Read Online The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories by Geoffrey Household - Free Book Online Page A

satisfied by my credentials.
    I introduced myself in turn.
    â€œWell, it’s luck for me that you happened to feel a bit curious about my hill,” he said. “It’s not often I get a chance to speak my own language.”
    As he knotted a scarf around his throat and settled a solid, well-cut tweed coat on his broad shoulders, I looked at him more closely. He was older than I had thought at first—a man in the middle fifties, bearing himself with a distinction that might, when he was younger, have been a raffish swagger, but was now the independence of one who had made his own laws for himself and found that they also appeared satisfactory to his fellows. I could not understand how I had mistaken him for the cowman. He was very obviously the estanciero.
    He poured drinks, and we discussed Cornwall and cattle till supper. On the top of the Andes, a hundred miles from the equator, his pedigreed beasts were short-lived and inclined to curious failures of their natural instincts. But he was a born experimenter, and the butter and cheese showed a profit. The religious orders of Quito—priests clucked around the capital as thick as fat black hens on a chicken farm—were, he said, his best customers.
    A wizened mestizo in a white jacket showed us into the dining room. It was exquisite. Plate, linen, glass, and furniture would have done credit to a Spanish grandee. Over his seat hung the portrait of a woman in her early thirties: a full-bosomed commanding beauty with fiery brown eyes in an unintelligent face.
    â€œThat’s her!” he said, jerking an irreverent thumb over his shoulder towards the picture. “What do you think of her?”
    I couldn’t gather from his tone whether she was the chief love of his life from whom he had at last and proudly broken free, or merely some woman over whom he had triumphed.
    â€œShe had a pretty good opinion of herself,” I replied. “And I expect she was right.”
    â€œAh, Doña Clara! Doña Clara!” he chuckled.
    The cooking of the simple meal was excellent, and the estanciero was a good talker. Like so many exiles, he reveled in the expressiveness of his own language. He would halt for a moment in his flow of eloquence, feel for the English word, taste it and hand it to me, as it were, on the tip of his tongue. He had the slow, rich humor of the West Countryman, but had lived too long in Latin America to have kept a West Countryman’s reserve.
    â€œIf you’re really idling,” he said when we had reached the coffee, “why don’t you stay a few weeks?”
    â€œI wish I could. But I’m only idling for the week end. I’ve been in Quito on business and I have to be down at Guayaquil the day after to-morrow to catch my boat. I’m staying three nights at Riobamba on the way to get some exercise and see a bit more of the plateau.”
    â€œThree nights at Riobamba!” he laughed. “You must be the first person that has ever stayed more than one in that hotel!”
    An exaggeration, of course, but there can’t have been many. The train from Quito to Guayaquil stopped for the night at Riobamba, and the hotel lived on passengers who arrived at seven in the evening and left at six next morning. That one ate reasonably and slept in a clean bed was proof of the proprietor’s natural hospitality; he could neither reduce the number of his guests by a bad name, nor increase them by a good one.
    â€œThe hotel’s all right,” I said, “considering—”
    â€œAll right? You bet it’s all right! I bless that hotel. Good Lord, I—I turn to it to pray!”
    He looked at me sardonically, as if measuring how much curiosity so deliberate a statement had aroused.
    â€œIs that where you met Doña Clara?” I asked.
    â€œNo. I met her just five hours before we got there—when the consul escorted me to the train. A polite man, the consul. He didn’t quite