefer a town where he was not known.

  Striding up the main street of Chesterford, however, alongside the colonel, he understood. Wagstaff’s air was guiltless, so full indeed of a casual manliness as he greeted an occasional acquaintance that only one of them thought it proper to comment on his appearance.

  ‘Showing our friend here some sport,’ said the colonel. ‘Mallard right. Teal left. Got ’em
both. Lost me balance. And this gallant fellow hauled me out.’

  As they resumed their squelching progress up the High Street, Bill remarked that he sounded exactly like a British colonel on the movies.

  ‘A very useful accomplishment,’ Wagstaff agreed, ‘which has enabled me before now to rescue allies from well deserved court martial. Later in the day which is now upon us, Bill, or even tomorrow or whenever that damned bowl permits us both a reasonably sober countenance, I shall accompany you to your commanding officer and obtain for you a mention in your home town paper and probably a medal from the Royal Humane Society.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It gives medals. Did you not leap into mud of unknown bottom to rescue me?’

  ‘Don’t mention it, colonel. It was the least I could do,’ said Bill, and paused. ‘Say, wasn’t it the bowl?’

  ‘The values are quite irrelevant, Bill. Me or the bowl? The bowl or me? We will now go into the Red Lion here for a bath and breakfast.’

  ‘Will the bar be open yet, colonel?’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be all right. They know me there.’

  ‘Then I’m not going in with this bowl,’ Bill said firmly. ‘Not to the Red Lion or any other of your animal friends.’

  ‘Fresh herrings, Bill. I can smell ’em. And Bacon and eggs to follow.’

  ‘We can have breakfast at a tea shop.’

  ‘Too respectable. They wouldn’t let us in.’

  Sergeant Torbin, desperately searching the market square for safety, was inspired by the opening of the double doors of the Chesterford Museum. He ran, vaulted the turnstile in the vestibule where the doorkeeper was just changing into his uniform coat, and charged down an alley of Roman tombstones into a collection of stuffed foxes and weasels marked ‘Natural History’. Hesitating wildly between ‘Neolithic’, ‘Iron Age’ and ‘Gentlemen’, he saw a door to his left with CURATOR on it. He leaped through it, and found himself facing a desk where a very tall wisp of a man in his seventies was quietly cataloguing.

  ‘You take this,’ he said. ‘Lock it up in your safe, quick!’

  Before the Curator could get over the shock of an American sergeant, covered with mud from head to foot and offering with outstretched arms an unknown object wrapped in dirty linen, Wagstaff also was upon him.

  ‘Is it—is it a baby?’ the curator asked.

  ‘It is, sir, a fifth-century Attic cylix,’ the colonel replied with dignity.

  The curator tremblingly extracted the bowl, and at the sight of it instantly recovered an almost ecclesiastical self-possession.

  ‘But this is an article of great value,’ he intoned.

  ‘I know it is. You’ve no idea of the trouble I’ve had preserving it from destruction.’

  ‘This—um—er—has dispossessed you of it?’

  ‘Lord, no! It’s his.’

  ‘Colonel, it is yours,’ said Bill with what he hoped was finality.

  The colonel took the bowl with both hands, pledged an imaginary draught to the gods and held it high above the stone floor of the curator’s office.

  ‘I’ve nowhere to keep it,’ Bill screamed.

  ‘Oh, that’s all that is bothering you, is it?’ the colonel exclaimed. ‘Well, what’s that damned owl doing?’

  A stuffed barn owl in a Victorian show case stood on the curator’s work-bench. Wagstaff lifted the glass dome from the ebony base, and removed the owl which immediately disintegrated into dust and feathers.

  ‘Mouldy,’ said the colonel. ‘Disgrace to the museum. That reminds me, I believe I’m on the committee. Give you a new one and stuff it myself.’

  ‘I was indeed considering—’ the curator began.

  ‘Of course you were. Quite right! Mind if I sit down at your desk a minute?’

  The colonel printed a neat card:

  LENT TO THE MUSEUM BY COURTESY OF

  SERGEANT WILLIAM TORBIN, USAF

  He laid the bowl upon the ebony stand and propped the card up against it.

  ‘That will keep you quiet,’ he said, replacing the glass dome, ‘until Bill has a mantelpiece for you again. The sergeant has only to write to you to get it, I suppose?’ he added fiercely to the curator.

  ‘Yes, yes, but—’

  ‘Any objection to the Red Lion now, Bill? It will be a pleasant change to drink out of glasses once more.’

  EGGS AS AIN’T

  Mrs Swallop had been working her twenty-acre holding single-handed ever since Tom Swallop was killed in the Boer War when she was seventeen years old and a six-months’ bride. He left her his scrap of freehold land, no child, and apparently so pleasant a memory that she preferred to live with it rather than change her status.

  Her farm—if you can call it a farm—was up at the end of a grass track: a patch of cultivation in a dry bottom surrounded by the thorn and bracken on the slopes, and well fenced except for short stretches of queer material such as old bed-springs and rusty sheets of corrugated iron. It had a name on the map, but no one for ten miles around ever called it anything but ‘Noah’s Ark.’

  The birds and animals were not, however, in biblical couples. Mrs Swallop stocked her land with breeding females, for she had her own ways of encouraging them. There were two enormous turkey hens, a goose, a saddle-backed sow, a flock of undisciplined chickens, a black cow, a black nanny-goat and a big black cat who was fierce as a watch-dog when she had kittens. The only representative of the male sex was a buck rabbit who attended to the comfort of several prolific does.

  She was a bright and cleanly old body—so far as one can be when farming alone—but her dress and her ways were odd. She might be wearing an old tweed skirt below an upper half swathed in sacking, or a new purple jersey with a horse blanket for a skirt. She had a black moustache, and she used to whisper under it to her animals.

  Mrs Swallop would whisper for her neighbours, too, if she liked them; so they were always ready to lend her a male when she turned up driving one of her females in front of her, or pushing it, squawking, in the large dilapidated perambulator which was her only farm transport. If there were anything else in the bottom of the pram, such as eggs or cream, they would buy it from her by some careful method which would not draw the attention of Percy Crott.

  Those were the days just after the war when farmers were making a lot more money than now. On the other hand, they had to put up with fellows like Crott. He had been a village schoolmaster till one of his fourteen-year-olds sent him to hospital; and when he came out he got a job in the Ministry of Food. How he rose to be an inspector, no one ever discovered—for all he knew about food were the regulations to prevent the public eating it. He had a blotchy pink face as smooth as a pig’s, with a nasty little mouth in the middle of it and a round chin which he used to stick out when he was speaking—like one of those business men who are so proud of their faces that they put their pictures in the advertisements in spite of the sales they must lose.

  Crott could never catch the big farmers who generally obeyed the law, and had a dozen inspector-proof ways of covering themselves up when they didn’t. If he wanted to bring a neighbour before the courts and make an example of him, he went for the little man who was sure to be breaking regulations because he had no time to read them. And he made a dead set at Mrs Swallop because she built a breeding hutch for the rabbits out of all the pamphlets and government forms which the postman brought her. Those rabbits fairly flourished under the welfare state, but when Percy Crott saw the hutch he said it was a scandal, and carried on as if Mrs Swallop had built it out of a stack of Bibles.

  All the same, it was difficult to find an offence by which he could put her out of business. She had no books or accounts—for she insisted that she could not write—and old Trancard was always ready to tell any lie for her. Crott’s only hope was to catch her red-handed selling eggs to the public.

  Trancard took a very friendly interest in the old lady, for his sheep-run surrounded her land on the north and east, and the luck he had with the lambing was
marvellous. He guessed what Percy Crott was up to when he saw him hiding behind a hedge and counting Mrs Swallop’s birds. So he persuaded her to turn over a new leaf, and register herself as a poultry producer.

  ‘It won’t give ’ee no trouble at all, missus,’ he told her. ‘I’m a licensed packer, and you hand over your eggs to me for grading and packing, and get paid by the government at fifty shillings for ten dozen. But what you must not do, missus, is to sell ’em to anyone who ain’t licensed. And if that young Crott catches you at it, you’ll fetch up before the beaks.’

  ‘I don’t want no more of ‘is papers,’ Mrs Swallop answered.

  ‘Ain’t no papers, not to speak of, me dear! You delivers your eggs to me whenever you happens to be passing, and along comes the money and your National Poultry Food regular. If you mixes it up with a bit of barley, which maybe I can find for ’ee, the hens won’t hardly know what they’re eatin’. Oh, it’s all as easy as kiss your ’and, missus, begging your pardon,’ he said.

  Trancard was obviously making money out of his fine flock of Rhode Island Reds, so Mrs Swallop decided to take his advice. While there was plenty she wouldn’t understand, there was nothing she couldn’t once she got her lips moving silently round the problem. She collected another score of hens, one by one wherever a bird caught her eye, and a shocking lot of mixed breeds they were; but she soon had them in the pink of condition and laying up and down the hedgerows as fast as if they had been their orderly sisters in Trancard’s deep litter house.

  When Mrs Swallop came up with her third load of eggs, six inches deep in the bottom of the pram, Trancard graded them and gave two dozen back to her. They were too small or too crooked.

  ‘And what must I do wi’ ’em, mister?’ she asked.

  ‘Do what you likes with ’em. The government don’t want ’em.’

  ‘They be all egg inside,’ she said.

  ‘But the public won’t buy ’em in the shops, missus.’