Love such as I feel, baby,
Has never existed in the world.
By that time I had heard the song six times, so I just bowed to the blonde and went home. Rollo was mixing something messy in a dish, and I could hear Uncle Willie banging around in the bathroom,
“What is going on here?” I asked,
Rollo just rolled his eyes and stirred the mess in the dish. The bathroom door opened and Uncle Willie came out, preceded by a blast of heavy steam. He was in a bathrobe, his head wrapped in a turban made of a large towel. He saw me and shook his head sadly. “You might as well see it.”
He pulled off the turban. His hair and mustache were a bright green. I stepped back and looked at the two madmen; Rollo looked into his dish and said. “This batch is no better. sir.”
“What is this, an Easter-egg-dyeing party?”
Uncle Willie shrugged his thin shoulders. “When my medicine chest was stolen on the bus. it included some touching-up liquid that I use on my hair and mustache. I'm nor gray, you understand, but I do have to help nature a bit now and then”.
Rollo nodded. “And this city has no proper hair dye at all.” He pointed to Uncle Willie. “You see what they sell for dark brown?”
“You can't travel like that,” I said.
“Any suggestions, smart boy?” Uncle Willie asked.
“Shave it all off?” said Rollo.
Uncle Willie shook his head, “I'd be drummed out of the Guards. You know the mustache is a tradition. I could dress as an Arab, just expose my eyes.”
“I've been having fun in the night clubs,” I said.
“Youth,” said Uncle Willie, relying his turban. “What docs it know of the problems of age? We'll go hide in the Lake Country; Lake Villarrica, Pucon, How's that sound, Rollo?”
“Might do. Fun there, sir—and no one would pay much attention to the green hair. Lots of crazy sports lovers up there. We could stay there till the dye wears off or the hair grows out.”
“Back to the mountains?” I said.
Uncle Willie seemed relieved. “Rollo, Order us all a round of anis and soda from the bar, and then pack. We leave at dawn.”
I must say Uncle Willie carried it off very well; yon won't find many men with bright green hair and guardsman mustaches of the same hue going boldly at dawn into a cab and off to a hired-car garage, Uncle Willie picked out a beat-up English Bentley. Rollo drove us up to the lakes, the great fiords, some of the best forest in the world; a sports world of skiing, sledding, and a heaven of just drinking and eating. We stayed at the Hotel Pucon, over which looms the Villarrica Volcano. This hotel is run by the Chilean State Railroad.
Uncle Willie, wrapped in a heavy burberry coat, sat under the Cocteles y Aperitinos sign and sipped vaina, the local eggnog, and told the guests that many British soldiers turned green from the break bone fever that recurred in all who had fought at Khyber Pass “in the old days in Injah.”
Rollo said to me, “Let's you and me sec the hill country.”
“Camp out?” I asked,
“Jolly boy scout sort of thing,” Rollo said.
We hired a man called Pelon, who knew the hill country very well, so he said. We started out with two horses and a mule to carry our gear. A thicket of rabbit brush and tamarisk hid the hotel from view. The horses began to climb.
All morning we rode among crinkled growths, and then we came to the high plain. The soil was hard sand and gravel studded with great stones. A few vineyards tried to exist here, and there were herds of goats and a few cud-chewing cattle, but nothing else much. Prickly trees and weed fought for the few arid yards of hard soil between the weathered stones. By noon we had passed these sterile levels and were moving toward a watershed. Here we saw avocados. Higher still we saw larkspur and balsam and, over our heads, pitch pines, very tall and very even, like arrow marks on the mountainside. Rollo sang Zulu love and war songs.
We saw some birds that looked like buzzards, but they made no attempt to come near us. We camped for lunch by a stream and ate bacon and beans and sweet humitas fried together in a skillet, and the horses cropped the grass and ran out as far as their picket ropes would let them. Pelon's hound had caught an interesting smell in an old log and spent much of his time guarding it. We sat on cut branches, and the scent of pine pitch and brook moss and wind in a wild meadow was restful.
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