Complete Short Stories by Robert Graves
Nero, as it happened, heard only a vague rumour about the affair, but enough to make him ask Petronius whether Lucan had been warned not to trespass on the Imperial preserve. Petronius answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, Caesar. I explained that it would be ridiculous for him to compete with his master in literature.’ So Nero sent a couple of Guards officers to Lucan’s house with the curt message: ‘You will write no more poetry until further notice!’
The sequel is well known. Lucan persuaded a few other hot-heads to join his plot for assassinating the Emperor in the name of artistic freedom. It miscarried. His friends were arrested; and Lucan had his veins opened by a surgeon in the usual warm bath, where he declaimed a tragic fragment from his Conquests of Alexander: about a Macedonian soldier dying for loss of blood.
Lucan’s father naturally had to follow his dreary example, and so did old Seneca. (Rather hard on my poor sister, that!) Moreover Lucan had left a rude letter behind for the Emperor, if rude be a strong enough word, incidentally calling Petronius a coward for pulling his punches in the Trimalchio portrait. So Petronius was in for it too!
But I had run straight from the banquet down to Ostia – a good twelve miles – with all the gold I could cram into a satchel, and taken ship to Ephesus; where I dyed my hair, changed my name, and lay low for three or four years until Vespasian had been securely invested with the purple. Thank goodness I was stupid at school, and never felt any literary ambitions whatsoever! But nobody in Rome could touch me as a long-distance man…
Earth to Earth
YES, YES AND yes! Don’t get me wrong, for goodness’ sake. I am heart and soul with you. I agree that Man is wickedly defrauding the Earth-Mother of her ancient dues by not putting back into the soil as much nourishment as he takes out. And that modern plumbing is, if you like, a running sore in the body politic. And that municipal incinerators are genocidal rather than germicidal… And that cremation should be made a capital crime. And that dust bowls created by the greedy plough…… Yes, yes and yes again. But!
Elsie and Roland Hedge – she a book-illustrator, he an architect with suspect lungs – had been warned against Dr Eugen Steinpilz. ‘He’ll bring you no luck,’ I told them. ‘My little finger says so decisively.’
‘You too?’ asked Elsie indignantly. (This was at Brixham, South Devon, in March 1940.) ‘I suppose you think that because of his foreign accent and his beard he must be a spy?’
‘No,’ I said coldly, ‘that point hadn’t occurred to me. But I won’t contradict you.’
The very next day Elsie deliberately picked a friendship – I don’t like the phrase, but that’s what she did – with the Doctor, an Alsatian with an American passport, who described himself as a Naturphilosoph; and both she and Roland were soon immersed in Steinpilzerei up to the nostrils. It began when he invited them to lunch and gave them cold meat and two rival sets of vegetable dishes – potatoes (baked), carrots (creamed), bought from the local fruiterer; and potatoes (baked) and carrots (creamed), grown on compost in his own garden.
The superiority of the latter over the former in appearance, size and especially flavour came as an eye-opener to Elsie and Roland. Yes, and yes, I know just how they felt. Why shouldn’t I? When I visit the market here in Palma, I always refuse La Torre potatoes, because they are raised for the early English market and therefore reek of imported chemical fertilizer. Instead I buy Son Sardina potatoes, which taste as good as the ones we used to get in England fifty years ago. The reason is that the Son Sardina farmers manure their fields with Palma kitchen-refuse, still available by the cartload – this being too backward a city to afford effective modern methods of destroying it.
Thus Dr Steinpilz converted the childless and devoted couple to the Steinpilz method of composting. It did not, as a matter of fact, vary greatly from the methods you read about in the Gardening Notes of your favourite national newspaper, except that it was far more violent. Dr Steinpilz had invented a formula for producing extremely fierce bacteria, capable (Roland claimed) of breaking down an old boot or the family Bible or a torn woollen vest into beautiful black humus almost as you watched. The formula could not be bought, however, and might be communicated under oath of secrecy only to members of the Eugen Steinpilz Fellowship – which I refused to join. I won’t pretend therefore to know the formula myself, but one night I overheard Elsie and Roland arguing in their garden as to whether the planetary influences were favourable; and they also mentioned a ram’s horn in which, it seems, a complicated mixture of triturated animal and vegetable products – technically called ‘the Mother’ – was to be cooked up. I gather also that a bull’s foot and a goat’s pancreas were part of the works, because Mr Pook the butcher afterwards told me that he had been puzzled by Roland’s request for these unusual cuts. Milkwort and pennyroyal and bee-orchid and vetch certainly figured among the Mother’s herbal ingredients; I recognized these one day in a gardening basket Elsie had left at the post office.
The Hedges soon had their first compost heap cooking away in the garden, which was about the size of a tennis court and consisted mostly of well-kept lawn. Dr Steinpilz, who supervised, now began to haunt the cottage like the smell of drains; I had to give up calling on them. Then, after the Fall of France, Brixham became a war-zone whence everyone but we British and our Free French or Free Belgian allies were extruded. Consequently Dr Steinpilz had to leave; which he did with very bad grace, and was killed in a Liverpool air-raid the day before he should have sailed back to New York. But that was far from closing the ledger. I think Elsie must have been in love with the Doctor, and certainly Roland had a hero-worship for him. They treasured a signed collection of all his esoteric books, each called after a different semi-precious stone, and used to read them out aloud to each other at meals, in turns. Then to show that this was a practical philosophy, not just a random assemblage of beautiful thoughts about Nature, they began composting in a deeper and even more religious way than before. The lawn had come up, of course; but they used the sods to sandwich layers of kitchen waste, which they mixed with the scrapings from an abandoned pigsty, two barrowfuls of sodden poplar leaves from the recreation ground, and a sack of rotten turnips. Looking over the hedge, I caught the fanatic gleam in Elsie’s eye as she turned the hungry bacteria loose on the heap, and could not repress a premonitory shudder.
So far, not too bad, perhaps. But when serious bombing started and food became so scarce that housewives were fined for not making over their swill to the national pigs, Elsie and Roland grew worried. Having already abandoned their ordinary sanitary system and built an earth-closet in the garden, they now tried to convince neighbours of their duty to do the same, even at the risk of catching cold and getting spiders down the neck. Elsie also sent Roland after the slow-moving Red Devon cows as they lurched home along the lane at dusk, to rescue the precious droppings with a kitchen shovel; while she visited the local ash-dump with a packing case mounted on wheels, and collected whatever she found there of an organic nature – dead cats, old rags, withered flowers, cabbage stalks and such household waste as even a national wartime pig would have coughed at. She also saved every drop of their bath-water for sprinkling the heaps; because it contained, she said, valuable animal salts.
The test of a good compost heap, as every illuminate knows, is whether a certain revolting-looking, if beneficial, fungus sprouts from it. Elsie’s heaps were grey with this crop, and so hot inside that they could be used for haybox cookery; which must have saved her a deal of fuel. I call them ‘Elsie’s heaps’, because she now considered herself Dr Steinpilz’s earthly delegate; and loyal Roland did not dispute this claim.
A critical stage in the story came during the Blitz. It will be remembered that trainloads of Londoners, who had been evacuated to South Devon when war broke out, thereafter de-evacuated and re-evacuated and re-de-evacuated themselves, from time to time, in a most disorganized fashion. Elsie and Roland, as it happened, escaped having evacuees billeted on them, because they had no spare bedroom;
Roland broke a long silence by coming, in some embarrassment, to ask my advice. Elsie, he said, had decided that it would be wrong to trouble the police about the case; because the police were so busy these days, and the poor old fellow had claimed to possess neither kith nor kin. So they’d read the burial service over him and, after removing his belt-buckle, trouser buttons, metal spectacle-case and a bunch of keys, which were irreducible, had laid him reverently in the new compost heap. Its other contents, he added, were a cartload of waste from the cider-factory, salvaged cow-dung, and several basketfuls of hedge clippings. Had they done wrong?
‘If you mean “will I report you to the Civil Authorities?” the answer is no,’ I assured him. ‘I wasn’t looking over the hedge at the relevant hour, and what you tell me is only hearsay.’ Roland shambled off satisfied.
The War went on. Not only did the Hedges convert the whole garden into serried rows of Eugen Steinpilz memorial heaps, leaving no room for planting the potatoes or carrots to which the compost had been prospectively devoted, but they scavenged the offal from the Brixham fish-market and salvaged the contents of the bin outside the surgical ward at the Cottage Hospital. Every spring, I remember, Elsie used to pick big bunches of primroses and put them straight on the compost, without even a last wistful sniff; virgin primroses were supposed to be particularly relished by the fierce bacteria.
Here the story becomes a little painful for members, say, of a family reading circle; I will soften it as much as possible. One morning a policeman called on the Hedges with a summons, and I happened to see Roland peep anxiously out of the bedroom window, but quickly pull his head in again. The policeman rang and knocked and waited, then tried the back door; and presently went away. The summons was for a blackout offence, but apparently the Hedges did not know this. Next morning he called again, and when nobody answered, forced the lock of the back door. They were found dead in bed together, having taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. A note on the coverlet ran simply:
Please lay our bodies on the heap nearest the pigsty. Flowers by request. Strew some on the bodies, mixed with a little kitchen waste, and then fork the earth lightly over.
E.H.; R.H.
George Irks, the new tenant, proposed to grow potatoes and dig for victory. He hired a cart and began throwing the compost into the River Dart, ‘not liking the look of them toadstools’, as he subsequently explained. The five beautifully clean human skeletons which George unearthed in the process were still awaiting identification when the War ended.
They Say… They Say
THIS IS SATURDAY, listeners, and here I am standing beside the old recording van in a Spanish seaport town on the Costa Brava. The sun is pretty hot, even for this time of year: several scores of farmers and dealers, mainly from outlying districts, have taken possession of the Market Square cafés. Nice fellows, too. Not a knife, pistol or unkind thought in the whole crowd. That hoarse buzz you hear is their usual exchange of views on the price of tomatoes, olive futures, the effects of drought on the regional economy, and so on. The overtones are excited argument about the Grand Tour of Catalonia – on push-bike – and the fearful struggle of the local fútbol team to avoid relegation to the Third Division of the League.
Now, suppose we bring the microphone over to a corner table and listen to what those two very relaxed-looking types are saying to each other over their coffee and anís. The melancholy-looking fellow in black corduroys, sporting a massive silver watch-chain, is Pep Prat. Pep breeds mules; and his rubicund vis-à-vis with the blue sash, by name Pancho Pons, grows carnations for the Barcelona market.
PANCHO: Well, Master Pep! Been along Conception Street lately?
PEP: And if not, have I missed much, Master Pancho?
PANCHO: Nothing, nothing. I was only making conversation.
PEP: Make some more by all means.
PANCHO: I went this morning to change a one-hundred-duro note at the Banco Futurístico.
PEP: Did they short-change you? Mistakes often happen on a Saturday. pancho: No, indeed. Don Bernardo Bosch was in a very good humour.
He now has an enchanting little office with three easy chairs, a mahogany desk and a window overlooking the street.
PEP: Of course… Of course… Ah, Master Pancho! That poor woman’s face comes back to me so clearly!
PANCHO: What courage, eh? I should never have dared address him as she did.
PEP: It is now more than a year ago.
PANCHO: Yet the words still ring in my ears. I happened to be doing some business with the cheesemonger next door, and poor saintly Margalida never spoke in a low voice, even at the worst of times. On that occasion she might have been missionizing the heathen. She said: ‘Don Bernardo, not another word! I have this shop on a hundred years lease, with eighty-six more to run and since (thanks be to God!) I am now only thirty years old and enjoy good health, it should last out my life. I am not selling, I do not need to sell, and though the shop may measure only twenty-five and a half square metres it suffices for my modest business.’
PEP: She had spirit.
PANCHO: And Don Bernardo answered: ‘You are a bloodsucker, you are a negress, Margalida Mut, you are Jael and Sapphira rolled into one. I offer you fifteen hundred duros a square metre to surrender your lease and you dare refuse it!’ And the poor creature answered: ‘I am not selling, you gipsy! But if you and your colleagues think of selling the Banco Futurístico equally cheap, let me know – I may need it as a lumber room. Adiós!’ That ended the comedy.
PEP: But tell me: exactly why would she not sell?
PANCHO: Ask me, rather, why she should sell. Should she sell just because the Banco Futurístico had bought up the rest of the site, and did not wish her rusty shutters and peeling sign to interrupt their beautiful marble façade in Conception Street? Margalida was a martyr to principle.
PEP: Nevertheless, principle puts no bacon in the stew. Her trade was beggarly. She called herself an antique-dealer but I have seen better stuff spread out on a sack in the Flea Market: nails, horseshoes, a broken sewing machine, three cracked dishes, books without covers, half a Salamonic bedrail.
PANCHO: Mind, I know nothing, but they say… very unjustly no doubt… that the excellent woman was a receiver of stolen goods, a usuress at compound interest, a blackmailer, a Protestant!
PEP: They say! Ah, the hypocrites! They said nothing like that at her funeral. What a display! A thousand people at least walked in it, besides priests and acolytes. And an epidemic of tall wax candles. Also columns in the Heraldo about her good works and devotion and saintliness. I recall how shocked Don Bernardo was when he heard the news. He hurried at once in his very pyjamas to condole with the deceased’s afflicted sister Joana Mut.
PANCHO: It was well done, although Margalida had not been on speaking terms with either of the two sisters since their parents’ death – some dispute about the inheritance, they say.
PEP: Yes, they say. And they say… But never mind.
PANCHO: An extraordinary end, eh? Altogether baffling. It happened, you will remember, at precisely seven o’clock, when all the shutters in the street were clanging down; and her protests, if any, must have been drowned in the noise. Nobody was aware that anything unusual had occurred until nine o’clock next morning when someone noticed the gap at the bottom of the shutter – which showed that she had not locked it as was her custom when she went home to her solitary flat. A pity, because it was then too late to telephone the station-police at Port Bou and have the passengers searched as they crossed the frontier. You may be sure that the assassin was French.
PEP: My brother-
PANCHO: No Catalan of the Costa Brava would murder even a supposed usuress for her money!
PEP: Certainly not! But no money was taken. A two-hundred-duro note was left untouched in the open cash-box. They say that the assassin was a married lady who wished to retrieve some compromising document from it. They say that a long strand of hair was found in poor Margalida’s fingers…
PANCHO: Yes, they say! But they also say it was Margalida’s own hair, torn out in the struggle.
PEP: Of the same colour and thickness, I admit. It certainly seemed to be Mut hair… What I cannot understand is why my brother-in-law had orders from high up to post an armed guard at either end of the street for a whole month; as if to prevent a disturbance.
PANCHO: It is, of course, a theory that murderers revisit the scene of their crimes. But what I should have liked to ask your brother-in-law was, why he allowed that picture of poor Isidoro Núñez to appear in the Heraldo entitled: ‘Wanted, dead or alive, for the Conception crime!’ Isidoro is not a bad fellow. Once he got drunk and borrowed the mayor’s bicycle and ran it into a tree, so they jailed him for a couple of months; but that was his one crime. Actually, it was well known that he had gone off, two days before, to visit his father in Galicia; and when he returned the police did not even interrogate him. They say…
PEP: Oh yes, they say! They also say that it was a love tragedy, that the poor woman was killed by an amorous and impulsive youngster whom she had rejected.
PANCHO: Ka! Margalida was as ugly as a fisherman’s boot.