Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

  “You go upstairs and ‘ave a nice rest, and tell it to Mr. Yudenow,” said Copper Baldwin. “Eh, Mr. Laverock?”

  “There is a blue light in the generator room,” I said. “He’s impressionable, Mr. Eena. You never can tell where it might lead.”

  “Well, I’ll pull a few faces for him, if you like,” said

  Eena.

  Copper Baldwin said, “That’s right. You cover your nose with your lip.”

  “I can touch my forrid with my tongue,” said Eena.

  I said, “By all means.”

  So I showed him to the gentlemen’s dressing room, where he immediately unpacked his suitcase. His wardrobe consisted of a little girl’s party dress with frilly bloomers, a wig of blond corkscrew curls, silver-buckled shoes, and a Dracula cloak.

  When I got back into the hall, Copper Baldwin said to me, “I think you kind o’ bring me luck. I ‘aven’t laughed so much since Father died.”

  “Tell me, Copper, what does Sam Yudenow do with his contortionists and what not?”

  “If you want my candid opinion, cocko—nothing.”

  “Tell me something else, Copper. Where did you get all your education?” I asked.

  He said, “It come natural to me. I told you, my mother was a finder o’ the pure.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Pure, son, is dog’s dung. It’s best ‘and-picked, and in the better quarters o’ the town, or round the posh kennels.”

  “What do they use it for? Growing flowers?” I asked.

  “Gawd, no! Pure is death to flowers. But it’s the only thing you can possibly treat Russia leather with. Dog’s dung and no other dung’s got some chemical principle in it that makes Russia leather supple and fragrant. The best sort was worth a few pence a pound, and it ‘ad to be picked by ‘and so you knew what you was getting. None o’ your biscuit-fed pure would do, nor your bone-eating pure. The real meat-fed stuff with body in it.... Didn’t you know that? It’s still in use, but Gawd knows who collects it. My father was a finder in the sewers. But I’ll tell you all about that some other time, one o’ these days.... The old woman put a bit by, and when she got too rheumatic to bend, she opened a little general shop back o’ the Polygon. Well, there was the garret going empty, so she lets it to some old geezer that was writing a book. Don’t ask me what book. We called ‘im Old Maunder. ‘E ‘ad thousands o’ books of ‘is own, but ‘e was writing another ‘un. ‘Alf a crown a week rent Old Maunder paid—earned it addressing envelopes. I used to go up, when my old man wasn’t about, and bring ‘im a bit o’ cake, or something, from my old woman, and sweep up a bit. My old woman covered up for ‘im; ‘e never paid no rent for the last few months, and my old man would never ‘ave stood for that. (My old man lost ‘is nerve when ‘e was attacked by rats in the sewer by Lambeth and didn’t do much.) So this Old Maunder used to tell me stories—the Glory that was This, and the Grandeur that was That, and so on—and I soaked it up.

  “‘Abit-forming. My old woman dies, and I know what’s going o ‘appen to Old Maunder then, and to all ‘is books, sick as ‘e vas. That’s what made me cry, when they buried the old woman, slot ‘er. She was as good to me as she knew W to be, which vasn’t very; but we all got to go sometime. I could see poor old Maunder out in the street, and ‘is books ... Well, anyway, I sold papers, I run errands for a few pence, which I give my old man. But every Sunday I got up five o’clock in the morning ‘nd walked out to ‘Ighgate, where the fat man they called Jolly Rhino ‘ad his pub and ‘playing fields.’Also, roundabouts and swings and coconut shies, and all that. Champions was bred there, yes. But ‘undreds was ruined. One o’ Jolly’s big attractions was the ‘Junior Events’—which meant to say, two twelve-year-old boys fought it to a finish wiv gloves in a ring. The winner got ‘alf a crown and ‘is dinner, apart from praps a few tips—what they called ‘ring money’—chucked into the ring if ‘e was ‘specially good. Loser take nothing, and a bloody good hiding. Unless ‘e was ‘specially game, in which case ‘e got ‘is dinner and ‘is fare ‘ome—because you can believe me, ‘e’d be in no condition to walk.

  “After that, a football match. Then ‘ome. I never lost a fight. They used to call me ‘The Little Eel,’I was so slippery, and I’d go ‘ome and give my old man ‘alf a crown, and tell ‘em, ‘Old Maunder’s rent.’ Generally, my old man give me a bloody good ‘iding for being out late or, if I ‘appened to ‘ave a black eye, for fighting. Because the more the bastard lost ‘is nerve, the more ferocious ‘e’d get. Typical. But in between times, I’d sneak up to sweep out Old Maunder’s place, and ‘e’d tell me about the abdication o’ Diocletian, and Shelley, and all that. I thought it was worth it, but now I doubt it.

  “One day I got a job with a furniture mover, to ‘elp ‘im take a van down to Cardiff. I always ‘ad a fight ‘and wiv ‘orses. Like ‘orses?”

  I said, “I can take them or leave them alone, Copper.”

  “Leave ‘em alone. I admire ‘em, mind you, for one thing—they don’t like people. But I despise ‘em, on the other ‘and, because they’re subservient to man. Madness is catching. All ‘orses are mad. As I was saying, my old man made me take this carrier’s job to Cardiff. Ever been to Cardiff? No? Congratulations. It was a special load, see, that couldn’t go by railway or canal—a bit to be picked up ‘ere, a bit to be dropped off there. Well, it was three weeks before I got back, and there was no more Old Maunder. It seems ‘e caught pneumonia in my absence, and died. The parish buried ‘im. My old man got all ‘is books and stuff onto a cart and sold the ‘ole bloody lot in the Farringdon Road for thirty bob. What Old Maunder was writing, Gawd alone knows, because ‘e never finished it, but there was enough of it to stuff a sofa, and the rag-and-bone man gave eighteen pence for it. That’s when I ‘ad my one real bundle with my old man. ‘E weighed fourteen stone, but it was beer fat, and ‘e was yellow. Never touched me, but I cut ‘is face open, and closed ‘is eyes, and bloodied ‘is nose—crying like a babby all the time, mind you, just out o’ temper. Then I left the ‘ouse and got a job as plumber’s mate.... You wanted to know ‘ow I got my education? Now you know.”

  “I thought you told me,” I said, “that you won a scholarship.”

  Copper Baldwin said, “So I did—could ‘ave gone to grammar school. Would ‘ave, too, if my old woman ‘ad ‘ad her way. But she was too sick with a growth in the inside, plus rheumatism, to fight my old man; ‘e wouldn’t ‘ear of it. Gave me a tanning wiv ‘is belt for daring to presume to go and pass scholarships when my own father couldn’t read or write. I got the scar to this day, on my ‘ip, where the buckle cut in ... and there was my poor old woman crying with rage, too much in pain to take a frying pan to ‘im, poor old girl....”

  “And what happened to your father, in the end?” I asked.

  “What ‘appened to your father, in the end,” said Copper Baldwin.

  “Died.... Blimey, ‘ark at Miss Noel play! Crossing ‘er ‘ands, I bet you. But wait, she’ll tail off—ginger ‘erself up with a dose o’ Red Liz and go on till she unwinds. Poor cow. I think you made a proper conquest there, son.”

  And he would not say anything more until Sam Yudenow arrived, half an hour later, saying, “Tvouble in the genevator room already? And this Eena?”

  Copper Baldwin said, “Eena’ll be in the generator room in five minutes—won’t she, Mr. Laverock?”

  I said, “Oh, definitely.”

  So Sam Yudenow went into the generator room carrying, for the look of the thing, an insulated screwdriver, while Copper Baldwin went next door and roused Eena out of a deep sleep. The Chinese Contortionist put on his Little Nell dress, but covered himself in his Dracula cloak, and came down. As they hurried past me, I heard Copper Baldwin saying, in his most affable voice, ”... Yes, touch your forehead with your tongue, by all means, and cover your Irish Rose with your lip. And you say you can dislocate your jaws? Do that, and I’ll stand you a quart....”

  Then they disappeared in the dark. If my life had de
pended an it, I could not have kept away from the door of the generator room. Copper Baldwin came out and whispered to me, “One good ‘eart attack ought to finish that twicer.... D’you ‘ear anything?”

  I could hear nothing; only I had a sense of quiet tumult in the vestibule, which I ran to investigate. There stood a hornet of a woman hunched in a mink coat and wearing a lot of precious stones. She must have been pretty, in her day; but she had the appearance of the victim of an acid-throwing outrage—if you can imagine corrosive acid thrown from the inside outward. She said to me, “You’re the new one, I suppose, are you? I am Mrs. Yudenow. Where’s my husband? ... Don’t bother to lie. I heard every word on the extension. Give me the key to the generator room!”

  I gave her my keys. She knew exactly where to go. More customers were coming in, but “To ‘ell wiv ‘em!” said Copper Baldwin. “This is an education.” Mrs. Yudenow got the right key—she knew the feel of it in the dark—twisted it, flung open the door, burst in, and began, “So, at last—” Then she let out such a scream, so high and sustained that it was later alleged that the factory hands of the locality went to dinner. She fell back in my arms unconscious. Sam Yudenow got her by the legs and said, “Give Mrs. Yudenow a lift out into the fresh air, Laventry. Copper, get a glass cold water—a glass cold water get.”

  For “fresh air” we carried her to the office and put her on the chaise longue. The Chinese Contortionist, who had followed close behind us, took off his wig and fanned her with it. She awoke with a sneeze.

  Sam Yudenow said, “Dolly, what’s the matter, what? Tell Sammy, Doll, what did somebody do to us?”

  “That face! Oh, that face!” cried Mrs. Yudenow.

  “What? Mr. Eena?” said Sam Yudenow. “A new attraction. A face is only skin deep. But this one, Dolly, is made of India rubber. I got a use for ‘im. Cashier, praps.... Eena, make again miv the ears.... Can you imagine, thvough a box-office window, such a face, for example? ... But what d’you come here for, Dolly, notmivstanding? You wanted something? Only speak!”

  Copper Baldwin said to me, “Get what I mean, Dan? You can’t win. Begin to get what I mean?”

  7

  LATER, I said to Copper Baldwin, “Look here, Copper; I get what you mean all right about Sam Yudenow. But I don’t see why I should be expected to share your hate for him. He makes me laugh, like Sairey Gamp, and Montague Tigg, and—”

  “No literature, please,” said Copper Baldwin. “Like I began to tell you, I was born and bred and brought up among these characters that your friend Charles Dickens never saw except with a police inspector at each elbow. ‘You can’t tell me nothing about bringing up children,’ the old girl says to the welfare worker. I’ve ‘ad thirteen and buried ten.’ Lovely, eh? You like population, don’t you? As I gather from your attitude, Mr. Laverock, one of ‘em might write a sonnet, or something. Okay, let ‘em breed. But you feed ‘em—I won’t. According to you, that filthy old greasy midwife is ‘charming,’ just because ‘er front teeth ‘ave rotted away and she says, ‘Put the bottle on the mankle-shelf and let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.’Instead of ‘disposed.’ But I was dragged into the bloody world by Sairey Gamp, and me and my sister were the only two that lived, out of eight. Lovely, tell your mum!

  “And by the same token, you and the rest of ‘em shove down your kids’ throats the charm of the Eatanswill election, in the Pickwick Papers. Charming. The voters was bribed and dragged to the polls blind-drunk. And the journalism was scurrilous. But that was good old English, so it was delightful, wasn’t it? Old Mr. Pickwick could get drunk as a tinker’s bitch on cold punch and chucked into the pound in a wheelbarrow. But that was character, wasn’t it? Whereas, Charles Dickens goes to America—‘e was disappointed, you know, in a Mississippi investment on which ‘e expected the Yanks to pay twenty-five hundred per cent— and when they didn’t was disgusted because they run personalities in a newspaper, drank cocktail before dinner, and rigged an Eatanswill election. ‘Umbug, bloody ‘umbug! And so are you.

  “But you cry your eyes out because Edgar Allanbloody-Poe was dragged drunk to the polls in Baltimore.... Look—did you ever ‘ear of an empire getting great on Mr. Pickwick and the Cheeryble Brothers? I mean, the spirit of innocent benevolence? Your friend Charles Dickens’s city merchants? Did you, bloody hell! You make me tired. Old Pickwick, I’ll lay you nine to two, was selling Indian opium to China. So don’t give me this stuff about Sam Yudenow amusing you. It’s literature and lies, son—fiction. Just because Sam Yudenow is such a bloody out-and-outer, and you’ve read too many books, you see what you call a character. You’ll live and learn, son, believe me.”

  I asked, “What’s the nature of a character, Copper?”

  “Something dirty in a picturesque kind o’ way,” he said, after a moment’s pause. “A madman for ‘is own benefit. That’s a character. And always remember, son, there’s no such thing as a young character or a middle-classer that does a regular ‘ard day’s graft and pays off on the furniture. A character is a parasite. I don t say ‘e doesn’t put as much work into being what ‘e is as somebody else might put into doing what ‘e does. A character is a kind o’ clown. First ‘e makes you laugh, and in the process feels your pockets. Sam Yudenow’s one.”

  I said, “I don’t mind if he feels my pockets so long as he makes me laugh.”

  “Very likely,” said Copper Baldwin dryly. “Because, after all, what ‘ave you got o’ your own inside ‘em? ... ‘Ello, what’s this? Not that I blame ‘im, but there’s a geezer staring at us. Look of a gentleman—man with big boots. Know ‘im?”

  The Pantheon was closed for the night, and the only light burning was a sickly one under a yellow-and-green shade in the vestibule. The Film Renters On-the-Dot Delivery Service, which picked up old cans of film and delivered fresh ones the night before change day, was late as usual. As Sam Yudenow was eventually to tell me, On-the-Dot worked “on stvictly Amevican lines”—that is to say, the manager smoked a cigar. For a consideration, Onthe-Dot would deliver not only films but other perishables, from Aldgate Pump to Southend-on-Sea. For example: one October evening they tossed into my vestibule a box of fireworks and a case of butter. Sam Yudenow had his eye on the delivery boy, with a view to making some kind of manager of him—that boy could throw an oblong steel trunk containing twenty cans of film sixteen feet, so that it landed on one of its corners with such force that it made a hole in the floor. And he was never out more than three inches.

  So we stood back while the man in big boots who looked like a gentleman came clumping into the vestibule, muddy to the knees with the hopeless, useless, clayey mire of the neighborhood. There were splotches of this same mud all over him and a great smear of it on his lip, where he had wiped his nose with his finger, which he managed to wear like a guardee mustache. On him, it had a calculated, cosmetic appearance. Yes, indeed, there was no mistaking this newcomer for anything but a gentleman. It was not that his breeches had been cut to fit, or his boots made to measure—he was dressed in old army surplus stuff. It was, simply, that nobody but a born gentleman could have turned up in this strange place, mediocre in every line and filthy from head to foot, with such an air of owning it.

  God knows how they have—not what it takes but what it lacks—to do it! By rights, I am supposed to be something of a gentleman myself (or so my poor mother used to insist) but I could never file myself blunt and blatant enough to fit the wards of the lock that opens the door to the gentry. It has always struck me that there is something swinishly unfair about the aristocratic attitude.

  Now the humblest workman has it. Turnabout is fair play, I dare say; but still I don’t like it. Top or bottom, it implies a droit de seigneur, to which I will not submit.

  This man with big boots bellowed, “I say, look here, my car’s broken down—and where the hell am I?”

  I looked at him closely—which means to say that the tip of my nose was less than a foot distant from the tip of his—and saw a face such as is gene
rally described as “attractive.” It was shaped somewhat like a dancing-master’s fiddle: broad at the temples, curving in at the cheeks, and swelling out a little at the jaws. There were even two symmetrical creased dimples something like I holes in the belly of this kit-face, which had the appearance of having been stained to a weather-beaten look. Only, where the finger board should have been, hung a most atrocious tie with which I was miserably familiar—the tie of the Old Valetudinarians, which may be worn only by those who were at school at Snellgrove-in-the-Vale. This tie cannot be mistaken for any other: the background is flowerpot red, and it has diagonal stripes of emerald green, buff, black, sky blue, orange, and gray.

  I recognized the man at once then—he had been a prefect when I was in the fifth form at Snellgrove—and quite a figure he cut, as I remembered. He used to lash about with an ash plant, wore his hat at a distinctive angle, and had the right to put his left hand in his trousers pocket. I used to admire him tremendously; he was a leader in games, surreptitiously gambled for money, and was the son of a magnate. It was he who introduced to the seniors the practice of parting the hair neither at one side nor in the middle, but two inches off dead-center. He used to have six pairs of flannel trousers and a staring way of looking that took the heart out of younger boys. It all came back to me in a rush. His father was involved in the building of medium-priced houses somewhere south of the Midlands, but something went wrong and he took to drink—breakfasted off brandy, fell into a log fire, and died of burns. His mother turned up for the last sports, and nobody had ever seen a more truly bred gentlewoman. It was the first time I had ever seen a woman with pale blue hair. I heard my mother telling my father that she used to be a vendeuse in haute couture—“a shopgirl.” Then our hero swaggered off with his flannels and his dimples, and it was generally supposed that he could have done no less than make a fortune.