Complete Short Stories (6 page)

‘The waiter passed and slipped a piece of paper into the printer’s hand.
He read it, crumpled it up and stuffed it into his shoe. Then he stopped his story about that morning’s fight – I didn’t tell you that this was the
first of May – in which he had half-killed one Royalist by hitting him on the head with another Royalist, because the Royalists had tried to spoil their parade, and began to pay attention to the other table.

‘The kid, having had his oysters, wanted
to excuse himself, say goodnight and go off – probably to sleep in the Bois. He looked as though he needed sleep. But the fat fellow whom they called
“Mon cher Grégoire”
wouldn’t let him. He said that the little angel, meaning the kid, must have some dessert. I ought to have mentioned that they had already given him two or three glasses of old brandy and the kid was feeling a bit dizzy, by the
look of him. The way he had eaten the brown bread and butter, he can’t have had much in his stomach to begin with.
Mon cher Grégoire
and the nephew of the War Minister had now changed places with the other two and were sitting next to the kid and gently detaining him, holding his arms in a sickly affectionate sort of way.

‘Grégoire called the waiter; the waiter looked angrier than ever, but obviously
didn’t want to lose his job by refusing to do what he was told. Grégoire asked him what fruit he had, and he said: “Every sort, sir.” “Good,” said Grégoire, “and now what angel’s food would my little Cupid like to eat?” (The printer translated this for me; I didn’t recognize the word
cupidon
.) Would he have Guava or Persimmon or Pampelmousse? The kid shook his head.

‘The kid was almost in tears with embarrassment, gratitude mixed with a rising shame, even fear. The nephew of the War Minister had laid his sleek yellow head on the kid’s shoulder, and was quoting a bit of Racine or something. Grégoire filled the kid’s glass again, and said
with some impatience that Monsieur Pierre – Pierre was the kid’s name – was remarkably fastidious about his dessert. He went on with the list of fruits – mandarins and medlars and mangoes and God knows what. Then the nephew got hold of Pierre’s hand and began admiring it, what strong, firm fingers, what a slender wrist and actually picked it up and began kissing it. It was the funniest thing you
ever saw. He was probably the drunkest of the four. The Count and the Marquis were still discussing breasts, but in a very inconsequential way. Grégoire wasn’t so drunk, though.

‘Well, at last the kid shouted out in a hysterical but somehow proud way: “JE SUIS OUVRIER! AU DIABLE AVEC VOS POIRES D’AVOCADO!” He tried to get up, but couldn’t, because the nephew was clawing on to him and kissing
his neck. But Grégoire did not seem in the least put out; he turned to the waiter and said:
“Alors, garçon. De la
merde pour ce monsieur.”
Well, at that the printer picked up a carafe of water, and, walking over to Grégoire, broke it over his head. Then he detached the nephew, and jerked him backward on the floor, and grabbing the kid, pulled him out. He got him into a taxi that happened to pass,
and off they went at full speed. The waiter had pretended to stop us, but had allowed me to push him over with a bang against a door. As soon as he saw the kid and the printer safe in the taxi he began to blow a police whistle. But, of course, the taxi got away. I had thrown a loaf of bread at the Marquis, which hit him on the cheek, and that made me feel good. As it happened, I had only a few
hundred yards to walk to my hotel, so I escaped all right.

‘I never saw the printer again, or the kid. I was thinking of them just now and wondering what sort of a fruit
merde
was.’

IN JULY
1916 I was in hospital with one Captain H.H. Johnson of the Army Service Corps, who had a habit of referring to himself in the third person as ‘Old Papa Johnson’. I was in with a lung wound, and he with a badly fractured pelvis. ‘Of all the inappropriate happenings!’ he said. ‘Imagine, Old Papa Johnson, of all people, being laid out by the kick of an Army mule in the middle
of a European war!’ He added, to remove any misunderstanding: ‘No, the A.S.C. isn’t my corps, except just now for convenience. I’m cavalry, really – did fifteen years off and on in the Lancers. I was with them at Le Cateau and got wounded. And then rejoined them at Ypres and got it again. This time it was shell, not bullet, and the medical board gave me “Permanently unfit for Combatant Service”.
So I transferred to the A.S.C. – yes, I know you fire-eating young infantry officers look down on that worthy corps – and I hadn’t any great passion for acting as baker’s boy and butcher’s delivery man myself. Still, it was better than being in England. But now that ridiculous mule…’

Papa Johnson was about forty-five years old; very broad shoulders, medium height, I judged (but it is difficult
to judge the vertical height of a man whom one sees only in a horizontal position), and a comedian’s face. I only once saw it as anything but a comedian’s face, and that was when a hospital orderly was impertinent. Then it set hard as stone, and his voice, which was ordinarily a comedian’s voice, too, rasped like a drill instructor’s; the orderly was terrified. Papa Johnson talked the most idiotic
patter half the time and kept the nurses in hysterics. I had to ask him once to stop it, because it was bad for my wound to laugh like that; it might start a haemorrhage again. He had a small make-up box with a mirror and grease paints, and an assortment of beards and moustaches. While Sister Morgan was taking his temperature he would get under the blankets with a pocket torch – the thermometer
in his mouth – and when the two minutes were up he would emerge in some new, startling character. A handkerchief and a towel were his only other stage properties. Sister Morgan would take the thermometer from him gravely, and he would say: ‘Hello, boys and girls, I’m Queen Victoria as a young wife and mother!’ or ‘Beware, you wicked old men, I’m the Widow Twankey,’ or
‘Give ear, O Benjamin, I
am Saul the son of Kish in search of his father’s asses,’ and she couldn’t help laughing. And he would insist on talking in character until breakfast came up. Biblical parts were his speciality.

One day I was watching him at work on a complicated paper-cutting trick. He folded a sheet of newspaper this way and that, snipping it carefully here and there with a pair of nail scissors; he had told
me that when it opened out it was going to be what he called ‘Bogey-Bogey Ceremony in Sumatra’. He was full of tricks of this sort. I quoted a verse of the Psalms at him about it – I forget which it was – and he said, shaking his head at me sorrowfully: ‘No, no, little Gravey-spoons, you’ve got that all awry. Never misquote the Psalms of David to Old Papa Johnson, because he knows them all off by
heart.’ And so he did, as I found when I challenged him, and Proverbs, too, and St Mark’s Gospel (‘It’s the one that reads truest to me,’ he said, ‘the others seem to me to have been played about with by someone who wanted to prove something’), and most of Isaiah and the whole of Job. Also Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.
I was astonished. ‘Where on earth did you come to learn all that?’ I asked. ‘At a
Jesuit College as a punishment for independence of character?’

‘No, no, no; bethink yourself, child! Do Jesuits use the
Sonnets
as a textbook? I learned most of my stuff in the Antarctic – I was on two expeditions there – while we were snowed up. Some of it in the Arctic. But I learned most when I was Crown Agent on Desolation Island.’

‘Where’s that? Is that one of the Fiji group?’

‘No, no,
no, child. That’s in the Antarctic, too. It’s the most southerly land under the British flag. The appointment is made yearly – it’s well paid, you would say – but others wouldn’t agree – £1,000 a year and everything found. Usually a Scot takes it on. The Scots don’t mind living entirely alone in a howling wilderness as much as we English do; they are a very, very sane people. But my Scottish predecessor
stuck it only for nine months, and I stuck it for two years: you see Old Papa Johnson is just a little bit insane. Always was so from a child. So he didn’t come to any harm there. Besides, he had company for the last ten months.’

‘If the island’s a wilderness, what’s the sense of keeping an agent there and wasting all that money on him? Is it just to keep the British claim from lapsing? Mineral
deposits waiting for development?’

Johnson carefully laid down his ‘Bogey-Bogey’ business before answering. It was, by the way, a birthday present for Sister Morgan. Johnson went out of his way to be friendly with Sister Morgan, though I couldn’t understand why. She was a V.A.D. nurse, middle-aged, incompetent, and always trying to play the great lady among the other nurses; they detested her.
But with Johnson she behaved very well after a time and I came to like her, though when I was in another ward I had thought her impossible.

‘As Crown Agent, I would have you understand, Captain Graves, I had
to supervise His Majesty’s customs, and keep a record of imports and exports, and act as Postmaster-General and Clerk of Works, and be solely responsible for maintaining the Pax Britannica
in Antarctic regions – if necessary with a rope or a revolver.’

I never knew when Papa Johnson was joking, so I said: ‘Yes, your Excellency, and I suppose the penguins and reindeer needed a lot of looking after; and what with their sending each other so many picture postcards and all, you must have had your hands full at the office.’

‘Hignorance!’ snapped Papa Johnson, in the idiotic tones that
he used for the Widow Twankey, ‘Reindeers hindeed! Hain’t no sich hanimals hin hall Hant-harctica. Them dratted reindeers honly hinhabitates
Harctic
hareas. Which there wasn’t no penguins neither, not a penguin hon hall that hisland. There was prions, and seahawks, and sea helephants come a-visiting; but they wasn’t no trouble, not they.’ Then he continued in his usual voice: ‘The gross value
of imports and exports in the two years I was there amounted to… guess, child!’ I refused to guess, so he told me that the correct answer was something over one million seven hundred thousand pounds sterling.

‘For I should have told you, little Gravey-spoons, that Desolation island has a harbour which is more or less ice-free for a month or two round Christmas every year. The whalers put in there
then. It isn’t every ship that can deal, like the
Larssen
can, with an unlimited quantity of whale; so when the smaller ships have more oil than they can manage comfortably and don’t want to go back to Norway yet – half the world away – they dump it in barrels on Desolation Island, in care of the Crown Agent, and get a chit from him for it. There are big store caves blasted out of the rock. The
oil tankers come to collect the stuff. Also, a Norwegian company had put a blubber-boiling plant on the island for the convenience of its smaller boats – three great metal cauldrons, each about twice the size of this room, and weighing I don’t know how many hundred tons. They must have been landed in sections and welded together on the spot; but that was before my time.

‘When those fellows came
ashore to boil down their blubber, I always had a busy time. I had to watch that they didn’t pinch Government property or the oil belonging to other ships that I had in bond, or raid my house when my back was turned. I carried my revolver loose and loaded and hardly had time to sleep. But I was the sole representative of His Majesty, and he had given me unlimited power to make laws for the entire
period of my stay, and to see that they were kept. After my first experience with a blubber party, which ended in a death and a fire, I issued an edict that henceforth Desolation Island was to be the driest as well as the coldest of His Majesty’s possessions. I couldn’t stop the brutes from boozing themselves silly aboard their own vessels in the harbour, but I saw to it that not a drop was landed
on British soil. (Tough! you wouldn’t believe how
tough these Norwegian whalingmen were. But their ships’ officers were tougher still and kept them under.)

‘One day a tanker put in and two unexpected visitors came off her. One of them, a tall fellow with a Guards’ Brigade moustache (here Papa Johnson made one up to show me, from his make-up box) and a quarrelsome sort of face (here Papa Johnson
made the sort of face he meant) came up to me and said in superior tones (here Papa Johnson imitated them): “Mr Henry Johnson, the British Crown Agent, I believe? My name’s Morgan, Major Anthony Morgan of the Indian Army. I have come to live here with you. This is Professor Durnsford, who is on the staff of the New York Museum of Natural History,” and he pulled forward a harmless-looking little
fellow with a snubnose and the expression of a Pekinese. “We intend to do research work here.” He handed me an introductory letter from the Government of New Zealand. I was too busy with customs business to read it, so I put it into my pocket – you see I disliked the man at first sight and didn’t like having his company forced on me without a please or thank you – and I said: “Well, I can’t refuse
you, I suppose, if you have decided to dwell among me. There’s my house; it’s the only one on the island. Make yourselves at home while I attend to these papers. I’ll send your stuff ashore when I’ve examined it.”

‘Morgan flared up. “You will certainly do no such thing as to tamper with my personal luggage.”

‘I shrugged my shoulders and said: “It’s my job; I’m Customs here. Give me your keys.”

‘He saw that I was serious, and realized that the tanker was still in the harbour and able to take him off; I could refuse to put him up at my house and so he would have to go back in her. He threw me the keys with very bad grace, and Durnsford politely handed me his. They were numbered keys, so I had no trouble finding the right boxes for them.

‘That evening I cooked the supper and Morgan got
a mess kit out of his tin trunk to eat it in. The man Morgan actually tried to old-soldier Papa Johnson with his row of ribbons. And do you know what they were? Child, one was the Coronation ribbon and one was the Durbar ribbon and one was the Osmanieh, which one gets almost as a matter of routine if one is seconded to the Egyptian Army, and the fourth and last was the M.V.O. of the Third Class.
So, pretending to be dazzled, I went off with the frying pan in my hand and changed into my old campaigning tunic, which sported Ashanti, Egypt, China, King’s and Queen’s medals South Africa, and North-West Frontier. Not a routine ribbon among them; they made his display look pretty sick. But I had only two stars up, so he tried to high-hat me with his crown.