by Gerald Kersh
“Bloody marvelous what old horse?”
“Charley, the old ‘orse we keep in there. Just like a ‘uman bean. You wouldn’t think an ‘orse could sink so low, would you? It’s bloody marvelous!”
“So low as what?”
“You know a lion eats twenty-eight pounds of ‘orse meat at a sitting? Well, every day, more or less, we slaughter an ‘orse. Well, you know an ‘orse ‘ates the smell o’ blood, specially ‘orse blood? Well, old as they are, these ‘ere old ‘orses balk like ‘ell at the slaughter ‘ouse. Well, that’s where old Charley comes in. Twenty-two years old, ‘e is, and a bloody nuisance to ‘imself, but ‘e rubs along gettin’ a livin’ as a sort of a nark. Charley gives a kind of a whinny over ‘is shoulder, as much as to say, It’s all okay, chum, foller me and see.’ Walks into the slaughter’ ouse. Other ‘orse calms down an’ foilers ‘im in. Biff, bang, wallop! A ‘umane killer right in the conk, and down ‘e goes in all bloody directions like a carpenter’s ruler. While Charley walks out the other side and ‘as ‘is breakfast. Marvelous!” “Lucky horse,” I said.
“In a ‘uman bean, you’d think nothink of it. But in an ‘orse it’s bloody marvelous.” “It only goes to show.”
“It do, don’t it?” said this pestilential man, and hiccuped slightly. “My eldest gel married a farmer, and she sent me a flitch o’ bacon from Wiltshire. I overate meself this morning.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“The Frenchies eat ‘orse flesh. So do the Belgiums.”
“They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
“And frogs. Snakes eat frogs too. Bloody marvelous!” He chuckled. “One o’ these fine mornings, though, old Charley’s goin to git the surprise of ‘is life. ‘E’ll walk in as usual, only this time the other ‘orse’ll be in front of ‘im. I bet old Charley’ll ‘ave taught ‘im ‘is job, too. I’d like to see the expression on poor old Charley’s face when they say, ‘Wait a minute, Charley—’ I bet ‘e’ll eat tough.”
You have to be in just the right state of physical and mental balance not to be nauseated, or maddened, by the fundamentals—food and sex—and the whole cosmos, it seems, is generally in a conspiracy to rub you up the wrong way in these matters. If you hunger for physical love, the world is as full of full-blown female buttocks as a baby’s pipe is of bubbles; you may look and yearn, but you may not touch. An invisible portcullis has been let fall between you and your desire. Come away, satiated with the embraces of some object of your affection, and (as if you have invented a new kind of man) all womankind will make tracks for you. Again: Eat your fill of your favorite food— eat ad nauseam—and wherever you turn you will encounter the sight or the smell of it, or hear some voluptuous talk of it, to turn your stomach. Fast, dream lustfully of how right your good mother was when, after you turned your nose up at fat mutton broth, she said, “You may be glad of it someday”—brood over the semolina you rejected, the custards you had to be bribed to eat, and so forth—and wherever you turn there is sure to be some malevolent spirit in the form of a park-keeper, or what not, talking food, food, food!
It is all very well for one of these martyrs you read about to go on a hunger strike. He has a cause; somewhere, somebody goes hungry with him out of sympathy; benevolent jailers coax him with steaming broth, et cetera. In any case, he knows perfectly well that a man, lying still, and upheld by his belief that the show must go on, can prolong his dying a couple of months on nothing but water. An Irishman out of the I.R.A. (it took him thirty years to eat himself to death in America on the strength of it) told me how he once went on a twenty-day hunger strike in prison. The first seven days, he said, were the worst; after which, the gnawing pain in the stomach having subsided, there was no discomfort but a feeling of lightness, of freedom from the flesh. Very likely. But mine was a one-man hunger strike, and I was full of an urgent desire to live. Furthermore, not yet having fully grown, all my tissues seemed to scratch and scream for nourishment. Yet again, I had no one to show off to.
And here, depression notwithstanding, was a world full of food, an atmosphere full of roars in anticipation of food, down-trodden minorities talking about Wiltshire bacon.... I walked to the lake in Regents Park with, I believe, some mad idea of stealing a duck. No doubt I was lightheaded with hunger; floating away from my body. All the ducks were gathered about an eccentric old lady in withered skirts who was throwing them bits of cake. I toyed with the idea of going up to her and saying, “Madame, I am Curator of Ducks. It is strictly forbidden to feed ducks with cake. A duck, as you know, has a special kind of digestive system. Cake is deadly poison to the duck. I am afraid I must confiscate that bag; and think yourself lucky!” But my nerve failed me.
I walked, with dignity, to a drinking fountain, washed my face, filled myself up with water, and walked, swinging that nuisance of a cane, into Baker Street. Where does one go from Baker Street? Why, to Orchard Street, and thence to Oxford Street. The restaurants were warming up. I hurried along, paused, and, for want of something better to do, asked a policeman if he could direct me to the British Museum. I pretended to speak little English; he held up the traffic while he pointed the way. So I walked eastward, window-shopping in the provision stores, until I reached Museum Street and so came to the museum, and sat for a while where the Easter Island monoliths are, wishing that I were a pigeon: a crop-filled, amorous, law-abiding pigeon, subject to no rules and protected by the state. Soon I went inside for another drink of water. A party of students was being conducted around the room on the ground floor where the Egyptian statues are. Now here you may find a certain glass case containing statuettes; look through it at a certain angle, and an empty granite sarcophagus twenty feet away is mysteriously filled with the image of the god Anubis, or it may be Thoth. It is a trick of reflection. Here was an inspiration—I might make a couple of shillings by pointing this out. Hanging on the fringes of the crowd, I hemmed and I hawed, and prepared my little speech; but nothing came out. The guide, who had been looking at me suspiciously, said, “Are you aware that this is a privately conducted party?”
I said, “Of course. I mean, no.”
Then I went to the gallery, to look at that colossal mask of Rameses which hypnotizes with its blind eyes by virtue of sheer hugeness; it is just great enough, and small enough, for you to see in all its immensity from a distance of a few yards—if you get the right angle.
At this I stared and stared, until the stone eyes blinked and I had hypnotized the granite mask. But then I fell in spirals and awoke with a start. One of the attendants was tapping me gently on the shoulder and saying, “I’m sorry, sir, you’re not supposed to sleep here, sir.”
I said, “What do you mean, sleep? I was thinking.”
“Ah, you want the library,” he said.
In the lavatory, where I went for another drink of water, I saw my reflection in a mirror. These British Museum lavatory mirrors will impart to the best nourished and most carefully nurtured face a ghastly gray archaeological look. As I believe I have mentioned, I am no oil painting at the best of times; now I had a two-day beard. I hurried out and walked again. Now I might quite easily, without shame, have dropped in on any of four or five relatives, or one or two prosperous friends. It was lunchtime. It would be: “Why, Daniel, my boy! How are you? Just in time for a bite. Have a chop, have a chicken, have a lobster!”—“No, no, not a morsel!”—“Come on, Dan, have a saddle-bag: twelve juicy oysters sewn up in a thick filet of steak and grilled until the bubbles come out at the seams?”—“Oh, well, fust a corner, since you insist.”—“Glass of burgundy?”—“Oh, no, really! Well, perhaps ...” It would have been like that, only pride held me back; they would have looked at the state of my chin and my shirt, and somebody would have said, “If only Daniel had listened to his Uncle Hugh!”
Rain was coming down in an uneasy, sporadic drizzle; evidently the weather was getting set to make a day of it, just out of spite. I wandered into Soho, where there were several men on the loose who owed me money or mon
ey’s worth. But I could not bring myself to within the breadth of a street of where any of them might be found; I don’t know why. At last I found myself—all roads led to food—in that market place between Berwick Street and Brewer Street. The city seemed to be bursting with a plethora of agonizingly appetizing food. The barrowmen were shouting, begging and pleading with passers-by to take the stuff away just for a few pence. The butcher’s shop there had more meat than it knew what to do with; but I think that it was the smell of the cheesemonger’s that tipped the balance. I put out my finger to stroke a beautiful round Dutch cheese, not much larger than a grapefruit; it had a waxy surface, which was so pleasant to the touch that I must have stood there for some moments in the attitude of that Philosopher with a skull, in the picture; until a black-browed man in a white coat came and stared me out of countenance. I went away toward the Cafe Royal, but here, too, the air was dense with the aromatic steam of food. So, via Shaftesbury Avenue, I arrived again at the market and stopped to look at a barrow-load of oblong tin cans under a sign which said:
BARGAIN! BARGAIN! BARGAIN!
TINNED HERRINGS IN
MUSTARD SAUCE!
per 2 1/2d tin!
For some reason this twopence-halfpenny per tin drove me into a state of unreasoning anger. The triviality of the sum belittled the magnitude of my hunger; it mocked at my misery. “Twopenny-halfpenny” is a denigratory term, anyway: I have seen a Cockney woman sneering off all the “bitches” and “whores” her neighbor could lay her tongue to, but it took four policemen to hold her after she had been called “a tuppenny-ha’ penny creature.” What is more, the heartiness of the salesman was getting on my nerves. He kept shouting, “Ooo, they’re delicious, mum! Ooo, they’re scrumptious! Yum-yum! Ooo, won’t yer old man give you a lovely cuddle if you bring ‘im ‘ome luscious ‘errings in descruptious mustard sauce for ‘is nice little tea! They’re degor-geous, they’re scruscious, they melt in the marf, they’re degesti-ble, all the way from ‘Olland! Tuppence-ha’ penny! Tuppence-ha’ penny! Tuppence-ha’ penny!” I wanted to kill that man, to tear him into little pieces. By way of a compromise, out of my great need, I decided to rob him. One of his innumerable tins of twopenny-halfpenny herring was balanced on the edge of the stall so that a touch might send it into the gutter. My plan was to brush it with my sleeve in passing and later, when nobody was looking, pick it up and carry it off. At present it seemed to me that the eyes of all the world were focused upon me.
The man went on, in a voice that went through and through me: “Delicious mustard sauce, mind you! Deluscious, degor-geous, degestible—it warms the cockles! Rub it on yer chest, rub it on yer feet—it cures ipsy-pipsy, pyorrhea, female ailments, lack of appetite, and the gout! Tuppence-ha’ penny, gels! tuppence-ha’ penny!”
This was rather too much. Taking careful aim with my cuff, I brushed the balanced tin of herrings. It fell right back onto the stall. Believe me, anyone who tells you that hunger sharpens the senses ought to try it and see. But now my blood was up, and I was determined to get that tin of herrings and no other; so I picked it up boldly, scrutinized it with what I believed to be an air of mild amusement mixed with a certain disdain—all this with an eye on the salesman, whose detestable patter had attracted several customers. I took the tin by one corner, between thumb and forefinger; glancing left and right, convinced now that nobody was looking at me, I dropped it into my pocket and turned to go away—when I found myself staring at a silver-buttoned blue tunic which seemed vast as a night full of stars, and there stood the biggest policeman I had ever seen. From the boss of his helmet to the iron heels of his immense boots, he must have measured some six feet eight, and the expression of his face was such that I lost all hope. Drowning men are supposed, in a flash of recollection, to relive their pasts. (This, by the way, is untrue; I have nearly drowned twice, and I know.) I, in a prophetic flash, suffered the agonies of the future: I saw a shambling, shamefaced man, prematurely stooped, standing in a cemetery, weeping bitterly, while someone said in a penetrating whisper, “That is the ex-convict, Daniel Laverock. If only he had taken the advice of his Uncle Hugh, he would not have brought his mother’s gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.”
I said to the policeman, “Which is the way to the British Museum?”
The policeman’s fist came up, clenched, from under the skirt of his tunic, and I stared at it, fascinated, for it was covered to the second joints of the fingers with black hair.
But then something remarkable happened. A girl took me by the arm and cried, in a high, clear voice, “Oh, there you are! Did you get the herrings?” And she slipped sixpence into my hand and pulled me toward the salesman. I looked back and caught one last glimpse of the policeman. His hairy fingers, uncurled, revealed what he had been about to let me have with that formidable fist—the price of a tin of herrings in mustard sauce, two pennies and a halfpenny. As in a dream, I took out my stolen herrings, held them up for all the world to see, and gave the sixpence to the salesman, saying in a feverish and hysterical way, “Delectable. Try delectable.”
He said, “Well, strike me lucky, I never thought o’ that one! Does it mean good to eat? ... Oh, it do, do it? Gawd stone me for adultery!”
I said, “There is also deglutition.”
“Well, bastardize me for a row o’ pins! Take your tanner back—keep the ‘errings—’elp yourself to a few tins more.... Come on, gels, they’re delectable! They’re deglutitious! All the way from Amsterdam, and Amsterdam sight better deglutition than you’ll get in this delectable town!... ‘Elp yourself, guv.... Ooo, de—”
I picked up three more tins, making four now, and offered the whole lot together with sixpence to the girl. “You see how easy it is—four tins of herrings to the good,” I said, trying to be flippant. “Now let me show you how to crack a safe. All we need is nitroglycerine. If you have no nitroglycerine about you, dynamite will do. We’ll try it out, as we say in the Underworld—a stick of dynamite, a gas ring, and a double boiler, and I can try out the soup in any stick.” I must have been in that state of low fever when sensation really does float away, and reason is free to wander. I went on: “Better yet—let us get hold of the metal tops of soda-water siphons and make counterfeit half crowns. But first we must find a dentist who will lend us prepared gypsum for molds. The next step, of course, is to borrow a real half crown to copy. Thus, I get a stake, and get my face lifted, so that I can go back to my trade, which is the Confidence Trick. Get it, moll? ... Everything would have been all right if my head hadn’t got caught in the potato-peeling machine when I was working in the kitchen in Pentonville.”
I expected her to burst out laughing. Instead, she said, “I suppose you know that all this leads nowhere? You know, you can’t get out of life more than you put into it. You must give this up.”
“Right-handed,” I replied, holding up my mutilated left hand and talking in a tone of exaggerated bitterness. “Oh, yeah? And what did life give me? I was the best left-handed forger in the racket until my finger was bitten off by a shark.”
You must understand that in the circles in which I had been used to moving we used to talk like that. We thought it was funny. No word was allowed to convey its proper meaning or was uttered without a certain note of irony. We went in for a kind of tonal double-talk—a manner of cowardly equivocation by expressions of face and voice. For example, we never said love, but lerve; and crime was not crime, but cur-rye-um. In any case a mock-serious look followed, and a snigger, to indicate that whatever we said, right or wrong, we didn’t mean a word of it. This is the way of the joker: the way of the comic-strip rabbit that mocks the hound from the mouth of a little hole, brave in the knowledge that behind him lies a complex of devious narrow tunnels, impassable to any creature bigger than himself. He always has some way of escape in the back doubles of the preposterous.
I expected her to laugh, but she was deadly serious. She said, “Why, you poor man—you stole because you were hungry.”
Trying despera
tely hard to keep it up, I said, “Don’t you believe it. Just to keep my hand in. I’m in training for a bank vault-starting small with a tin of herrings.”
Then—it may have been hunger, or exhaustion, or shame, or all three—something caught me by the throat, and I choked.
She got me into a taxi in the nick of time; no sooner had the door slammed when I found myself sobbing thanks and gasping apologies, while she was stroking my head and calling me a poor fellow, and holding her handkerchief to my nose and saying, “There, there—blow!”
Pride had its fall indeed, that day.
Afew minutes passed before the dimness was out of my eyes, so that I could see her clearly. Hers was a difficult face to categorize or describe. My first impression of it was that she had admired a very different sort of face in her childhood, and had spent a good deal of time trying to mold hers accordingly. Her expression was intended to be haughty, aloof, disinterested, blase—the expression of the vamp, the femme fatale. But it didn’t quite come off. From time to time, in her smooth pale cheeks, little dimpled imprints would appear and disappear, as if a ghostly conflict was going on there as Vanity locked horns with laughter. Her eyes, which were blue and extraordinarily large, were fixed in what she intended to be a deadly, hypnotic glare— which, however, ended up as a look of startled interest, of concentrated engrossment. It was her hair that fascinated me, just then.
Now how do you describe hair? Generally, in terms of minerals and vegetables—copper, ebony, gold, chestnut, silver, carrots, bronze, corn, and what not. Her hair resembled nothing so much as that Manzanita wood which the artistic photographers used to take pictures of from every angle, with grave reference to “Art Forms in Nature.” Manzanita has since become the pride and joy of lamp designers, interior decorators, and other rabble. It has no color, but only form, suggestive of struggle against the elements. Sand-blasted, sun-struck, wind-beaten, fiber clings to writhing fiber, artfully tortuous, subtly stubborn. It seems to say, Life, do what you will with me—twist me, turn me, freeze me, burn me—I know where I am going! An inspired doodle, suggestive of something that has refused, pointblank, to live the easy way and has suffered accordingly— such is Manzanita, and that is what this girl’s hair looked like. She had tried to cut it off at the nape of her neck, but it had clenched itself into a defiant knot there, seemingly of its own stubborn will.
