by Gerald Kersh
“‘Ave you eaten yet this morning?”
“Why?”
“You should ‘ave ‘ad a sandwich,” said Copper Baldwin, with his sour smile. “‘Unger, love, et cetera. A fat lot you know about that, I bet.”
If there had been time, I would have told Copper Baldwin that I knew a devil of a lot about all kinds of things. I might have said, for example, that, young as I was, hunger had already led me into crime, and thence to love; and that this love was leading me back to crime again; and that the whole mess had its germ in sheer stubborn pride. By “crime” I do not mean anything that would cast a man out from decent society. It depends, of course, what you mean by “decent society.” Decency, in society, is measured in strange ways. It is weighed in terms according to your capacity to foot the bill. Innocence goes in inverse proportion to need. If a tramp knocks a rich man down and takes his wallet, that is robbery with violence; if a rich man knocks a tramp down and takes his hat, that is an escapade.
It had happened two years before, when I was still in my twenty-second year and had already frittered away my tiny patrimony in a crackbrained money-making scheme that had been evolved in a Soho cafe by a man named Barron (or, as I put it, “lost my small fortune by untimely speculation”). I used to spend night after night in the cafes around Old Compton Street listening to all kinds of interesting conversation. Barron fascinated me. There was something godlike about the man’s tremendous scorn for the reading public—and for the writing public, and the arithmetic public too, for that matter. He could prove, conclusively, that everyone was a fool. According to him, he got a living out of the bigger bookshops in Charing Cross Road. The process was so simple that I wondered why everybody didn’t do it: all you did was walk in, go to the Latest Biographies shelves, pick up a twenty-five-shilling book, carry it without paying for it, of course, to the Books Bought Department on the second floor, and sell it for half a guinea. The booksellers hugged themselves at the thought of having cheated you, you hugged yourself at the thought of having cheated the booksellers, and everybody was happy.
Another trick of Barron’s, which he confided to me, was equally simple and, by his irresistibly persuasive reasoning, highly moral. He would put on a pair of earrings and, carrying some cigar boxes under his arm, stand outside some newly opened shop, scratching his head and looking hopelessly bewildered. Eventually the shopkeeper would ask him if he could be of any assistance; whereupon Barron, simulating acute embarrassment, would say that he was looking for a man named Rose who used to live there—you know, Mister Rose, the connoisseur of fine cigars. He, Barron, was a seafaring man just back from Cuba and had smuggled past the Customs a matter of two hundred and fifty fine Coronas worth five shillings apiece, which Mr. Rose generally took off him for a fiver the lot. It was highly illegal, of course, and strictly hush-hush. But with no Mr. Rose, what the devil was he going to do with all these fine cigars? Would the gentleman like to try one and see? The gentleman would, and the gentleman did, and ended by beating the poor old seafaring man down to three pounds for five cigar boxes full of brown paper. (Why brown paper, God knows; somehow, Barron made it sound cleverer that way.) He was full of such tricks; as he talked of them in his haughty drawl they sounded, as it were, evangelic—he was a kind of practical missionary demonstrating that dishonesty does not pay. You do not have to cheat people, he told me; leave them alone and they will cheat themselves....
But he had a legitimate scheme for making money, real money, he told me. What was the one thing a person borrowed that he invariably returned? A book. Why did he return this book to a library? Because there was always a crying need for something trashy to read. Start Circulating Libraries, said Barron, stocked with popular tripe, all in their dust jackets with celluloid covers; twopence per volume per week and no deposit! There was a fortune in that. Ninety per cent of the buying would be on credit, of course; that was easy; one had only to start a limited company with a registered office and embossed notepaper. Heavily embossed. Even the stationery could be got on credit, and the shelves, filing cabinets, et cetera. Unhappily, ready cash was needed for the rent of premises in populous areas—in the City, for example, where clerks and typists worked; and in the suburbs where, starved for love and adventure, they dreamed away their evenings over the claptrap of Rafael Sabatini and Jeffrey Farnol, and the musky goosh of Elinor Glyn and Ethel M. Dell.... As Barron calculated, such an investment would pay about ninety-five shillings in the pound—not fantastic, perhaps, but steady. All the proprietor would have to do would be ride from branch to branch and collect the takings in a heavy leather bag. You would need a safe, of course; but that was one thing you could always get on credit. Nobody ever ran away with a safe....
The idea enchanted me. And so it came to pass, one bitter Saturday six months later, that I found myself faint with hunger in the British Museum with nothing in my pocket but a dirty handkerchief and that feeling of sick desperation in the heart that comes to a healthy young man when he has slept out of doors and had nothing to eat for seventy-two hours. It seems that Barron had met a helpless old lady in a Temperance Hotel near Russell Square. She had three hundred and fifty pounds in golden sovereigns saved up. Someone had told her that the surrender value of a golden pound was now twenty-five shillings. Did Barron know of an honest goldsmith? Now the value of a sovereign had risen almost overnight to twenty-eight and sixpence. Barron bought the old lady’s hoard for twenty-five shillings apiece. When he opened the wash-leather bag he found three hundred and fifty of those lead disks with which tailors used to weight women’s skirts. The old lady from the country, I may add, turned out to be an ex-girlfriend of Eddie Guerin’s, a notorious character who sold the diamonds out of her front teeth to help him escape from Devil’s Island and later, in France, was acquitted by an emotional jury on a charge of killing her mulatto lover by throwing him off the Eiffel Tower. But Barron, it transpired, was not a trickster at all; he was an unemployed shorthand writer out of Temple Bar who lived on the earnings of his mother, who had a little hand laundry in Paradise Street, Marylebone. That is how I lost the thousand pounds I inherited from my grandmother when I came of age. We did open the “main branch” of Laverock Libraries Limited, off High Holborn, and did, indeed, a brisk business. Fourteen hundred books were borrowed in the first day. Only ninety-seven were returned, and three of these were hopelessly stained with tea-and-cocoa rings.
I took this failure hard. The loss of the money did not move me very deeply; after all, I hadn’t really seen it, and didn’t know it, except to say hello and good-by to. But my pride was hurt. When I came home one day and told my mother that I was going to put my capital into a chain of Circulating Libraries, she said something like “I don’t know anything at all about anything whatsoever, Daniel; but in the very nature of things, whatever you do of your own initiative must lead to disaster in the end. Your arguments are perfectly sound, I am sure. But for goodness gracious sake, don’t, unless you are determined to bring my gray hairs in sorrow to the grave—which may be at any moment now....” Then she went behind my back and called in my Uncle Hugh, who, when I told him what I intended to do, sniffed suspiciously at my breath and said in effect, “I am thirty-five years older than you, and therefore know better. I have spent thirty years in the City, and I can assure you that it won’t work.”
When I said, with some bitterness, “They laughed at Marconi, too,” he replied, “And rightly so—the fellow got roundly swindled, and serves him right. You can take it from me, young man—and, as a solicitor, I may claim to have some experience of human nature—nobody who gets a brand-new seven-and-six-penny book for twopence down and no deposit is ever going to return it.” I told him that this was unthinkable because Property of Laverock Libraries Limited would be plainly marked in every volume with a rubber stamp. He laughed at that, and my poor mother, clutching at a word, kept saying, “Oh, Daniel, you must have a deposit!”
Then my Uncle Hugh said, “My advice to you, my boy, is this: Put that tho
usand pounds of yours into Fabricated Utilities and leave it there two years. Meanwhile, we’ll get you a job with prospects. Otherwise, I can see you spending the night in jail for stealing apples off a barrow. This Mr. Barron of yours is evidently nothing but a petty adventurer.” I cried out that he was nothing of the sort, and my mother said, “He may be a nice man, but!” I shouted that Barron was not a very nice man and there were to be no buts. Uncle Hugh said, “Oh, very well, Daniel, throw away your thousand pounds, and then, perhaps, you’ll take my advice.”
My mother cried, “Oh, Daniel, don’t throw away your thousand pounds. Do take your Uncle Hugh’s advice!”
“I will follow my instincts,” I said. “They laughed at Sir Isaac Newton.”
My uncle said, “And quite right, too, since the merest German Jew—one Einstein—has proved him wrong!”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Figures prove it,” said my Uncle Hugh. “There is a law, Daniel, a certain law.”
After some thought, I said, “Look at the Middle Ages!” But my Uncle Hugh said that these were not the Middle Ages, and that this was the time to buy Fabricated Utilities at 1 1/4. My mother cried, “Buy Fabricated Utilities, Daniel, if only a few!” But I would not. In eighteen months, the Ordinary shares of Fabricated Utilities rose from 1 1/4 to 8 3/4, and I bitterly regretted never having listened to my Uncle Hugh’s excellent advice. Everything was as he had foreseen it; and even my mother was right. I became an outcast, a wanderer. I became a Minority of One, with only myself to consider. Pride took hold of me. If I had gone to my Uncle Hugh and said, “All right, Uncle, you were right and I was wrong. Let’s have that job,” he would have taken me to lunch at Sweeting’s and staked me to a couple of new suits; and my mother, writing off a pigheaded streak in me to the debit of my father’s ancestors, would have thanked God that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
But I could not do it. It wasn’t in me to go back with my tail between my legs. If my Uncle Hugh had only known it, I had given him the wherewithal to say, “I told you so,” and with a vengeance. But I took good care that he should not know it. There is something humiliating, sometimes, in a display of penitence; and always something disgusting in a show of misery. It corrupts, it is indecent, it is bad for the soul.
Live or die your own way, I say.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: The next person who saves my life does so over my dead body....
5
BECAUSE, AFTER all is said and done, a man has his pride—or at least a certain decent habit of self-continence. But do you know what? The “harsh realities” that jostle him from point to point are matters for a healthy man to laugh off; he lives, at his fullest, in essentially imaginary noble quarrels, fierce triumphs, and saintly defeats.
Especially in the small hours, from the kind of people that like to spill their souls, I have heard a lot of talk about loneliness; and to deal plainly with you, I don’t believe in it. There is no such thing as one person alone— this side Colney Hatch, where the lunatic asylum is. I went there once to pay a visit to a melancholic, bringing him a harmless, nourishing, and beautiful bunch of grapes. An imbecile would have played with them. A maniac would have trampled on them. The melancholy madman did neither, but just looked at them without seeing. He had achieved—largely through wanting to escape—complete solitude, the last word in self-containment. You see, he was within himself, sold to himself.... Believe me, as long as a man knows that he is lonely, he is not alone; he is still fumbling the void for an imaginary companion, of no matter what sort.
It takes three to make a person—himself, a friend, and an enemy—even when he is in the self-imposed solitary confinement romantically known as Loneliness.
Most of your Great Lonely Souls, so-called, are nothing but stubborn babies crying to be picked up. And that is what I was, animated as I thought by manly pride. Manly pride? Frantic childishness refusing its supper in order to be coaxed and willfully hurting itself just a little for the sake of a lot of bandaging and cosseting; trying to make a virtue of an error, presuming on my childishness. A great sin, that: to wet your bed to water the seeds of guilt in your elders! I should have known better. Mine was something like the story of Little Trott, over whom I wept reading it in the Children’s Encyclopedia. His mother having the presumption to suckle his newborn sister, Trott threw himself off a high-backed chair and bumped his head, whereupon he was taken back to the maternal bosom and to the paternal mustache discreetly redolent of toilet water. A swift slap in the jaw is what Little Trott wanted. So did I. To my horror, I got it self-administered.
Walking into the Pantheon, I felt that this was no time to treat Copper Baldwin with reminiscence (or what the critics call a flashback) but I knew what I thought I knew, and smiled at him—mysteriously. I was thinking about my pride, and it seemed to me that I was a hell of a fellow, and little he knew. Hunger, love, et cetera—I could show Copper a thing or two if I chose!
When the last of my valuables went up the spout, as the saying goes, and my landlady told me that, whereas she had all the faith in the world in my prospects, unless I let her have a little something on account there was a gentleman from Leicester in steady work who needed my room, I pressed my tie by putting it between two sheets of damp cardboard and sitting on it for two hours, and steamed my hat with the last of a pennyworth of gas; said that I would return in due course to settle my little account and every inch a gentleman, went my way down the windswept road of the night. Loneliness? I asked for it; it was romantic.
Mine was the pride of the eagle (that filthy bird which lives on mice and leavings) that brooked no company. Craggy was the word for my hauteur when I refused to have anything to do with other down-and-outs, when the Depression was going strong and if I had gone and sat on a bench on the Embankment where I belonged I might have got a cup of cocoa, a pie, a lecture, a couple of cigarettes, and a blessing. I tried it once, being parched and starved, but Pride stepped in the way. Cocoa, as a beverage, I detest; but I was cold and hungry, and no steam ever smelled more delicious. There was also a promising-looking oblong packet containing, as it had been whispered, a sandwich, five Woodbines, a piece of slab-cake, and a tract full of useful information about the Second Coming and Repent Ere It Is Too Late. Also, a bit of soap—to which I was particularly looking forward. But when it came to my turn I said to the lady with the packet, “No, no, thanks all the same—really, I couldn’t dream...” Taken at my word, I went away empty—emptier, I believed, than any human vessel had ever been before—and walked away and away, drinking saliva until on the stroke of two I remembered that there is a little gate near the zoo through which the park keepers pass and the mysterious tradesmen who carry in the carcasses of horses they cut up for the hyenas. To this gate, twirling my cane m an elegant manner, I made my way hoping that if I were seen I might be mistaken for some gay young man-about-town seeing life.
This part of Regents Park borders on Primrose Hill. “The Scotchman’s Zoo” they call it, because here is Monkey Hill where the baboons live and publicly perform certain acts which the local girls, peeping between their fingers, describe as disgusting. To this part of the Zoological Gardens are relegated the creatures that once were beasts— an old wild boar, undistinguishable, until it breaks wind, from the winter mud or the summer dust; one or two scabby dogs of the dhole or dingo variety, I forget which; a moth-eaten bison, a discouraged antelope, et cetera. You could look at them free any time the park was open; that is why this part of the place was called “The Scotchman’s Zoo.”
Well, as I had foreseen, the little gate was ajar, so I went into Regents Park and sat down, not far from the Lion House, to doze away the rest of the darkness on a bench, leaning on my cane—an elegant old malacca with an ivory knob which was still in my possession for three reasons: nobody would buy it, I could not give it away, and whenever I tried to lose it someone always brought it back to me. There was thunder in the air, and the great cats were restless
. A lion roared first of all, and then a tiger; whereupon a leopard made a noise like a blunt saw going through plywood, and all the monkeys began to scream and chatter in terror, while my empty stomach grumbled in sympathy. Soon a man came by shoving a wheelbarrow.
“‘Ow’d you git in?” he asked.
“Climbed over the railings,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to,” he said.
I said, “Breath of air.”
“‘Ark at the lions. ‘Ear ‘em?”
“I thought I noticed something roaring.”
“They smell blood, you know.”
“Do they? What blood?” I asked.
The man was fragrant with breakfast bacon; I wished he would go away. But he lingered, and said, “‘Orse blood. They’ll be knocking orf an ‘orse just about now, aginst feeding time. Bloody marvelous, that old ‘orse.”
