Authors: Gerald Durrell
He was a sweet little man, whose most striking attribute was a magnificent three-pointed beard and carefully waxed moustache. He took his job rather seriously, and was always dressed as though he were on the verge of rushing off to some important official function, in a black cut-away coat, striped trousers, fawn spats over brightly polished shoes, an immense cravat like a silk waterfall, held in place by a plain gold pin, and a tall and gleaming top hat that completed the ensemble. One could see him at any hour of the day, clad like this, picking his way down the dirty, narrow alleys, stepping daintily among the puddles, drawing himself back against the wall with a magnificently courteous gesture to allow a donkey to pass, and tapping it coyly on the rump with his malacca cane. The people of the town did not find his garb at all unusual. They thought that he was an Englishman, and as all Englishmen were lords it was not only right but necessary that they should wear the correct uniform.
The first morning I arrived, he welcomed me into a living-room whose walls were decorated with a mass of heavily framed photographs of himself in various Napoleonic attitudes. The Victorian chairs, covered with red brocade, were patched with antimacassars by the score; the table on which we worked was draped in a wine-red cloth of velvet, with a fringe of bright green tassels round the edge. It was an intriguingly ugly room. In order to test the extent of my knowledge of French, the consul sat me down at the table, produced a fat and battered edition of
Le Petit Larousse
, and placed it in front of me, open at page one.
‘You will please to read zis,’ he said, his gold teeth glittering amicably in his beard.
He twisted the points of his moustache, pursed his lips, clasped
his hands behind his back, and paced slowly across to the window, while I started down the list of words beginning with A. I had hardly stumbled through the first three when the consul stiffened and uttered a suppressed exclamation. I thought at first he was shocked by my accent, but it apparently had nothing to do with me. He rushed across the room, muttering to himself, tore open a cupboard, and pulled out a powerful-looking air rifle, while I watched him with increasing mystification and interest, not unmixed with a certain alarm for my own safety. He loaded the weapon, dropping pellets all over the carpet in his frantic haste. Then he crouched and crept back to the window, where, half concealed by the curtain, he peered out eagerly. Then he raised the gun, took careful aim at something, and fired. When he turned round, slowly and sadly shaking his head, and laid the gun aside, I was surprised to see tears in his eyes. He drew a yard or so of silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose violently.
‘Ah, ah, ah,’ he intoned, shaking his head dolefully, ‘ze poor lizzle fellow. Buz we musz work… please to continuez wiz your reading,
mon ami
.’
For the rest of the morning I toyed with the exciting idea that the consul had committed a murder before my very eyes, or, at least, that he was carrying out a blood feud with some neighbouring householder. But when, after the fourth morning, the consul was still firing periodically out of his window, I decided that my explanation could not be the right one, unless it was an exceptionally large family he was feuding with, and a family, moreover, who were apparently incapable of firing back. It was a week before I found out the reason for the consul’s incessant fusillade, and the reason was cats. In the Jewish quarter, as in other parts of the town, the cats were allowed to breed unchecked. There were literally hundreds of them. They belonged to no one and were uncared for, so that most of them were in a frightful state, covered with sores, their fur coming out in great
bald patches, their legs bent with rickets, and all of them so thin that it was a wonder they were alive at all. The consul was a great cat-lover, and he possessed three large and well-fed Persians to prove it. But the sight of all these starving, sore-ridden felines stalking about on the roof-tops opposite his window was too much for his sensitive nature.
‘I cannot feed zem all,’ he explained to me, ‘so I like to make zem happiness by zooting zem. Zey are bezzer so, buz iz makes me feel so zad.’
He was, in fact, performing a very necessary and humane service, as anyone who had seen the cats would agree. So my lessons in French were being continuously interrupted while the consul leaped to the window to send yet another cat to a happier hunting ground. After the report of the gun there would be a moment’s silence, in respect for the dead; then the consul would blow his nose violently and sigh tragically, and we would plunge once more into the tangled labyrinth of French verbs.
For some inexplicable reason the consul was under the impression that Mother could speak French, and he would never lose an opportunity of engaging her in conversation. If she had the good fortune, while shopping in the town, to notice his top hat bobbing through the crowd towards her, she would hastily retreat into the nearest shop and buy a number of things she had no use for, until the danger was past. Occasionally, however, the consul would appear suddenly out of an alley-way and take her by surprise. He would advance, smiling broadly and twirling his cane, sweep off his top hat, and bow almost double before her, while clasping her reluctantly offered hand and pressing it passionately into his beard. Then they would stand in the middle of the street, occasionally being forced apart by a passing donkey, while the consul swamped Mother under a flood of French, gesturing elegantly with his hat and stick, apparently unaware of the blank expression on Mother’s face. Now and then he would punctuate his speech with a questioning ‘
N’est-ce pas, madame?
’
and this was Mother’s cue. Summoning up all her courage, she would display her complete mastery over the French tongue.
‘
Oui, oui!
’ she would exclaim, smiling nervously, and then add, in case it had sounded rather unenthusiastic, ‘
OUI, OUI
.’
This procedure satisfied the consul, and I’m sure he never realized that this was the only French word that Mother knew. But these conversations were a nerve-racking ordeal for her, and we had only to hiss ‘Look out, Mother, the consul’s coming,’ to set her tearing off down the street at a lady-like walk that was dangerously near to a gallop.
In some ways these French lessons were good for me; I did not learn any French, it’s true, but by the end of the morning I was so bored that my afternoon sorties into the surrounding country were made with double the normal enthusiasm. And then, of course, there was always Thursday to look forward to. Theodore would come out to the villa as soon after lunch as was decent, and stay until the moon was high over the Albanian mountains. Thursday was happily chosen, from his point of view, because it was on this day that the seaplane from Athens arrived and landed in the bay not far from the house. Theodore had a passion for watching seaplanes land. Unfortunately the only part of the house from which you could get a good view of the bay was the attic, and then it meant leaning perilously out of the window and craning your neck. The plane would invariably arrive in the middle of tea; a dim, drowsy hum could be heard, so faint one could not be sure it was not a bee. Theodore, in the middle of an anecdote or an explanation, would suddenly stop talking, his eyes would take on a fanatical gleam, his beard would bristle, and he would cock his head on one side.
‘Is that… er… you know… is that the sound of a
plane?
’ he would inquire.
Everyone would stop talking and listen; slowly the sound would grow louder and louder. Theodore would carefully place his half-eaten scone on his plate.
‘Ah-ha!’ he would say, wiping his fingers carefully. ‘Yes, that certainly
sounds
like a plane… er… um… yes.’
The sound would grow louder and louder, while Theodore shifted uneasily in his seat. At length Mother would put him out of his misery.
‘Would you like to go up and watch it land?’ she would ask.
‘Well… er… if you’re sure…’ Theodore would mumble, vacating his seat with alacrity. ‘I… er… find the sight very attractive… if you’re sure you don’t mind.’
The sound of the plane’s engines would now be directly overhead; there was not a moment to lose.
‘I have always been… er… you know… attracted…’
‘Hurry up, Theo, or you’ll miss it,’ we would chorus.
The entire family then vacated the table, and, gathering Theodore
en route
, we sped up the four flights of stairs, Roger racing ahead, barking joyfully. We burst into the attic, out of breath, laughing, our feet thumping like gun-fire on the uncarpeted floor, threw open the windows, and leaned out, peering over the olive tops to where the bay lay like a round blue eye among the trees, its surface as smooth as honey. The plane, like a cumbersome overweight goose, flew over the olive groves, sinking lower and lower. Suddenly it would be over the water, racing its reflection over the blue surface. Slowly the plane dropped lower and lower. Theodore, eyes narrowed, beard bristling, watched it with bated breath. Lower and lower, and then suddenly it touched the surface briefly, left a widening petal of foam, flew on, and then settled on the surface and surged across the bay, leaving a spreading fan of white foam behind it. As it came slowly to rest, Theodore would rasp the side of his beard with his thumb, and ease himself back into the attic.
‘Um… yes,’ he would say, dusting his hands, ‘it is certainly a… very… er…
enjoyable
sight.’
The show was over. He would have to wait another week for the next plane. We would shut the attic windows and troop
noisily downstairs to resume our interrupted tea. The next week exactly the same thing would happen all over again.
It was on Thursdays that Theodore and I went out together, sometimes confining ourselves to the garden, sometimes venturing further afield. Loaded down with collecting boxes and nets, we wended our way through the olives, Roger galloping ahead of us, nose to the ground. Everything that we came across was grist to our mill: flowers, insects, rocks, or birds. Theodore had an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge about everything, but he imparted this knowledge with a sort of meticulous diffidence that made you feel he was not so much teaching you something new as reminding you of something which you were already aware of, but which had, for some reason or other, slipped your mind. His conversation was sprinkled with hilarious anecdotes, incredibly bad puns, and even worse jokes, which he would tell with great relish, his eyes twinkling, his nose wrinkled as he laughed silently in his beard, as much at himself as at his own humour.
Every water-filled ditch or pool was, to us, a teeming and unexplored jungle, with the minute cyclops and water-fleas, green and coral pink, suspended like birds among the underwater branches, while on the muddy bottom the tigers of the pool would prowl: the leeches and the dragon-fly larvæ. Every hollow tree had to be closely scrutinized in case it should contain a tiny pool of water in which mosquito-larvæ were living, every mossy-wigged rock had to be overturned to find out what lay beneath it, and every rotten log had to be dissected. Standing straight and immaculate at the edge of a pool, Theodore would carefully sweep his little net through the water, lift it out, and peer keenly into the tiny glass bottle that dangled at the end, into which all the minute water life had been sifted.
‘Ah-ha!’ he might say, his voice ringing with excitement, his beard bristling, ‘I believe it’s
ceriodaphnia laticaudata
.’
He would whip a magnifying glass from his waistcoat pocket and peer more closely.
‘Ah, um… yes… very curious… it is
laticaudata
. Could you just… er… hand me a clean test-tube… um… thank you…’
He would suck the minute creature out of the bottle with a fountain-pen filler, enshrine it carefully in the tube, and then examine the rest of the catch.
‘There doesn’t seem to be anything else that’s particularly exciting… Ah, yes, I didn’t notice… there is rather a curious caddis larva… there, d’you see it?… um… it appears to have made its case of the shells of certain molluscs… It’s certainly very pretty.’
At the bottom of the little bottle was an elongated case, half an inch long, constructed out of what appeared to be silk, and thick with tiny flat snail-shells like buttons. From one end of this delightful home the owner peered, an unattractive maggot-like beast with a head like an ant’s. Slowly it crawled across the glass, dragging its beautiful house with it.
‘I tried an interesting experiment once,’ Theodore said. ‘I caught a number of these… er… larvæ, and removed their shells. Naturally it doesn’t
hurt
them. Then I put them in some jars which contained perfectly clear water and nothing in the way of… er… materials with which to build new cases. Then I gave each set of larvæ different-coloured materials to build with: some I gave very tiny blue and green beads, and some I gave chips of brick, white sand, even some… er… fragments of coloured glass. They all built new cases out of these different things, and I must say the result was very curious and… er… colourful. They are certainly very clever
architects
.’
He emptied the contents of the bottle back into the pool, put his net over his shoulder, and we walked on our way.
‘Talking of
building
,’ Theodore continued, his eyes sparkling,
‘did I tell you what happened to… a… er… a friend of mine? Um, yes. Well, he had a small house in the country, and, as his family… um… increased, he decided that it was not big enough. He decided to add another floor to the house. He was, I think, a little
over-confident
of his own architectural… um… prowess, and he insisted on designing the new floor himself. Um, ha, yes. Well, everything went well and in next to no time the new floor was ready, complete with bedrooms, bathrooms, and so forth. My friend had a party to celebrate the completion of the work, we all drank toasts to the… um… new piece of building, and with great ceremony the scaffolding was taken down… um… removed. No one noticed anything… um… anything
amiss
, until a late arrival at the celebration wanted to look round the new rooms. It was then discovered that there was no staircase. It appears that my friend had forgotten to put a staircase in his plans, you know, and during the actual… er… the actual
building
operations he and the workmen had got so used to climbing to the top floor by means of the scaffolding that no one apparently noticed the… er… the
defect
.’