by Gerald Kersh
And do you know what? There is the Spirit of Man in this—good, bad, or indifferent, a certain heroism.
So, while I soon learned to hate Sam Yudenow, I couldn’t find it in my heart to betray him—though it did not take me long to decide that, if he ever said one offensive word to me I would knock his head off.
Only he never said that word in time for me to act on my decision.
9
IT MUST have been about then that the sharp points of experience began to puncture the overblown inner tube of youthful enthusiasm. There is life for you: you go to sleep a child and wake up an apology for a man or a woman.
It was then, I am sure—pitying myself in retrospect—that I really started to know my place in the world, and who was who—to realize that what I had hitherto seen in a mirror was not myself, nor even anyone I had ever seen, but only the projection of a shadow.
I don’t believe them when they say that wisdom is something gently acquired. It may come gradually over your head, but it hits in a flash and with a shock. Such wisdom as you have strikes like lightning, and you are none the happier for it—if you are wise. I can liken it only to a sudden and agonizing eructation of perceptiveness, upon whose sad wind your years of innocence are belched away, leaving a bitterness which it takes all the years of your maturity to purge you of—if you are lucky.
Do not ask of me a definition or an explanation of how it came to pass; but I got wise, in this moment, when Sam Yudenow caressed Miss Noel’s newly washed hand. It was a curious gesture. There was nothing sexual in it: you have seen the last couple of strokes of a barber stropping a hollow-ground razor? Imagine that. He was taking a little more sharpness out of her hide. But although I somehow sensed that there was nothing but bad luck for Miss Noel in this gesture, there was nothing I could say. It takes a less introspective fool than I to find a cause for direct action in the smile on the face of the tiger. Besides, it seemed to gratify her, so that she appeared to gain at least an inch in height; and when Sam Yudenow said, “Mmm! Such nice perfume!” ten years fell off her.
God knows how obtuse a man can become. Perhaps Sam Yudenow was still delirious with his Greenburger, or something. He seemed in an instant to forget what he had just said, and went on: “Believe me, Miss, I’ve done what I could for your sister. Didn’t I, Copper? Whereas, however, she’s incorruptible—she won’t even help herself. A pail I put down for her; out of the gutter I’ve picked her. But what’s the use, Miss? It’s a ... a—” he made a twisting movement with his hands as one who works a lever ”—a vice. I deliberately paid her less, for her own sake, and then she drank up a pint shellac the minute my back was turned, so Copper Baldwin had to make a stomach pump from a carbolic spray in reverse. Could a father do more? Miss, more a father couldn’t do. Believe me, for scented disinfectant alone she cost me a pretty penny, miv her wind in the bells! ... So if, perhaps, there might be a small bill...” He started like a man who has been dreaming of falling from a great height and sighed with pleasure at finding himself safe and sound on the pillows of his adjustable consciousness. “Uxcuse me, I was thinking of Booligan,” he said. “Miss Noel, you may confidently expect a rise in salary as soon as talkies go out. Meanwhile, keep on the job meanwhile. Believe me, it does me good to recognize you only by the tears in your eyes!”
I saw Copper Baldwin calculating the distance between his left hand and Sam Yudenow’s chin. Indeed, I believe that if he had struck and missed I would have gone for Yudenow myself in my close, shortsighted way; only Miss Noel said, “The piano is somewhat out of tune, Mr. Yudenow.”
He said, “Copper, take a scvewdriver and tune it. Nothing but the best is good enough for the Pantheon—eh, Daniels?”
It was impossible not to laugh. I said, “You mean a corkscrew.”
“A thing miv a handle,” said Yudenow impatiently. “Borrow it from the pub.... And while you’re about it, in the genevator room you’ll find a pair of bellows. Give those piano wires a good dusting. For Sam Yudenow’s musicians, Miss Noel, nothing is too good. Remember that, Laveridge, and Sam Yudenow will remember you miv love and gratitude. Only no false pride, please! You take the bellows to the piano; you see here and there missing a few wires—take off your jacket, roll up your sleeves, and put ‘em back. There’s a roll wire in the genevator room. The tone depends on the way it’s stretched. Here a wire, there a wire; it’s a question of tension. Okay? Okay. I thank you one and all. Uxcuse me, please, I got to take my drops. Let the show go on, which is the Ten Commandments of the biz. The Eleventh, I already told you: a capacity house, or there’ll be a wave of unemployment rahnd ‘ere. Enough chatting—you think I got nothing bigger on my mind? Get on the job!”
“I’ve got to go to town to get my things, you know,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘town’? What town? Things? What sort of things? ... Oh, yes, I remember, Laventry—go right ahead, don’t hesitate for one moment to dock yourself up to four hours, and to hell miv the expense. I’ll gladly give you a lift. Which way are you going?”
“Toward Regents Park,” I said.
“I like your conversation—there’s never a dull moment—and I’ll gladly give you a lift in the opposite direction.... What, you don’t want to go in the opposite direction? Why not? ... Oh, your things. What a pity. Good-by now.”
When he was gone, Copper Baldwin said, with something curiously resembling pride, “And now do you begin to see what I mean? I tell you, Danny-boy, that one’s a sort of a genius.... By the way, what’s your definition of a man o’ genius?” When I said that I didn’t have one, he said, “Nor me, neither. But as I see it, a genius is a ‘uman being evolved from Sam Yudenow. Ain’t ‘e a bastard? An’ does ‘e still make you laugh? You wasn’t laughing much a couple o’ minutes ago, unless my eyes deceived me.
“Not until he talked about tuning a piano with a screwdriver,” I said.
“Then you said, ‘You mean corkscrew,’“ said Copper Baldwin, with a sour smile.
“‘A thing miv a handle, borrow it from the pub,’“ I said. Then my sense of the ridiculous got the better of me and I burst out laughing.
Copper Baldwin laughed too, and then said, “Can’t ‘elp loving that man, can you? Grows on you, don’t ‘e? ‘Abit-forming, ain’t ‘e? But lousy to the backbone, wouldn’t you say? Evil! ‘Owever, so long as ‘e makes you laugh, ‘e’s got you by the balls, ain’t ‘e? Well, so long as you begin to get what I mean when I call ‘im dangerous. But you mark my words—”
He was interrupted by a burst of music from the orchestra pit. Miss Noel was down there playing her poor scrambled heart out—playing the most extraordinary music I ever heard. I have since heard the wild, picturesque, and sometimes terrifying ravings of a literate drunkard in delirium. They consist, generally, in a kaleidoscopic review of broken memories. Such was Miss Noel’s playing now. Those medleys, which are always so popular with that rabble of half-listeners and stuffs the ears of the spirit with pure noise, are edited jumbles of whole tunes. She was not making a medley but a most fantastic delirious mishmash of half-remembered and partially distorted bars and phrases from all the classical compositions in the world—everything she had ever heard seemed to be passing through some mixing machine in her head and coming out in foam at her fingertips. It is indescribable. She remembered, for example, that Handel wrote the tune later known as “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” played a recognizable fragment of it, staggered back, somehow, to Scarlatti, tripped over him, picked herself up out of a kennel in which trickled some dregs of Mozart—only to lurch, wildly groping, into the arms of the surly Brahms, who shoved her back into the hairy hands of the impatient Beethoven, through which her bruised soul slipped, after a brief contact, onto the nervous knees of Berlioz, who kicked her over to Liszt. Imagine all this played in an empty hall on a piano with a wooden frame, so long untuned that every note sounded like some other note—some hiccuping, husky, whisky-voiced note, still beloved but rendered only half recognizable by dissipation and negl
ect.
“I played that for you,” she said to me when she had finished. “It was one of my little compositions, or improvisations.”
“Thank you, Miss Noel. And could you play it again for me, do you think?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Laverock. For you. Only will you talk to me a little bit every day? It isn’t that you have anything to say to me, only could I just hear the sound of your voice?”
“Of course I will, Miss Noel, but I must go now.”
“But you’ll come back?”
“Only if you promise not to have anything to drink, and to eat the poached eggs Copper Baldwin is going to get you.”
“I do promise.”
So, at last, I got away and, having caught a variety of trams and busses, arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon at June Whistler’s flat near the zoo.
It is odd, wherever you live or have known ever so little relief, you leave a little bit of yourself, and, returning, try to take it back to yourself. But having grown into an entity of its own, it repels you. June Whistler’s flat, which, a few days before, had opened its arms to me, didn’t seem to want me. Yet some little living piece of the grateful, well-meaning fellow named Daniel Laverock was lost there, running around the walls. I do believe in haunted houses. Whoever lives in June Whistler’s flat now, some portion of my ghost will continue to haunt those rooms; and if there are “thought forms,” I see one materializing in the shape of a spaniel made of mist with an uplifted paw, begging pardon....
June Whistler was there in a flowered apron of outlandish design. It had a bib such as no one had ever thought of before, and a flounce, and it was sewn out of linen patterned with blue tulips and trimmed with mauve upholstery braid. She had put on a pair of orange slippers with yellow pompons, and it was evident that she had been crying.
Now, although my heart went out to her, I felt the constraint of a stranger; and, I believe, she felt the same about me, because of the way she said, “Oh, hello.”
I did not know, then, as I know now that people, like houses, may be taken over by spirits and inhabited by ghosts when they feel they are deserted and empty. You may be possessed, in spite of yourself, by the shadow of a dream. June Whistler was silently weeping in the grip of Elinor Glyn and bleeding internally in the talons of Theda Bara. Romance had got inside her—that secret poisoner.
Being young and very foolish, I did not stop to reason that the nature of a person should not be judged by the outward and visible signs but by the inward and spiritual trends of romanticism. I did not pause to consider the difference between the romantic whose fantasy is of biting the full-blooded and the romantic whose dream is of giving blood to the empty. Perhaps I was overtired, perhaps Fowlers End had already got caught in the jaw by some hook dragging in the muddier part of my perception—I only know that I observed, with painful clarity and ill-concealed distaste, a red-eyed girl preposterously dressed, from whose presence I wanted to escape as soon as possible. “Hello,” I said. “What’s the idea of the fancy dress?” “Oh, it’s just an old apron.”
“Sorry, June, I never noticed it before. Mind you don’t hurt yourself with it, because I seem to see a needle hanging out of the hem.”
“You have such wonderful eyes; is that all you see?”
“Why, what’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed by her tone. “Nothing,” she said; and her eyes filled with tears. Now this “nothing,” said with that deliberate nonchalance, irritated me. I said, “What do you mean, nothing? There must be something.”
“Very well, darling,” said she, with appalling calm, “if you say there must be something, there’s something. Although I must say, really, that to stay away days and nights and then come back in a stinking temper, criticizing, is really rather much!”
“‘Rather much,’“ I said, imitating her intonation. “That’s a new one. Did you pick that one up from some girl, all sophisticated in beads, at the Ministry? Or did you read it in Peg’s Paper?” I was getting worked up now into a fine irony. “You know, darling, the owner of the cotton mill makes the heroine drunk on brandy; she resists his advances, so he drugs her with morphine, chloroforms her, hits her with a lead pipe, binds her hand and foot, and has her carried in a curtained limousine to a perfumed bedroom. Do you follow me? Then he produces a large glass syringe full of an oily liquid—sulphuric acid, of course—and an Australian stock whip, and a charcoal brazier in which branding irons are glowing. He will give her the whole works—unless the heroine says, ‘No, really, this is rather much!’”
June Whistler said, “I can get along very well, darling, without any of your bloody sarcasm. Where have you been?”
“Oh, getting a job. And what have you been doing, darling?”
Her blood was up now; and while, in affectation, she might use strong language as she might cock her little finger lifting a teacup, her real self did not take kindly to it. She was going to call me a bastard, but there was a hair-trigger reaction between the beginning and the middle of the epithet, so that she said, “Oh, you barling! If you must know, it being a half day off, I have been making meringues. Not that you care, but I burned my finger. No, really, one of these days I’ll end it all—” and thereupon she burst into a terrible passion of weeping. “I wanted to make meringues for you!” she cried, between sobs. “I followed the book. There must have been something wrong with the eggs. The meringues turned out liquid. Lemon meringues!”
Now my heart was touched, and I felt that nothing I might ever do could make up for my brutality. Kissing her burned finger, I said, hastily improvising, “Why, darling, you probably got the wrong recipe and made soup. A gourmet’s soup, what they call ‘Soupe a la meringue.’”
“You’re only trying to comfort me ... but I’d like to see you beating up the whites with a fork!”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and ran to the nearest baker’s shop, where I bought a shilling’s worth of lemon meringues, which I cunningly concealed under my coat.
“Forgot to send a telegram,” I told June Whistler when I returned. “Now you sit down, sweetheart, and let me look at this ‘Soupe a la meringue.’”
I went into the kitchen. God knows the girl had tried, because the oven was almost red-hot still. The baking dish was full of a kind of frothy, lumpy glue, which I poured into the sink. Then I wiped the dish, put in the meringues which I had bought, slid it back into the oven and shouted, “I see nothing to cry about here!”
She came running to look. “Well,” said she, with shining eyes, running a hand through that manzanita-wood hair, “I really must be neurotic. Forgive me if I was impatient. Really, you must give meringues time to come up. And there must be absorption, because I made four and now there’s six. Really, darling, you’ll never know what a relief this is. Now we can have tea.”
We did, and I was compelled to eat four of those baker’s meringues. Of what they were made I do not know, but I am sure they did me no good. In the course of tea June Whistler questioned me about my new job.
“I am about to become an executive in show biz,” I told her.
She said, “Oh, Dan darling, I’m so happy I could cry. Dan, you really do love me, don’t you?”
“Why do you ask?” I said evasively.
“Then we could get married, couldn’t we?”
“Why,” I said, “we’ve had hundreds of conversations about it in a general way, and you’ve always led me to suppose that you disapproved of that sordid convention.”
“I used to think so, but really, darling, the bedrock of society is the happy home. No, really, theoretically I used to be all in favor of state support for children. But when you come to think of it, isn’t that like putting childhood into a great big orphanage? And when you come to think of it, what for? Don’t you honestly think that a loving family unit makes for a pronounced individual?”
I said, “Well, yes, but as for my marrying you, that would have to be much later.”
“Very much later?”
“Not for years, perhaps
.”
“Oh,” she said, and her eyes grew wet. “Do you really like my apron?”
Glad to change the subject, I said, “I think it’s charming, only you ought to take it in. You don’t mind my saying so, but it looks like one of those maternity robes. You know what I mean—those shepherd’s smock arrangements they sell to women eight months gone. I’m not criticizing, only that’s my opinion.”
She said, “Yes, I know. I made it like that on purpose. Really, you know, I’m awfully frugal. I hate waste. I can put a couple of tucks in it now and simply let them out again later on. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of tucks in it already. At a moment’s notice, with a penknife I can let this out to forty inches bust and forty-eight inches waist.”
“It’s a good idea,” I said, anxious to please her, “but what’s it for?”
“It’s awfully unhygienic to constrict a foetus,” she said. “I’m going to give up girdles, too. As a matter of fact, darling, I’m going to have a baby—a little baby.”
Literature is full of descriptions of shock and dismay: read them, make a composite of them, and you will arrive at some idea of how I felt when she said this. I have no words to describe my sensation: I can only tell you that I upset a cup of hot tea over my chest, bit my tongue, trod on my own foot, and inhaled a morsel of meringue which sent me into an ecstasy of coughing, recovering from which I put a lighted cigarette into my mouth the wrong way round. “You’re going to have a baby?” I asked at last.
“A little baby, just for you and me. If it’s a boy, I’m going to call him Eric. But if it’s a girl, I shall call her Greta. Don’t worry too much, darling. I’ll have to give up my job, of course, but I’ve got two pounds ten a week of my own, and seven hundred pounds saved up for a rainy day. What was the name of that school you went to? Snellgrove-in-the-Vale? We’ll send him there. But if it’s a girl, I want her to have a degree in economics. Don’t you think Eric Laverock is a fine name for a boy? Doesn’t it sound like the sort of man that climbs Mount Everest and gets knighted—Sir Eric Laverock? And if you’re going to be in the cinema business, you could go with him with a camera. And really—I was talking to somebody in the office—these travel pictures make millions.... But if it’s a girl—don’t you think Greta Laverock is a good name?—first she must win scholarships, don’t you think? Then she must go to the London School of Economics. I will teach her etiquette, and how to dress. You see, I want her to be a power behind the throne. You know, it isn’t prime ministers that run this country but their wives?”
