by Gerald Kersh
I said, “Better ask Mr. Yudenow.”
Billy Bax the Agent said, “I don’t wanna do that. It’s bad for prestige. Oh, for Christ’s sake, look—ten per cent passes through my hands, and I’m taking the place of Gritto, ha-ha-ha! What’s the odds, so long as you’re happy? I been on the boards and better off ‘em. I been on the boards and now I’m on the floor, ha-ha-ha! The show must go on—ask Sam Yudenow—so I need a quid at this very moment to keep my office open. Funny—isn’t it?—ha-ha-ha!... Fix you up with a nice girl? I mean, free of charge? Ha-ha-ha!”
“I’ll give you your pound,” I said.
“And I’m much obliged, ha-ha-ha! As for the girls, remember there’s a depression on. In the old days many a good ride I had for a sandwich, ha-ha-ha! But now you can bottle anybody for a threat or a promise. Only see what I’m reduced to, ha-ha-ha.”
“Here’s a pound, and sign a chit,” I said. “And better make it good.”
So Billy Bax came on that Monday night as a substitute for Gritto, the Stone Crusher. His was an odiously allusive style.
The language, at its lowest, was not quite expressive enough for this debased man; he had to reinforce his double meanings with winks and leers. One of his songs was encored, the refrain of it being:
If you are a fat old hen
Then any old cock will do ...
After that he went into what he called an “eccentric dance.”
When he came off I ran up to the dressing room, impelled by cold distaste, to tell him to moderate his act. There I saw him sitting on the edge of the bed, unnaturally rigid, ghastly in his make-up. As I came into the room he stood up stiffly, cried, “California, here I come!” and fell dead of heart failure. So perish all such.
This, I told Copper Baldwin, was heartache; but he upbraided me, saying, “Oh, be your bloody age! Your heart aches, does it? Then let it. What’s a heart for? Gawd strike me blind, didn’t anybody ever tell you that the heart is the most muscular organ in the body? Ever foot-slog forty miles a day? Then your knees ache and your hips ache— Gawd’s sake, that’s the way you get strong, you currant! You can believe me, cocko, it’s a weak heart that never ached. And you’re an unlicked pup as yet. You’ll get hardened, you’ll harden. Only it’s a painful process. Everybody’s got to carry ‘is own pack until ‘e drops, and the longer you carry it the heavier it gets. I’m not telling you a word of a he. That is, of course, provided you don’t live like a bleeding pig—on your Darby-and-Joan, for yourself. And you ain’t a pig, are you, now? You’re not, you know; otherwise why bother with poor old Miss Noel?”
I said, “Oh, that’s neither here nor there—”
“Begging your pardon, son, it is both ‘ere and there. What’s she to you? It’s a case of divine compassion; and you mark my words, cocko, when it comes your turn Gawd will pity you.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said.
He replied, “It’s a manner of speaking. Always there is some-think close behind you.... Never mind Gawd. What’s He to Hecuba? What’s Noel to you?”
“The hell with Noel!” I cried.
“Leave ‘er alone, poor gel, and she’ll find ‘er own hell. Found it, matter of fact. But what made you wash ‘er, and dress ‘er, and soak ‘er in scent? Tell me that. And answer me this: what made you bring that gentleman, Sourbreast, up from town to gee the poor bitch up?”
“Sourbreast came here to pay me a visit,” I said. “Although, if you must know, Copper, I first took Miss Noel to Sourbreast’s place in Albany.”
And well I remembered that incident. I took her in, subdued and decent. She seemed to inhale the flat while she was looking at it. The Sickert over the fireplace brought tears to her eyes, and when she caressed the spines of the old books there was something in her gestures that put me in mind of an aged bachelor caressing the head of someone else’s newborn child. Then she saw the piano and asked, “May I try and play it?”
“Please do, my dear madam,” said Sourbreast, uncovering the keyboard and lifting the great lid.
Then Miss Noel played, much as she had played that day when we washed her and changed her clothes.
Sourbreast cried, “No, really! Upon my heart and soul, this is talent, God bless me! I’ll get you engagements, I’ll be damned if I don’t. Yes, upon my word of honor I’ll get hold of Miller and hire you the Wigmore Hall.” He was excited. “Leave it to me,” he said. “I positively guarantee you fifty guineas. Seriously, this I categorically guarantee out of my own pocket! ... Oh, please, no thanks!—we’ll show a profit. But you’ll need some kind of dark evening dress, and your hair done, and a manicure, and all that. Shoes, et cetera; I am not well up in these matters, you know. Could I, perhaps, advance you twenty pounds?”
“I really don’t know what to say,” said Miss Noel, weeping. “Nobody ever believed ...”
But he took out of his wallet five five-pound notes (for he was of a generous nature) and thrust them into her hand. And he did, indeed, rent the Wigmore Hall, and poor Miss Noel was in her glory. She bought a long-sleeved black dress of some stuff they called “ring velvet” and had her hair trimmed and dyed dark brown, which, I suppose, was its original color. She had her nails attended to, also, and got herself a pair of black suede court shoes and a discreet little hat. I chipped in with a diamond clip from the HiLife Gem Company, which cost eleven shillings. Copper Baldwin came forward with a most ladylike row of artificial pearls—not too big, not too little—the largest one in the center was about the size of a marble. Miss Noel had already taken to washing. Now she developed a new manner and kept talking about her engagement at the Wigmore Hall. She gave me supercilious looks, ignored Copper Baldwin completely, and laughed in Sam Yudenow’s face. There was no controlling her—she kept playing medleys and trying to perfect them.
Copper Baldwin and I throbbed with anticipation. We had clubbed together to hire a car to take her to Wigmore Street at six o’clock one Thursday evening. She had been closeted with Sam Yudenow, who had said, “I want to say a few words congratulations. A few words congratulations I want to say. You see? Stick by Sam Yudenow and he’ll put a gold spoon right in your kisser. And you’ll be buried in a silver casket miv trimmings!”
He came down wearing an expression of innocence and despair, saying, “Go on, fetch ‘er. What do you want I should do, what? Carry her on my bended knees or something? I’m sorry to say the lady is, uxcuse me, pissed.”
And so she was, with her forehead on the edge of the desk and her lap full of vomit. Near by stood a bottle and two glasses.
Doubling his fists, Copper Baldwin said to Sam Yudenow, “Now this time, you bastard, you are going to get it!”
“A moment, please, Copper—all I ask of life is you shouldn’t do what you’ll be sorry for later. Go into the ladies’, put your head in the laventory, pull the plug, and cool off. Believe me, it’s a godsend.... Lavenberg, don’t look me no daggers. The poor girl can’t ‘elp it. Don’t laugh; pity, rather. It’s a dragedy.”
I said, “How come a bottle of Johnny Walker?”
Sam Yudenow said, “Doctor’s orders. Catarrh. But above all, I will not have my office polluted miv a sahr smell. Better put ‘er down on the piano and work it off.”
“What about the Wigmore Hall?” I asked helplessly, for Miss Noel was quite unconscious.
Sam Yudenow said easily, “Believe me, pianists are two a penny, as sure as I stand here. Wipe ‘er down and spvay her with perfumed disinfectant. More I couldn’t do for my own mother, God forbid!”
I said, “After this, Yudenow, I’m going to fix you.”
He said absently, “Yes, I want you should do that. Good boy. Get on the job.”
So Miss Noel went back to her tuneless piano, weeping as if her heart would break; and Copper Baldwin said to me, in a matter-of-fact voice, “In confidence, cocko, I’ve just made up my mind to murder Sam Yudenow.”
And he expounded the cruelest plans for the liquidation of Yudenow that I ever heard of. Bein
g a handy man with his mitts, said Copper Baldwin, he could rig up a gadget. Now if Sam Yudenow happened to be a bathing man, (a) he could drown him in a bathtub or (b) so arrange it that when he turned on the showerbath it would come out at boiling point. He had a working knowledge of electricity, he told me. “You know the bastard’s got a weak bladder. A copper electrode in the carsey wired up to the generator— nothing conducts electricity like water. Stream o’ pee is as good as a cable. Shape Sam’s heart is in, one convulsion o’ the bladder ought to bust ‘im like a balloon—somebody done it to me once when I was working on the railways where we ‘ad iron urinals. Yes sir, I went four feet into the air. I must ‘ave ‘ad a strong heart, because they wired me up to a live rail.... Somebody told me there was a poison you could make out of three ingredients anybody can buy for sixpence at any ironmonger’s shop. Undetectable. You wouldn’t ‘appen by any chance to know the names of these ingredients, would you? If ‘e was a drinking man I’d get ‘im tight, I would, and give ‘im a lovely great bubble of air in one of ‘is fat old arteries. I’ll bet you that would fix ‘im. What’s your opinion, Dan?”
I said, “Detectable—” entering into the spirit of the thing—“what about putting opium into his tea and then pouring molten lead down his throat through a funnel?”
“I could cut up a bit of water pipe. But wouldn’t solder do?”
“I imagine so,” I said, “only lead is heavier and holds the heat longer. I know a jujitsu blow—two, in fact— that are dead-sure killers, both with the edge of the hand. One is under the nose on the upper lip: you strike upwards. The other is on the bridge of the nose between the eyes, in which case you strike downwards. There is also, I believe, a jab of the thumb under the ear. I can’t say I’ve practiced these things, but a Japanese told me so. His father made him strike a wet sandbag with the outer edges of his hands ten thousand times every day, so that they developed hard callouses sharp as glass. I do not think I have the time.”
Copper Baldwin said, “Where’s your tactics? I got hard hands.”
Not without enthusiasm, I added, “I get it—stimulate a rough-house when Yudenow is around and let him have it in the dark.”
“That’s the style!” cried Copper Baldwin. “You distract attention and leave the rest to me. But touching the matter of lead pipes...”
“I’m told that a woolen stocking full of wet pebbles is not at all a bad thing.”
“I ‘ave often contemplated a swift kick up the arse in the generator room,” said Copper Baldwin, “or maybe an extra tablespoonful of copper sulphate in a Greenburger? Somebody else might get it, it’s true, but it wouldn’t be you or me—and the scandal would cost ‘im plenty, which would be a fate worse than death for that stinker. Yes. Why swing? Better yet—let’s cost the bastard. What say?”
“Cost him what? Cost him how?” I asked.
“You’ve got me there, cocko. If we burned ‘is bloody show down, Yudenow would be only too delighted. It’s insured to the hilt. It’s insured; ‘is wife is insured; ‘is car is insured; ‘e’s insured. Kill the sod: you’ll be doing ‘im a favor. ‘E’s worth more dead than alive, the cowson bastard. But I want ‘im punished. There’s no use arguing, that man’s got to suffer. Brute force and ignorance will get us nowhere. But what will? Get us anywhere, I mean. Can’t we get ‘im into trouble?”
I said, “Come now, Copper, there is always the question of integrity. Besides, I’ll bet you anything you like that Yudenow could get you into more trouble than you could get him into.”
“You’re not far wrong there. The bastard would spend a pound to trace a farthing, just out of spite. Better think it over, son.”
And then Cruikback turned up again in his Daimler. It was a limousine of 1911, such as only a gentleman would have dared to ride in, and the back of it was packed with those three-legged instruments that surveyors use, together with maps and particolored sticks, and tape measures the smallest of which was bigger than a Camembert cheese. He stamped into the vestibule in his huge cleated boots, shaking himself like a retriever, about eleven o’clock one night. I have never seen a muddier man. He was miry as a boar but the whiteness of his teeth looked elegant and cheerful in his dirty face. He was wearing the same old breeches but had slung about his shoulders a great pair of binoculars in a new leather case and had on a deerstalker cap.
“I stopped off,” he said, “for a leak. Do you mind terribly, old thing, if I use your wee-wee place? ... Ah, there, Mr. Baldwin! Gordon’s Dry, wasn’t it? Hadn’t forgotten, you know—” and he took a sealed bottle out of his pocket and put it into Copper Baldwin’s hands. Then he dashed into the nearest lavatory. It irritated me to see the joy with which Copper Baldwin received him, and I was doubly irritated when Cruikback came out with a dripping face, shaking water off his fingertips and saying, “No, really, young Laverock, that towel is unusable. Lend me a handkerchief or something, will you?”
Copper Baldwin offered him a red bandanna, upon which he dried himself, muttering, “I hope the dye doesn’t come off. I mean, I hope this is a vegetable dye. I suppose you know that aniline is a coal-tar product, and there’s one hell of a statistical correlation? I’ll return this, of course, washed. What say we have a little bit of a drinkie?”
Copper Baldwin was already busy with his pocketknife at the capsule of the bottle. But now Cruikback took on a melancholy air, while he pocketed the handkerchief.
“A word with you, young Laverock,” he said. “A matter of some seriousness.” So I took him into the empty hall, and we sat side by side in two eightpenny seats.
Having borrowed a cigarette, Cruikback said, “Charming fellow that Baldwin.”
“One of the best-read men I’ve ever met,” I said.
“Uneducated, necessarily,” said Cruikback.
“And what the hell do you mean by that?” I demanded, with some heat.
With his customary air of condescension, Cruikback said, “Old thing, you haven’t got the correlation. You and I are educated—you’ll grant me that? But Baldwin has merely been subjected to academic exposure. Couldn’t hold a candle. I suppose you know, of course, that given a thumb a chimpanzee can do it? No, common savvy and blood: these you can’t deny. Anthropology.... But look here, old thing— I’m in a hole. Did I mention that I was married?”
I said, “I forget, Cruikback. All I know is you made my name mud—or something—that last time you came, and I’ll be damned if you sleep in my room tonight. Cruikback, do you appreciate that you actually shat?”
“I thought that was all explained,” he said stiffly. “It must have been bad gin. Laverock, for God’s sake, what are you? Are you a Valetudinarian, or what are you? I know you were always a crank, you know, but sometimes I don’t know whether to make head or tail of you! You might pay a little more attention. I told you just now that I was in a hole, didn’t I? I mean, I’m married, and I’ve had a boy—or rather, my wife has. Now look here, young Laverock, man to man, I’ve got to get the poor little fellow out of pawn. Man to man, man—what would you do in such a case? Trouble with what the doctors call the prepuce—grew together, had to be circumcized like a bloody pawnbroker— and until I pay the bloody bill I can’t get the kid out. Can you pause to imagine that? I don’t believe you met his mother—my wife, I mean, of course. No family, I’m afraid, but a sweet gel. Now you know, Laverock, that a gentleman knows when to swallow his pride. Unfortunately, my wife doesn’t. Her father is absolutely lousy with the stuff, but she’d got (it’s her only fault) a sort of proletarian pride and absolutely refuses to raise the wind. I went to the old gentleman and told him I’d had the boy circumcized, but he was not impressed.”
I said, “This is too bad.”
“Now you and I, young Laverock, are Old Valetudinarians—men of education, such as it is, not subjected to academic exposure. I suppose you know, of course, that there is not merely a statistical correlation but a justifiable correlation of statistics between supply and demand? Incidentally, I ought to tell you
that my wife is a Braddock. Then consider my position. Old thing, I hate to talk to you like this ...”
I said, “Now look here, Cruikback, you know I’m broke or I wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t think you take me, young Laverock. I’m not on the cadge, you know; I’m trying to put a fortune in your hands. What do you think I’m surveying round Ullage?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.
“Heard of the A.A.A.A.?” he asked.
“Why, that would be the Anglo-American Automobile Associates,” I said.
“Right you are,” said Cruikback. “And I’ll give you the low-down, young Laverock. I suppose you know about the Ford Works that are going up at Dagenham? The Ford Works is making the town, I dare say you know. Dagenham used to be a stinking village in the swamp. Ford’s made a rich suburb of it, with a branch line running out. And in, too, upon my honor! They cut roads, they electrified lines, and the value of real estate in Dagenham went up several hundred per cent, and is going up still. Why? The hoi-polloi have got to live on top of the job. Hence, lots, streets, buildings. Projects, Laverock, projects! Now who is Ford’s greatest competitor in Europe?” “A.A.A.A.?” I suggested.
“Right for once, young Laverock. Good show. What’s going to happen is this: A.A.A.A. is buying land round Ullage for an enormous factory, and I’m doing the surveying. Now wait a minute, young Laverock—consider the implications, correlative and statistical! First of all, speaking purely mechanically, the railway absolutely must run a line out to Ullage—I mean, a passenger line, because now it becomes a Place. The land there automatically increases in value. Correct me if I’m wrong, of course. Village becomes town. Where there’s a town, there’s got to be a High Street, or something of the sort, with shops and things. Well?”
