Neither Man Nor Dog Page 5

  “Then Anna spoke to me. ‘I saved this in case I might need it,’ she said; ‘but you take it, it means two more wolves.’ And she took out a little brass pistol with two barrels. She was a nice girl. Bing-bing! Not bad, this toy pistol! Two more wolves went down.

  “But the rest poured over them like water, and the horses were labouring, dead tired. ‘Another girl,’ the old man shouted. Anna was the heavier of the two left, but I liked her. Did I mention it? She was my cousin.

  “I said to the other: ‘Out you go.’ She was too scared to move. I dropped her out. She just lay still. No nerve, no fire! The sledge was lightened. It went faster. So did the wolves. In five more miles they caught up with us again. The old man sighed, and said: ‘Nothing for it; better live penniless than die rich. . . . Chuck out the last one.’ I looked at Anna, and Anna looked at me. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘Anna, you’re a nice girl, and I’m sorry. But what would be the sense of your staying here and killing us all? Will you jump, or shall I push you?’ She covered her eyes and jumped. The sledge almost left the ground. Aha, the good troika!

  “But the horses were beat, finished, and there was still a long way to go. They were almost on the back of the sledge. I was beating them back with the butt of a rifle. ‘Can’t loose any more horses,’ the old man said. I said: ‘No, and there are no more girls to shove out.’ Sweat started dripping off the old man’s face. He said: ‘Nothing for it. . . . Unless one of us jumps. No, damn it, loose another horse, and chance it!’ I said to him: ‘It wouldn’t be a chance, it’d be a certainty. We’d both be finished. What for? One or the other, but not both.’

  “ ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I’m an old man. My life’s finished. I’ll jump.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but there’s no time to lose. Take a rifle and at least smash a few before they get you. Don’t worry. I’ll take a good revenge on these damned animals.’

  “ ‘That’s the style,’ said the old man. He kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Then he stopped and said: ‘These are new boots I’ve got on. Why waste new boots? I asked the bootmaker to make me a pair to last seven years. Wait a moment while I get them off. But don’t wear them; sell them. Dead men’s boots are unlucky.’

  “He pulled off his boots, covered his throat with his sleeve, took his knife in his hand, got a rifle by the barrel, and jumped right into the middle of the pack smashing them right and left like a whirlwind. I didn’t look round. I heard him yell: ‘Take that, you lousy wolf!’ Then, yelp-yelp-yelp. I beat the pack into town by a matter of minutes.”

  * * * * *

  Adze sneered at the look of horror on my face.

  “What’s the matter? If we had all died, would that have been more practical? Yes? Bah. Well, that winter I had revenge. I went into the forests, wolf-hunting. I shot them, I trapped them, I gave them what for. I wiped out the rest of the pack. I made nine hundred roubles on the skins.”

  “Fratricide!” I muttered.

  Reflections in a Tablespoon

  I remembered all this in a grim, cold, northern restaurant.

  A sour waiter, twisting his face in a pale sneer, banged down a plateful of something flabby floating in grey water and, snarling over his shoulder, said that I could have Spam or boiled salt cod and brussels sprouts to follow. I replied that in the meantime I needed a spoon, so he brought one, wiped it on his trousers, and let it fall with a clang. Then he went away with a shrug of despair.

  It was a magnificent tablespoon, weighing several ounces; heavily plated and monogrammed—a relic of old, good, solid days. Turning it over I saw the autograph of Gino engraved on the handle. Gino’s name, scrawled with a flourish, looked remarkably like Gino himself. The big loop and the fine curly tail of the G were the nose and the moustache, the ino recklessly sprawling downwards were the pendulous lower lip and the three fat chins of that noble restaurateur.

  His silverware had gone under the hammer, I supposed; and I wondered what had happened to the bold brass fittings and the honest round mirrors that used to look so massive and gay in Gino’s Long Bar. Gino, I knew, had turned to dust, which he hated, and to flowers, which he loved—he was always beating away dust or arranging flowers. But his place had been built to last a thousand years. All the same, it began to die when Gino died of an enlarged heart in 1923—I always thought that his heart was dangerously big for a man who owned a restaurant. Yes, the place went into a decline and sank from owner to owner until a bomb closed its eyes in 1940. It had been beloved for Gino’s sake. He was a good man, bright and kind; people in trouble found their way to Gino as lost dogs find their way to a watchman’s fire in the cold, inhospitable night.

  Things pass: they break, or they wear away. . . . “You don’t like?” grunted the waiter, jerking a contemptuous thumb towards my soup.

  I said: “I see that you have some of poor old Gino’s silverware here.”

  “You knew him?”

  “He was my friend,” I said, “he gave me credit.”

  The waiter changed. He stood up and grew taller; he smiled and became friendly. “In a minute I get you two nice little lamb cutlets,” he whispered.

  We smiled at each other. I was moved. Although Gino was dead and the dust carts had dragged away the rubble that had been his house, by God’s grace his generous heart had not stopped beating.

  The waiter said: “He was patient. My goodness, what would have drove me mad, so it only made Monsieur Gino say Well! My Gawd, you remember that yellow woman what she called herself. The Countess? With the scar on her face?”

  “Gino was very patient with her.” I said, “Poor woman.”

  The waiter winked and said: “Don’t drink that muck: I get you two nice little lamb cutlets—they do you more good, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said and he went away, flapping like a seal on his big flat feet in his shiny black coat.

  The Countess had been a beautiful lady, but when I knew her she was nothing but an attenuated shadow in a late afternoon. Her scar, a small one over her left cheek-bone, made her face arresting. She was reminiscent of beauty, as an echo is like a voice. Yet in spite of her wild yellow hair, nobody denied that she was a lady. Have you ever come upon a ruin left tottering after a raid—some bit of bedroom wall, for example, broken beyond repair, still retaining a few strips of carefully-chosen wall-paper? You know that although blast has opened it to the rain and that it is pitiful in its exposure, it has, in its day, been beloved: it has witnessed certain glorious moments. The Countess was such a ruin. She always had a little money on the first of every month—about eight pounds. Then she was a great lady, ready to carry the weight of all the troubles of the world. For about two days she gave drinks to strangers and money to beggars. On the fifth day, she would be alone, twitching, with the Black Dog looking over her shoulder into the small glass which she was trying to keep half-full until somebody happened to offer her something. It was awful to see her on the edge of the twenty-one arid deserts of her next three weeks.

  Then Gino would catch the barman’s eye and nod, looking tired and sick. His nod said: Let her have credit. He insisted only that she ate something. Sometimes he would coax:

  “Madame la Comtesse, for you especially I make a little something. Not for anybody, not for everybody, but for you.”

  She was always contemptuous, and said: “It doesn’t concern me. I am not interested in your little something.”

  “If I have make it, could Madame la Comtesse not be gracious and say: ‘I will taste’?”

  “Very well, only you must cash me a cheque.”

  “First, you must give me your opinion. There is an entrecôte. Nobody could tell, nobody could judge—only you. We beg your opinion.”

  And so she ate. As for her bill, Gino “charged it to expenses”, as the saying goes; he chalked it up, and washed it out. Knowing this, the Countess grew more and more capricious, intolerably haughty. How could she admit that she was accepting charity? It was out of the question. “Laugh at me, laugh at me now!” she would
cry, while her eyes flickered. She could not meet the horrible white stare of the Hangman, Sobriety. “Laugh at me, laugh if you like, but I say I could have bought a dozen Ginos a little while ago!”

  To this, Gino always replied: “Dear lady, there is nothing to buy, nothing at all.”

  The last time I saw her she was trying to cash a cheque. “September the what?” she asked, making blots on the dateline of a crumpled blue slip with a miniature fountain-pen.

  A respectable bystander said: “The fourth, madam, September the fourth.”

  “Of course it’s the fourth, I know very well it’s the fourth. I didn’t need you to tell me that. . . . Gino, you will cash my cheque for two pounds.”

  Gino gave her two pounds and, closing her poor smudged cheque-book, slipped it back into her bag. She glared at him and screamed:

  “You thief! How dare you go over my bag?”

  Gino murmured: “Be nice, put away your cheques. Among friends, one trusts. Away, away—put it away!”

  He knew that her cheques were valueless, they always came back; but she, tossing her bewildered head and still trying to write, said: “The fourth? . . . of what month? Of September. September the fourth . . .”

  I heard Gino mutter: “Oh, God, the sea is so wide and the boat is so small!”

  But then the Countess, waggling her useless cheque-book, said, with an odious and provocative grin: “I’ll tell you something. The Monk Paphnutius looked into my eyes—I was a girl of fourteen—and he said: ‘You shall betray and be betrayed, and be loved by one whom you do not love and give your love to one who does not love you. You shall avenge your own victim, and after that you shall order the destiny of an Oriental Empire.’ . . . You and your dirty two pounds!”

  The bar was filling. Gino said: “Dear lady, you are always welcome, but since you are excited, you had better go and rest a little.”

  On the verge of tears she exclaimed: “And a little while ago I could have employed this creature to brush my shoes, and he would have been honoured!”

  But she walked out, pushing the revolving door so violently that it thudded fifteen times. A few seconds later we heard a woman’s scream, a screeching of brakes, and a smashing clangor of metal and glass. Everybody looked at everybody else. The door revolved again, very slowly, and the Countess came back trembling, with a pale face.

  “It just missed me,” she said.

  The chasseur, following her, said that she had missed death by inches, having stepped off the pavement in front of a speeding car, which, swerving in order not to hit her, had skidded across the street into some railings. The Countess was ordering a drink. Gino, shaking his head at the barman, said: “No, dear lady, this is all. No more. Just one last drink with me, for your nerves, and then God bless you. You must not come here any more.”

  She wept.

  “The Monk Paphnutius looked into my eyes . . . and I, I who rule an Oriental Empire, that I should be spoken to like this, oh . . . Oh . . .”

  Gino nodded and said: “Yes, Madame la Comtesse, even you. Good-bye, for God’s sake. You have an Empire, and I have a Licence. Enough is enough.”

  She went away, trailing her old-fashioned handbag, and Gino said: “Monks! Eyes! Empires! Licences! I wish to God Almighty that I was an American sitting on a flagpole.”

  I never saw the Countess again.

  The waiter came back with the cutlets. They were burnt on the outside and raw within. He was unconcerned. While a man at an adjacent table stamped his feet and beat hideous noises out of a cruet with his knife-handle, the waiter talked of Gino and of what a man he had been. “Except somebody sometimes he liked everybody always,” he said.

  Then the manager came and almost dragged him away.

  I knew one of the men whom Gino did not like; a ruffian out of the Balkans, a man with a withered arm, who always had something to sell—a silk handkerchief, for example, with somebody else’s monogram; or a fountain-pen—fine to-day, oblique to-morrow—marked with any name but his own. He answered to the name of Stavro, and he was an unscrupulous villain, an unmitigated blackguard, and a swindler by vocation. His right arm and hand were bent into something like the shape of a tired rattlesnake. This deformity appeared to be the result of some recent injury, for the first time I saw him, in the spring of the year of Gino’s death, the arm was caught up in a black silk sling, and he had the drawn look of a man suffering persistent pain. Even so, he was handsome in a dark, pantherish way; one sensed the man’s power over women and hoped that God would have mercy upon any infatuated creature that fell into his grip, for Stavro would have no mercy at all. I never saw a stonier pair of bright black eyes. Stavro was short but beautifully proportioned, a sort of vest-pocket Hercules, unquestionably a dangerous man in a rough house for all his fastidiousness of dress and manner, and his gentleness of voice. For no definable reason I also detested him. With Gino, it was hate at first sight. Stavro had a disconcerting way of looking at you: he gazed right into your eyes with the hungry, immovable, wide-eyed stare of a pervert or a watching cat. He seemed to be having trouble with a match and a cigarette, so I offered him a light. He thanked me graciously and said:

  “This is nothing, this arm. I am almost ambidextrous. I can write with my left hand, even. Look . . .”

  He took out a fat green fountain-pen, unscrewed the cap with the help of his fine white teeth, and scribbled Stavro on the marble-topped table. “Do you like my pen?” he asked.

  “It is very nice.”

  “You can have it for two pounds, if you like. It cost me three guineas.” He was lying, of course; he was not the man to pay good money for anything. I wondered what he did for a living and concluded that he got a risky livelihood on the fringe of the Underworld, buying things on credit and selling them quickly for cash; walking off with other people’s luggage. . . . Always moving quickly and quietly; elusive; a Disappearing Man in a conjuring trick; here to-day, gone to-morrow; best left alone. Later, Gino said: “I am an old man and you are a young man. Allow me to warn you—keep away from that dark one. He is no good. He is a Pomp.” He meant “Pimp” and was not far wrong at that.

  Stavro went on talking, purring out self-glorification: “My left hand is as good as my right. I will show you something. There are not many men you know can do this . . .”

  He whisked an elegant pearl-and-silver fruit-knife out of a waistcoat pocket, opened it with two fingers and his teeth, turned his head and pointed to a small wooden sign two yards away, which advertised somebody’s Highland Whisky in elegant gold lettering.

  “Which do you prefer? The dot over the i in Highland or in Whisky?”

  I did not know what he meant. He explained: “I will dot you the i in Highland.”

  Then, with a casual snap of his powerful fingers he flicked the little knife away. The point buried itself in the centre of the dot he had specified. “Have I earned a drink?” he asked, retrieving his knife and putting it away. I said that he had, indeed, and I bought him one. In the end I bought his fountain-pen.

  Stavro frequented Gino’s Long Bar for several weeks. His arm, free from the sling, was permanently distorted, fixed in its peculiar, weary, reptilian droop. He told me that all the tendons and muscles had been cut to pieces so that he would never use that arm again. He hooked himself on to me, and to others also. I was not sorry when Gino told him to go and stay away.

  “No,” he said one morning, as Stavro came in, “you are not coming here any more. Get out and keep out; I don’t want you in my bar. . . . Why? . . . Because I don’t like your face, in the first place, and in the second place you are keeping nice people away. Go, please.”

  Stavro, smiling with his mouth while he murdered Gino with his eyes, bowed and walked out.

  It is odd that, thinking of Gino, I should think of the only two customers whom I saw sent away from the genial and kindly atmosphere of his bar. Mourning Gino, I remember his enemies. It is strange. . . .

  As I have said, I never saw the Countess again, bu
t I did meet Stavro once, nearly twelve years later. He had changed, so that I was almost sorry for him. Although he was still elegantly dressed and carried himself, as always, like a gentleman, he had got fat. All his feline litheness, all his supple charm, was dead and buried under an extra hundred pounds of flesh. I recognised him first by his right arm, which was still withered and useless, and then by his eyes, which were still bright and wicked. He, with his swindler’s memory, remembered me immediately, and greeted me as if we had parted only a day or two before. He asked me how the fountain-pen was working. I had given it away ten years ago, cursing myself for having been hypnotised into buying it. I told him so and he laughed, and then we went to a nearby wine bar for a glass of sherry.

  I looked at Stavro in a mirror, as Perseus looked at the evil face of the Gorgon, and it occurred to me that while some great men may die with their best songs unsung, this fat crook was destined to go to the grave with most of his evil unconsummated. This idea filled me with a strange sense of peace; I knew, then, that while there is certainly a Devil, there is unquestionably a God. I said to Stavro: “Can you do with a couple of pounds?”

  He looked at me stunned with astonishment. “Do I understand that you are offering me money?” he asked.

  “Without rancour, as man to man,” I said.

  He was touched. He took the money, bought me a drink with one of the notes, and put the change in his pocket. Then he said: “I accept your money in the spirit in which it is offered. I love frankness, openness, and candour between man and man.” He was a born liar. He went on: “And for this two pounds I will give you something worth two thousand. I will tell you the story of myself.”

  Stavro looked at me with expectancy, and made a protective gesture with his good hand, as if he feared that I might be thunderstruck and utterly overwhelmed by his magnanimity. But, observing that I bore up, he plunged straight into the great drainpipe of his past.