Tales of Adventurers

by Geoffrey Household

  When we had settled down comfortably in a sheltered little anchorage on the Galway Coast, I sent Redworth an unsigned picture postcard with our address. In a few weeks he wrote us a most discreet letter, just giving the local news as if it had nothing at all to do with us.

  He said that he and a dozen other farmers had been bothered by the police about a certain British Imperial Andean Exploration Society, and that none of them knew why. The Society had seemed to them quite genuine.

  “I have been making a few inquiries on my own,” he went on, “and it seems that our poor old country is being shot at again. I cannot imagine what on earth induced this Society to call itself Imperial. I hear that there have been strong protests from every single South American republic that owns a slice of Andes, and that when the Foreign Office swears there isn’t and never was such a Society, it’s accused of covering up some imperial bit of monkey business. The liberals are going to make matters worse by asking a question in the House, and there’s not a thing that anybody can do about it.”

  But that is where he was wrong. I could write this story, and I have.

  Railroad Harvest

  WE, THE FRENCH – said Maître Braillard, stretching his feet under the table and swallowing a draught of the acid white wine which was all the café had in 1946 to offer – are ever ready to accept tradition. I speak to you as a lawyer and perhaps I exaggerate. But in my opinion the worst that the occupation did to us was to destroy our sense of continuity with the past.

  This wine is revolting, but will do while we wait for better. And I assure you that within two years the tradition of the Gallic palate will have triumphed.

  It is customary – he went on – to prophesy that the revolution we are undoubtedly about to suffer will be more drastic than our revolution one hundred and fifty years ago. I do not believe it. We wish to order our lives by the law. We accept immediately the law. It is only when we know not what the law is that we become a little difficult.

  I will tell you a story. It has a slight piggery, but we are after dinner – if indeed we may dignify by the name the small portions of antique horse and salad that we have just consumed.

  Do you know the municipality of Saint-Valery-sur-Marne? No? I am not surprised. Saint-Valery is ten kilometers from the fortifications and remarkable only for its ugliness and its extensive railroad yard. If you travel round Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Quai d’Orsay, your train will inevitably pass through Saint-Valery. But why should you be in it? You will of course spend some hours in Paris, and will pick up your train again at the Quai d’Orsay.

  Saint-Valery has a black canal, and some small industries without any permanence, built of cement and corrugated iron. There is no architecture. There are only hoardings, and houses of a startling melancholy. It is quite evident that one is compelled to inhabit Saint-Valery; one does not choose it.

  In the middle of this tasteless wilderness are the railroad tracks, and in the middle of the tracks is a little tower of dirty brick. The tower is old. I do not know how old, nor what it was for; it might have been the base of a round dovecot. But now the interior has been rearranged – you understand – as a convenience for railway men.

  It stood, this tower, upon a triangle of blackened gravel between the canal sidings and the main loop line round Paris. In spite of this little-promising situation, the brickwork was covered by a resplendent vine. There was no other green thing within three hundred meters; not even a dandelion could live in such a waste of steel and cinders. But the vine was older than the railroad, and its roots were far down in good French soil. It was well nourished by the iron that filtered in solution through the gravel and had, no doubt, some other excellent sources of fertility.

  In August of 1945 the vine was superb. It rejoiced in its liberation. The walls and parapet of the tower were jeweled with bunches as long as my forearm. The grapes were of that indescribable tint which is purple, yet not quite purple. All the station staff of Saint-Valery were agreed that it needed but twenty-four more August hours for fifty bunches to be at their perfection.

  Mme. Delage, who was the wife of the stationmaster and impatient for good morsels as befitted an admirable housekeeper who was tormented by the impossibility of a decent table, was the first to lose her self-restraint. One had not yet decided upon the ultimate destiny of the grapes; one had perhaps deliberately avoided so delicate a subject. Mme. Delage, however, had set her heart upon a bunch, already and indubitably ripe, which hung on the south wall immediately above the window of the tower.

  I knew her well. She had a black mustache, and her rotundities, though massive, were more square than round. She had no reason to hope for those attentions which traditionally await the wives of stationmasters. She wore high-heeled shoes, as was proper for the consort of an important functionary, but they did not become her ankles. She resembled, I thought, a hippopotamus on skates. Nevertheless M. Delage was a model husband. She had fine brown eyes, one must admit, and then he was very afraid of her.

  At six in the morning Mme. Delage, with a basket and a pair of scissors, waited before the door of the tower. I say she waited, for the tower was occupied; and she could only reach the chosen bunch through the window from the inside. After a while she permitted herself to hammer on the door.

  This intemperate gesture being without effect, she approached Lulu, who was waiting on the track, and climbed upon her footplate and blew her whistle loudly. It was Charles Cortal, the driver, who had christened his locomotive Lulu. He loved little else but Lulu and all humanity, for he was a communist. But humanity is too large to love with enthusiasm. His true affection was for Lulu.

  Charles Cortal launched himself in a fury from the tower.

  “Madame!” he cried. “It is forbidden by the regulations of the company to climb upon a locomotive!”

  “It is also forbidden,” Madame replied, “to leave a locomotive unattended.”

  I was not present, you understand, but I can imagine what Cortal retorted. I have had dealings with him. He answered, with a beautiful selection of obscenities, that there were times when locomotives had to be left, above all when his cretinous fireman had gone to pour coffee into his filthy guts, and that if he had known Madame so urgently required the tower he would have made other arrangements.

  To this Madame replied, with the exasperating calm in which she was accustomed to address the angry proletariat, that he knew very well she desired only to gather a bunch of grapes.

  “Then gather them, nom de Dieu!” shouted Charles Cortal. “But without disturbing me!”

  “One can reach the grapes only from the inside,” answered Madame.

  She was, you will agree, in the wrong. And to Cortal she exhibited plainly, immediately, the shocking inhumanity and acquisitiveness of the bourgeoisie. He therefore demanded why Madame should gather grapes which had been the property of the company’s drivers and firemen as long as the Third Republic existed. Then Madame began to tell him what she thought of this right he had so brilliantly invented. And Cortal said that for one old cow she made more noise than a whole veterinary surgeon’s back yard.

  And patati, patata! And before anyone knew of the quarrel, Mme. Delage was off to swear a procès-verbal against Cortal for insult and contumely, and Cortal had gone to complain to the local secretary of the union.

  Meanwhile Lulu remained where she was as a protest. M. Delage and the signalmen might say what they liked, but not a driver would move her. The loop line was blocked, and on the telephone from Paris were jolly things to be heard.

  After a hasty breakfast, M. Delage placed upon his head the gold-braided hat of office and visited the Café de la Gare, where Charles Cortal was expressing his opinions over a glass of very bad eau de vie. Before them all Delage accused Cortal of sabotaging the transport system of France. Cortal, without hesitating an instant, called him a collaborator, a Pétainiste, and a pro-Boche. After that there was no more to be said.

  M. Delage was a man of duty. It was his bus
iness to see that trains ran, and he saw that they did run, even during the occupation. He did not understand the Resistance; he was paid, he said, by the company. All the same, he looked the other way when it was required of him, and he kept his mouth closed. I would never call him a collaborator, but he was narrow.

  At midday arrived from Paris the general secretary of the union. He was a reasonable man. True, he had the hungry and farouche appearance of a revolutionary assassin; but it was expressly cultivated. In manner he was tactful as a director of funerals. Though his sympathies were naturally with Cortal, he was determined to restore discipline at Saint-Valery.

  After he had wholly failed with the drivers and firemen, he took it upon himself to make Delage laugh at this petty affair – as between men of the world, you understand. But Delage was in no laughing mood; there was, he said, a question of principle involved. He pulled out the railroad regulations and made the secretary read the powers of the stationmaster: how he was responsible to the company for all property, movable and immovable, in or upon the station and the yards, and in the event of any attempt upon such property might call upon the civil power – and so on. Delage was prepared to admit that he might have no right to eat the grapes. A court of law, he said, would settle that. But as to his right or that of his wife, acting as his agent, to pick the said grapes at maturity there could be no doubt at all.

  The secretary was inclined to agree, but to excuse Cortal, he suggested that an overworked and honest driver, disturbed in a moment of tranquillity, might permit himself expressions which –

  “Monsieur,” said Delage gravely, “she waited a reasonable time.”

  “But, Monsieur, consider the impropriety!”

  “Monsieur accuses my wife of impropriety?”

  “Of no such thing, I assure you. I wished to say that Madame with her delicate susceptibilities would not have desired to gather grapes had she been aware—”

  “Madame is above such petty considerations. And then, I repeat, she waited a reasonable time.”

  “Monsieur would be good enough to define a reasonable time?” asked the secretary, who was beginning to forget his tact.

  “Ah, par exemple! Let us say five minutes!”

  “It is in the regulations, perhaps?”

  “It is in the regulations that a driver shall not leave his locomotive unattended.”

  “When France mourns for so many missing sons,” said the secretary sharply, “one cannot manage labor by red tape, especially at 5.00 A.M.”

  “It was six, Monsieur.”

  “In any case, Monsieur, it was a suspiciously early hour that Madame chose to sneak her grapes.”

  “Monsieur, I forbid any criticism of my wife!”

  To which the secretary, at last under the infectious influence of the vine and angry as lesser men, replied by a pleasantry in the poorest taste. And then M. Delage slapped his face.

  They were separated by the chief clerks of the Grande Vitesse and the Petite Vitesse. Those two were invaluable. They were calm, you see. They voted for the Catholic center and had all that was necessary to their convenience upon the station. They had thus no conceivable right to the grapes.

  It was quite otherwise with the shunters. They disagreed entirely with the impulsive claim of Charles Cortal that the fruit had always been the perquisite of drivers and firemen. The shunters had just as good a case in all respects; two of them had even pruned the vine.

  The solidarity of the working class vanished altogether when the shunter, Hippolyte Charvet, took it upon himself to remove Lulu while she still had steam. He made a speech from the footplate explaining that the act he was about to perform must not be interpreted as having any bearing upon the future of France, and had nothing to do with the dispute between the stationmaster and the locomotive engineers. In that argument the engineers were right and Delage, the so-called stationmaster, was a fascist who would shortly receive his deserts. No, comrades, he removed the locomotive merely because in its present position it kept the afternoon sun from the shunters’ grapes.

  He thereupon returned Lulu to the sheds. I think he is still in the hospital. Charles Cortal did not even permit the oiling of Lulu by any but himself.

  To hear the arguments, you would have thought that every man remembered exactly what had happened before the war. Even Cortal’s claim, which he had obviously invented merely because he was angry, was taken seriously. But nobody in fact remembered any tradition at all. For five years the Boche RTO in charge of the yards and his Boche staff had eaten the grapes themselves and allowed no one else to approach them. That alone was certain.

  I will now give you the intelligence summary for Saint-Valery at nightfall. M. Delage was prostrated, partly by answering telephone calls from Paris and partly because he feared to be shot as pro-Boche. Mme. Delage was at her lawyer’s for the third time. The drivers and firemen were on strike. Charles Cortal was summonsed for the attempted murder of Hippolyte Charvet. The shunters had a peaceful picket round the vine. Grande Vitesse was occupied in composing an apology for the union secretary, who had not the least wish in the world to fight a duel, and Petite Vitesse was doing the same for Delage. And Saint-Valery yards were just as idle as when all the employees used to pretend they heard an air-raid warning.

  The next day it was hot. But how hot! Only to think of it gives me a thirst even for this wine. We descended, a horde of officials, upon Saint-Valery. I was among them, being the union’s attorney. There was the undersecretary of the Ministry; there were two big men of the Resistance; there were all the union officials and the company officials. There were even some soldiers. In these days one can never have a row between civilians without soldiers desiring to be present.

  First of all we held a quite informal conference at the station. We arrived at the facts. And then we protested that the whole affair was ridiculous. The Resistance men laughed. That started us off. A complainant had only to mention the tower for us to giggle like boys, all of us and uncontrollably. On a hot day one laughs easily. One’s companions are themselves comical. They mop their faces. The poor railway men of Saint-Valery were more furious than ever.

  It was Charles Cortal who imposed more gravity upon us. He mounted on a barrow and addressed the union officials.

  “We,” he bellowed, “we, the drivers and firemen, we were the heart of the Resistance in Saint-Valery. A month after the liberation we were thanked. And now, a year after the liberation, observe how they allow us to be stuffed up with insults from a sort of pig of a collaborator! Comrades, one steals our birthright!”

  And then he called Delage by the names of various animals, and commented, without any regard for zoology, upon his probable descent from others.

  This wiped the smiles off the faces of the company officials; they were about to be nationalized, and it would do no good to their salaries to have the reputation of capitalist tyrants.

  Mme. Delage had dressed herself like a pretty countrywoman, but in surprisingly good taste. She chose her moment to direct a few words to the General Manager. Everybody listened.

  She was going, she said quietly, in the freshness of the dawn to cull a bunch of grapes.

  Our chivalry leaped to our hearts. She had a fine voice, and she made one see French Womanhood, all pure and laborious, going about its simple tasks at sunrise.

  She had been insulted, she sighed, but that was nothing. There were gentlemen in plenty to defend a French-woman in distress. No, it was not for herself that she asked justice, but for her husband.

  Delage was in his best cap and uniform, looking handsome and pale and very much the old soldier. Of course she touched that string too. His service in the last war. Wounded for France. Twice mentioned. And now to be called a collaborator!

  She picked up Delage’s hand and kissed it passionately.

  “That is what I think of him!” she cried. “And I – will anyone dare to say that I, Susanne Hélène Delage, am a collaborator?”

  That wiped the smiles off th
e union officials too. Lack of discipline, inability to appreciate the plight of the country, incitement to rebellion against the government – those were the accusations they saw coming.

  It was time to treat the affair with all the dignity of public men. One whispered. One formed lobbies. One admitted the need of subcommittees. And at last we constituted ourselves into a commission and decided to sit in the upstairs hall of the Café de la Gare. We summoned all witnesses and representatives to accompany us.

  There was a yell from Charles Cortal.

  “And leave these camels here to steal our grapes while we are away?” he asked. “These thieving sons of mackerels?”

  Two of the shunters were still unobtrusively picketing the tower. A third was inside. We formally ejected them. Grande Vitesse and Petite Vitesse were called upon to stand guard.

  “And if one wishes to enter?” asked Grande Vitesse timidly.

  “It cannot be permitted,” the General Manager ordered. “One can find everything necessary on the station.”

  “That I forbid absolutely!” shouted Delage.

  “Bien! One will be instructed to make whatever arrangements one can,” said the General Manager in his most conciliatory manner.

  I cannot say that the commission was a success. The hall had not been used for a long time. We could not expand in an atmosphere which reeked of mice and the ancient smoke of locomotives. And then – we could not create tradition where none existed.

  We suggested that the grapes be given to a hospital. Not one of the railway men agreed. They said that next year and for all the years we liked they would send enough grapes to hospitals to resurrect the dead; but this year it was unthinkable. There had been insults. There was a question of principle to be decided – though heaven alone knows what cursed principle it was.