Free The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories by Geoffrey Household

her flowers, four by her baggage, and on the tenth she had a regular wardrobe of wraps and coats, with a damn great garden-party hat on top of the lot which I guessed she meant to put on five minutes before we reached Guayaquil. I didn’t like messing her things about, so I smiled at her sort of helplessly. But she looked clean through me. Don Anastasio caught my eye, and got up to clear the chair alongside his own.
    â€œâ€˜Not that one,’ says she [Trevithick imitated the deep voice of a pompous woman and made me howl with laughter]. ‘You may move the flowers, Anastasio.’
    â€œDon Anastasio sighed—well, no! He’d never have dared to sigh in front of his wife. It would have started an argument. Put it this way. He looked as if he had sighed. The flowers were easy enough to move, but at the other end of the coach. She had banished me as far away as possible.
    â€œWe moved them, and then Don Anastasio silently shook my hand. I couldn’t quite understand it at the time. He told me afterwards that the scent of all those flowers had reminded him of the innumerable funerals that a vice president had to attend. He was just keeping his mind off everything—trying to get away from Doña Clara and travel and the reproaches he’d have to listen to as far as Riobamba—and so he was open to the suggestion of funerals, if you see what I mean. He shook my hand quite automatically. I was the chief mourner.
    â€œWell, I returned his grip—with sympathy, for I was thinking of Doña Clara. He knew that all right. To cover his embarrassment he wiped up the damp patches which the flowers had left on the cream-colored upholstery, and spread his mackintosh for me to sit on. Then he patted me on the back—he was a great back-patter, Don Anastasio—and returned to his place.
    â€œI sat there, looking out of the window and watching Ecuador slide past. I wasn’t feeling very bright. You know how it is. If one has a few drinks and a good lunch and then gets on a train or boat—down come all the sins you’ve ever committed, and your last sin in particular. And, what’s worse, all the damn futility of living the way you do, or living at all if it comes to that. Hell! I’ve known men whose memories were fair stuffed with sins, and thought none the worse of them. We wouldn’t know what sin was if it weren’t for the priests and the lawyers. But we’d know futility all right. I tell you, I think sometimes that monkeys know all about futility. That’s why they’re always hopping after some mischief; they daren’t do nothing. I’m going to buy a monkey some day. It’s no good theorizing and reading about human beings. I sit here in the evenings and think I’ve solved the problems of the universe, but it’s all hot air. There’s no solid fact behind it. I must buy a monkey. I say, where was I?”
    â€œYou were watching Ecuador slide past the window,” I said.
    â€œAh, yes. Well, I liked Ecuador—green and soft and warm. I was sick at being turned out of it. It reminded me of home. My father was a farmer—a gentleman farmer he called himself, but the only gentlemanliness I saw was when he used to swear at me and my brothers for running around with the village kids. I did a bunk when I was sixteen. South Africa, South America, New South Wales—always South Something-or-Other I’ve been in. Always running around to make a bit of money, enough to move somewhere else.
    â€œThat’s what I was thinking as we joggled along the altiplano from Quito to Riobamba. It was a bad five hours,—I expect you’ve had ’em too,—but something came out of it. I discovered that all the time I had been wanting a farm without my father.
    â€œOf course I could have had a farm without my father any year in the last twenty when I was flush. But it hadn’t occurred to me. Farms and fathers—they