Flames Coming out of the Top (11 page)

“The spectacle,” he announced, “is getting on nicely.”

“The spectacle?” Dunnett asked.

“Yes; we've planned something pretty good for you, something you won't forget in a hurry,” Carmel Muras explained. She turned to her father. “Do you know what's holding things up?”

“We are,” Señor Muras replied complacently. “I didn't want Señor Dunnett to miss any of it.” He rang a bell on the table beside him; it was counterpart to the miniature bell which he had used within his office. When he picked it up his hand engulfed it. There was something rather absurd about a man of his size emitting a sound like a tinkle on a cat's collar.

No sooner had he given his message to the servant than Señora Muras began to show signs of extreme alarm. The jewellery on her bosom started rattling and her breathing came in short, restricted gasps. Her hands made vague, strolling movements in the region of her temples.

Señor Muras turned to Dunnett. “It is my wife's nerves,” he said. “We must be very careful.”

“But what about?”

“The noise.”

“What noise?”

“The noise of the spectacle.”

“What kind of a spectacle is it then?”

Señor Muras appeared surprised, almost offended. “Fireworks,” he replied. “We have been preparing them all the afternoon.”

“I see,” Dunnett replied. “I hadn't understood.”

At that moment Carmel intervened. “Don't tell me that you don't like fireworks, Mr. Dunnett,” she said.

“I do,” Dunnett assured her hurriedly. “Only I haven't seen any for a long time. We don't get many in England.”

“Do you hear that,” Carmel exclaimed in amazement. “And we call all our big displays Crystal Palace Spectacles. It sounds screwy to me.”

Señor Muras rose majestically to his feet, and the chair in which he had been lying gave a little volley of creaks as it began to remould itself into its previous shape. Señora Muras immediately became more voluble than ever: her zero hour was evidently approaching. Both Señor Muras and Carmel were needed to comfort and reassure her. They led the quaking woman to the couch at the far end of the room and left her.

“Shall we go out onto the terrace?” Señor Muras asked.

It was a deep, sultry dusk outside. A faint expansive glow over to the west gave promise of moonlight as soon as the clouds had cleared. But at that moment there was nothing. The night seemed to have drawn in very closely. It lay over the house, enveloping and smothering it. Wherever one looked, there was the same velvet screen of darkness. Altogether it was perfect. It might have been designed for Señor Muras's firework display. Señor Muras himself went away to superintend.

“It's a pity your mother doesn't enjoy fireworks,” Dunnett observed.

Señorita Muras looked up at him. “You're kind of dumb, aren't you?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Do I look like her daughter?”

“Not in the least.”

“Well, haven't you ever heard of people marrying twice.”

“I … I'm sorry,” Dunnett stammered.

“It's all right so long as you didn't mean it,” Señorita Muras assured him. “You just didn't think. But say, we're missing things.” She pointed out into the garden in front of her.

The brandy which he had been given helped to add to the mystery of the evening; it made him feel at once happy and remote. Dim shapes were moving in the rear courtyard and among the trees. They loomed up suddenly and seemed larger than life when close at hand. Once they had gone a few feet away they were lost again in the gloom. There might have been six of them. Or ten. Or a dozen. It was impossible to tell. What was obvious was that they were all carrying heavy things. The sounds of their laboured breathing came through the night.

Señor Muras returned, smiling. “It ought to be a very distinguished performance,” he observed. “I have novelties here to-night that we have never seen before.”

“What about my Egyptian Rain?” Carmel demanded.

He turned and allowed his hand to rest for a moment on her head. “There is better than that to-night,” he said. “I have got Rings of Saturn and Stygian Candles and rockets that are a flock of birds when they explode. But it is the set-piece that is most beautiful. It is a burning ship. You see the passengers actually jumping overboard one by one. Jumping overboard and burning all the time. The effect is never forgotten if one has seen it. Children should not be allowed to watch: it damages their minds too much.” He paused a moment for breath. His enthusiasm was indisputably genuine. He might have been trying to sell the fireworks instead of merely describing them.

“But what about my Egyptian Rain?” Señorita Muras persisted.

“It is there,” Señor Muras answered. “It comes last of all. Flood upon flood of it. It will extinguish even the set-piece.”

One of the workmen appeared without warning at their elbows and announced that everything was ready. Carmel
gave a quick little excited intake of breath and edged up closer to Dunnett. From the open window behind them came the low groans of Señora Muras. With head buried in the cushions on the couch, she was agonisingly awaiting the first of the explosions.

One came almost immediately. At what was evidently some prearranged signal, four small infernos were simultaneously ignited. They v/ere not particularly startling; childish even among fireworks. They burnt fiercely for a moment, sending out dense clouds of yellow smoke, and then exploded with a foolish report. Bits of hot cardboard shot through the air and a coop full of fowls somewhere on the
hacienda
started chucking and squalling. The groans from the couch changed abruptly into hysterical sobbing.

Then there came bigger things. A man with a cloth across his face to save him from the sparks went round igniting a dozen Roman Candles. They hissed and roared and fired their stars into the air with an almost pathetic eagerness to please. The walls of the house seemed to jump backwards and forwards in the shifting light. Carmel Muras seized hold of Dunnett's hand and held it; hers was hot and sticky from excitement.

As the spectacle continued, there were, Dunnett discovered, fine points about fireworks of which he would otherwise have remained ignorant. In South America, Carmel told him, fireworks were never out of the air for long; tons of the stuff were going up all the time. They occupied, it appeared, a place in the national life somewhere midway between opera and religion.

“A little more red in the Rings and fewer sparks from the Candles,” Señor Muras was saying under his breath when they were over. “Then it would have been perfect, quite perfect.”

It was obvious, however, that his tastes were for the lavish and the spectacular. He was itching for his rockets. They were enormous things, of the height of a man—their striped bodies had been revealed in the glow and fires of the previous
exhibits. Even the workman who attended them seemed somewhat nervous. He used a fuse attached to the end of a long stick. From inside the room there came a shrill scream. Señora Muras had evidently roused herself enough to look out of the window and see what point of the programme had been reached.

The rockets went up one by one with the noise of an express train rushing madly off into space. They seemed to be dragging the earth up with them; a fierce rush of wind surged round the heads of the watchers as, one by one, half-a-guinea's worth of good rocket went up somewhere among the stars. The sky above them was soon a concentrated carnival of streamers and coloured moons. And still more rockets went up into the night to disturb and add to it. Señor Muras's pyrotechnic display was working up to its grand finale.

And then the accident occurred. One of the rockets declined to rise. Instead, it tore along, almost horizontally, at a height of about six feet. Another couple of feet and it would have lost itself harmlessly in one of the neighbouring corrals. But, as it was, the set-piece stood in the way. The rocket hit the as-yet unburning liner full amidships. Carmel gripped Dunnett's hand tighter. The rocket stuck where it was for a moment and then exploded. Without further invitation, the set-piece began to function. Smoke started to pour out of the funnel and the portholes glared. Next the mast began to sparkle and the captain's bridge jumped into life and began to be consumed. Squibs went off in the holds. But this was only a portion of the spectacle. One of the silver stars from the rocket fluttered to earth among the Egyptian Rain. At the next moment there was an Egyptian cloudburst. Great gusts of it were vomited into the air. Through the downfall could be seen the brilliantly illuminated figures of men running desperately for shelter.

“Let us go in,” said Señor Muras quietly. “Someone has blundered. I must apologise.”

Carmel let go of Dunnett's hand and they went back into the drawing-room. When they got there the Señora's couch
was empty. Of her occupation there remained only her fan and a crumpled handkerchief which she had dropped in her flight. Señor Muras appeared distressed.

“I hope,” he said, “that we did nothing to disturb her. For her the doctor has prescribed rest, absolute rest.”

Señor Muras would not allow Dunnett to leave him even at the front door. He insisted on walking with him right up to the car. How long the car had been there Dunnett did not know. Apparently it had not been moved since he came in it. The chauffeur was sitting at the wheel in readiness; he had the stately, padded look of all good chauffeurs. He sat there as though he might have been supplied with the car.

Walking down the steps Dunnett thought that he had never seen a night so beautiful. The moon had risen by now, and the trees around the house swam in a clear vitreous light as though they were being looked at in a mirror. The house itself, its outlines slightly blurred with silver, seemed to grow naturally out of the ground. There were lights in some of the windows: they showed square and peach-coloured like lighted windows in a picture book. Even the shadows came to life. They were no longer simply patches of darkness but pools which glowed with a cool, purple colour of their own.

“It is beautiful, isn't it?” Señor Muras remarked. He spoke as though he had not even for a moment doubted what was at the back of the other man's mind.

Apart from that they reached the car in silence. Señor Muras helped his guest to settle himself in the corner and then held out his hand. “Good-bye, Mr. Dunnett. This has been our great pleasure, our very great pleasure. Only one thing, Mr. Dunnett. Please do not send any more of those telegrams. So very misleading and so worrying. It disturbed me deeply what you said to Mr. Govern.”

The Ride back from the
hacienda
was a long, continuous blur. Perhaps it was Señor Muras's brandy; or perhaps it was simply that Dunnett was tired; tired and still a little dazed by the spectacle of the fireworks. Whatever it was, Señor Muras's parting remark about the telegram kept recurring with the insidious emphasis of something sinister in a dream. Dunnett repeated it over to himself word by word, and he grew angrier each time he said it. If only he had felt a little steadier, more sure of himself, he would have gone straight along to the Post Office. He had no doubt how Mr. Verking would have handled such a situation.

When he reached the Avenida, Dunnett found that he was far from being the only unsteady man in Amricante. In front of the hotel a stout, dishevelled figure was standing. It was Señor Alvarez, the landlord. He stood bareheaded, addressing the empty face of the building that confronted him. Across his chest ran a vivid streak of scarlet silk.

“The best years of my life,” he was saying, “wasted for ever, and no reward. Nothing to show for it. Not even one. Absolutely alone.” He stopped and pulled himself together; it was evident even to an outsider that he had lost the thread of his complaint. He was about to begin again when he caught sight of Dunnett. “Perhaps we can assist each other,” he suggested.

For a moment Dunnett endeavoured to avoid him, but a Grand Bolivian Eagle was not to be so easily thrown off. He kept sidling round for a grip. Finally he managed to fasten his fingers on Dunnett's arm. It was just at that moment that he happened to remember the relationship there was between them. “Is your room comfortable?” he asked.

“The hotel is to your liking?” Then his more immediate difficulties re-presented themselves. “May I request your hand,” he enquired. “You see I am far from well.”

They got into the doorway of the hall without trouble. There was even a night porter who greeted them; but he did not offer to assist them. In any case, offers of assistance at that moment would have been refused. The landlord had just remembered his real grievance against life.

“Women,” he said. “All women. Every one of them women. And the servants too. Nothing but women. Out-numbered all the time. Believe me “—he turned to Dunnett and tried to fold him in his arms—” when a man marries he marries ten women. He is never free again. They are all round him for ever.”

He stood now in the dimly-lit hall and eyed his surroundings with distaste. “My prison,” he said simply. He picked up a small bowl that lay on one of the tables and threw it into the darkness at the foot of the stairs. The noise appeared to please him. He began looking for something more to throw.

“You'd better come upstairs,” Dunnett suggested.

“Not until I've finished down here,” the landlord replied. “To-night I make my protest. I smash everything up. To-morrow morning they will see whether or not I am master here.”

Dunnett removed himself from his companion's grasp and prepared to leave him. After all, it was no particular business of his what happened to the Hotel Avenida. It was not as though the outrage were to occur in an immaculate salon; the whole hall looked as though similar scenes of by-now forgotten violence had occurred there before.

Half way up the stairs he heard a sound and looked back. The proprietor had removed a picture from the wall. He put his fist through the glass as Dunnett looked at him; then having broken the frame across his knee he turned about for something fresh to destroy. Obviously the smashing process was well under way. Dunnett left him in disgust and went on upstairs.