by Gerald Kersh
But it was a long time, I assure you, before I was allowed to handle a pencil after that; and even then they coated my pencils with bitter aloes—the stuff they smear on leashes to discourage puppies from eating them. (Actually, when you get used to the stuff, bitter aloes isn’t bad at all.) But in the meantime I was given crayons to write with, which, being made of wax, grew soft in my hot little hand, inviting me to roll and mold them into interesting and useful shapes. This suited me fine because I was never satisfied with the shape of a thing as it happened to be. Art begins that way.
I owe one of my “redeeming” features to an accident connected with this urge of mine to change the design of things.
Every boy must have a pocketknife. Not me. My mother would as soon have given me a vial of prussic acid, as a knife. So I decided to make one.... Looking back, sometimes, I feel that my life has been wasted. I ought to have been born before the dawn of civilization, I am so inventive and, once my curiosity is aroused (which doesn’t take much doing), so completely devoid of fear. I might have got myself run over in the process, but I bet I would have invented the wheel; and although I should certainly have become a charred tribal demigod, I believe that I might have discovered fire. Lacking a knife, I say, I invented one. In those days, we used to play a silly game with pins. You take two pins and place them crosswise on a tramline. The tramcar rolls over the crossed pins and flattens them into the likeness of a pair of scissors. Now what is a pair of scissors but two knives fastened with a screw? I reasoned. If two pins make two knives, one pin therefore will make one knife. An ineffectual brass knife, it is true; but a knife notwithstanding. It was not bad for a child of my age, mind you. From pins I went on to nails; and I think I might have made something out of a tenpenny spike if I had not been caught, in the nick of time. The driver braked the tram to a standstill, its front wheels less than a yard from my fingers—other nails having been shaken off by the vibration, I was determined to hold this one down. “Promise me on your honor you will never do a thing like that again!” said my father. “If you do, all your fingers will be cut off and you will be sent to a home.” I promised, and I kept my promise.
But my promise did not include trains. Not far from where we lived there was a railway line along which rushed the giant expresses of the South Western Railway, hurtling past at seventy or eighty miles an hour. We boys used to stand on the bridge and watch them as they passed—the idea being to catch in one swift glimpse the names of the huge locomotives and their serial numbers, which we solemnly entered in little notebooks. This was all very well, but when I said that I was going to make a knife, I made a knife. I found an iron bolt twelve inches long and nearly an inch thick. Knowing better now than to hold this down with my fingers under the Lord Wolseley, which was due to come through at 11:45 that Saturday morning, I fastened the bolt to the nearest rail with adhesive tape (which, God knows why, I soaked with iodine). As I calculated, the great Lord Wolseley and the countless steel wheels of all its carriages should do a real swordsmith’s job for me and turn this bolt into a kind of machete. I had been reading the works of Major Charles Gilson at that time, and felt that this was all I needed to get me to the place where the elephants go to die. I crawled down the bank and waited. My calculations were almost accurate, but not quite. The Lord Wolseley passed dead on time, and its off-front wheel made a spearhead of the end of the bolt, but jibbed at its square head. This, caught in a flange, sent the sharpened bolt whirling away. The point hit me in the right cheek, half an inch away from the corner of my mouth, and came out at the other side. The result was that my poor mother had a nervous breakdown, and I healed with two fascinating dimples which, as a girl once told me, “illuminate” my face when I smile.
As if this were not enough, I lost the little finger of my left hand in the zoo. One of my aunts took me there to cheer me up while the wounds in my cheeks were healing. Slipping past the keeper, I tried to make a hyena laugh by tickling his lip. It is lucky for me the beast did not get the whole hand.... But it got me out of music lessons—my unhappy mother had conceived an idea that I might make a violinist, but nothing was further from my thoughts: I didn’t know what I wanted to be, really, unless it might be an explorer.
Which is, in a way, exactly what I turned out to be. Only it didn’t take me long to learn that you don’t need to go to Africa for savagery, to Tahiti for the exotic, or to the moon for monsters. If I want the thunder of the galaxies or the interplanetary cold, I can find them in Beethoven and Sibelius. Just any old bit of ground is vantage point enough for me. I will do my extraterrestrial traveling when my time comes, not in a chromium-plated rocket but naked, out of a good old-fashioned wooden box six feet deep in my own familiar earth. And for this I am in no hurry at all. To put it tritely: Man is my Dark Continent, and his heart is my jungle. I actually like people in general, and enjoy being in company—any kind of company.
I get involved in it; I feel that it enriches me, generally. One reads of the love that casteth out all fear: I am inclined to believe that this kind of love is a sort of mysterious absorption of oneself in a state of sublime curiosity that lives on the frontier between conjecture and pure understanding. Fear is written in every heart, but seldom indelibly. Fear is a mere misprint which you need only recognize to correct.
Many a night have I spent in the rooms of my old friend John Sourbreast, who has a lease in perpetuity in Albany and two thousand pounds a year taxfree all to himself. I remember those nights with pleasure. That was not a sitting room; it was a set in a scene in which, if one were not perfectly comfortable, one ruined the act. There were the richly bound old books, the black walnut Bechstein grand piano licking itself like a contented cat in the firelight, the wonderful rug that came out of the palace of Abdul the Damned, the easy chairs by the fire, and tobacco and drinks ready to hand. Over the mantelpiece a painting by Sickert of the old Quadrant, seen in wintery slush with a fog coming down; in the foreground a man in a heavy overcoat splashing in the direction of the Cafe Royal to sit on red plush, drink something hot, and play dominoes. I always liked that picture—whatever the weather, you looked at it and said to the man in the overcoat, “Good for you!” And here we used to sit, talking of Life and Death, and Good and Evil. Sourbreast didn’t seem to know which was which. In any case, he was uneasy about the whole damned lot.
Toward about two in the morning he would try me with the Fool’s Mate of metaphysics: “Is God omnipotent?”
To this, for the sake of argument, I would reply,
“Yes.”
“Is God all-powerful?”
“Yes.”
“But is God all good?” “Yes.”
“Yet you acknowledge the existence of evil?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do you reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God?”
Then I would counter, “Sourbreast, is it a good thing to torture a horse?”
“No!”
“Or a dog, or a cow?”
“Certainly not.”
“But is it a good thing to die of diphtheria, smallpox, lockjaw, typhoid, et cetera?”
“No, it is not a good thing.”
“Tonight we ate steak. Was it good steak?”
“Excellent.”
“Yet, eating that filet, did it not occur to you that the steer was dragged in agony to the slaughterhouse, where it went down in a whole mess of blood and guts? That this steer was castrated to stay quiet and get fat for your table?”
“Stop it!”
“But the steak was good? It refreshed you, kept you going?”
“Well?”
“That’s the way people are,” I would say. “They wouldn’t touch a dead cow with a barge pole, but oh, how they love her tripes! Without the butchers you’d starve, wouldn’t you? Now tell me, is it good to be a butcher?”
Sourbreast would sigh and say, “They are a necessary evil.”
“Hold hard there!” I’d say. “If a
thing is necessary it can’t be an evil. Evil is unnecessary. That is why it is evil. You observe, you are the sick calf, or horse, or dog, in the laboratory. You feel only your immediate discomfort. You can’t say to yourself, Out of the misery of this base flesh may come a better life and longer hope for something higher up in the scale of evolution.’Which comes first, the man or the horse?”
Sourbreast always fenced then: “That depends on the man.”
“Oh, I suppose you would have given preference to a lamb, just because you liked its looks, over a bloody butcher from the Midlands? Yet that butcher begot William Shakespeare. I like your presumption! It’s like a mouse in a cathedral talking architecture.”
At this point we generally had another drink, and then Sourbreast would say moodily, “You don’t know the meaning of doubt.”
My reply never failed to irritate him. It was, simply, “That’s right.”
“Yet anyone can see with half an eye that you’ve suffered like hell.”
“In point of fact, I haven’t,” I would tell him. “Traumata are a lot of crap. Anybody who says he remembers a physical pain is a liar. You are not constructed to remember pain, or you’d never survive being born. You remember only the fear of being hurt. It is fright, not hurt, that destroys you.”
So I told him, and so I believed—and so I still believe. Now, in perspective, I see my sentiments just as they were when I lived by instinct. I still believe that sensation is nothing but a spur on the heel of time rowelling the crotch of eternity. Pleasure and pain are neither here nor there; both are evil if you consecrate yourself to one or the other—if you do this, you fall in the scale of things; you sink under the surface of yourself. True happiness is to be found in a species of spiritual osmosis—in absorbing, and at the same time being absorbed. Be calm, hold on to the nucleus of yourself; let yourself be taken in by what surrounds you, and you will get back more than you have given, and so become stronger by having been thus involved. In the meantime, you will have given back some of your strength to its nameless source.
We are all part of a cosmic give-and-take. There is nothing to be afraid of—not even your own shadow, no matter what danse macabre it makes between guttering candles and the dying embers in the small hours when life runs down.
As for suffering, I am told that I have had my share of it. But it never took. Experience never taught me to be afraid. It taught me that a pain is a red light, a danger signal, something that warns you to be on your guard against what it presages. But the memory of pain suffered never dulled my desire to find out what lay beyond the pain, behind the red light. Why, good God, if there were any such thing as true remembrance of physical pain, there would be the end of adventure and high endeavor—which would be a great pity. Ninety-five per cent of the tales people tell about their sufferings are a kind of emotional sales talk. Take child-birth, for example, which is the commonest pain in the world and, while it lasts, one of the most acute: every woman talks about it but not one, not a single one, truly remembers it. Pain brings its own anodyne. One deep sleep, and all is forgiven. What they remember about it is the anticipation of it.
Fear is a kind of hate; they both smell alike. I should not be surprised if it turned out that many of the early Christian martyrs got no more than they asked for—hating and forgiving, and fearing and hoping all in quick succession. Whereas Daniel came alive out of the den of lions simply because he couldn’t be bothered with them. By the same token, if you like, God destroys those who fear Him as surely as life destroys those who fear to live. Superficial observers believe that it is on account of my formidable appearance that I can walk unharmed, well dressed and talking like a gentleman, in places where the very policemen have to go in twos and threes. It isn’t true. Apart from the fact that ill-disposed people, looking at me, ask themselves what the other fellow must have looked like when the fight was over, and respect me on sight as a dangerous kind of walking casualty, I think they get a spiritual feel of me. Neither they nor their dogs curl a lip at me—well, hardly ever—because, my face notwithstanding, they know that I am of them, involved in them.
We are all breakables close-packed in one universal parcel.
Apropos of dogs: I was snapped at only once, and that was when I was ill with an undulant fever. Running away from bad dreams and lonely with an ineffable loneliness, I paused in a doorway to stroke a mongrel terrier. He warned me off, snarling. The dog was right: fear and disease give out a whiff of corruption which all healthy animals shy away from. The smell of fear, like pain, is one of nature’s warning signals. Danger-Keep Off! it says. You must know yourself that, in school for instance, the least popular boy— the creep, the drip, the butt, the one who is most avoided— is the most fearful of you all. You feel that he carries with him a contamination of uneasiness. Whereas, though he may have all the vices in the world, you will follow the daredevil like a pack of hounds. No disrespect; it’s only natural....
“I admit,” I said generously, “that I am no oil painting.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Sam Yudenow. “The year before last I and my wife, we went for a holiday to Belgium. I got a brother-in-law in the diamond trade. So they take me to the Weirtz Museum, an’ believe me, a very nice class oil painter paints worse types than you. Don’t you worry. You got the face for the job. Rudolph Valentino wouldn’t last five minutes in Fowlers End—” He stopped abruptly and said, “Uxcuse me, what’s your name?”
“Daniel Laverock,” I said.
“Laverock,” said Sam Yudenow, “Laverock—isn’t that a kind of a cow?”
“No,” I said, “that’s a maverick. A laverock is Old English for skylark.”
Sam Yudenow said, “I’m broad-minded. I don’t care what your name is, personally. But Fowlers End ain’t Old England an’ they’re sure to call you Laventry. Why not call yourself Carlton, or something?”
I said, “Call me what you like, so long as I get my wages. Oh yes, that reminds me—what are my wages?”
“You could go all over London,” said Sam Yudenow, “an’ not get a ‘alf. There’s men seventy, eighty years in show biz who’d pay me for your job, an’ do my laundry an’ darn my socks an’ wash my back every Sunday morning. One o’ my managers in Luton, ‘e got less than ‘alf o’ what you’re getting, an’ ‘e used to cut my ‘air every week.... You’re not ‘andy miv a pair scissors by any chance?”
“Not very. Seriously, how much?”
“It’s a gentleman’s life. It’s a chance in a million. A lot o’ people I know miv university edyacations would pay a premium to learn show biz from Sam Yudenow. An’ ‘ere you are, a beginner, an’ I’m paying you wages like a prince. What more could you want?”
“How much was it you said?”
“I don’t know why I should, but I like you. Speak any foreign languages?”
“French, Spanish, German.”
“Forget ‘em. Well, seeing it’s you, Laventry, I’ll make it forty-five shillings a week. That puts you in the upper brackets rahnd ‘ere. Only don’t tell anybody ‘ow much I’m paying you—they’ll all want a rise. If Mrs. Yudenow should ask, ‘Confidentially, Mr. Carlton, ‘ow much is Sam paying you?’I want you should keep a straight face an’ take the Bible in your right and an’ say, ‘Mrs. Yudenow, I swear on this ‘ere Book that I’m not getting a penny more than thirty-seven-and-six.’ There’s a Bible in the office, only the inside’s been cut out to make a cigar box. Is your mother living?” “Yes,” I said.
“In that case, you can say also, I swear on my mother’s grave.’ If she ain’t got one, it can’t ‘urt. Your father dead? ‘E is? Then you can say, ‘May I never shake ‘ands miv my father again, Mrs. Yudenow!’But I want you should keep your fingers crossed at the same time because I never lie to Mrs. Yudenow. She always finds out. Where do you five?”
“My address,” I said evasively, “is Poste Restante, Charing Cross.”
“Give ‘em notice. Why should you work for a West End landlord? Or if you got a
long lease, sublet. I like my managers should be on top o’ the job. So if you like, I can fix it up miv Costas you should ‘ave a room ‘ere an’ breakfast for ten shillings a week.” He cupped a hand over his ear and listened intently for a second. “‘Ear that chirpy noise? It’s the critics rahnd the stove.”
“Crickets?”
“I said critics, diddle I? Some people say they’re lucky. When you got nothing else to do Sundays, trap ‘em. Borrow a pisspot, an’ put some crumbs at the bottom. They jump in an’ eat themselves sick, the uncivilized little bastards, an’ then they can’t get out. When you got a pound or two of ‘em, chunk ‘em into Godbolt’s. I dare say you’re quick miv your ‘ands. Catch fleas. Buy for a penny a tin pea-shooter. Get two bits cotton wool to plug it up. When you got a tubeful—an’ you’d be surprised ‘ow long those little buggers can live mivout food—go over to God-bolt’s in the dead night, an’ blow ‘em thvough the keyhole. Only be sure to draw a deep breath before you blow. That bastard Booligan didn’t an’ for days ‘e was complaining of a tickling in the thvoat.... Bedbugs, they’re easy to catch. Fill up a paper cone; undo this cone an’ drop the lot thvough Godbolt’s letterbox. As I calculate, if only one in five gets into the woodwork, that’s good enough. An’ on no account drown rats. I got a wire ‘Catch-’Em-Alive-O’ trap in the cellar: its capacity is four. When it’s full, take it to Godbolt’s letterbox an’ open the trap. Stir ‘em up miv a sharp pencil an’ in they go. There’s a pencil sharpener in the office. Now
