Free Complete Short Stories by Robert Graves

of his wife and children and of their step-father.
    In short, he was perfectly dead, andhis daily post-bag, because of the recency of his death, was enormous; he used the blank pages of letters and the back of envelopes for his replies. He was in no position to buy stationery, even if his signature to cheques or letters had been valid, which it was not. However, he calculated that the serviceability of his large gold propelling-pencil (which held, screwed in its base, a copious supplyof refills) could even at the present extravagant rate of daily use be prolonged for fully another three hundred years.
    ‘With care, for as long as three thousand years,’ he cried, ‘and by that time who will care for my work except antiquarians?’
    His mood was now so hilarious that I had no compunction in leaving him without another word of commiseration or encouragement. His parting joke wasone about the legal impossibility of the dead libelling the living.
    ‘But,’ he said, ‘I am careful not to trade on my immunity. I flatter myself that I died a sportsman and lie buried as such.’

Está En Su Casa
    ‘Holá – señor!’
    The sudden summons came from a thin hook-nosed man in a baggy white shirt, blue striped cotton trousers, and a black felt hat, who rose suddenly from behind a mastic bush a few yards off. I had been sitting for ten minutes or more on the stone bench of the
mirador,
a look-out platform built on the cliff edge, idly watching a tall-funnelled Spanish destroyer disengageitself from the horizon and disappear behind the distant headland to the north-east. Below me was a drop of nearly a thousand feet to a glaring white stony beach. I sprang up, startled, and may have answered in English; but I do not remember. He forced a reassuring smile, spread out both hands to show that he was unarmed and said in Spanish: ‘Please forgive my disturbance of your tranquillity.You are an American?’
    I answered: ‘No,
señor
, you must not judge me by my elegant straw hat, a gift from a friend in the United States. Judge me rather by my old shirt and patched trousers. I am one of the victorious but bankrupt English. What a stifling day, is it not?’
    This put him at his ease. ‘Yes, it is very hot,’ he said. But he stayed where he was, so I strolled over to him.
    ‘Your firstvisit to Majorca?’ he asked.
    ‘The first time since the troubles started in 1936, when I had to leave my house and lands. And I remember you well, even if you do not remember me. Surely you are Don Pedro Samper, the proprietor of Ca’n Samper on the other side of the mountain spur?’
    We shook hands heartily as I went on: ‘I visited you once in the company of your neighbour Don Pablo Pons, backin 1935. I needed some really good cuttings to graft on two young apricot trees that had proved to be of poor quality, and Don Pablo informed me that you had the best tree on the island. I had the pleasure of meeting your charming and sympathetic wife. I hope she is in good health?’
    ‘Thanks be to God, we are well, and so are the children.’ He apologized several times for not having recognizedme, explaining that my sunglasses, the greying of my hair and the thinness of my face had deceivedhim. In return he enquired after my health, that of my family, and the condition of my property after ten years’ absence. And of course he wanted to hear about the flying bombs in London. The Spanish Press had played up the havoc of the flying bomb until it was difficult for anyone to believe thatthere could be a single survivor. ‘And is it true that in England now potatoes sell at a hundred pesetas a kilo?’
    ‘No, at about one peseta. The farmers are subsidized by the Government.’
    ‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘Our journalists seem to have been misinformed about many things… But, tell me, did those apricot cuttings take?’
    ‘Divinely well. I found a barbaric crop of apricots waiting for me –the branches had to be tied up to prevent them from breaking