by Gerald Kersh
Wild Rose said: “I’ll tell you what though, I’ve got a cheque.” Tishy groaned, but she went on: “It’s as good as gold. Jack Duck gave it to me. I didn’t ask him for it, he just gave it to me. It’s quite all right; good old Jack Duck doesn’t bounce stumer cheques – you can take your dying oath on that. It’s for twenty quid.”
“Couldn’t you get Little Lew to cash it?” asked Tishy, without hope.
“What him? Little Lew?” said Wild Rose. It was said of Little Lew that he had taken the pennies off his dead mother’s eyes and replaced them with an IOU.
“No use talking. I’ll see what I can fiddle. Still, it seems such a pity,” said Tishy. “ – But I tell you what. If it’s a cash cheque, there is just about half a chance I could get this party to take it. You see, he’s gone and got himself into a spot of bother with a certain other party, and if he doesn’t come up to the mark on Monday, this other party’ll raise hell on Tuesday. Do you get what I mean, Rosie?”
Wild Rose understood. In her reckless, contemptuously gesticulating way, she said: “I get it. This valet of yours is a bit of a tea-leaf. His boss snuffs it. This valet half-inches just about as much of the old man’s stuff as he thinks he can get away with, before the poor old gentleman is cold. So if somebody turns up and starts shouting the odds, this valet might draw attention to himself. Then there’d be inquiries, and I shouldn’t be surprised if they found out that this valet of yours had been half-inching the old gentleman’s gold studs, and things, for years and years. So your valet wants to hush it up. Isn’t that it?”
“He’s not my valet, Rosie,” said Tishy, humbly. “But that’s just about it. I think you’ve hit it, just about.”
“I suppose he got himself mixed up with some woman,” said Wild Rose, curling her lip.
“That I couldn’t say. I shouldn’t be in the least surprised. I’d tell you if I knew, but I don’t,” said Tishy. “My idea is that this client might take the cheque and use it to stall the other party off with. Well now, say that cheque is a stumer. Say it does bounce. By the time it bounces my deal will of gone through – I’m dead certain of that – and everybody’ll have had time to breathe, and I can pay off the valet, and everybody’s happy. If only I can get him to accept the cheque . . .”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute! Whose cheque is this? Where do I come in?” asked Wild Rose.
“Lend me that kite, and I’ll cut you in fifty-fifty. Is that fair? If my party doesn’t accept, well, you can have your cheque back. . . . But I’ve got a feeling that he might.”
Wild Rose took Middleton’s cheque out of her purse, and gave it to Tishy, saying: “Here you are then. Twenty pounds. Now remember, Tishy, this has got a back to it! I’m in with you fifty-fifty. Don’t you forget that, now, do you hear? And if you try any funny stuff with me, may I never move from this spot if I don’t break every bone in your body – because I’ve been a good friend to you, Tishy.”
“Even if I dared to, I’d never play you a dirty trick, Rosie,” said Tishy. “It’s a chance, nothing but a chance. Let’s try it, and chance it. I’m going to get a cup of coffee. Want a cup of coffee?”
“I’ll walk along with you. You ought to have some scrambled eggs, or a sandwich. The trouble with you is, you don’t eat half enough,” said Wild Rose.
So, at eleven o’clock that night, Trew found himself alone in Soho Square, with sevenpence in his pocket: his legs were rubber and his feet were wool, yet it was necessary to walk a few hundred yards to a bus stop in Oxford Street. He did so, but got on the wrong bus, and, having bought a penny ticket, fell asleep until the conductor shook him at Aldgate and demanded threepence excess fare. From Aldgate Trew had to walk home through the deserted streets of the City. Cats wailed in the dark. Policemen watched him from the shadows. Passing the Old Bailey, Trew looked up at the golden statue of Justice that stands with sword and scales on the dome, and he sneered, cursing the world in general and Middleton in particular. If Middleton had never been born this could never have happened. He cursed Middleton from Hatton Garden to Gray’s Inn Road; turned right, inventing new curses; and so, in the remorseful stage of sobriety, reached Wheeler Square at midnight with three pennies in his pocket just as Middleton and his wife were getting out of a taxi at Mrs. Gibson’s house.
Bilious with hate, Trew watched Middleton as he paid the taxi-driver, and listened while the flag went up with a sharp ringing noise, and the driver said good-night so politely that Trew could almost hear the tinkle of a substantial tip in a leather-lined pocket. Then he was more than half inclined to tap Middleton on the shoulder and say: “Look here, old man . . . Something I want to tell you. I know you can take a joke, so listen – this is going to make you laugh. About that letter of yours; I wrote it myself. Well, you know me, Middy, old man – anything for a harmless joke, eh?”
But even as he touched Middleton’s shoulder, instinct warned Trew that he would be prudent if he kept his mouth shut for the time being. And then gall and acid came up into his throat as he realised that he could never dare, openly, to enjoy his joke; never tell the story. All the world loves a lover, especially a newly-married one, whose silly little waitress of a wife is going to have a baby, and rejoices – strange world! – in his good fortune. The joker who plays the trick with him, therefore, is not funny: on the contrary, he is detestable. Trew shuddered away from a vision of himself as an outcast, shunned and scorned. And he remembered that Gutkes had given credit and Jack Duck had paid money out of pocket, on the strength of his joke. If the story came out Jack Duck would do nothing, but Gutkes might do much. Middleton, again, would be dangerous: apart from the fact that he had a temper, and a pair of hands, he would be compelled to explain and excuse himself when the trick was exposed. Sure as fate, on Tuesday morning Middleton would go to Pismire, who would deny all knowledge of the letter pertaining to the estate of Uncle Joe. After that there would be checking, and double-checking. Without a doubt, Middleton would have the envelope to produce, and this envelope might be traced to Forty Richards. If it were, Trew would have a great deal of explaining to do in the office. Forty Richards might see the joke . . . or then again he might not. He would certainly express, in the strongest terms, his disapproval of a man who filched the firm’s envelopes and sneaked other firms’ letter-headings out of the correspondence files to play practical jokes.
Then Trew knew that he was in danger, and that his only hope of salvation lay in brazen perjury and consistent lying; in heated denial, emphatic head-shaking, and plausible dissembling.
He could never claim authorship of his masterpiece. The glory was gone, the triumph was void, and there he stood, sick and sorry, with threepence in his pocket and nothing before him but a hopeless August week-end, four interminable hungry days between Tuesday and pay-day – days to be got through by means of hard-found jokes and humiliating loans that would have to be repaid if he starved for a month – and a funny story that could never be told.
So, when Middleton felt his touch and turned, Trew said: “Hullo, Middy,” so sadly that even Louisa’s heart was softened.
“Why, Trewie, old boy!” cried Middleton. “We’ve been out celebrating. We went to Romano’s in the Strand.”
“We made absolute pigs of ourselves,” said Louisa.
“ – She ate Omelette Arnold Bennett——”
“ – A sort of omelette with smoked haddock in it. And a whole roast chicken——”
“ – A baby chicken, Trewie, old boy, not much bigger than your fist. And I had——”
“ – He had smoked salmon, steak and chips, and a Welsh rarebit——”
“ – Louie had peach melba——”
“ – We drank a whole bottle of white wine, and Ted had a brandy——”
“ – Louie had a Drambuie. Of course we had coffee,” said Middleton, “and then we danced. You must come with us sometime, Trewie, old boy. It’s not bad at all.”
“Expensive,” said Trew.
“E
xpensive! I should say so,” said Louisa.
But Middleton said: “Oh I don’t know. The whole evening didn’t cost us a couple of pounds or so, tips and taxis and everything – did it, Louie dear?”
“Lucky people,” said Trew.
“What did you do with yourself, Trewie, old boy?”
“Nothing much.”
“How about us meeting to-morrow and going out?” said Middleton. “Eh, Louie?”
“If I won’t be intruding,” said Trew. “I’m not doing anything much that I know of. What time?”
“Well, Louie wants to rest and write a whole lot of letters to her mother and things, so what do you say to about seven or half-past, Trewie, old boy?”
“All right, Middy, old man, see you then,” said Trew; and went to his room. He was so tired that he would have gone to bed in his best suit; but reminding himself that next week he would almost certainly have to pawn this suit, he hung it up carefully, and then, throwing himself on to the bed, still wearing his shoes and underclothes, fell giddily into a heavy sleep full of anxious dreams.
But for several hours Middleton lay awake, thinking. His head, frozen by shock, began to thaw, now, in the hot, damp darkness of the little bedroom. Pinprick by pinprick and throb by throb, reason went back where it belonged and Middleton was in agony, wanted to wriggle and shake the brain in his skull, as he had occasionally needed to wriggle and shake a numb foot inside its shoe. Every day for two years, in the mail order department, he had been handling other people’s money – good, ready money – postal orders, Bank of England notes, and telegraphed money orders.
If you were an uncivilised person you might see this money as nothing but black-and-white or discreetly-coloured paper, and use it as such. But this paper, to a civilised man, was one of the most important things in the world. Black colliers went into hot dark tunnels a thousand feet underground, to tear the terrific energy of the buried sunlight out of the guts of the world; for bits of paper. Grocers – for paper – sold cakes of soap to wash away the blackness of the pits, and lumps of fat bacon that men ate to give them strength to cut coal to get – paper. You got to work to dig a hole to earn enough to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to dig a hole . . . oh, dreary eternal recurrence! Middleton’s head was seething, now. Some great Anarch had taken possession of it, so that his mind flew up in bright spray, whirled down in muddy vortices, rushed up in spouts to kiss the clouds, crashed back in thunder, shrugged sullenly into a languid swell overhung by a fog made up of unsettled particles of itself, and then – unpredictable and uncontrollable – divided like the Red Sea, only to clap back into turbulence again.
. . . Miners mined and weavers wove; farmers farmed, butchers killed pigs and scalded them with boiling water and bled them, and scraped them, and skinned and gutted and smoked them and sold them – for paper – to grocers who sold them for paper again to men who went to work to dig a hole . . . for paper. Paper was life. Paper was death. Middleton thought of his birth certificate; of his father’s death certificate. Now, his head was spinning in a rickety way, and he could see his thoughts running inwards to a hole and a pole in the centre of himself – not unlike a phonograph record on an ill-balanced turn-table – shivering white and glittering black, black cut by white, white scored by black. The disc ran down towards the pit, shouting: You go to work, you go to work to dig a hole to earn enough to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to dig a hole to earn enough to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to dig a hole . . .
The pit sucked Middleton down, and he found himself falling in spirals in a dark vortex – which exploded, all of a sudden, and blew him up through something mysteriously compounded of froth and light, back into consciousness.
Middleton sat up with a hiccup.
He tried to compose himself, and dozing, remembered an incident over which Trew had made merry a year or two ago. Some fly-by-night trader, advertising some specious bargain, had employed an impoverished man who was too weak to work and too proud to beg, to distribute leaflets on a gusty afternoon in March. The old man’s hands were cold. The passers-by kept their hands in their pockets. A bitter east wind was blowing from the direction of the bank. Suddenly, tired of it all, the old man hurled his bundle of leaflets into the wind, pocketed his hands, and walked away. For a second or two the air was white with flimsy bits of paper that seemed to be flying into the setting sun. But they fluttered down into the street and the heavy traffic rolled them into the mud.
And now Middleton felt that inside his head there was a rattling roll of paper, and that the more assiduously he tugged at it the larger it grew. He would have got up and walked about, but he feared that he might disturb Louisa, who was sleeping peacefully in her little bed two feet away. Forcing himself to lie still, Middleton thought of his letter, and of all that might be done with £76,000. £76,000 of capital, invested at five per cent, would bring him an income of £3,800 a year – nearly £75 a week. There were not many safe investments at five per cent. Assume, just to be on the safe side, that a man invested £76,000 at only two and a half per cent. He would have about £35 a week for life, and this was a great deal of money – but not half as much as £75 a week. Still, £35 a week (call it £36) was nine hundred per cent more than the £4 a week for which he was only too anxious to work eight hours a day . . . Middleton tried to laugh at himself.
He tickled his fancy, thinking of what he would say to Mr. Mawson on Tuesday. “. . . Mr. Mawson, as you will see, by this letter, I have come into an inheritance of £100,000, net personalty £76,000, and I have much pleasure in informing you that you may go and——”
. . . Or it might be better to be suave, and say: “Oh, Mawson, I want a word with you.” Then Mr. Mawson would glare at him like a maniac; but Middleton would remain calm. Without producing the letter, he would continue: “I have just inherited a very large fortune, and don’t intend to work here any longer. Feel like coming to Romano’s to-night with my good lady and me for a bit of a farewell dinner, eh, Mawson?”
So, thinking of Mr. Mawson, Middleton remembered all the money he had taken out of envelopes since he had been promoted to the mail order department. The money came in most heavily in the middle of the week; it was posted, generally, on Monday, when the glow of the Sunday advertisements was still warm, and people felt rich. He remembered a certain tremendous Wednesday when he had recorded orders to the value of nearly nine hundred pounds. Then he could see the money in the dark. There were the painfully-scrawled postal orders, the carefully-folded ten-shilling notes, the assiduously-smoothed pound notes. They came into every branch of Coulton Utilities by the million. But he had never regarded this stuff as money – only as something that was not his: paper. . . .
He was almost asleep when he realised that in two years he had dealt with something like a hundred-and-fifty-thousand pounds – all on paper. People bought food to get the strength to go to work to dig a hole to earn enough to buy the paper . . . the Sunday paper . . . paper. . . .
He fell asleep, and then he found himself in a nightmarish Holborn that ran without perspective from a blackness in the east to a fiery redness in the west; and the air was full of falling paper – forty-eight-sheets and postal orders, pamphlets and leaflets, circulars and bank-notes. One pale oblong fell at Middleton’s feet, and then, arching itself, crawled away like a caterpillar. “Come back here at once!” cried Middleton. The bit of paper said: “Try and catch me.” It stood on end and waited until Middleton was within reach of it, and then slid away like a snake just as he threw himself down upon it. “You had better be careful, Middleton,” said Mr. Mawson. But the paper oblong heaved itself up, grew great and flapped its corners derisively before it folded itself into an immense coffin-shaped kite, which caught a dirty wet wind that came rushing out of the darkness in the east, and soared to high heaven. “It escaped,” said Middleton; but no one heard him, for he was caught in the tail of the kite. Looking down he could s
ee St. Paul’s Cathedral like a pin-head, and the Thames like a twisted wire. And then the kite disintegrated, and Middleton was falling. He could see the world turning, black and glistening – growing larger and larger. The larger the world grew, the less Middleton could see. The world was a wobbling, shiny disc, spinning and spinning, and shouting in a scratched voice that grew louder and louder like the roar of a crowd at a critical moment in a great game . . . and Middleton slid through a silent black hole in the centre of a howling phonograph record, and was profoundly relieved to find himself in bed, and not in the cruel cogs of a dark machine, somewhere in the guts of a howling nightmare.
Dawn was coming, and Louisa was smiling in her sleep. But Middleton could not shake himself free of his dream – the base of his spine still twitched and crawled and his heart was hammering at the walls of his chest. “Now what the dickens is there to be afraid of in a kite?” he wondered.
A psychologist, asked to interpret Middleton’s dream, having put him on a couch and cross-examined him for three days, would probably have come out with a terrifying rigmarole, well laced with tasty technical terms and flavoured with some spicy little revelations that would have made his hair curl. He would have told Middleton about the power-symbolism of flying, and the anxiety-symbolism of falling, in a dream. In the end he would, no doubt, have arrived at some kind of conclusion which would have been cheap at half the price. But, after the age-old and unchangeable manner of married men who dream dreams fit to talk about, he told Louisa about it when she awoke an hour later; and she gave him what the carnival fortune-tellers call a “cold reading” on the spot, free of charge. She was a good cockney who, having exchanged back-chat and overheard conversations in a cheap City restaurant, had acquired a fair smattering of slang and unconventional English. She said:
