by Jerry
I said, “Let’s make the tea. We’ll feel better when we’ve had tea.”
Mildred said, “Yes,” and we went into the kitchen together with the dog between us, right on our heels so that when we stopped, she bumped into us. The very act of making tea was calming.
Things still kept falling, and the air was filled with papers that rose sailing like kites on the currents between the high buildings. It was very dark and there was no light when I tried to turn on the table lamp. Neither of us said anything. The wind continued to rise, assuming almost whirlwind proportions. I began to be aware of the noise of sirens. Fire engines and ambulances and police cars were evidently out on the streets. We both said, “Listen to the fire engines.” Then there was a shot and Mildred said, “Is that a shot?” and I said, “Yes.” There were to be plenty more later. Then we heard a scream. The paralysis of fear was now changing to hysteria. Terrified people were rushing out to escape from themselves, to find out. We’d have to go out ourselves sometime—but not yet.
We had a second cup of tea. I was surprised how very calm I seemed; my hand hardly trembled. That amused me, not because it showed my lack of fear but because it showed my ability to control most of it. Probably the only people who were not frightened at that moment were lunatics, to whom this must all have seemed very logical and predestined. Perhaps that is why I was not more frightened, having been classified, because I had expected something of this kind to happen, as a lunatic. I was, in a way, psychologically prepared for the end of the world, but there was little satisfaction in being able to say, “I told you so,” and, at the moment, no one to whom I could say it except my wife, who always believed everything I said and thought me an altogether remarkable man, thus tempering her criticism with her charm.
I went into the bedroom to try the telephone. The room was very smoky but not so bad as it might have been, for the wind had changed again. I did not know whom I was going to call. It was just that I wanted to see if the telephone worked. I had always hated the telephone—the network of copper threads that tied all civilized mankind together in a web of misunderstanding. If there had been no telephones and no airplanes and no electricity, there would have been no atomic bomb. I held the receiver to my ear. It was dead. No phone. That, after all, was not surprising after the failure of the electric light. But as the discovery of the telephone had been hailed as a great advance of our civilization, its end—for there was no doubt in my mind that it had ended—was a definite sign that our civilization was disintegrating.
I went to look in the kitchen to see what we had to eat. There was quite a lot of stuff: cans of baked beans, boned chicken, soups, glass jars of tongue.
There were other factors that were to the good. Once the first shock had worn off, I began to consider the possibilities of life as well as I was able—began to look and see if there was anything to reconstruct with. As I say, there was a fair amount of canned food in the kitchen and there were, in addition, about ten large parcels of food that we had wrapped and were going to send to friends in England and France. It was remarkable how distant England and France seemed and how little our dearest friends now mattered. I was grateful to them for my own good impulse that had made me buy the food, and delighted with the habit of procrastination which had prevented my sending it to them.
Another good thing, though I did not realize it fully at the time, was that I had a thousand rounds of .22 ammunition for the Mauser, because we had been intending to go on a holiday and I had meant to do some target shooting. I must have thought of this, though subconsciously, because my next move was to go and see the manager of the hotel, a great deer hunter who lived in the adjoining penthouse, and ask him if he would let me have one of his heavier rifles and some ammunition. I was already aware that there would be a necessity for weapons, that civilization in terms of protection had broken down and that it must be every man for himself.
I obtained a rifle and fifty rounds of 303 ammunition without much difficulty—the manager had more guns than he could use—in exchange for a case of whisky that I had just bought. We talked around the subject of the bomb and our predicament, more or less ignoring it, which was fantastic, since the air was filled with smoke. Like me, he must have had the feeling that this was the end of everything. Actually, of course, there was nothing to say. And to talk would probably only have torn the last shreds of self-control from our naked fear. We got no further than saying it was terrible, that neither of us had been out, that we had better be careful, and that it would probably be all right.
My wife fixed some food. We had meat in the icebox, which by this time had stopped working; we had potatoes and soup. Surprisingly, the gas was still on; our supply had evidently been unaffected. And we had water; it was still running, probably from the reserve tank on the roof above us, and we did not have to use the reserve in the bath. We gave the kinkajou the dead fish from the tank and a banana, the last, and a bit of bread, and Annie had our leavings. The day passed somehow. I forget how. Night came—a night like those of the blackouts of the war but without air-raid wardens or police. The streets were dark and lighted only by the light reflected down from the low ceiling of cloud and smoke which was illuminated by those parts of the city that were still burning. It was a night filled with strange happenings—screams, cries, shouts, shots, the noise of doors being forced; a night of black horror edged by the glare of the buildings that still burned to the south of us. The McGraw-Hill Building still stood out like a great black pinnacle against the glow of the sky. There was still the sound of sirens as fire engines and police tried to keep some semblance of order, but it was all sporadic. There was no sleep for us, but we lay down with the dog between us and tried to rest. I had the deer rifle loaded beside me, and I had a Gurkha kukri in its sheath under my pillow; I had sharpened it till it was like a razor. I have it still, having carried it since that day. I say we did not sleep, but we must have dozed off, for at dawn we were wakened by a sound truck.
An impersonal voice was giving out the news. It made me think of the town crier who had in the old days brought the news of war, of victory or disaster. It appeared that Washington was completely obliterated and that, since the federal government no longer existed, New York and all the other states were on their own. The Governor advised calm and patience. He said he would undertake to keep order and restore vital utilities. People were advised to stay where they were and wait and not rush off to the country. This news, of course, succeeded in achieving the purpose opposite to that desired and stampeded everyone, so that later in the day there was a veritable exodus of such cars as had gas in their tanks. The rest of the news was that, bad as things were, there was no cause for panic or alarm and, though the casualties in New York City were estimated to be more than seven hundred thousand, the fires were under control and we should remain calm.
The voice went on and on. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and every other major city had been severely damaged. But everything would be all right; this foolish catch phrase was reiterated and we were again advised to remain calm, stay at home if possible, until normalcy was restored. How this was to be done with seven hundred thousand casualties and a quarter of Manhattan destroyed was not revealed.
There were a great number of suicides. Within an hour of the blast, we saw one woman throw her child out of a high window in the Lincoln Hotel, stand naked for an instant on the parapet and then follow her child in a headfirst dive. Most suicides, however, were on the fashionable upper East Side—the working poor being more able to stand disaster; having so little, they had little to lose.
Forced by curiosity and the knowledge that the longer we waited, the harder it would be to go out, we made our way down the stairs from our eleventh-floor apartment to the street. I had often called dwellers in apartment houses “troglodytes,” and I remember thinking how right I had been as we climbed down the concrete stairs and crossed the paved passages that divided one flight from the next, pausing to rest and to listen to the strang
e sounds we heard. There was some drunken singing, the sound of quarrels, a hysterical woman blaming her husband for what had happened and asking him why he did not do something about it. He did. He struck her; she fell down and got up screaming she’d “have the law on him for that”; at which he laughed and she burst out crying loudly because now there was no law. On another floor, people were having a prayer meeting and singing hymns. There was no one in the office, and the lobby was deserted.
We went into the street and found it empty. It was rather like a Sunday afternoon with everyone away, or a Saturday—a week-end—because a car was being loaded with things from a house almost opposite the hotel entrance. I had with me a heavy blackthorn stick that I always carry on account of the lameness caused by an old wound, and since we had money with us, we thought we might as well go up to the corner and see if we could buy more food. Obviously, money was no good any more, but here was the possibility the grocer would not have come to that conclusion yet; he might not have had the sense to load up his stock and take it home with him. This guess proved to be right, and we were able to buy fifty dollars’ worth of canned goods: sardines, herring, salmon, tuna fish, and potted meat. We obtained a gunny sack and staggered back with our wealth.
On the way home there was the body of a man—his head had been bashed in—lying in the gutter on the corner of 45th Street, opposite a liquor store which had been raided and was completely empty. And, as we were getting our stuff in the grocery store, a girl ran screaming past us pursued by a gang of young hooligans. I judged from the noise that followed that they must have pulled her down in the next block. It was this incident which decided me to cut off Mildred’s hair (she wore it long, more than shoulder length) and make her dress in dungarees. With short hair, dungarees, and a dirty face, she would pass for a youngish, rather queer-looking boy, but everyone looked queer now and she would certainly be safer.
We lay low for a few days. This was the time that the sediment of the underworld rose to the surface and took over. The streets were the scene of unrestricted pillage, murder and fights between rival gangs. From our roof we saw some amazing sights. But by degrees, in a matter of four or five days, things improved. My friend the manager told me that he had heard that the city was full of wounded and crazed people. He asked if I had seen any and I said no. He said they were flooding up Lexington and Park avenues. He told me more of the exodus, of how the routes out of the city were packed with refugees in cars and on foot. The police were making no effort to control them, since control was impossible. But what could they have done, anyway? Given tickets? Made arrests? Broken cars were jamming the roads. People were being run down and robbed, girls abducted; other people were jumping off bridges and out of windows. But still they were moving outward like the spokes running from the shattered hub of a wheel. He asked me what I was going to do. I said I was going to stay.
Though my memory of the sequence of events that followed is somewhat confused, certain incidents stand out very clearly, the first among them being the destruction of our pets. The fish went first, since they could not live without the light in the tank. But then they did not count as pets; they were merely a decoration and an interest—no more than that. The kinkajou was different. She was very affectionate and never bit hard enough to draw blood. Looking back on it, it seems funny now; but I had been away from farming for fifteen years or so and had gotten out of the habit of killing things. It was only with the greatest difficulty that, holding her in the crook of my left arm, I made myself hit her on the back of the head with a two-pound ball hammer. She stretched out the way animals do when struck, her legs quivered, and then she went limp. I skinned her while she was still warm, as it’s much easier then, and then I cut her up for a stew. Mildred cried. The dog looked on, not at all sorry to see the kink go. She had never understood our interest in it. It was difficult to think of Annie going the same way, which she did two days later.
Dogs have been associated with man for so long, a million years perhaps, that they no longer, in the full sense, count as animals; they are extensions of man, inventions of many like the spinning jenny, the Queen Mary and the atomic bomb. Breeding livestock has always interested me, and I have learned a great deal about it since I have lived alone in the world with animals. Domestic dogs, as we knew them, were bred by continually discarding dogs that were not tractable, but my dogs now are bred two ways: the dogs of my hunting pack, which have been bred for strength and courage alone, would be capable of pulling me down if they were really starving, while my personal dogs are almost human, having been bred for both brains and courage.
In taming any animal, you must replace the mother of the young animal so that it fixes its affection on you instead of on its dam; or, in the case of animals that hunt in packs, you must become the leader of the pack.
This is what I do when I hunt with my hounds. Though I carry a rifle, a knife, and a pistol, I would not try to handle my pack without a bull whip and a short club. Every now and then a young dog, never a bitch, challenges me. Weighing as much as or more than I do, he might pull me down if I were not ready for him. On one occasion I killed—with my bare hands—a dog that weighed two hundred and five pounds (I had the curiosity to weigh him.) His name was Racketeer, and his breeding was Great Dane, police dog, Saint Bernard and Afghan.
Racketeer was a lovely beast, but suddenly he challenged me. I had put the pack onto a bear spoor. It was spring, and the spoor was very clear in the moist ground, but Racketeer wanted to follow a lynx. When I began to whip him off—this was before I carried a club—he turned on me, while the pack waited to see which would be master. I saw him crouch for the jump, and as he leaped for my throat I struck him straight in the nose with my fist. As he fell I jumped on him; leaping into the air, I brought both feet down on him, smashing his ribs. Then I raised him in my arms and threw him back to the waiting pack.
But all this discourse has been an evasion of the description of the death of Annie, my pinscher. The past is still too near to make it easy to discuss. But the way it went was this: I held her on my knee, with my left hand over her shoulder, and brought the hammer down on her skull, cracking it with a single blow. I then cleaned and skinned her and we ate her, for though we had canned food we were trying to conserve it for the days that were to come. When it became known that I had killed my pets and eaten them, a woman burst into the apartment and called me a cannibal and a brute. She said it was like eating a human being, and I said, “We may be doing that yet.” There had been cannibalism in the German concentration camps at Dachau and elsewhere, but this good woman had forgotten or had never believed it. On the other side of the same penny were the people who wanted me to kill their dogs for them because they could not bring themselves to do it. I killed a number of dogs that I had known quite well, many of them having lived in the hotel as long as I had. I charged half the dog for killing and dressing it, and became accustomed to dog soup and stew.
During this period the destroyed part of the city was walled off, the rubble of the fallen buildings being used to close off the streets. It made me think of the walled-off ghettos of the German occupation in Poland, and of the way situations tended to repeat themselves, death being enclosed by walls in both cases. It was a defense mechanism on our part against the knowledge that death had us hemmed, walled in, and was one of our final tributes to complacency, to the idea that if we could not see a thing we stopped its existing. But you could not help smelling it. All over the city there was a stench of death in the air.
Order, as I say, had been for a while somewhat restored and a few minimum services functioned, but everything worked on a kind of reflex. Policemen remained policemen because it was their habit and they did not know what else to do; for a few days garbage collectors still collected garbage for the same reason. But there was neither credit nor currency, central authority having disappeared. Public servants were paid in food from the stock that was available in the city warehouses, a system that obviously could not cont
inue for long.
There were amazing tales of the fights put up by farmers against the influx of city dwellers who had run out of the metropolis and had flung themselves upon anything edible in the country—a swarm of human locusts that the country people resisted in every manner possible. There was a pitched battle on the Canadian border in the vicinity of Niagara Falls. The Canadians appeared to be a little better off than we were, having retained their central government, and they used troops to turn back the unwelcome thousands, many of whom had known the Falls only as a honeymoon resort. We got the story from one of the survivors and his wife. She was a lovely blond night-club singer who now looked like an old and shrunken woman; he had played a hot trumpet and was at one time internationally famous through his recordings. I recall the incident because, despite everything, he had held onto the silver trumpet that had made him famous—a remarkable young man who no doubt died tooting on his instrument.
All this took place in the first few months. I was proved to have been wise in my decision to stay in New York: there was more food here than in the country. There were still some pigeons, and there were plenty of cats, for with the departure of mankind and the failure of all city services, the rodents had increased in a phenomenal manner and naturally the city cats had increased with them. I had eaten cat as a child (our gardener in France, who trapped them, had once given me some), and both Mildred and I found them excellent. There were still some dogs in the street, which lived, literally, by dog eating dog, and these I shot with my .22. Our system of hunting was to go out together; I went a pace in front with the .22 and Mildred followed with the heavier rifle, the 303, which she, like a gunbearer in Africa, put into my hand if I asked for it. Some of the big dogs could not be stopped by a small-bore rifle; and there were human wolves, too, who had to be destroyed. Mildred was in no danger now as a woman, having like all other surviving women, lost any visible sexual charm which she had ever had, near starvation having reduced the sexual curves that characterize women; and the sex fiends, who had run riot in the early days, raping and murdering, had either been eliminated or had been reduced by the food shortages to seeking nourishment rather than other satisfactions.
