The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (9 page)

“What he offered at first wasn't what I wanted. He kept on insisting on coffee and cocoa and quinine and all the things I could grow that would make me rich. I told him that I was sick of trying to make money, that I wanted to settle down. Then he showed me this place. I could see it was pretty much what I had dreamed of, but too big. I hadn't any capital, I couldn't stock it.

“‘I'll make you a sporting offer, Jorge,' he said. ‘Take the place as it stands. It'll feed you and your men and keep a roof over your heads. And if you can't make that
estancia
pay its own running expenses, then you're an
hijo de puta
who ought to live in the same back street as your mother.'

“I was short with him after that insult. I told him I'd forgotten more about grass farming than he ever knew, and I accepted the place. At nine o'clock he took me down to his lawyers and made out a deed of gift then and there—everything on the land movable and immovable, as they say. I couldn't know it included this furniture and a volcano and the beginnings of the best dairy herd in Ecuador, could I?”

“No,” I answered. “But what
did
people say?”

“Exactly what I prophesied. And I called the ranch La Embajada to encourage them a bit. And those who didn't believe our story started a rumor that Anastasio had bought me off because he didn't dare let me travel on the same boat with his wife. So I had her portrait painted and hung it up to let them have a bit of evidence on their side as well. Of course that was long ago. I think everybody knows the real truth now—except Doña Clara.”

DELILAH OF THE BACK STAIRS

SUMMONED from his pantry by the buzzer, Widgeon put his head over the edge of the shaft and found that the delivery lift had come to rest three feet lower than his landing.

“Higher!” he called.

The unseen delivery boy wound a crank in the area, and the lift, like an inverted and continually disappointed guillotine, leapt savagely into the space where Mr. Widgeon's head had been.

“The two whiskies is for you,” shouted a careless voice eight stories below. “Sign the book, please. The wine's for Number Twenty-One. Give 'em a knock, mate, will yer?”

“Push Twenty-One's button!” said Widgeon. “What do you think they're for?”

He objected strongly to being called “mate” by an errand boy and disapproved of his laziness; the boy had only to take four steps and press the button in an orderly manner. Nevertheless Widgeon crossed the iron grille of the service landing and knocked on the back door of the opposite flat. He did not wish his neighbor, the cook of Number Twenty-One, to think that he was unwilling to do her a favor even if unnecessary.

“The wine merchant for you, Mrs. Hussey,” he said.

“That boy,” answered Mrs. Hussey, striding out to the landing with the corners of her mouth turned sternly down, “didn't ought to worry you, Mr. Widgeon. And 'e's late again. Thank the Lord, 'ere's my cooking sherry!” She took a package from the lift and set it respectfully upon the kitchen table. “And that's the 'ock they ordered for dinner”— she casually swung two narrow bottles by their necks. “What'll I do with them, Mr. Widgeon?”

“What time is dinner, Mrs. Hussey?”

“'Alf-past seven.”

“Then I would suggest the ice box.”

“The master don't like 'is wine iced,” said the cook doubtfully.

“He'll want his hock iced. Take my word for it, Mrs. Hussey.”

“Well, if you say so—but I'd never 'ave dared to do it myself, never!”

“Sign the book, please!” called an impatient voice below.

“Them dratted boys!” exclaimed Mrs. Hussey.

She signed the book, and the lift shot down.

“Not 'arf 'avin' a turn-up down 'ere, they ain't!” shouted the errand boy cheerfully, and went on his way.

Mr. Widgeon and Mrs. Hussey leaned over the guard rail of the lift. The sound of raised voices and a woman's sobs drifted faintly up from the porter's apartment in the basement.

“She's a bad lot,” said Mrs. Hussey.

“Poor little woman!” Widgeon said. “She doesn't have an easy time.”

“Well,” replied Mrs. Hussey distrustfully, “you 'ave a kind 'eart, Mr. Widgeon. We all know that. But what I says is, she's made 'er bed—”

The bell in Widgeon's pantry rang shortly and precisely.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Hussey,” he said. “My gentleman's come in.”

He jumped into his pantry with the alacrity of his thirty years, then composed himself to an ageless gravity as he entered the presence of his employer. He had the dark and brooding respectability of a young, active, and progressive bishop.

“Good evening, sir. I was taking a delivery from the wine merchant.”

Mr. Trimlake twitched his thin lips into the form of a smile, acknowledging his manservant's excuse.

“Do you know anything about the porter service in this building, Widgeon?” he asked, allowing his face to return to its normal and expressionless shape.

“I understand, sir, that a porter is supposed to be on duty at all hours. I hope you have not been inconvenienced.”

“I wished to ask him the reason for the irregular deliveries of the evening post. The extreme variance is twenty-three minutes. He was not there.”

“I will see about it at once, sir.”

Widgeon set down at his gentleman's elbow the invariable dry martini with which he desired to be welcomed home, and took the lift to the entrance hall. It pleased Mr. Trimlake to have his wishes carried out at the first possible opportunity; having himself a nervous terror of forgetting anything that came into his mind, he assumed that his employees suffered it also and that a habit of immediate action made their work easier. Widgeon was not upset by this idiosyncrasy. Indeed he had no complaints at all. For a well-trained manservant the care of Mr. Trimlake was as simple and automatic a task as working in a factory, and considerably better paid.

In the entrance hall Widgeon confirmed his gentleman's observation that there was no porter on duty. A caller was ringing the front-door bell with an air of contemptuous disgust. Widgeon opened the door for him and, pretending to be the porter, apologized for the delay on the grounds that he had been on the top floor. The visitor, soothed by his perfect manservant's manner, accepted his apologies with a pleasant smile. Widgeon was glad. He had made, as it were, the excuses of the house, not because he had any particular affection for Agg, the porter, but because bad service offended him. Service was his craft and he was jealous of it. An employer who paid good wages should not have to put up with inefficiency.

He walked down the stairs to the basement. As the wine merchant's boy had said, there wasn't half a turn-up going on. Mrs. Agg's genteel voice was pouring forth a stream of heartbreaking complaints, punctuated by little sobs. It was evident that Agg had been drinking again.

“A bloody little bitch,” Agg was saying, “yes, you are. Gawd 'elp me if you ain't. A blurry little bitch. One of these days I'll catch you a clip over the ear-'ole, you blurry little bitch.”

Mrs. Agg, catching sight of Widgeon approaching down the corridor, gave a pathetic scream. The manservant ignored it and also, though with more difficulty, Mr. Agg's husky and improper language to his wife. It was no quarrel of his. He coughed correctly as an official announcement of his coming.

“Mr. Trimlake,” he said, “was looking for you.”

“He can look!” replied Agg with gloomy gusto—he was grateful for the interruption and for a chance to let himself go. “I can't always be in the 'all, can I? What about the post? What about the 'eating? What about the blasted garbage I 'ave to carry down? 'Ere! And you tell Mrs. 'Ussey that if she wants to fill her bloomin' dustbin with 'alf a ton of earth what's been used by 'er itsy-pitsy bleedin' pussycat, she can carry it down 'erself. I ain't no cat's lavingtory man! And as for old Trimlake, you can tell 'im from me—Agg says, you can say to 'im, Agg says that if you're looking for 'im and can't see 'im, you can lift your bleedin' finger and shove it on the bleedin' doorbell. And if this blurry little bitch ain't making so much noise that the bell can't be 'eard, Agg'll come. You can tell 'im that, see?”

“I don't know how he can say such things,” whimpered Mrs. Agg. “He'll be sorry for it one day, I'm sure.”

“Of course he will!” Widgeon comforted her. “He doesn't mean it.”

Mr. Agg opened his mouth and then thought better of what he was about to say. His wife's large pale blue eyes (forget-me-blurry-nots he'd called them, Gawd help him) were fixed admiringly on Mr. Widgeon's black, neat, and sturdy figure. She was quiet. It didn't seem worth while to break the peace.

“There's a deal of work,” Widgeon remarked judicially. “I don't say there isn't, Mr. Agg. Still, you have a cosy little home down here, and a boy to help at the back. I don't say it's easy, but I've known harder jobs.”

“And so 'ave I!” declared the porter. “And if there's any of them tenants who say I don't give satisfaction, let 'em say it to my face, see?”

“It's nothing to do with me, mind you,” Widgeon replied. “It's Mr. Trimlake, wanting to talk to you about the posts. You know what he is for standing on his rights. What he's contracted for he gets, and what he hasn't he doesn't ask. You can't want fairer than that. He's no trouble. I'll say that for him.”

“'E's a bastard,” said Mr. Agg shortly.

Mrs. Agg got up daintily and walked to the window. She remained there as if staring out over rolling parkland instead of the area wall three feet away, dissociating herself from the coarseness which defiled her soul and her living room.

“Now, now, pal,” said Widgeon. “You didn't ought to use language like that in front of her.”

“She don't know what it means,” replied Mr. Agg with heavy irony. “Too blinkin' innocent!”

Mrs. Agg turned from the window, and looked at Widgeon, forlorn, her arms limp at her sides. The tears rolled down her pale, honey-colored face, inclined a little forwards so that it was pitifully framed between the falling waves of her fair bobbed hair. Everything about her had a slight downward curve—her mouth, her shoulders, her breasts. Her features were too faint for beauty, but she drooped appealingly. She was a lily that one longed to revive.

Widgeon spoke with heat:—

“Now look here, pal, I'm telling you straight and it's time someone did. You'll lose your job if you're not careful. Mr. Trimlake did ring the bell, and he gets no answer. Then I came down, and there's a visitor ringing the bell, and he gets no answer. There might as well be no porter in the house. And it isn't only what Mr. Trimlake says. They're all saying it. Now you don't want to have the little woman starving, do you?”

“'Er? Starve?” asked Mr. Agg, genuinely amazed. “Not likely! She wouldn't even miss the pictures, she wouldn't! Starve? 'Er? 'Strath!”

Mr. Trimlake accepted without comment the porter's excuses as invented by Widgeon. He had no mental picture of Agg and would not have recognized him on the street; the porter fell into that vast class of human beings who, to him, were merely walking illustrations of statistics: 5.3 per cent of them would be run over by cars; .006 would die of apoplexy; 43 per cent were suffering from piles. Trimlake was an actuary and absorbed by the mathematics of his profession. A few men and, very occasionally, their wives ate with him and played bridge with him and thereby emerged momentarily from the general class of risks into a particular class of acquaintances. Widgeon was neither an illustration nor an acquaintance. He was a part of the established order of the world for whom Trimlake had as much and as unconscious affection as for his own toe—a member whose presence he accepted, whose absence he could not imagine, of whom he became solicitously aware when and only when it let him know that all was not well with it.

When his gentleman had dressed and gone to the club to dine, Widgeon ate a cold meal and slipped out to the Rising Sun for beer and conversation. Between nine and nine-thirty the manservants of three fashionable squares—those of them whose employers were dining out—congregated in the private bar to exchange gossip and discuss probable winners for the following afternoon.

Satisfied with the information that the filly Pekinese could carry eight stone two over a mile and a quarter, Widgeon strolled back through the soft London night. Except for the unhurried footfalls of hatless saunterers like himself and the distant rumble of traffic in Oxford Street, northern Mayfair was silent. The heat of the day lingered between the dignified nineteenth-century houses that were neither tall enough to retain it nor low enough to admit the tentative explorations of the evening breeze. Here and there the skyline was disciplined by new blocks of flats, their coping faintly luminous from the lights and neon signs below.

As he approached his own building, he caught sight of a dim figure, as of some servant girl awaiting or having just parted from her boy, under the arched entrance to a mews. The woman peered in his direction and made a movement towards him; then shrank back into the archway. He drew level, and saw that it was Mrs. Agg. She had rested her head against the brickwork of the arch and was crying.

“Well, well!” said Widgeon, concerned. “Well, well! Anything I can do, Mrs. Agg?”

“Mr. Widgeon! Oh, Mr. Widgeon, please go away! I don't like that you should see me like this.”

“We all have our troubles, Mrs. Agg,” he said shyly.

“But you don't know what it's like to be lonely,” she sobbed. “Not to have nobody you can tell them to.”

“If there's anything I can do—” he repeated.

“I can't talk about it. Not to you.”

“I hope I've done nothing wrong, Mrs. Agg,” said Widgeon, noticing her gentle emphasis on the last word.

“Wrong! No, you haven't done nothing wrong. It's me that wants to do wrong. Me! Me!”

She knocked her fluffy head against the wall.

Widgeon inserted his left hand between her head and the wall, and passed his right arm round her shoulders, intending to draw her gently away. She laid her head on his shoulder and remained collapsed against him.

“It's the end of me,” she said. “I can't do no more.”

He held her gingerly in his arms, hoping that no one who knew him, especially Agg, would choose that moment to pass the head of the mews. She did not cling; she leant helplessly against him, so that he felt her thin legs against his own and the spasms of her sobbing. It was worrying and dangerous, but—poor little woman—he was ashamed to think of taking advantage. He twisted his body to a more innocent position, and she slid against him, a spineless explosive creature, the thin silk of her dress making her slippery as a fish.

“Hold up!” he said jocularly. “Hold up, Mrs. Agg!”

She disentangled herself with sudden modesty.

“I don't know what I mightn't have done if you hadn't come along,” she said. “I go mad sticking in that house and thinking what'll happen to me if Mr. Agg loses another job.”

“You ought to get out a bit more.”

“I've no one to go with,” she murmured, looking up at him with waterlogged eyes, mysterious in the light of the single street lamp.

“Why don't you have a nice long talk to Mrs. Hussey?”

“Mrs. Hussey!” sniffed the porter's wife. “She wouldn't understand the modern girl, Mr. Widgeon.”