Sergeant Nelson of the Guards

by Gerald Kersh

  “We’d been married about six months when one day I came home and found her with some geezer’s arms round her. So I give this other geezer a dressing-down, and I give my poor little woman a smack in the face, may God forgimme, and I rushed out of the place, and I drew out of the bank the dough I was going to use for the business, and I went on the Cousin Sis, and after about six weeks I got through three hundred pounds, and I was flat on the ribs.

  “I didn’t think of going back and talking it over. I’m that sort of bloody fool. That’s me, fool right through to the bones. I went and joined the Army. I remembered something I’d seen in a book, and I went to join this mob. That’s how I come to join the Brigade of Guards.

  “My wife sort of traced me. I never knew how. I know, now, that she traced me through poor old Bill Nelson. He had a heart too big for his poor body, my china Bill. She kept on writing to me, and writing, and I recognized her fist, and I never answered her letters. I never even opened ’em. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear from my little woman; only I was sort of mad, proud. I was afraid if I read anything she wrote, I’d go and reply by return, and make it up with her … and I thought she was making a mug of me, and I couldn’t bear it. So I put her out of my head.

  “Get me? That’s how it was.

  “Yes, you’d better listen carefully. You Oxley, listen to me. You can be as tough as God Almighty, but you won’t chuck a scare into me. No.

  “Comes round some time in November, and Bill Nelson, that was squad-instructing then, and a Corporal, says to me like this: ‘Butcher. I want to talk to you about something very particular indeed.’

  “‘What’s that?’

  “‘Never mind what’s that,’ he says. ‘I want to talk to you. I want you to be in the “Farmers” at no later than eight-thirty pip-emma to-night. Get it? Eight-thirty, in the “Farmers.” I know it’s your night out‚’ he says, ‘so don’t fail me, because this is important.’

  “I was his pal, and I’d meet him anywhere and at any time, and so I says okey-doke, I’ll be there.

  “There’s nothing much to this. But listen, because I’m telling you.

  “For the love of God listen to me, Oxley!

  “I turn up at the ‘Farmers,’ and Bill isn’t there. I knock back a pint, and then another pint, and still Bill doesn’t turn up. I watch the clock, and I wonder what it can all be about. Eight-thirty. Eight-forty. No Bill, and this is a bit queer, because Bill turns up on time, usually. You can set your clock to Bill, as a rule. Ten to nine. Then all of a sudden a bloke comes in looking shocking and disgraceful, a disgraceful sight. It’s Bill. He’s got a black eye. He’s got a swelled nose. He’s got a puffed lip. He’s got a lump on his jawbone. He’s got an inflamed earhole. He’s got a torn tunic and mud on his back.

  “I don’t want him to run the risk of running into the Gestapo in his condition, and so I leaves half my pint and goes to head him off. I meets him in the doorway and says, ‘Come and get a wash, you Burke.’

  “He says: ‘Never mind washing. I want to tell you something. I never had a chance till now. I’d have been earlier, only I had a bit of an accident. Listen,’ he says. ‘That about your old woman was a big mistake. Your good lady is as respectable as your mother or mine,’ he says, ‘and I’ll lay my life on it. She’s off her head in love with you, Butch,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t carrying on with nobody.’ He says this breathless, gasping, as if he’d been running hard and fast. ‘She never carried on with nobody. The bloke you see her with was drunk. He burst in. It came out after. She never see him before, Butch. There was other complaints. It was all cleared up. Butch, what you got to do is, make friends again. Don’t be a fool, Butcher; don’t be a silly horrible idiot. Come with me and have a cup of tea, and let me tell you …’

  “We goes to a tea-and-wad-shop round the corner, and as we go in Bill Nelson grips my arm and holds me. I feel myself going round and round, because there at a table, with a cup of tea in front of her (she was never the woman to sit in a place without ordering anything), there she was, sitting with her heart in her mouth.

  “She had come down on Nelson’s responsibility, do you see? He’d paid her fare and found her a room. He knew that if I see her again I’d stay and apologize. He sort of knew it. More especially as she was about three months off having a kid, do you see? And he’d made a date with her for that night, that time, and swore he’d bring me. He knew I’d turn up for him, just as he knew that my rotten silly pride would stop me coming along to see her. Get me? He understood all that, and banked on it; banked on what he sort of had a feeling on in the matter.

  “And when I saw her I just went like dried-up boot polish when you fan it with a lit match … I ran, I went liquid, I melted away, I got moist.

  “I said: ‘Hiya, duck.’ She said: ‘Hiya, Joe.’

  “Bill had taken a room for us and paid the first week’s rent in advance. I saw how right he was. But I’d signed on for twenty-one years. I didn’t have the money to buy myself out.

  “The kid was born nine weeks later.

  “It died. It was a he. She died too. They both died. That last few weeks was all right, though. We got together and understood each other, like. She knew all about me, I mean … but I sort of understood her, and we kind of linked up, sort of style. She was the only one, always. Never mind all that bull-and-boloney, though. Do you think I’m going to forget nine, eleven, thirty-seven? The ninth of November, two days before Armistice Day, at nineish at night? If I live to be ten thousand million billion years old, do you think I’ll ever forget?

  “And you dare to tell me that Bill Nelson ran away from you, Oxley? You bloody dare to tell me that? As I reckon it, he felt pretty sure he could finish you off in time to get back and fix her and me up again. And when time passed he just run. He run away, yes. But from you, Oxley? Never in your life. Not if you was an army of dirty lousy Oxleys with a Bren in each hand. A louse bag like you would of stayed and fought it out—which it was Bill’s nature to do—and you would have let everything else go to pot. That’s you. But Bill ran away. Not from you. To her, for her sake and my sake…. He only stood to lose. Bill always did stand to lose. But say he’s yeller again. Say it now. Say it and I’ll do yer, if it takes me ten years. If I swing fifty foot high. Now say it!”

  Oxley shrugs his great bony shoulders.

  “You don’t scare me,” he says. “But it don’t matter one way or another. I shan’t say it. I said it. If it was like that, all right, forget it.”

  “Take it back,” says Butcher the Butcher.

  “Well,” says Oxley. “He might not have been yeller. But he didn’t ought to have run off like that.”

  “You, what do you understand about anything?” asks Butcher.

  “I’d rather he knifed me,” says Oxley, “or kicked me in the guts. I don’t like seeing a man running away. But taking it all in all, I’m prepared to overlook it.”

  VIII

  A Kind of Pink Snake

  OXLEY BROODS for a few seconds, and then says: “See what I mean? If it was a Jerry, or a Wog, or a Wop, well, if he run away it’d be no more than what I expected and so I wouldn’t hold it against him. But a bloke in your own mob, no, he’s not entitled to run away, not even from you. Where do you stand if blokes on your own side start running away all of a sudden? No disrespect to the dead, but say you found yourself in a trench next to a bloke that run away from you? Would that be good for your morale?”

  His face softens. “I admit I never could stick him,” he says, “but I will go so far as to say he marked me up a bit. Bill Nelson was a body-puncher. It didn’t show much, but it felt. He sort of lifted up a kind of … I don’t know quite what to call it, but a sort of punch as if he was lifting a sack of flour, and always at the body. It told. After a few of those, you felt sort of not quite so fresh. And I don’t mind saying that if he’d put a few of those body-punches round about the head, well, I would have got up all right, but maybe I wouldn’t have got up quite so soon. I c
ouldn’t stick Nelson at any price, but in a way he was like me in the matter of a punch—he put some sting into it.”

  “He was soft-hearted,” says Bearsbreath. “He’d punch you in the guts but not in the teeth because he didn’t like to do any damage that couldn’t be repaired. He hated to leave a mark.”

  Hands says: “Mark! Hah! Did you ever hear about the time Bill Nelson and me got tattooed in Egypt?”

  Hands rolls up a sleeve and uncovers something that is supposed to represent a terrifying reptile in faded red, tattooed on his forearm. “What I really wanted to have done was one of those belly-dancers. The general idea is, they tattoo them over the muscle, and then when you wiggle your arm, they dance. Their little bellies kind of waggle, provided you got muscles enough to provide the background. That was my original intention when I got tattooed. But as it so happened, fate intervened.”

  Sergeant Crowne says: “It’s a thing of the past, tattooing. Only kids and crooks get it done. Lots of old sweats have got a mark or two … a snake here, a crucifix there, or something like I Love Amy, or Death Rather Than Dishonour, but they only get that done when they’re very young, and they’re sorry afterwards. Skin is like wallpaper. If you got to live with it you might as well have it plain. Bill Nelson only had one tattoo mark that I know of, and that was …”

  “Two clasped hands,” says Dagwood.

  “Nothing of the sort,” says The Budgerigar. “It was a palm tree.”

  “As far as I remember,” says Hands, “it was——”

  “A skull and cross-bones,” says Crowne, “and a motto, a motto which said: My Mother Is My Only Sweetheart.”

  “Now that I come to think of it,” says The Budgerigar, “it could have been the Regimental Star done in blue and red.”

  “Listen,” says Hands, “I happen to know that Bill Nelson had two tattoo marks. One was on his wrist, or thereabouts. It was a kind of a blue bird. And there was another one on the left-hand side of his chest which said: I Love Daisy. It was supposed to be over his heart, but the bloke that did it was some kind of a Syrian, and according to this here Syrian, Bill’s heart was somewhere near his armpit. The coloured races are ignorant.

  “It was the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of in your life. I don’t suppose you ever heard of Sergeant-Major Twine? We used to call him Swine. He was a misery. He only made one joke in his life, and to this day nobody can be certain that he wasn’t serious. First parade on board the ship going East, after he dismissed the parade, he said: ‘All right. Dismiss. Nobody leave the ship.’ He was unpopular, but actually I got on with him fairly well. He was regimental, but fair, and usually when he said a thing, he more or less meant it. I can’t vouch for his loyalty, but he was once seen standing up for one of his sergeants during some argument or other. I forget what. He was a real old sweat. He had a wife and kid in Cairo, an Irish wife. Well, all of a sudden, this kid of his seemed to grow up like a mushroom, almost overnight. One day she was a skinny little girl with long legs, and the next afternoon she blossomed out into a raving beauty such as I’ve never before seen in my life. You know Ann Sheridan? You remember Marie Dressler? Well, compared with this kid Pat, Ann Sheridan was as plain as Marie Dressler. She was a blond, with black eyes, and very well developed for her age, or, for that matter, any other age. I dare say she must have been about seventeen, or probably less. She got about eleven proposals of marriage every twenty-four hours. As soon as you saw a feller putting scented brilliantine on his hair, you knew perfectly well that he was going to propose to Pat Twine.

  “I was young and foolish then, and I don’t mind admitting that in a way I fell for her myself. It was probably the climate. I hung around this kid like any lovesick mug. The funny thing is that I was quite serious then. So was nearly everybody else in Cairo. But she, I need scarcely say, was aiming no doubt at bigger game than mere mugs of N.C.O.s in the Brigade of Guards. After all, she had the example of her father before her to warn her what this mob can do to a man after seventy or eighty years of service. I don’t think she wanted to be a soldier’s wife at all, because she was a sharp kid and she could see what had happened to her Mum through being a soldier’s wife. The old girl was pretty awful.

  “All the same, although we all knew we were wasting our time, we hung around her. You know what kids are when it comes to love and all that kind of thing. Bolts and bars won’t hold them. Well, one day, when I was off duty, I ran into her and began to chat with her a bit. You know how ridiculous these girls stand, twiddling their heels, and blinking their eyes, and swinging their arms about, and showing off their figures. She waggled herself about, and then got around to talking about some fellow called Finnan who, she said, wanted to marry her. Of course, I asked her whether she cared anything about this Finnan, and needless to say she hummed and hawed, and tried to make me jealous, and succeeded in doing so. And she said: ‘Well, I don’t know, Sergeant Hands, but I’m certain that Walter Finnan would make a very devoted husband. Do you know what he did, only the other week? He had my name tattooed over his heart, as a proof that, whether I would have him or not, he would never look at another woman as long as he lived.’

  “And then I started to tell her that all that was nothing. I told her how real devotion to a young woman came from the heart, and was more than skin-deep. After all, tattooing was only skin-deep. She seemed to be offended at that and said that, after all, it was Finnan’s business what he did with his devotion or his skin, and no business of mine.

  “I had it bad. I could think of nothing and nobody but her, and I lay awake nearly all that night, unreasonably annoyed with this Finnan, who was a very harmless sort of mug, and somehow going into a rage about his having her name tattooed over his heart. And then I made my mind up to get tattooed with her name myself, the very next payday.

  “Well, there was a little Syrian bloke whose name was Hassan, who did a good deal of Army tattooing off and on. There were better tattooers, but Hassan was cheap. I believe he used to either drink, or smoke opium, or take hashish. Or maybe he was just a bit of a lunatic, like everybody else connected with the Army. Be that as it may, he was pretty hot on Death Rather Than Dishonour and graveyard crosses with In Memoriam underneath them. Poor mugs of soldiers, their own silly skins are about all they can count on carrying about with them for certain in peacetime. And I’m not so sure about that either…. So I go to Hassan, and this little Hassan wallah is sitting down, rather like a pig in a trance. He asks me what I want and I tell him that I want I Adore Pat right over my heart, in blue letters of a reasonably-priced size.

  “I’ve never had anything done to me that hurt me half so much. It hurts like hell, this tattooing gag. No more of it for me, I don’t care who I fall in love with. They ought to give you gas. It took him a long time, too, because he seemed to be somehow a little bit dopey. The more he hurried the more he hurt me, but at last he got through it and I paid him and scrammed. But as I’m going out, who should I meet in the doorway but Bill Nelson.

  “‘What you doing here, Bill?’ I ask him.

  “‘Oh, nothing,’ he says, ‘nothing at all. I just come to make a couple of enquiries. I tell you what I’ll do, Handsy—I’ll meet you for a drink across the road in about half an hour’s time.’

  “All right. I go and get myself one lukewarm beer, which takes about half of all the money I have left, and I wait, and at last, after nearly an hour and a quarter, Bill Nelson turns up and sits down opposite me. He has the price of two beers, so he orders, and we sort of have a bit of a chat.

  “Then he says: ‘Handsy, what were you doing over there in Hassan’s?’ And I tell him that I’ve just gone and had one or two decorations put on me, and he asks what.

  “Well, he’s a pal, so I take him into my confidence and I tell him that it’s practically impossible for me to go on living without this girl Pat, and so I’ve gone and had her name tattooed over my heart, since it seems that she likes that sort of thing. At this poor old Bill looks very down in the mouth
and asks me: ‘What did you say over your heart, Handsy?’ So I tell him, and he says: ‘Oh, Jesus.’ I ask him what’s up, and he says: ‘Well, to tell you the honest truth, Handsy, I feel pretty much the same way about her myself. And to be perfectly frank with you, I’ve been and had my own heart sort of decorated with the same motto.’ I ask him if it hurts, and he says it hurts like stink. Then I say to him: ‘Bill, let’s see what sort of a job that little dopey idol done on you.’ He says: ‘No, you let me see yours first.’ So he undoes his tunic and waits, holding his great big hands over his bosom, like the naked girl in that picture of September Morn. I rips open my tunic and shows him my bit of lettering. I’ve got it here to this day. I dunno what to do with it. It has practically ruined my life, this bit of tattooing. Bill looks, and he kind of grins as if he’s very proud of himself, and he says: ‘I’ve got a dollar’s worth of fancy scrollwork round mine.’ I say: ‘Let’s look, Bill.’

  “He lets me see, and I takes a good look and then I practically have to strangle myself to stop from busting out laughing. Because do you know what this nigger Hassan has been and done? Under the influence of whatever it was he took to liven himself up, he’d done a marvellous job of work, a smashing hot job. He’d put the lettering inside a sort of fancy heart, with twiddley bits all round it; but instead of the name Pat he’d gone and put Daisy. Don’t ask me why. I dare say some other mug had got tattooed with the name of Daisy, and it had somehow sort of come to the front of his mind just as these things will when you’re a bit tight.

  “I said: ‘That’s smashing, Bill,’ and he said: ‘It’ll be pretty hot in a week or so when the swelling goes down.’