Pig and Pepper

PIG AND PEPPER

A COMEDY OF YOUTH

DAVID FOOTMAN

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Pig and Pepper by David Footman

First published by Heinemann in 1936

Second edition published by Derek Verschoyle in 1954

Reprinted by Robin Clark in 1990

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Copyright © 1936 by David Footman

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where . . .’ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

‘. . . so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.

‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if only you walk long enough.’

Alice in Wonderland

PART ONE :THE SENTIMENTALIST

I

Guide to Tsernigrad

This chapter is nothing more than its name implies; so those who want to begin the story or who object to guidebooks on principle had better go on at once to Chapter II. Perhaps they are right, since, taken objectively, Tsernigrad is nothing much to write home about. It is just the raw and ramshackle capital of one of those small Balkan states who spotted the winning side in the Great War, and consequently did well out of the Peace Treaties. It is neither Eastern nor Western; culturally and architecturally it is in the awkward age; and most of those who come to it from the West are very ready to go away again as soon as they can.

But I came to Tsernigrad from the East, after three years of dust and boils and consular tea-parties in Aleppo. I came, too, at the age of twenty-six, an age that I suppose is for most of us a period of mental stock-taking. We feel ourselves irrevocably caught up in the profession in which we started four or five years previously, and are apt to wonder whether we have chosen rightly. The faith of youth that can remove mountains is beginning to wear rather thin. No doubt in interesting and congenial surroundings this depression soon passes. But how on earth can one keep up any interest in a place like Aleppo? I learnt Arabic and a little Turkish, and wrote the first and only two chapters of a detective story; I made ineffective attempts to outwit the mosquitoes, and when I could not decently avoid it I attended the social gatherings of my colleagues. Oh, those tea-parties! To this day I can see the huge powdered face and strained smile of Madame Mazaraki bearing down upon me.

‘Ah, Monsieur Mills, how are you?’

‘Thank you, Madame, and yourself?’

‘Oh, I am always well, Monsieur.’

‘You are looking extremely well, Madame.’

‘Thank you, Monsieur. Your health is good?’

‘Thank you very much, Madame. What news is there?’

‘I have no news, Monsieur. Do you sometimes play your gramophone?’

My consular career looked like being forty years of this conversation with a series of Madame Mazarakis, to be continued, after my retirement, in Tunbridge Wells or Mentone.

I was profoundly relieved to find that my transfer, when it did come through, was for Tsernigrad, the capital of Vuchinia, twelve hours from Budapest and eighteen hours from Vienna, as near to the heart of Europe as the limits of HM Levant Consular Service will allow. I felt I was going to live in a proper town, among Europeans, right away from that atmosphere of sand-flies and sullen resentment and ill-used mangy dogs that I had come to associate with the East. I set out all agog with anticipation.

Tsernigrad sprawls over three hills at the confluence of the Danube and the Bina, with the green Vuchinian uplands behind, and to the north, across the rivers, the great Danube plain stretching out towards Hungary. I first came to it by steamer. We touched at Mohrstadt about nine o’clock on a summer evening, and five minutes later we rounded a bend and Tsernigrad stood up before us in pyramids of twinkling lights above dark and hurry­ing waters. The quays along the Danube and the Bina swung out on either side in shining crescents. Here and there the little red and blue lights of a garden restaurant glittered like jewels. Away to the left was a great chimney-stack standing up like a sentinel with its jet black smoke rising across the blue velvet of the sky. I am not very susceptible to landscape, but this always gave me a thrill. So did the view the other way, that is looking north from the edge of the Kezbin Park or from the balcony of Colonel Fraser’s villa. The ground falls sharply; and you look down on the two great rivers with the ferry boats crawling over to Mohrstadt, a little clump of spires and trees three miles away – and around and beyond the plain, mile upon mile of growing maize reaching out to the horizon.

These two views are the show features of Tsernigrad: these, and of course the girls. Slaughter, whom you will meet later, has a curious game which consists in walking down the main street of any fresh town he visits and deciding to how many of the first hundred women he meets he would care to make improper advances. If the game were played scientifically by enough people and the results compared one ought to get an interesting table of the Coefficient of Sex Appeal in the principal towns of Europe. In Slaughter’s list, I remember, Berlin and Southport come out best, with those strongholds of spiritual beauty, Oxford and Geneva, bracketed bottom. Tsernigrad comes third and I myself would be inclined to mark it even higher. I often wonder, thinking of their mothers and brothers, where it is these girls get their looks; and also, knowing how little they spend on clothes, how they manage to turn themselves out so smartly. The first problem remains insoluble; as to the second I suspect gruesome economies in underwear. Six to eight is the time for the evening Corso. All day long the young ladies have been sitting in their homes or their offices, filling their own or their employers’ time with day-dreams of clothes, film stars, and the Eternal Male. At six o’clock they come out to be admired, and make no secret of it.

Not that there is anything lax about the moral atmosphere of Tsernigrad. The Mayor and Municipal Council have seen to that. All houses of ill fame have been banished to Mohrstadt, twenty minutes away by the municipal ferry service which does a roaring trade every evening in consequence. No bachelor or widower may employ a female servant under thirty years of age; and no woman under thirty may smoke in the public gardens. Further, when a site had to be chosen for the War Memorial, the gigantic statue of The Warrior, it was felt that five metres of such magnificent virility if placed in the centre of the town might have an unsettling effect on the young. So the statue was set up at the extreme edge of the Kezbin Park, pointing, appropriately, to the immodest spires of Mohrstadt, and bidding defiance to the Serbs, Austrians, Magyars, Germans and Roumanians beyond.

Otherwise Tsernigrad has little to offer in the way of natural beauty or historic interest; unless you admit the claims of the forceful profile and flowing white mane of Mr Tropoff, who can be seen any day drinking his slivovica, the pungent local spirit distilled from plums, in the Café Esplanade. Mr Tropoff with his own hands strangled the last Queen of Vuchinia in the glorious revolution of 1907, and has taken his place as a national hero ever since. Half the houses are one-storeyed Balkan cottages (some picturesque, others merely sordid) and the rest pretentious and jerry-built erections run up since the war. After a storm one is always surprised that more houses have not been blown down. The streets are crooked and ill paved, and prolific of curious and unexpected smells. You soon acquire the habit of polishing your fork and your glass with your napkin in every restaurant. Hughes-Winsor, our immaculate Second Secretary, puts gloves on before backing his car a couple of yards into the shade, explaining that the people from the garage brought it round in the morning and one can’t always be sure that they wash their hands. But Hughes-Winsor is an extreme case.

I recommend you to put up at the Continental or the Bristol. In the other hotels you will probably be expected to share a room with a total stranger, who, if you demur, will think you are giving yourself unjustifiable airs because you happen to have more money than he has; or else will suppose that you have some unpleasant disease or deformity which you are anxious to hide. The Continental has a small American Bar where about eight in the evening you generally find Messrs Pemberton, Grimshaw and Slaughter with other good eggs. That, we think, is the hotel’s greatest asset.

For the rest Tsernigrad has 240,000 inhabitants, three churches, a university, four secondary schools and 2,987 cafés and drink shops, a proportion which, as Mrs Brinkworth says, is all wrong. A ramshackle town and yet I have a feeling for it that no other place has been able to inspire. Perhaps it is because there I had my most vivid emotional experiences; perhaps I still feel the magic of that first glimpse from the river. Whatever the reason, I have a hunger for the sound of peasant carts rattling over its uneven cobbles, for the blare of gipsy music round the café doors, and for that blended smell of dust, cattle, cheap Viennese scent, petrol and slivovica that hangs about its streets.

2

The Vice-Consulate was in a corner of the Legation. Vice-­consuls do not as a rule like this sort of arrangement, but Sir William Drexler was not one of those prowling and inquisitive ministers who make life a burden to their subordinates; he had, I think, come in once in eighteen months. Also I liked my room. It faced north, a great advantage in summer, and was clean and cool-looking. My chair was well padded, and by turning it sideways and opening the second drawer in my desk I could manage to get my legs up and read The Times in comfort whenever I had nothing much else to do. This happened quite often. I am not lazy but I dislike any form of unproductive effort, and in posts like Tsernigrad where there is a Legation, a Commercial Secretary and a Passport Control Officer the vice-consul’s efforts are often unproductive. In any case it is pleasanter to sit with one’s pipe and read The Times.

On this particular morning the Commercial Secretary had gone on leave and left me an elaborate questionnaire from the Department of Overseas Trade concerning possible outlets for British toothbrushes. I looked at it with pessimism. Toothbrushes are on the list of luxury articles the import of which is stopped by Vuchinian Ministers of Finance whenever they want to restore the balance of trade; and although no toothbrushes are made in the country nobody has ever objected. Vuchinians as a nation have excellent teeth and as little liking for unnecessary effort as I have. I felt the Department of Overseas Trade was wasting time.

My window looked out on a corner of the Legation garden, with an old lime-tree where jackdaws cawed with sleepy querulity. Beyond the garden wall the ground dropped, rising again half a mile away towards the Kezbin Park. On the side of the hill I could see a tumble of irregular roofs with vines clinging about the eaves. Here and there one of the big new concrete houses blazed white in the May sunshine. It was all very peaceful. I pushed away my papers, and tried to determine whether or not I was in love.

Of course in the past I had often been in love. Some sort of feminine interest is a psychological necessity for me; and I suppose since the age of ten I had been in love on an average three times a year – except during my time at Aleppo, where, contrary to the opinion of a certain school of novelists, there is very little doing. When I came on to Tsernigrad I had a considerable store of emotion in reserve and succumbed three times in the first six weeks. There was a girl in the Tabarin, who had gone on to Bucha­rest at the end of the month; there was the daughter of the American Military Attaché, who gave me clearly to understand that she was out for larger game; and then there was a girl in a gramophone shop who turned out to be even more of a baggage than I had taken her for. Besides which there was the very trying incident of Olga.

Olga was the daughter of a local lawyer, and I first met her at the annual ball of the Cercle des Avocats. I suppose she must have been looking rather nice, or I was feeling full of beans. Anyhow I kissed her in the corner of a passage and got her to promise to come out on the river the next day. (Hughes-Winsor is always ready to lend his motor-launch on these occasions.) When the time came I found she didn’t look nearly so nice in a hat as she had the night before; also it was a hot day and she ought to have worn dress-preservers. As I got the motor going and turned the boat upstream I felt I was not going to enjoy the afternoon as much as I had anticipated. Still, I was then learning Vuchinian and it would be good practice.

Olga said it was an unheard of thing for a girl of good family in Tsernigrad to go out alone with a young man, but she herself would not be bound by these absurd old prejudices.

Politely I applauded her independence.

‘So that when I come out,’ she said, ‘I have to keep it secret from my father. He is a congenital idiot, and gets on my nerves. But then I am not happy at home. I am out of sympathy with my relations.’

‘What about your friends?’

‘I have no friends. I have never found anyone who could under­stand my character.’

I got a little anxious. I always do when a woman starts talking like this.

‘I have my thoughts,’ said Olga, looking at me with intense dark eyes.

‘What do you think about?’ I asked.

‘Love. I sit and wonder when I shall find the man whom I can really love. He alone will know what real passionate love can mean. Do you think much about love?’

‘I’m afraid I never think very much about anything.’

‘I have always found Englishmen most interesting,’ said Olga. ‘I have not known many, but I have read a lot of English books. What wonderful writers you have – Oscar Wilde, E. M. Hull! How well they make one understand the passionate heart that beats beneath an Englishman’s cold and distinguished surface.’

I hurriedly explained that though that might no doubt be true in some cases, yet there were many others, like myself, whose surfaces were neither very cold nor very distinguished, and who were inherently incapable of any but the most superficial emotions.­

Olga’s eyes grew more intense than ever.

‘You like to pretend,’ she said, ‘but I know you better.’

Just then I began to suspect I might be the man whom Olga had been waiting all this time to love. In a panic I turned the head of the boat round, murmuring something about important official interviews. And then the damned engine coughed and died away: Hughes-Winsor’s chauffeur had forgotten to fill up the oil tank.

I am a poor oarsman, and it seemed ages till we got back to the landing stage. All the way we wrangled inconclusively about my capacity to love on the grand scale. We went up into the town in a closed taxi (for fear of her father), Olga sitting very close to me so that on that summer afternoon my side was hot and moist. I dropped her two streets away from where she lived (also for fear of her father), and went back to my flat feeling like a heretic who had escaped from the Inquisition.

But that was not the end. The following day Olga rang up the Consulate twice, the day after four times. I got Mr Aquilina, the Pro-Consul, to answer the phone and say I was not there. Whereupon she took to writing me notes, dozens of them, which Mr Aquilina brought in with an air of exaggerated discretion which gradually turned to one of hardly concealed amusement, while ragged little gipsy boys who acted as messengers waited outside for an answer.

It was a dreadful time. I felt angry and resentful, the more so because my conscience pricked me – quite unreasonably: for how on earth could I have known that the girl was going to behave like this? Then one day she wrote that she had something very urgent to tell me, and that if I did not meet her in the Kezbin Park the next afternoon she would throw herself into the Danube. This made me seriously alarmed. Young Vuchinians are very unbalanced and throw themselves into the Danube on the slightest provocation; there is a crop of suicides every year when the results of the University examinations are given out. I imagined my name in large headlines in the morning papers. I wrote back at once and said I would come.

Olga turned up dressed completely in black and with her face powdered a deathly white. I asked her what she had to tell me.

‘You know already,’ she said, and began to sniff.

I searched desperately for some way of escape.

‘My good girl,’ I said, ‘can’t you understand that it’s not really me at all that you’re interested in? It’s simply something that you’ve imagined yourself. I’m not made that way: I’ve no deep feelings of that sort at all. You’re very young: some day no doubt you’ll find what you want, but it’s no good asking me for something I haven’t got.’

‘You’re only pretending when you say that.’

At last I got her into a taxi and back to two streets away from her home. Her last words were that after she was dead I would perhaps understand.

Next day she wrote that she had not been able to say all she wanted to, and therefore I must meet her again that afternoon. I tore the letter up.

Two mornings later her father called at the Consulate. He said he had found that I was corresponding with his daughter and he wished to know my intentions.

I said I hadn’t got any.

He looked very grave.

He had, he explained, called in the family doctor, who had fortunately been able to assure him that his gravest fears had not been justified. But even so it was grave enough. He realised that in London we had the so-called modern ideas. They might be all very well in London. He did not wish to express an opinion. But in Tsernigrad one still kept to the good old-fashioned ways. And then his little Olga, his timid quivering rosebud, with never a thought that she did not share with her beloved father, with never a wish outside her own dear home circle, never an inkling of this unwholesome modern talk about love – in short, what were my intentions?

I repeated firmly that I had none whatever.

In that case he must ask to see the Minister.

I rang the bell and told the porter to take him round to Sir William Drexler. Meanwhile I sat waiting, picturing myself banished in disgrace to some particularly trying post in the Red Sea.

However it turned out that Sir William (who has a remarkable talent for not receiving stray visitors) refused to see him and never learnt the object of his visit. So the indignant father retreated with the feeling that the whole British Empire was leagued against him, and took the only course left which was to pack off Olga for an indefinite stay with her aunt in Sofia. And so the whole thing fizzled out.

But this is a digression. The Olga incident was all over months before this particular morning. Now I was thinking of Jill Bingham – wondering if I was in love with her and hoping if I was that I should succeed in becoming more so. I was conscious of the need of doing something definite. My eighteen months at Tsernigrad had been pleasant, but so far singularly barren of achievement. I ought to have distinguished myself enough to get transferred to the Diplomatic Service; have written a novel; won the Irish Sweepstakes; got a job outside; somehow or other have shown myself a man of action instead of waiting as I was while the days rolled on until I should once more be swallowed up in the Levant. Failing anything else a successful marriage was something.

Jill Bingham was so suitable. Of course, Mrs Bowles, her aunt with whom she had come out to stay, regarded me as a spineless and dissipated young man; but there was no reason to suppose that Mrs Bowles could cause much trouble after her marriage. Otherwise there were no disadvantages. She had money of her own (assessed by local gossip between three and six hundred pounds a year), and expectations. Her father was on the board of the Meridian Insurance Company, and therefore in a position to find a comfortable job for a son-in-law. And then Jill herself was charming. Everybody said so. She was pretty, not quite so much as everybody made out but still definitely pretty. She wore her clothes nicely. She was intelligent. She was a thoroughly nice girl. What then was lacking? Goodness knows. Perhaps if I had to be wrecked on a desert island with either Jill or Greta Garbo as the other sole survivor I might have chosen Greta Garbo. But the practical chances of my being offered such a choice were nil. Perhaps what I have written above has been rather unfair to Jill. She really was very charming. I gazed out of the window at the lime-tree. Of course if I was seriously in love with Jill then Mausi would have to be liquidated.

Mr Aquilina brought me in a card. I looked at it with the anxiety all consuls feel when a stranger calls upon them. The caller may always want to borrow money, thus giving the consul a choice between the probable loss of anything he may be rash enough to lend and the certainty of subsequent self-reproach if he is hard-hearted. But this man seemed as if he ought to be all right. Lieut-Col C. P. Vickery, Warsaw.

‘Show him in, please, Mr Aquilina.’

A tall spare man in a grey suit came in, and took a chair and a cigarette while I ostentatiously pushed away the questionnaire on toothbrushes. He seemed very young to be a colonel: but for a few grey