by Gerald Kersh
Copper Baldwin dragged me past a bookshop, saying, “Yes, I know all about that. Romance. Chuck your life away for ‘alf a volume o’ Macaulay’s History of England out o’ the penny tub, and go wivout your lunch. It’s a bloody mug’s game. There’s public libraries, aren’t there? What was Carnegie for? ... This is what I love about the capitalist system—they got to take it but they got to give it back. ‘Ospitals, the works o’ Sir Walter Scott, slum clearance, the League o’ Nations, shit-houses, Zionism, the Salvation Army, and pie in the sky—” Getting cantankerous, he argued with himself. “And what’s the matter wiv pie in the sky? At least that’s one promise you’re certain not to live to see unfulfilled.”
I said, “For Christ’s sake, Copper, shut up. You’re making me nervous.”
“Then don’t be, cocko. You are going to meet Mr. Payne of—” he repeated the name of the firm with relish— “Payne, Payne, Payne, Payne, Rackham, Rackham and Payne.”
These old City lawyers—the more names they paint up and the dirtier they get, the more respectable they become. I had a cousin once by the name of Everingsley who qualified and set up in business as a solicitor near Hatton Garden. People shunned him like a leper. But when, acting on the advice of my Uncle Hugh, he called himself Everingsley, Everingsley, Son and Everingsley, he made a go of it.
I believe there was only one Payne, but he looked like a concentration of several generations of them as he sat, making a pyramid of his bony hands and swaying his head like a snake in a stiff collar. I do not know why, but his office made me feel cold through and through. Three of its walls were covered with black-framed certificates of incorporation printed in red; but on the wall over where he sat hung a stuffed trout and a photograph of an old lady who might have been himself in disguise. He kept in a kind of cubbyhole a little woman of an age that I could not determine; but by the odor she gave off I thought he must have kept her there for at least thirty years. And I could just imagine him putting her out at night for five minutes and then locking her up with a saucer of milk while he wriggled away about his nocturnal business. Or flapped, for he wore a morning coat with long tails much too big for him.
My first impulse was to run away, but Copper Baldwin had a nerve grip on me just above the elbow, and his fingers were like steel. So what could I do but bow politely? “Meet Mr. Laverock,” said Copper Baldwin, quick as a mongoose.
I behaved like an idiot, pointed to the name of the firm on the glass door, and said, “Mr. Payne? Or Mr. Payne?”
Then June Whistler came in, dressed all in black and wearing a little golden cross on her breast. She must have thought that she was going to be asked to swear to something, because she was carrying a prayer book, brand new. Evidently she had stopped to buy it on the way, at that benevolent place near Cheapside where they sell Bibles and stuff in various languages. As it transpired, June’s prayer book was in Swahili, but we didn’t need it anyway. Goodness knows what I signed: I only know that I became Managing Director of Daniels Copper Limited. Secretary: J. Puddingberry Whistler. Directors: Percival Clarence Baldwin (I never saw him blush before) and Ezra Payne.
I left my mother out of it: Uncle Hugh would have got to hear of it, and I wanted no discussion with that man. It was not that I didn’t love him, only he had no faith in my acumen as a man of business, thereby wounding me in my tenderest sensibilities. Tit for tat, I had long prophesied the collapse of Uncle Hugh and his system—which, by some prestidigitation or trick of catching a point of balance, was still there. But I did not want him to know that I was speculating in real estate; he would only have asked me irritating, unanswerable questions about what had happened to my principles and so forth.... And so a hearty laugh, and lunch at Tozer’s, a real City man’s lunch—a Dover sole; steak-and-kidney pie made with mushrooms, oysters and skylarks; a piece of very ripe Stilton cheese; a glass of port—disgusting! But thinking of it I had a mad desire to excuse myself for ten minutes, rush out to that cook shop, and devour a plate of boiled beef and carrots, simply to clarify my intellect.
We got the business over and done with in no time at all. When we were out of that malodorous office and back in Chicken Lane, I said to June Whistler, “Well, now you are a director of a Limited Company, eh?”
“Hold up, lady!” cried Copper Baldwin, as she fainted in his arms. “It’s all right, so am I.... If you ask me, the lady wants a drop o’ brandy.”
She came to in a few seconds and, still clutching her prayer book in Swahili, allowed herself to be led into the private bar of the Wat Tyler, which was almost exactly opposite the cook shop: one of those extraordinary pubs that look forlorn and forgotten but in which big business is done in the City. Coming into a place like Chicken Lane and pushing open the sticky red door of the Wat Tyler, you find to your astonishment well-dressed men, all whispering. This was before the Wat Tyler got a direct hit with an eight-hundred-pound bomb in 1941. It was in all the papers: there were fourteen corpses and seven hundred skeletons—the bomb had turned up another old plague pit under the foundations. That was the night brave London burned, and St. Paul’s, marvelously untouched, stood nobly against the flames.
Well, there is no more Wat Tyler now, but there was then and a charming place it was. When I called for brandy, the land-lady produced a hundred-year-old bottle of very young liquor which she poured as if it were molten gold, and charged for it likewise. Baldwin and I had ale. At the first sip of brandy, June Whistler, who could not take her eyes off the bottle, revived. “It really is remarkable when you think that Napoleon himself might have drunk this very same brandy,” she said.
“Ain’t it?” said Copper Baldwin. “Or Stanley Baldwin, or Winston Churchill. Marvelous. You drink it all up, ma’am, and we’ll get a bite.”
It was impossible not to smell the cook shop, and I could see his Adam’s apple working as he swallowed something that was not his pint of ale, which he had finished at a gulp. I said, “Let’s go across the road—” my mouth was watering, too—“Let’s have boiled ham and pease pudding.”
“I’d love that!” said June Whistler.
But Copper Baldwin, with jaunty disdain, said, “That place is for pen-pushers—in celluloid collars. You stand up and eat like a bloody—excuse me, ma’am—like a confounded ‘orse at a bloody manger. No, we’ll go to Tozer’s, where the directors go. They make a special kind o’ pie—steak and kidney, oysters and mushrooms, and skylarks.”
Dreading to meet my Uncle Hugh, I said, “Come on, Copper, we’ve got to get back.”
June said, “Did you ever read ‘Ode to a Skylark’?”
“ ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert ...’“ said Copper Baldwin, “and something about ‘profuse strains of unpremeditated art.’ But economically valueless. One nest o’ skylarks will devastate an acre, in season—“
“I couldn’t eat a skylark,” said June Whistler, her eyes filling with tears, “but I’d like to taste one....”
So we went to Tozer’s, where grave and hearty men used to sit in booths and eat themselves half insensible at lunchtime. My appetite had left me. As soon as he set foot in this ancient and somber restaurant, Copper Baldwin showed signs of a desire to flee. All over the place men in stiff collars who were built like cubes were talking millions and writing on the tablecloths.
The waiters alone were worth the money—Tozer made them wear frock coats, and the youngest of them was over sixty. God knows where he found them: they all had the air of scions of some great house, begotten on the wrong side of a monogrammed blanket, who had been kept in the scullery for half a century or so to nurse a terrible grievance. Our waiter was the spitting image of Austen Chamberlain. Frustrated though I was in the matter of the boiled ham and pease pudding, I enjoyed Copper Baldwin’s discomfiture. But June Whistler was having a good time.
As if attached to an invisible thread, the little finger of her right hand went up in the air. With this finger she adjusted an errant wisp of hair, while she said to the waiter in a languid
voice, “Really, I think I could eat a skylark.”
“The pie, ma’am?”
Becoming irritated, I said, “Presumably the lady doesn’t want a skylark in a cage!” “One pie.... Gentlemen?” “Three pies,” I said. “Cocktails?”
“Champagne cocktails,” said Copper Baldwin aggressively. “And make ‘em double.”
The waiter called a wine waiter who looked like Prosper Merimee, “The Man Nobody Could Love.” He took the order with such an air of disgust that I wished I were dead; June Whistler thought him distinguished. There was a busboy, too, who resembled Chopin in the last stages of consumption, and a headwaiter who put me in mind of President Wilson. The proprietor had once been mistaken, in Smithfield Market, for King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales.
I said to Copper Baldwin, “And what would have been the matter with boiled ham and pease pudding?”
“Better order wine,” said he, putting down his empty glass with a grimace.
“Beer,” I said.
“What, can you order wallop from that bloke wiv the silver chain round ‘is neck?”
“I can and I will,” I said. Then the food came, under silver covers. It was common or garden steak and kidney, with foreign bodies in it. I said, “They buy only two or three skylarks in the summer and keep on using the bones—”
But June Whistler did not hear; she was engrossed. While tears trickled down her face, she was saying between substantial mouthfuls, “‘Bird thou never wert’... Oh, the cruelty of men! To cut off his melodious pipes ...”
Copper Baldwin was eating sourly; he knew he was in the wrong. Assured now that my Uncle Hugh was not likely to be in today, I got my appetite back and, having emptied my plate, called for dessert and cheese. I tried to revive the spirits of Copper Baldwin. I made June Whistler keep a skylark bone for luck. The meal had put heart into me. We all felt better. I told preposterous anecdotes about my Uncle Hugh, whom I represented as a species of bloated clown—at the top of my voice, too.
I called for port, I called for brandy and liqueurs, but when I called for the bill—in spite of Copper Baldwin’s protests—an assistant headwaiter, who could have stood in for Henry James, said respectfully but very distinctly, “It is paid, sir, thank you.”
“Paid? By whom?”
“Mr. Hugh Laverock, sir, the gentleman in the booth immediately behind you. Thank you, sir.”
Feeling as if every bead of the perspiration that sprang out all over me was a small pin, I leaped to my feet. Oh, indeed, separated from me by about an inch of oak sat my Uncle Hugh, who had been eating chateaubriand and drinking burgundy with a pair of rollicking stockbrokers. As I looked, the wine waiter, with an entirely different aspect from that which he had presented to me, came up with a bottle of unquestionable port.
“Have a nice lunch, Dan?” asked Uncle Hugh. I could only say, “Thank you, but—” “Didn’t want to barge in on your conference, old boy, but you don’t mind if your silly old uncle picks up the bill, I hope? Oh, by the bye—George Chowder, Bill Saulte—my nephew, Daniel Laverock. Introduce your friends?”
There was nothing for it but to do so. Copper Baldwin shook hands in his dour way. But June Whistler, comforted with skylarks and stayed with chartreuse, decided to be amusing. I was tormented by the fear that she might tell my Uncle Hugh about our big deal and tried to drag her away. But she wouldn’t come. They made room in the booth and offered B-and-B. There was nothing to do but accept— I was indebted again to that man.
Having swallowed a thimbleful of brandy-and-benedictine, I said, “Must get back on the job, I’m afraid. Look here, Uncle Hugh. This lunch. You mustn’t. I mean. No, honestly. After all’s said and done.”
“Well, all’s said and done, my boy, and that’s that. But shall I give you a tip? There’s an improved sound system coming out, and a new photoelectric cell. Talking pictures are in.”
“A mere fad,” I said. “A novelty. Are you ready, Copper?”
Ill at ease in such company, Copper Baldwin was very ready indeed; but June Whistler was not. She said, with hauteur, “Really, I can’t gulp. It’s awfully bad for one. Besides, I got the day off, so I’m a lady of leisure.”
So I shook hands with her and my Uncle Hugh, bowed politely to his friends, and left the restaurant with Copper Baldwin, seething with humiliation. I was sure that my Uncle Hugh had overheard every word I had said about him; and the annoying part of it was that he not only took it in good part, he seemed to find it funny.
When we got back to Fowlers End, Sam Yudenow was waiting in the vestibule, looking—with writhing lips and twitching nostrils—at a pitch-black Burma cheroot of the cheapest and vilest kind, which he was holding between thumb and forefinger. “Fire that rewinding boy!” he shouted. “Back to the reformatovy school miv him! Like a millionaire already, so he comes up to me and sticks this in my mouf, and says,” ‘Ave a cigar!’Is this discipline? Is it right? Laveridge, go and give ‘im a bloody good hiding. I would’ve done it myself, only I was taken off guard. Take this cigar away; put it on Godbolt’s doorstep—he’ll think it was a dog. It tastes exactly like it....
“What a morning I’ve ‘ad! What a booking I made! I tell you an experience. A veritable Covered Wagon, that trade show! And a lovely title: Sinners Beware! We all owe a debt to society. This is it. Honest to Gord, it’ll frighten the piss out o’ the layabouts. And ‘ere’s the secret of show biz—let me not see a dry seat in the house—give ‘em the horrors, the dirty rotten yobbos! Sinners Beware! It’s all about venereable disease—pox, to you—spine-chilling, frank, revealing. That’ll put a stop to all this so-called sexual intercourse! Not that I give a flying bugger if the whole lot of ‘em catch black syphogonic cholera so their heads fall off, so long they pay for their seats, the scum. But I’m a funny fellow—I like to be unspirational, the layabouts. So wait till you see this picture, Daniels. You’ll never drink another cup o’ tea so long as you live without you first boil yourself. And before you touch a woman, paint ‘er miv iodine, soak ‘er in permanganate of potash. Then run for your life.
“Oh, it’s marvelous, it’s terrible, it’s breath-taking! Draft me some streamers, double crowns, eight sheets, twelve sheets, twenty-four sheets, forty-eight sheets. Never since the Covered Wagon ‘ave I wished there was such a thing as a ninety-six sheet! Sinners Beware! It’s clean as a whistle, but we play up the sex angle, get it? It’s scientific. It’s German. It’s all about pox and clap and ‘ow to get it— as if the layabouts don’t know. Rahnd Fowlers End anybody who ‘asn’t got clap ‘as got pox; the rest are consumptive. So let ‘em learn a lesson, the stinkpots! Lavendrock, tell me like a father—’ave you been drinking tea out of a cup lately?’
“Well, what am I supposed to drink tea out of? A jamjar?”
“Did I say that?” asked Sam Yudenow. “At home it’s different. I got a set from Hacker the Breaker, miv scalloped cups, and my wife is clean as a whistle. Did I say a whistle? As a gentleman I withdraw that statement. What is filthier than a whistle? Everybody breathes into it, and it ‘as to be shook out. Spittle comes. When Booligan was ‘ere, the police whistle was going day and night. Ever smell the inside of a trombone from the wrong end? Mauseating. Gord forbid that my wife’s tea set should be clean as a whistle. Tea we drink, in my house, not gob.... But this picture: it’s unfantic, it’s gryadammatic, it’s credible, it’s unbelievable! Laveridge, pox is like a snake. They done it like Mutt and Jeff. You go into a teashop, so you say, miv a mysterious smile, ‘Tea and a Bath bun.’ And very nice too. But believe me—I’m telling you for your own good—in the wim o’ this cup is a chip, and in your lip is a crack, so magnifried objects come out. Result, geneval paralysis.... There was also a sequence. In a park a bloody policeman kisses— miv a mustache yet—a nursemaid miv a pram. Nursemaid kisses contents of pram. Result? The baby’s face falls off. It’s marvelous!”
He was overcome with emotion for a moment but went on earnestly, ‘Tell me one thing—do you wear a belt?”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
With tremendous vehemence Sam Yudenow cried, “Get rid of it!”
“Then my trousers will fall down,” I said.
“Thvough belts comes pyorrhea. You’ll see. Thank Gord I wear braces. In Sinners Beware! you’ll see a sequence, a sadder and wiser man it should make you, you! Jesus Christ, so there’s somebody like a postman miv a sword. A blonde gives ‘im a mysterious smile in a room where there’s a brass bed miv knobs on. So he takes off his belt, he takes off his boots, he takes off his jacket, he takes off his trousers. The boy is well brought up—he takes off his cap. Two seconds later, so this nice boy is bald, miv a thing on his head like a volcano—ain’t nature marvelous?—and his wife is paralyzed, and his son is blind, and his daughter is mad miv Hutchingson’s teeth, and there’s a whole hospital full o’ babies miv sores and not a nose between ‘em. Ashundder ran up and down my back—it was just like Fowlers End, only there were clean sheets. No more belts, no more teacups. Let the layabouts drink octupuses out o’ chips. Buy yourself a new teacup. Your face falls off, and I’m the sufferer. Miv no nose, Sam Yudenow don’t want a manager. It looks bad, kind o’ style. In my vestibule it gets people groggy. Next time you get a chance to undress, and I want my managers should change their shirt at least once a week, look out for a rash on the chest. And lay off the tea. If you go to a restaurant, carry miv you a few crystals permanganate o’ potash: put ‘em in the coffee, sprinkle on the chops, make a solution in a glass water—a glass water costs nothing—and give a good soak to the cutlery. And never use toilent paper somebody ‘as used before....
