“I will tell you how it is done,” he said. “There is a glass sheet which runs away from us diagonally –” he belched and had another shot at the word “– diagonally across the tank from top to bottom. Thus, friends, you see an unbroken sheet of water, but the mermaid is in an empty compartment.”
“Then how does she breathe?” asked a fisherman. “There would be no air.”
“She is wholly immersed in water,” answered the showman, the Andaluz. “The pejemuller, gentlemen, does not, as I have myself observed, breathe like a Christian. She admits water into her body through a system of gills.”
“But where?” roared Paco. “Where does she keep them?”
He suggested several possible positions.
“Caballero!” protested the showman abruptly. “Be decent! She can hear.”
The pejemuller showed no sign of hearing. She waved her tail in languid response to the enthusiasm of the world outside her tank.
“But can she understand?” asked Salvador Aguirre with a precise little smile. “She seems to me to be an idiot.”
“She understands as much as you,” replied the Andaluz with a show of courtesy.
Paco shouted with laughter, and slapped his friend on the back.
“I say it is a little girl,” declared Salvador, his wrinkled face working with an excited obstinacy that hid humiliation. “I say that the tail is of colored scales of mica, and that diagonally—”
“It is a pejemuller,” interrupted the showman.
“It would not be your daughter, perhaps?”
The face of the Andaluz burned and went white as ash.
“It appears I am among brutes,” he said.
“And whom, señor, do you call brute?”
“Since you have said, señor, that I would exhibit my daughter …”
“Man, I said there was a diagonal and—”
“There is no diagonal.”
“There is a diagonal.”
“You know as much of diagonals as of your father.”
“You lie!”
“Stupendous bastard!”
Paco Igarzábal swayed forward his big frame between the two smaller men.
“Let us see, friends! Let us see! What is this? Are we going to kill one another for a little difference of opinion? This gentleman says that there is no diagonal and that, by logic, the pejemuller is a pejemuller. My companion says that there is a diagonal, and that the gentleman is perhaps exhibiting his afflicted daughter.”
The Andaluz leapt at him, just as Paco expected – for he was never one to miss a chance of sport.
Paco grabbed him by the opening of his black waistcoat, and held him at arm’s length. The Andaluz twisted and stamped, answering the renewed insults of Salvador, who was kept back by Paco’s other arm.
“Let us see!” repeated Paco. “A little calm, gentlemen! All this for a diagonal, that can be settled in a moment!”
“Hijo de puta!” hissed the Andaluz.
“Big names!” Paco answered, unaffected. “How much will you take to show us the tank?”
“More than I paid for your mother,” the Andaluz retorted, and spat in his face with a clean trajectory parallel to the arm which held him.
Paco Igarzábal barked with anger and flung him to the ground. Onlookers crashed down upon the struggling men, trying to separate them. The tank rocked on its trestles and spilled water over the edge. The mermaid held her pose, ceasing only, since no eyes stared at her, to move her tail.
At last the tumult of bodies cohered into two groups. The fisherman, huge and benevolent, held the Andaluz. Paco and Salvador were surrounded by the rest of the onlookers, all counseling prudence at the tops of their voices. Not a word could be distinguished in the uproar. The tent heaved and shook as passers-by pushed down the door to listen to so magnificent and delectable a row.
Paco was now more angry than Salvador – if indeed there could be any choice between two men who were living in a fantasy of rage – but, seeing himself surrounded by fellow townsmen who were wont to respect him for his supercilious calm, he choked on his stream of oaths and shouted at the Andaluz in a voice that quivered with the effort of control:
“Listen you! This is to end all argument. I will buy your mermaid and your tent! Understand?”
This astonishing offer brought silence. The Andaluz seemed to recoil as if his spirit were about to leap into passion beyond the reach of all humanity. The fisherman who held him tried with sincere simplicity to conciliate.
“Sell him the mermaid at your price, friend!” he said. “Don Paco has money. And thus – in peace!”
“Ten thousand pesetas,” offered Paco.
“I am a caballero,” answered the Andaluz, each word a slow, reluctant gasp of pain. “I carry this vile trade among brutes who have no upbringing, but I am a caballero. You have called me a liar. You have said that this unhappy thing is my daughter. Now you think that for your money –” his voice rose to a scream “– Where, among whom am I? Ay, my pride! My shame! Cabrones! Must I show you what it is to have a heart?”
He fell upon his knees, and the fisherman, not knowing whether this unexpected limpness was a mere feint or the illimitable appeal of a defeated soul, rested a light, embarrassed hand upon his shoulder. The Andaluz dived beneath the rope and flung himself at the nearest trestle. The green light went out. The tank thudded on the ground, and the water flopped in two solid masses against the canvas of the booth. The plate glass tinkled and crashed as the Andaluz flailed it with the trestle.
Men fumbled for the switch, heaving and swearing in the corner where the showman had turned off the central light. No one crossed the rope to enter that shadowy hell where a spirit translated its devastation into the material.
White light glared. At the back of the booth stood the Andaluz, the trestle in his right hand, his left around the waist of the pejemuller. She clung to him with her arms round his neck, pitiable as a shivering monkey. She was even smaller than she had seemed in the tank; her tiny yellow head was against his cheek, but the glittering tail did not reach his knees. Except that she clung to what she knew, she was not human.
The Andaluz walked through the tent and over the prostrate door. He still held the trestle in his hand, but it was no fear of physical violence that parted the crowd of powerful Basques. He passed under the harsh lights of the roaring fairground, blood and filth upon his face, clothes dripping water. He walked proudly. What march, what music of sunlit trumpets he heard, that too was accepted by the onlookers. They followed.
He took the lane to the sea, where, beyond the circle of trees, only the softness of the night gleamed on the black and changing mirrors of that marvel which flapped against his thigh. He strode over the rock and down to the boat-slip. The ripples of the Atlantic, inch-high, hissed as they parted over the descending stone.
“God guard thee, little friend!”
He loosened the thin arms from his neck, and flung the pejemuller into the night sea. She took the water cleanly, rose once and went under, her tail seeming to flick the starlit surface.
“And now – leave me in peace!” cried the Andaluz.
He stumbled away across the rocks, unnoticed, uncared for. The crowd were arguing, shouting with a recrudescence of anger, gaping into the darkness for another sight of the pejemuller.
In the morning, when they wanted the Andaluz, he had gone, leaving behind him only the debris of the tank, impossible to reconstruct. They understood that he had flung away his living for the sake of his honor; that was no thought foreign to any of them, except perhaps to Salvador. But what it was that he had flung away neither high-tide mark nor the passing of the months disclosed.
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 gray flannel trousers who crowded her decks. She was jammed full as a refugee ship; yet this was no ragged cargo hysterica
l 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 canceled 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 ardor 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 mustache, above which was a powerful nose sprouting blue-gray 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 afterturrets the deck was strewn with men lounging on blankets and reading, sun-bathing, 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 sunbaked 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 forever. 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 onto one of the long wooden benches and smiled dimly at his neighbors across the table until he recovered. The meal was simple; there were 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-gray 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 “armor” 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 th
ey 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 armor. 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 pompom, 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.
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