The Brides of Solomon (9 page)

But there it was. That was the way an army fought. That was the value of leadership. Even if Wrist did take good care that there was someone to commend his act of gallantry, it only reflected
tremendous credit on the Area Commander who had inspired him. Scamps, these old soldiers? Well, if you liked. But, by God, they made the rules of their own game and enough of them had died at
it!

The sergeant-major gave an indescribable hitch to his whole person, as if he were about to report to the Almighty that all, including his own well-polished soul, was present and correct. He then
stepped out smartly towards the northern sheds. No, thought Coulter, of course he wouldn’t run. Running, even forwards, suggested a sense of urgency and panic. That was not the way of the
majestically professional British Army.

Captain Coulter found himself unconsciously lagging half a step behind. That wouldn’t do at all, and he drew up and paced stride for stride with Wrist. He cursed his lack of any military
training, aware as never before that he had only been carried along by observing traditions of which he had heard and read, by listening to the sergeant-major, by a romantic enthusiasm for those
unrealised three weeks of youth.

What on earth was an officer expected to do in a case like this? Use his common sense, he supposed. The situation was not, in essence, very different from a pay parade when you followed all the
absurd little ceremonies because it was expected of you, because it was that way a soldier liked to work. Alternatively, it was doubtless in his power to order the sergeant-major to drop this
folly. Or he could go to ground in any solid cover there might be, and charitably watch Wrist trying to win his D.C.M. There was nobody looking to see what he did himself.

‘Oh, blast!’ Coulter thought. ‘
I
am looking.’

He found that he had grumbled the words half aloud, and was startled by his own voice as much as by his superb and unexpected arrogance.

‘Sir?’ asked the sergeant-major.

‘Nothing. What the hell of a lot of bricks there are in four walls!’

They clambered over the rubble of the shed, keeping the mound so far as possible between themselves and the waves of heat from the
City of Syracuse.
To Coulter’s right was the
line of railway trucks waiting for the cargo they were about—and instantaneously—to receive. For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. Some of them had been
loaded that afternoon. No stencilling on the boxes to indicate the contents. Security. Damned soldiers had learned that much if nothing else. At the tail end of the train, where there were neither
building nor rubble between sidings and ship, the wood of the trucks was smouldering.

The flames over the
City of Syracuse
had died down. The plates of her upper works were red and the paint was curling off like wood shavings. All of her above the main deck was spurting
and glowing. A subsidence or a melting anywhere would drop the furnace into the holds.

The cube of shed left upright was about thirty feet high. It stood because it had been reinforced to take the weight of the concrete gun platform on the roof.

‘This will get us up, sergeant-major.’

A long strip of iron railing had been hurled against the trucks. It did not look as if it had fallen from anywhere, but as if it had been preserved on the ground for some calculable event of
peacetime—to rail off the crowds at an embarkation of the royal family, or to fence a bit of welcoming garden in front of the customs-house. They up-ended the railing with some difficulty and
leaned it against the wall for a ladder.

The heat of the burning ship seared eyes and face as Coulter looked over the top. On the platform was the gun, pointing at the scorched foremast of the
City of Syracuse
and partly
wrenched from its mountings. There were two great-coats, forming a vaguely human-shaped pile which aroused and disappointed the gallant zeal of the sergeant-major. There were the long slender
Bofors shells ready arranged to be seized by their partners in the complicated dance of loading. The place was deserted. Well, what else could you expect? The officer in charge would have
ensured—and of that Coulter had all along been certain—that none of his men was left up there alive.

‘Time we were going, sergeant-major,’ he said irritably.

‘We’ll just have a look-round in the rubble, sir.’

‘All right. It’s possible of course.’

And he dutifully searched the hollows and dark corners where one of the gunners might have been blown. By this time he had become such a fatalist that he was jesting with the sergeant-major. To
himself he said: chum, you won’t know a damn thing about it if the ship goes up, so why worry?

He clung to that unreasonably comforting thought until such time as Sergeant-Major Wrist decided that honour was at last satisfied.

Coulter offered him a cigarette, and walked back to his truck which was parked outside the port offices. He could have run now with a clear conscience, but it did not seem worth while. He was
neither courageous nor cowardly; he was just empty.

As they drove out of the dock gates, he said to the sergeant-major:

‘Well, Mr Wrist, if there are many chaps like you among the old regulars, I suppose we might win the war after all.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the sergeant-major complacently. ‘There’s one thing we’re taught early, if I may say so, sir, and that’s our duty to look after the
men, sir.’

They had gone half a mile from the docks when the
City of Syracuse
blew up. The blast cut a swathe through the houses packed on the hill above the port, but on the open sea front, along
which they were driving, buildings merely spilled all their windows on to the pavement as neatly as if a stage set had fallen flat. Then a vast bulk, blacker than the night, swooped out of the sky
before them and hurled up a water-like spout of trees, earth and grass as it plunged into a little public park at the cross-roads.

‘Gawd, what was that?’ the sergeant-major yelled.

‘Must be the whole forepart of the
City of Syracuse
,’ Coulter answered, fascinated by such a colossal show of violence.

The bows and forecastle had pitched right way up, and immediately looked as if they had been on the site for years—a fitting decoration for the park of a seafaring people.

‘Gawd!’ exclaimed the horrified sergeant-major again. ‘She must have been full of ammo, and me muckin’ about alongside like a bleedin’ good Samaritan!’

‘But I thought you—’ Coulter began, and stopped.

Well, what was the use of saying that he thought Wrist knew, that he never dreamed he didn’t know? However he put it, it would inevitably look like boasting. And he was sure—indeed
he well remembered—that any unnecessary dwelling upon danger had not been considered a soldierly virtue by that lost generation whom he could never hope to equal.

I
T
’
S
no good waving at them. Take this one, for example! She’ll get bored with crawling up my arm in a moment, and
fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there’s just the usual mixture of insects, and on a twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all
the available air.

No, I don’t know what these are called—apart from their Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren’t they? Six legs. Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo
tube in the stern. That’s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick it out! There you are—neither of you one penny the worse!

We’ll go inside in another half hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn’t pay any attention at all to these fellows. They’re just satisfying their curiosity with
only one day to do it in perhaps.

Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don’t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won’t squash a cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in-law. I’ve no
fellow feeling for any of the little pests. But if it hadn’t been for them I should be half-way through a life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. A man can never quite
forget a bit of luck like that. It’s bound to influence him. Let me get you another glass! That one’s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably.

Live and let live—that’s all I say. This bit of Paraguay belongs to them quite as much as to me. I’d better tell you the story. I haven’t listened to myself speaking my
own language for more than a year. And it will stop you imagining that something is crawling down the back of your neck when all you need, like the rest of us, is a haircut.

I was a mechanic in Argentina then, repairing tractors and managing the power plant and refrigeration on a big
estancia
up in the north-east corner of Corrientes. That’s a strip
of real white man’s country—in between the marshes of the Paraná and the forests of Misiones. I liked the life and the people. Took to it from the start, like so many other
Englishmen.

The nearest town was Posadas, where the train ferry crosses the Paraná from Paraguay to Argentina. I used to go there three or four times a year to keep an eye on the discharge of any of
our machinery from the river steamers, and arrange for its transport up-country. You could drive a truck from Posadas to the
estancia
—just—but it was more comfortable to
ride.

Posadas was not much of a town. A lot of dim lights, but no bright ones except the railway coaches and the
Estrella de la Banda.
The
Estrella
was a far better joint than you
would have expected to find in a little river port, not at all the usual
pulpería
with a couple of half-witted girls in a dusty corner and drunks sleeping it off outside the door.
Posadas had a small floating population of travellers between Paraguay and Argentina—some of them men of distinction or money, or even both—and Don Luis, who owned the
Estrella
, found it worth his while to feed them decently and provide entertainment. There were plenty of first-class passengers who made a point of staying the night, whenever they had to
cross the Paraná, just in order to visit Don Luis’s joint.

He was a big buck of an Italian—padded shoulders, local politics and all—but he was born in the
pampa
and he flattered himself that he was an Argentine of the Argentines.
Anyone who addressed him as Luigi instead of Luis was safer the other side of the river. I knew him well enough to dislike him thoroughly. He didn’t suspect it. You can go on detesting a man
for years in Spanish so long as you have good manners. That’s quite impossible in English.

There was a north wind blowing on that last visit of mine to Posadas. Just like today. It always brings the damp heat and the insects. And thirst. The boat from Buenos Aires had not arrived; so,
instead of the drinks with the captain which I had been looking forward to, I went into the
Estrella de la Banda.
You could trust Luis’s whisky. I’ll say that for him.

It was early, and the place had not got going. Luis had a new girl.

‘That’s a little beauty!’ I said to him.

She was not my sort, he told me. She was meant for travelling senators and so forth.

‘She’s only a
mestiza,
’ I said. ‘What’s so special about her?’

He whispered to me what was special about her. I didn’t believe him. But one of those senators off the international train might possibly want to believe him.

I sat down beside her. She wasn’t more than seventeen, and she was wearing a frock of innocent respectability just like any young girl at her first party—except that it was black.
She had the wide, gentle face of the Indian, with eyes far apart and hair growing low on the forehead; but her mouth and her nose and all the rest of her were Spanish of the loveliest. I
couldn’t get much out of her but
si, señor
and
no, señor.
Very haughty indeed. Full of conventional little parlour tricks. She wouldn’t touch anything
but lemonade. The line would have gone over very well in Buenos Aires, but I thought she was overdoing it for Posadas where we all liked a bit of slap-and-tickle with, say, the third round of
drinks.

I spent an hour with her and then cleared out. I told Don Luis he was right—that she wasn’t at all the sort for a hardworking man.

All the same I could not get her out of my mind. Her face was so selfless and serious, too comfortable for a place like the
Estrella de la Banda.
Not that there aren’t some
perfect beauties about in cabarets, as well as in shops and offices. But her type was different. I’ve often thought about it since, and I can’t put it better than this. You did not feel
she was bothering about being loved. She wanted to love. Her name was Rosalinda Torres. But I couldn’t guess much from that. Rosalinda sounded professional. On the other hand they do like,
out here in the backwoods, to give their daughters high-sounding names.

There was no steamer next day, so I had nothing to do but hang around in the heat and slap at all the life coming down on the north wind, just like you chaps who travel for pleasure. By the
evening my curiosity was greater than ever. I call it curiosity. But I thought I would be quite ready to take it to another table if young Rosalinda showed no interest in it.

She was sitting with the Captain of the Port, whom I did not like to interrupt for the sake of favours to come. However, he wasn’t a wealthy man—in spite of all the help we shippers
used to give him for the sake of his dear wife and children—and he soon got the same impression as I had the previous night. Meanwhile, I was surprised to find myself a bit short with the
other girls who wanted to share my whisky.

I had the sense to play up to Rosalinda’s act. So, instead of beckoning or sending the waiter for her, I went over hat in hand. She gave me a reasonably courteous little nod, and indicated
that I might sit down. We got on a little better until I told her that I was English. That closed her up tight. I gathered that foreigners were right out of her experience—as terrifying as a
jaguar until you are sure it isn’t hungry.