by Gerald Kersh
A heavy-set man with a fixed expression of melancholy, but with a polite air, shrugged himself into a halfupright position and said, “Excuse me, but did you apply that remark to me?”
“You’re drinking wiv me,” said Copper Baldwin, “that’s unanswerable, ain’t it, wage slave? ... I will now give you a ditty.”
Then, to a combination of tunes, he sang as follows:
My poor mince pies are full o’tears,
My raspberry tart is jelly,
My daisies I bullock’d for two pig’s ears
To warm my Auntie Nelly.
A tosser on a Wilkie Bard,
A lord on a Charing Cross,
Is ‘ow I fell, and it’s bread-n-lard
To bear my milkman’s ‘orse.
No titfer to my loaf-o-bread,
No strike-me-dead to eat,
No place to go for an Uncle Ned,
Or boots to my plates-o’-meat.
On the Johnny Horner I must stand
In this land of the yet-to-be,
‘Olding out my Martin’s-le-Grand
For the price of a Rosie Lee.
Without ‘eavens above or china plate
I know I can never be missed,
So I shake in the chivvy of ‘orrible Fate
My trembling Oliver Twist.
I must die for the want o’ Johnny Rann,
No Little Nell shall be rung for
This Pope-o’-Romeless pot-’n-pan
My ding-dong has been sung for...
When we went back across the road, deafened by applause, the Inspector was waiting in the vestibule. “Copper, where were you last night?” he asked.
“Naturally, on the premises.”
“Whose?”
“Whose what? Premises? Generator trouble, Inspector. You want to see our generator? Come and put your ‘and on it. Only first of all make a chain ‘and to ‘and, you and the boys. Try it and see. Doctors say it’s good for the nerves. They can always identify you by your teeth, anyway. ‘Ave a go?”
“None of your sauce. There was a burglary in Thurd Street, Pickles Road. House of a gentleman in the legal profession. Thief took only cash out of a safe, but the skivvy recognized him, you know.”
“Good girl!” exclaimed Copper Baldwin.
“Was this man with you last night, sir?” the Inspector asked me.
“Oh, definitely,” I said.
“An alibi, eh?” the Inspector said, looking daggers. Then he went away.
After he was halfway down the street, I asked Copper Baldwin, “Where were you last night?”
“Cocko, don’t talk shop. And if you do, don’t go too deep.”
TOO MUCH money is too good to be true. It ceases to be real. Call yourself a treasurer and you can simply print the stuff. Whether you can roll purchasing power of bread and meat off the presses after you have eaten the wheat and the cattle is a problem for the economists, and I know nothing of economics. But you can get drunk on them. And, you know, drunkard breeds drunkard. Hence, inflations. Now that I come to think of it, I was a one-man inflation; and I am sick at the thought of it.
As I worked it out, every investor had, already, in hard cash nearly a thousand per cent of his or her original investment. With deductions, call it a mere eight hundred per cent or so. I apportioned everything, according to capital investments minus outgoings. By this token June Whistler had two thousand, five hundred pounds to come, Copper Baldwin had two thousand and my mother had three thousand, five hundred pounds—the odd eighteen shillings, since I was bad at arithmetic, I put aside for “Entertainment.” And I had a hundred and fifty pounds under my belt, and was still a company director holding massive projects in Ullage worth heaven knows what when A.A.A.A. moved in and started negotiations. I saw myself as somebody a shade more important than Uncle Hugh— one of A.A.A.A.’s stockholders, what they call a “comer.” If he thought I would let him in on the ground floor, I decided, Uncle Hugh would never have made a bigger mistake in his life. No doubt he would cringe for the handling of the remaining stock. Then my horse’s laugh would be something worth hearing.
I’d take him, say, to Claridge’s for lunch, and lecture him on imagination in business. Money, I would indicate, was a product of the higher imagination. If it came from produce, merely, we’d all be shoving wheelbarrows and shouting in cracked voices, “Coconuts!” or “Apples-a-pound-pears!” or “Who will buy my blooming lavender?” As it was, henceforward he had better be careful. Economics, that was the word; and let him look it up in a dictionary. While I was willing to concede that Stafford Cripps, Montague Norman, and other such dilettantes had a smattering, it was a case of Youth at the helm. And his face would be red—it was never otherwise, but it would now be redder—and he would be sorry for having entertained the idea that I was not cut out for big business.
I indulged myself in the most delicious fantasies. I blazed with thought-forms of jewelry while my feet tingled with imaginary kisses. A ballerina bit my ear and I smiled indulgently until I discovered that it was a Fowlers End flea, striking at which—in blind rage at being nibbled out of my dream—I hit myself on the side of the head. I never knew I packed such a punch.
I was intoxicated, in the manner of some decent fellow who, never having had more than sixpence, finds himself with a five-pound note. Money really does burn a hole in your pocket if you are not acquisitive. Well, it had better burn a hole in your pocket than in your heart, I suppose.
I went, first, to June Whistler’s place. There a chill descended upon me as in the science-fiction stories; out of a clear summer sky comes a Something. Your bones turn to water. In this case, it was draped in mauve.
I had not time to open my mouth before June Whistler cried, “Daniel Laverock, really, I think you have behaved abominably! Oh, I know I have been a fool. But does this confer on you the right to be detestable? Parasite!”
I said, “This I don’t quite understand, my dear.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said, with indescribable hauteur, curling her back hair with two fingers of her left hand, “I’m not your dear.”
“If it comes to parasite,” I said, deeply offended, pulling out of my pocket an envelope full of money, “I promised you a return on your investment. Here’s about eight hundred per cent. Take it. Furthermore, you are a shareholder. I don’t suppose you meant it, but you have hurt my feelings. If you were a man I would punch you right on top of the nose—” I had already picked up Fowlers End usage—“Being a woman, you deserve a smack in the face and a good kick up the arse!” Then the Old Valetudinarian spirit came upon me as, opening the envelope, she saw the money and her eyes filled with tears. Relenting, I said, “You might at least say thank you.”
June Whistler said, in a most plaintive manner, “I don’t deserve this. I don’t want it. Take it back. Oh, Dan, I’m sorry to say I took a man out of the gutter and he ravished me like a mad beast—”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Then I met an honorable man, a decent one. He offered me security. And then ...”
In a white rage I asked, “And precisely who was this bastard who ravished you like a wild animal, or whatever it was you said? I’ll kill the bastard!”
“No, darling, you mustn’t!”
“Oh, I see,” I said, “you still love him, is that it?”
“Very dearly. You mustn’t hurt him. He ravished me like a gorilla. No, really, he raped me like a buffalo.”
“Point him out!” I shouted. “And I’ll ravish him. I’ll show him buffaloes and gorillas!”
With a solemn and mysterious look, June Whistler opened her handbag and took out a powder compact, which she opened, and held the mirrored lid under my nose, saying, “It was you, but I forgive you.”
When I lose my temper I do it in reverse. When I am almost at my worst, I whisper; before the berserker, I become dumb. Now I whispered, with the extraordinary deliberation that comes over me at such times, “Pardon me. You will excuse m
e. But what, precisely, is this act in aid of?”
“Go!” June Whistler cried.
I said, “I never hit a woman in my life, but I am strongly tempted.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding in perfect agreement, “knock me down and lay me out, ravish me like a mad dog, roll me over and do it again, and let us part friends.... Would you like a meringue?”
“No,” I said, “no meringues. I still don’t get this lay.”
June Whistler became severe. She said, “I have yet to see the situation that is improved by beastly vulgarity. But you always were a dirty stinking crap-hound, weren’t you? Corrupt filth! Who picked you literally out of the gutter, you and your tin of herrings? Bah!”
“Look, if you want the economy of it, you’ve got back a couple of thousand pounds and your tin of herrings,” I said. “And now good-by forever.”
June Whistler said, “Wait a minute—” and went into the kitchen. She returned with that ill-fated tin of herrings which she handed to me with a grand air. I nearly told her what to do with them in the language of Fowlers End, but remembered myself and said that she should keep them in memory of me; whereupon she wept.
“I have treated you like a dog!” she said.
“Think no more of it,” I said.
Then, with genuine tenderness, she offered me the packet of bank notes and said, “I’m sorry we must part like this—” crying her eyes out—“but take this. Please take it. I don’t need it, and I won’t need it. I’m going to get married. Please take it, do!”
Now I do not know how the mind works, but an irrational irritation took possession of me at that moment. What right had she to get married to anybody? At the same time, I was somehow relieved; but, ashamed of itself, this same relief exacerbated the irritation. Knocking the envelope out of her hand, I said, “Good-by!”
Before I got to the door, she was after me, holding out a meringue and saying, “At least take this ...”
So I took it and put it in my pocket while I kissed her good-by out of sheer pity. She made circular movements and said, “Just one last time to remember me by?”
But my back was up. I said, “No. The surgeon’s knife, I say. If you sever, sever forever. Good-by.”
By the time I had got to the middle of the street I had a sudden yearning for her: I was prepared to propose marriage. I went back to the house and, quite diffidently, knocked at the door. June Whistler opened it about six inches and said, “Go away.”
“I have decided that I love you,” I said.
“You know that I have always loved you,” said she. “But just let’s be tender memories. Scram.”
Shoving my hands in my pockets and clenching my fists I went downstairs again and walked a hundred yards before I discovered that my left hand was full of crushed meringue of the most sticky nature. I thought, She had made it for me. Licking it off my palm, I mixed it with my tears and felt that loneliness was creeping in upon me.
But why shouldn’t a girl better herself? I asked myself.
Finding no answer to this, I abandoned the question, squared my shoulders, and went on to my mother’s house. The dear old lady was delighted to see me. She said, “I knew you would come; something seemed to tell me. Daniel, dear, how haggard you look. Have you been fretting?”
I ought to say that “fretting” was, in my time, an enemy of education: every week all the Sunday newspapers were full of cases of “fretting”—boys of twelve who were found stark and cold, hanging by the neck on their braces, with notes pinned to their bosoms saying that it was because they did not know enough trigonometry to get through an examination. The whole country was full of swinging boys with their tongues hanging out and un-thumbed books of logarithms at their feet. They had “fretted.”
I even considered it myself, once, on the eve of an examination when I did not see my way clear to get through algebra. Only there must have been in me a love of life—I could not bring myself to repeat the act after my braces broke and I fell to the floor of my bedroom with a terrible bang, which I had to explain away. I said I had fallen out of bed. My father sized up the situation, with his usual perspicacity, when he saw me with half my braces inexpertly knotted about my neck and noticed the other half, freshly torn, dangling from the ceiling. He was a man of law, bless his heart, and so got a swift juridical view of the situation. He said, “Daniel! If you go on this way, I give you my solemn warning you will live to be hanged.”
But my mother insisted that I had been “fretting,” and put the book of logarithms into the kitchen stove— where, no doubt, they helped to cook me a better dinner than if I had attempted otherwise to digest them. My argument was: Who wants to know the height of a tree by measuring its shadow? A shadow, I reasoned, is neither here nor there; and for that matter neither is a tree here or there. I was in the metaphysical stage. Man born of woman, I decided, was neither here nor there. Nothing was anywhere....
Only I liked my four square meals a day, having abolished God.... That was then.
Now, my mother said, “You mustn’t fret. Something seemed to tell me, so I made some meringues. And I’ll tell you something, Daniel—I held back a few pounds, which, God knows, you’re welcome to. Only promise, no bookshops?”
I said, “You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick,” and tugged out of my pocket an immense roll of money, which I handed to her with a sardonic bow, saying, “Enough to choke a horse, if a horse were fool enough to eat it. Eh?”
At this she cried, “It was because he fell off the roof into the cucumber frame,” and fainted away in sheer horror. But she came to in a little while, and I told her that I had made a deal, and here were three thousand, five hundred pounds—all for her. Tour poor father always predicted it would come to this!” she said.
My temper was frayed. “What the hell do you mean?” I asked. “Come to what? Eight hundred per cent and your money back?”
“Oh, I don’t know where to turn. Oh, Daniel, Daniel, why did you do it to me? How am I going to explain this to your Uncle Hugh? Where shall I put it, because I’m sure you’ll need it again?”
I said, “Put it in the bank. Need it again? Why ‘again’? It’s your money. Put it in the bank, Mother, put it in the bank!”
“Your Uncle Hugh would find out,” she said.
“The bank’s business is secret, confidential,” I cried.
“Daniel, you know I hate to be secretive with your Uncle Hugh—”
“Oh, God damn and blast my Uncle Hugh!”
“My poor boy, you’re overwrought and blasphemous. Have a meringue and I’ll get you a glass of brandy. Only I beg you, don’t drink it.”
“Then why offer it?”
“That’s only nice.... Your Uncle Hugh, my dear, is a fine man.
Don’t speak so hardly of your Uncle Hugh. He meant you nothing but good, and he has a good heart.”
Something in her tone put my teeth on edge; there was an excessive sweetness in it. I said, “I have an appointment. I’ll see you later.”
“Dear Daniel, just to please your old mother, your silly old mother, do take a teeny little sip of brandy?”
“No, thanks.”
“I’m so glad!”
Then I went out for a drink, all on my own, to the Prince of Wales, by the Common. This vilest of all hostelries was put up shortly after Queen Victoria’s legitimate successor was decorated for dancing a Highland fling at a tender age. It still has a prefabricated look, a halfhearted look, a jerry-built look. It should not be there. It should not be anywhere. But it has pretensions to gentility in that it has a saloon bar patronized by spies from the Inland Revenue. They mingle with the vacuum-cleaner salesmen and such rabble, and are always to be distinguished by the fact that they give or take nothing for fear of counter-spies by whom they might later be accused. Buy a double in that place and some insect of a man will scurry up and ask if you are someone else. Naively you correct him, saying that you are not someone else but So-and-so. Begging your pardon, he scratches
his way out. Two years later the bureaucrats, after an enfilading fire of cross-examination about your expenditure, take careful aim and shoot one last deadly question at you: Weren’t you having doubles in the Prince of Wales— two years, three months, and nine days ago? Then, out of the wall crawls Judas all in black, and you are done for.
In those days it was a nondescript, dull, middle-class place on the Common, and you could find your way to it simply by watching men in black coats taking their dogs out after sunset—they always looked north, south, east, and west in an abstracted way while the dog pee’d—and then they scuttled like beetles to the Prince of Wales, where they hastily gulped fourpennyworth of bitter. Beyond the Common lay some scrubby, useless land studded with silver birches, called Samshott Heath. Perhaps you have seen, in some side street, a mattress thrown out for the dustmen as unfit to use even by the poorest of the poor? So was Samshott Heath thrown out by God.
I went into the saloon bar, which was somber enough to strike terror into the boldest. Not into the timidest: into the boldest. It did not encourage boldness. Clearly on display was a frame such as they put obituaries in, enclosing a document in microscopic print pertaining to the licensing laws. I paused to read it while the proprietor, an ex-civil servant, looked at me like a proper little Godbolt. Disliking his manner, I went up to him and asked, “Got accommodation for an elephant?”
He said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you? It says that you are bound to provide ‘Accommodation, et cetera, for Man or Beast....’ I am a man, you will concede? I happen to have a beast, an elephant.”
This civil servant of a publican, instead of laughing in a jolly way, offering me a drink on the house and (taking me aside to whisper a confidence) beating me up outside the public bar as the good old publicans used to do, said sharply, “Get out of my house!”
“I won’t,” said I.
“I reserve the right—”
“On what grounds do you reserve what right?”
