Complete Short Stories (48 page)

Still no Houdini. Then a runner
arrives with a verbal message from Sergeant Foster. ‘Rum shortage: will the Company Commander be good enough to inspect Left Post as soon as convenient?’

I asked Ought-Three Davies, the runner: ‘Where’s the new officer, my lad?’

‘Haven’t seen a sign of the gentleman, sir.’

Young Stack took over the phone, while I went up to reconnoitre. ‘If the C.O. wants to know where I am, say I’m investigating
a report of trouble near Left Post.’

Sergeant Foster wore a grim look as he jerked his head towards the cubby-hole. ‘The new officer’s been out but once, sir, since you left; and then only for a certain purpose.’

‘Right, Sergeant. Let’s dislodge him!’

I squeezed in, and shone a pocket torch around. A two gallon rum jar lay on its side in the middle of the floor. I handed it back to the Sergeant.

‘Not a drop left, sir.’

Houdini huddled on some sandbags in the far corner, watching me. How queer he looked! Ingrowing moustache meeting two days of blue stubble, and his eyes like currants in a half-cooked suet pudding.

I could get nothing into Houdini, or out of him. He crouched there, making whining noises, for all the world like a puppy that’s been caught misbehaving in the best parlour.

‘Goddam that fellow! Turn your back, please, Sergeant, while I give him the pasting of his life. I don’t want witnesses.’ But when I came closer, Houdini squealed. It was a terrible noise that ran down my spine and churned my bowels.

I came out again, regretting that the rum jar was empty. ‘He’ll not get away with this lot,’ I said. ‘I’m going down to Battalion H.Q. Set a sentry on him, Sergeant!’

So I pushed off, stopping only to put young Stack in charge of the telephone. But soon I barged into Barney, our new Medical Officer, who had graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, two months before, and still found the war a great joke.

‘Begob! Ye look as though yer heart’s throubled and sore,’ he said in the exaggerated stage-Irish he used for our amusement.

I unloaded on him. ‘Ah, so ’tis
like that, is it?’ says Barney. ‘Let’s be taking a sly peep at the poor divil.’

Back with Barney to Left Post. Barney put his head into the cubbyhole, then slowly shook it in wonder and admiration: ‘Holy Mother of God, ’tis powerful drunk he is!’

But when I let myself go on the subject of Houdini in plain English, Welsh, and other languages, Barney got the point. ‘Very well, Dan,’ he said soberly,
‘I’ll go down to Battalion myself. Trust me to save awkward questions. It won’t do anybody any good if you bring a charge against the bastard.’

Barney was right. The C.O. would appreciate my silence, and keep the case dark. What with young Howland, who had deserted off leave and barely escaped the firing squad, and Lance-corporal Peters, the one who murdered an estaminet-keeper, and the Sergeant
Phillips scandal, we’d had more than our plateful of notoriety in recent months.

I let Barney have his way, and that was the last I ever saw of Houdini; for the Adjutant smuggled him down the line in an ambulance, without even informing me that he’d gone.

‘You win, Houdini!’ But the magnitude of his victory did not appear until Jock returned off leave. Jock had stopped at Rouen to replenish
his whisky store, and whom should he meet in the main square but Houdini! Once more a captain, and in the saddle again. Houdini explained that he’d been invalided back as a food-poisoning case, and written to Major Short from No. 2 Red Cross Hospital. The Major, it seems, was delighted, because Houdini had been giving him lessons in trick shuffling and trick dealing – guaranteed to fascinate an indefatigable
bridge-player who had once lost a packet to some sharpers on an Atlantic voyage.

Jock didn’t know the facts of the story until he got them from Barney and me. And even if he’d known, what could he have done to upset Houdini’s apple-cart? Officially, it
was
food-poisoning!

More posh dinners for you, Houdini, at the
Couronne
and the
Fleur de Lys;
but for Jock and young Stack and me the glories
of the wading of the Ancre, and the hundred days from Albert to Maubeuge. Ludendorff had shot his bolt, and it was our turn again. Near Maubeuge, Jock succumbed at last to a spent machine-gun bullet that entered his temple – not very deeply, but deep enough – as we bivouacked in a plum orchard. He was asleep, and nobody knew a thing about it until next morning.

In November came the eerie Armistice;
then a lot of square-pushing and shining up of brasses, and education courses, and other morale-raising employment.

The day after I got demobbed, I picked up the
Daily Mail,
and read:

But you write that Houdini got clear away to the States. He must have
slipped his handcuffs; which makes me think that
those he used at Rouen weren’t trick ones.

I don’t know how or when he went to Australia, or what his activities were in the long gap between 1919 and 1958; but I can tell you how he ended. While serving a ten-year stretch for fraud, he was made a ‘trusty’, and endeared himself to the Prison Governor ‘by his remarkable talents as a conjurer’. The Governor, in fact, managed to get the last four
years of his sentence remitted for good conduct. You win again, Houdini!

But this time his victory was short-lived. The day before he should have been freed, they found him in the Prison Library with his throat cut by the jagged edge of a dinner plate. R.I.P.!

‘G
REETINGS, MY LORD
! Red dawn and a clear sky,’ says Sophron, as he gently opens the shutters of an unglazed window. I can see climbing plants on my balcony, and the similar balcony of a tenement house opposite. Throwing off blanket and quilt, I look about me at the familiar square room, unfurnished except for my bed, a bedside table, and a wooden chest
painted with a spirited scene of cupids mounted on hares and hunting a weasel.

We Romans sleep in loincloth and tunic, so the old Syrian slave merely hands me my shoes and lifts the toga (a huge semi-circle of thick white woollen material) from its peg. He shakes his head sadly at last night’s wine stain. ‘Arrange the folds carefully, Sophron, and it won’t show,’ I say.

He drapes one toga-end
over my left shoulder, letting it fall to the thigh; next, winds the straight edge round the back of my neck and under the right arm, then grabs the mass of material low down and throws the other toga-end past the first, so that it hangs behind me. Finally, he fixes the ‘navel boss’ at my midriff. That leaves me warmly swathed, except for the right shoulder, and provides a capacious pocket at chest
level. Whenever possible, one wears only a tunic, supplemented by a rough, hooded poncho if the weather is bad; because togas are clumsy, burdensome, and difficult to keep clean in this filthy city, though required dress on all formal occasions. Into the pocket go my wax tablets and stilus, my handkerchief, and a small heap of money from the table. The coins are mainly those of the Emperors Augustus,
Tiberius and Caligula; but here’s the latest issue – a bright bronze piece with Claudius’s head on one side, on the other an oak-wreath, commemorating his recent fantastic conquest of Britain.

‘Hand me the goblet, Sophron!’

I rinse my mouth with water, spit out into the street, drink the rest. ‘Send Alexander for the mule! And, while you are waiting, empty the chamber pot.’

I married three
years ago. My maternal uncle arranged the match when he paid my debts. I did not love Arruntia, nor she me, but the creditors were savage as wolves, and her substantial dowry, inherited from a great–
aunt, was tempting. Arruntius, my father-in-law, is armourer to the Imperial School of Gladiators on the Via Labicana, which this uncle runs. He lets me live, rent-free, in a first-storey apartment
above his armoury, so long as I help him with the business. A terrible man, though! Sentenced to death ten years ago for the brutal murder of Arruntia’s mother, pardoned on condition that he became a gladiator – gladiators are public slaves – took up the net-and-trident style of fighting and killed or maimed twenty-five opponents in his first two years. When he had brought the score to fifty, a
vociferous Amphitheatre crowd demanded his release, and Caligula sent him the customary wooden foil; but also an insulting message:
‘Rude rite donatur ignavus’ –
‘The coward is duly granted freedom.’ Arruntius angrily snapped the foil in two, and re-engaged. His score had crept up to seventy by the time of Caligula’s assassination. When the crowd again demanded his release, Claudius, the new Emperor,
sent him another wooden foil with the characteristic message:
‘Desine: tridens tibi nimium placet’ –
‘Fight no more; you take too much pleasure in your trident!’ So he obeyed, was given back his forfeited possessions plus ten years’ interest, and bought this six-storey tenement house near the Subura.

At Rome almost everyone lives in tenements like ours; the whole city of a million people can’t
contain more than a thousand private houses. Apartments are excessively hard to find; besides, Arruntius’s ground floor has real running water, piped from a reservoir, which he puts at our disposal – the other tenants depend on the dirty goatskins of thievish water carriers. He also has an oven heated by the forge, and we may use this in the afternoons; otherwise we should have to get our joints
and poultry roasted at the baker’s two streets off.

Since I collect Arruntius’s rents, I know that he makes a profit of over twenty per cent on his investment. The rooms are more and more crowded, the higher one climbs. Fifty-five poor wretches jammed in the attic – Cilicians, Syrians, Moors – jointly pay almost the same rent as we first-floor tenants. They buy space by the square yard – just
enough to put down a mattress and a small cooking stove – and dispute possession with fleas, bedbugs and mice. Nor do they dare ask Arruntius to mend the hazardous roof.

‘Any message for the Lady Arruntia, my lord, if she rises before your return?’

‘Say that I’ll ride straight home after my duty call.’

Sharp words, a blow and a whimper from next door indicate that the new slave girl is at work
on Arruntia’s tedious toilet. Arruntia always keeps up with the fashions. She has discarded the simple Republican coiffure (hair parted down the middle and coiled into a bun at the nape) for the latest style which piles her tresses high in curls and braids, supported by a good deal of false hair from the Orient, and held by gold pins and
combs until it suggests the wall of a fortress. But first
the slave girl slaps lotions and pomades on Arruntia’s face and neck; applies chalk and white lead to her arms, eye-black to her eyes, rouges her cheeks with ochre, reddens her lips with wine-lees, dabs scent behind her ears… Not being vulgarians, Arruntia and I occupy separate bedrooms, and I am forbidden to see her until she is wearing a load of rings, ear-rings, necklace, brooches, pendants,
bangles, bracelets, and that long violet silk tunic, gathered at the waist by an embroidered belt, not to mention the Tyrian shawl.

‘Allow me to pass a comb through your lordship’s hair,’ says Sophron.

Meanwhile Alexander, my younger slave, mutters a surly ‘Good day!’, unbars the apartment door, and pads out. Soon I follow him down the stairs and step inside the armoury. The master-smith has
no time for chat. ‘My lord Egnatius, excuse me! We’re sadly short-handed since that prize-fool Hylas insulted his master.’

Sophron carries the chamber pot past me to the street corner. Tenement houses have no plumbing at all. Night soil is dumped on a midden at the dead end of the nearest alley. Chamber pots are emptied into a big tank outside the laundry; the laundrymen use its contents to clean
woollens, with the help of potash and fuller’s earth. They pay a City tax for this privilege.

I cross the street, and glance up. A bulge in the wall of our second storey worries me; so does the wide crack near our front window. It may be my imagination, but both seem more pronounced than in September when I last looked. Most modern houses in Rome are jerry-built, because the building contractor
need not submit his plans to a municipal architect, and because only temples are erected for eternity. Still, Arruntius swears that the fabric is sound, and continues to live underneath us.

By now the last straggling cart has left the city. To end traffic jams once and for all, Julius Caesar prohibited all wheeled vehicles – with the exception of ceremonial chariots and wagons engaged in the
building trade – from using the streets between sunrise and dusk. As a result, our nightly sleep is forever broken by rumbles, creaks, bumps, shouts and oaths as the carts pass. Rome’s streets and alleys, none of them lit or marked with its name, run higgledy-piggledy in every direction. Carters often lose their bearings, and when two lines of traffic meet in an alley, argue half an hour as to which
of them must back out again. Carts caught by police patrols after sunrise must stay empty and immobilized for the next twelve hours; so traffic quarrels grow more violent at first cock-crow.

Several stores have opened, and their stock is being piled on either side of the street, leaving only a narrow passage between – and a foul one at that. Near me, under an awning, a boys’ school is already
at work. No history, geography, literature, religion, or rhetoric taught here! It’s reading, writing, arithmetic all the year round, from dawn to noon,
without a break; except summer holidays, and one day off in eight. The schoolmaster, a ferocious wretch in a rickety chair, sits waggling his birch rod. Frightened pupils huddle together on benches. He distributes bead-frames among them, one to
every group of three and, while I am waiting, sets them a problem. ‘Add seventeen, two thousand, and one hundred and fifty-four. Hurry, villains! And no prompting!’ Each boy moves beads along the wires for his third-share of the problem, and when everyone has finished, the tyrant checks results. There follow heavy blows of the rod, dealt out by groups – he never bothers to find out which boy has
miscalculated.